February 16, 2022
Cornerstone On Air – Episode 1
Venice Storytellers: When The Fences Were Only Three Feet
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Welcome to Cornerstone Theater Company On Air, a companion podcast, where we share our work glimpses behind the curtain and introduce you to our ensemble in the communities we tell stories with, for, and about, I’m your host, Bruce Lemon. And I am an ensemble member of Cornerstone Theater Company and we are theater makers who collaborate with communities, creating new theatrical experiences that reflect complexity, disrupt assumptions, welcome difference, and amplify joy. With this work, we aim to advance a more compassionate, equitable, and just world. And in this podcast, we want to tell you all about how we’ve done it for 35 years now. Glad to have you in the circle. We begin this new venture in our audio theater with a three-piece series focused on one of our first live in-person events, since the pandemic halted live performance worldwide. We returned to Venice, California for a project called Venice Storytellers. Where we brought together, Venice community members, and a team of Cornerstone artists in conversation about the neighborhood. And over two Saturdays, we shared stories and perspectives and transformed them into three, brand new short plays. The first of which you’ll hear now after an introduction by founding ensemble member, Peter Howard, welcoming us to the Oakwood Recreation Center and introducing the Venice Storytellers project to you and the live audience that joined us that day. Oh, just a heads up. This play contains strong language.
Peter Howard:
It’s a beautiful afternoon in Venice, California. Welcome.
Peter Howard:
Indeed. I’m Peter Howard and we are Cornerstone Theater Company. We wanna welcome you to this Venice Storytellers event. So lovely to have you here. Look at you all. Um, before we begin, I get the, the honor of saying a few words to get us started here. And, um, as we do that, the first thing we want to do is, uh, acknowledge our presence here on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. These are the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar, otherwise known the English language as the Los Angeles Basin and the South Channel Islands. We pay our respects to the Honuukvetam, in English, the ancestors,
Peter Howard:
We pay a respect to the ‘Ahiihirom in English, the elders, and the ‘Eyoohiinkem in English, our relatives and relations past present, and future seems like a good way to get us started here with some gratitude for the caretakers of this land. But while we’re expressing gratitude, we also want to acknowledge the land and history of this neighborhood, the Oakwood neighborhood here in the heart of Venice that we’re gathered on here today. Now, when we were here three weeks ago, there was a big celebration over at First Baptist Church. In case you don’t know, it’s the church that’s right behind you to mark that church’s recent official designation as a historical cultural monument. And as you may know, Venice is, um, that First Baptist Church has served to it for generations as a symbol of black history here in Venice. And so, as we acknowledge and express our gratitude to the indigenous people of this land, we also honor the resilience hard work and leadership of the Oakwood community in the history and future of Venice.
Peter Howard:
Absolutely. And we are super grateful to be gathering in this special place. Venice does indeed hold a very special place for Cornerstone Theater Company, show of hands. How many folks here saw “Ghost Town”? The play that we produced here on this very spot five years ago in the summer of 2016, gorgeous, um, that play written by our very own Juliette Carrillo was created in collaboration with the community connected to this park. It was a love story about a woman and her house and her house, and it explored the neighborhood’s past present and a possible future. It had a cast of 44 actors performed for an audience of more than a thousand people over one weekend in August in 2016, show of hands, how many people were actually in that play? A bunch, beautiful. Now what you’re going to hear and see today, Venice storytellers is a super quick, super short, fast and furious two day version of what I just described. Three weeks ago
Peter Howard:
Today we met with about 20 concurrent and former Venice community members here in the park. On the other side of the park building, we split into three groups and each group spent about two hours talking about Venice, easy to do, spent two hours talking about Venice, right? Venice as history. Venice as home. Venice as a work of art. Now there was a playwright in each group. And after that one day of conversation, the playwrights went off and wrote the short plays that you will hear today. Now there are so many folks who we’re grateful too for helping us make this event happen today. I’ll just mention a few of them. Certainly our friends here at Oakwood Rec Center, including Keith Rice and Steve Clark. Yeah. Um, California Arts Council support of their Artists in Communities grant program. It’s a good one and special thanks to Carmen Navarro, Jataun Valentine and Sue Kaplan. These are three women who do a whole lot to make a lot of good things happen in this community. And we certainly couldn’t have done this good thing without them. So thank you to all the folks who have helped make it happen. At this point, I’d like to welcome our very first play the cast of our very first play up on stage, welcome, join us.
Peter Howard:
And while they take their positions, I will just offer couple more sentences here. Uh, you are now you are going to be the first play, the first people ever to hear these brand new plays, right? As you’ll see scripts in hand, we’re presenting these plays as reading. So actors will be holding scripts and delivering these brand new words right into these microphones here. Now, today is all about the words and we thank you for being here to listen to these plays about Venice, inspired by conversations with people who live here and people who love this beautiful place with now with that is my pleasure to, uh, present our very first play titled “When The Fences Were Only Three Feet High” by Fran de Leon
Lindsey:
LA. That’s where I learned my Chicano history,
John:
The Venice pavilion, where the debris meets the sea
Mick:
The Brig, classic dive bar been there forever
Herman:
Stan’s barber shop between Indiana and Brooks,
Dov:
The liquor store between palms of Venice. They used to sell me cigarettes when I was just 15 years old
Hector:
The Comeback Inn on Abbot Kinney, when it was west Washington,
Daniel:
Walk to Abbot Kinney Boulevard into the beach. The main home is gorgeous. Remodeled two bedroom, one bath, additional 3,600 square foot space for entertaining. This fantastic property was once owned by Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet list price 4 million, $350,000.
Herman:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up. Hold up. When I was growing up, my little league baseball coach, his mother owned several properties here in Venice. She could have got hope tons of money for, for, for rentals. However she wanted to keep the community and didn’t want to take advantage of escalating prices.
Daniel:
Thoughtfully designed Venice apartment that boasts features like a gas range stovetop with a hood high ceilings and walk-in closets moving special. Only one unit left for $8,280 a month.
Lindsey:
Wow. Across the street from Westminster school nextvdoor to the Baptist church. That’s where I learned my Chicano and Mexican history. Before then I thought Pancho Villa was like the Frito Bandido. La Causa In an older type craftsman house. Two stories
Daniel:
Come home to the front portion of an existing 1907 craftsman Bungalow. That was carefully relocated from an adjacent site, as well as a new two story rear edition with metal siding and Florida ceiling windows list price $6.5 million.
Lindsey:
You’d go there and meet with Chicano college students and just seeing them, you know, college students that were Chicanos. I mean, I didn’t see that growing up.
Hector
The Rodriguez family lived right down the street from La Causa. They’d been there since a long time. They had a nice garden.
Dov:
I saw the ’em on the sidewalk when they lost their house.
Daniel:
Gentrification is linked to displacement and homelessness in police killings. There’s a lot of money coming into Venice and they’re squeezing out poor communities. “The pressure is on to get rid of the people who don’t have the means the newcomers do,” said by co-organizer, Luis Rodriguez, the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.
Lindsey:
I knew that we sunk when I saw a $40 bottle of balsamic vinegar at Ralph’s market. $40 bucks for balsamic. I was like, who the fuck buys that?
Mick:
There’s a way we drive in Venice with the narrow roads, but the big trucks, the Teslas, they don’t yield for you.
Lindsey:
That’s why I moved to Inglewood because I got sick of saying, fuck you all the time.
John:
Oh yeah. That’s Hhorny Toad man. I saw them multiple times at the Venice Pavilion. That place it’s magic, was magic.
Mick:
I met a lot of beautiful people there. Fleetwood Mac played there. You know,
John:
There was a woman who lived there on the wall above her spot. The graffiti said, sea hag. I knew she was Native American, but I was too much of a hick Coloradan to ask what nation. She said, her ancestors lived there right there on the beach before us white European came and changed the surface of this continent. It’s a sad song, which we’ll be singing for the rest of our time.
Hector:
When the coastal commission took the pavilion down, a huge part of old Venice was erased from the surface.
John:
Only a few walls remained marked the place of many Venice stories buried in our past.
Mick:
Pearl White tried to fight that commission from tearing it down.
Herman:
Yes, indeed. She was a friend of my mother’s, Pearl White, the matriarch of Oakwood. Yeah. She always made sure we had summer jobs as kids. She called that commission out for their racism because they wouldn’t preserve the pavilion.
Lindsey:
You have turned against the poor people.
Herman:
That pavilion was supposed to be for daycare and community service programs for our low income black and Latino families.
Dov:
Does anyone remember Dr. John?
Mick:
I know
Dov:
He was about six feet, seven feet long gray beard used to sell those, uh, used to sell the wonders of spirulina in pill size capsules.
Mick:
Yeah. He was passionate about saving the pavilion.
Dov:
He got me on board with saving the pavilion. I was like 13 years old and he had me walk around door to door to get signatures to protest. He was living on the streets back then. And then he got ill. It killed him eventually, but he loved Venice.
Hector:
He was a standard fixture here and an oddball, another oddball in Venice. The fact that Venice can be home for oddballs. That’s what makes this place special.
Lindsey:
Hey do you guys remember the guy who used to skate around and play the saxophone? Like at one or two in the morning?
John:
Yeah, he was really good. Really
Mick:
Very good. And the guy used to play the bagpipes up on the balcony. All kinds of weird times.
Dov:
Oh yeah. He was good.
Mick:
Yeah. Just people just shouted him down. If they wanted him to stop. Nobody ever called the, all the cops back then
Lindsey:
Shoot. I trusted the bikers more than I trusted the cops. One time a guy in a convertible was following me and my friend around. We were still kids and this biker sees it. So he gets off his bike and he threatens the dude to make him leave us alone. So like at 11 years old, I learned if I’m ever in trouble, look for a biker. Didn’t help that I saw LAPD cuff a homeboy, then beat him with their billy clubs.
Hector:
There’s a, there’s a lot of trauma in these streets. I don’t even know how to talk about it.
Mick:
It’s easier to say let’s focus on what makes Venice beautiful, I guess.
Herman:
But there are a lot of people who didn’t get to live their full lives. The first drive by happened around around the corner here in 1976,
Lindsey:
I was living in Fresno at the time. My mom called to tell me that he had, he had been killed in front of Gustavo Perez’s house, Beanie Escalera. He was 18. My mom went to the mass at St. Clement’s. It was overflowing.
ALL:
(Breathing)
Lindsey:
Damn. That song is my battle cry. Whenever I hear this song, I am transported back to that Southeast corner of Abbot Kinny and Westminster, nine year old little kid standing across the street from the malt shop, waiting for the light to change. So much has gone by now.
Mick:
I heard, I first heard this song in the Brig, classic old dive bar. Been there forever new owners now, of course, but they kept the fabulous old sign outside the original owner, the boxer, Babe Brandelli. Good looking guy. He really was a babe
Herman:
Man that takes me back to Stan’s barber shop. Between Indiana and Brooks. You go across Lincoln there on the weekends, get your hair cut. Generations and generations going there. Mostly black. Stan was part of the Tabor family who moved here from Louisiana to help Abbot Kinney build this place.
John:
Irving Tabor was Abbot Kinney’s chauffeur. Except when the first, when he first got hired, he didn’t know even know how to drive.
Herman:
Ah, but he learned quickly and Irving and Abbot became real good friends.
Dov:
Akin willed his house to Irving Tabor.
Herman:
But they had to separate the house into three pieces and move it to Santa Clara and Sixth. Move there because the canals were there, moved there because the canals were because they said, nah, black folks can’t live over here.
Hector:
Yeah. Before that Irving built bungalows for his family,
Herman:
Built from reclaimed wood from the old Venice boathouse in the amusement park, and the gondolas, which he wasn’t even allowed to ride.
Hector:
The family sold the compound in the seventies. Then it got sold again.
Daniel:
Venice compound with historic pass hits the market for $5.8 million. This 10,410 square foot lot has bungalows that have been completely renovated for a modern vibe and
ALL:
Will you stop!?
Daniel:
Sorry.
Mick:
You know, I hope that people who live there now understand the Venice community is a fabric with many distinct threads, that they be kind and respectful of his history.
Herman:
The walls are getting so high around here. You can’t even see their houses,
Hector:
Big, big fences. Now they don’t wanna see their neighbors.
John:
I’m in the apartment I’ve been living in since 1989, five or six years ago. When Snapchat came here, one of the owners bought the brand new condo across the street. A billionaire, one of the youngest billionaires in the world. And he just keeps leasing his place out. I’m just waiting for that wall to come up.
Hector:
Yeah. Yeah. There used to be a building code that your friends could be more than three feet high.
John:
No more, man. It’s like, we used to care about community and now, fuck that. I want security. I want privacy, privacy, privacy.
Dov:
The discomfort that I feel about gentrification is really just sadness because I can’t afford to live here anymore. I moved to Inglewood too.
Daniel:
If you’ve been wanting to live in Venice, here’s your opportunity.
Herman:
Look, you know, I’m not saying you can’t come to Venice. Just, just, why not let Venice change you instead of you trying so hard to change Venice.
Daniel:
Venice is that, um, Venice is that spot in the back of the head or, or top of the heart that holds you long. And even when you’re forced to leave, you find it’s with you still. You can’t explain it. It’s impossible to understand.
Herman:
Well, Rick Davidson’s poem, that’s a start
Daniel:
Baby steps.
Herman:
There’s a history here. Black history.
Lindsey:
I have a deep yearning with a desperate need to hold on to the memories I have left of my time spent in Venice.
Mick:
I almost left here 25 years ago, but I married a girl next door. So I’m still here. Just can’t seem to get away.
Hector:
I left for a while. I’m back now it’s changed a lot. But then you feel that ocean breeze,
Dov:
You feel that ocean breeze,
Hector:
And it has an effect.
Lindsey:
It has a positive effect.
Mick:
And you still have to feel
Dov:
You, you start to feel a responsibility.
Hector:
You feel a responsibility to preserve that beauty to preserve your home.
AUDIENCE:
(Applause)
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Once again, that was “When The Fences Were Only Three Feet” by Fran de Leon, directed by Michael Garcia. We had such a great time being back together as a community with people we’ve missed and new folks, we got to meet. After the performance, we collected a few reflections of the experience here is Dov Rudnick a member of our community cast and Mary Claire Buchanan here to support her husband, Mick Buchanan in the play.
Dov Rudnick:
It was really lovely. Um, it was wonderful to mine, the depths of, of collective memory and just sort of, uh, see those connections between other people’s experiences of Venice and my own and learn things that I didn’t know previously about this community, which is, which is great, cuz they get different levels of depth and complexity. Um, I didn’t expect that, you know, growing up in Venice, I was like, yeah, I know, I know Venice. But then I was like, wow, you know, there’s all these other stories and characters and, and, and, and it was fun to learn as well as to make connections with my own experience. So it, it was great. It was great because you know. We can help each other remember as we share our stories, we sort of uncover our own memories, you know, and vice versa, you know, the stories we share uncover other people’s memories. So I like that experience, you know, it made me, it made me wonder how that can be done in other circumstances.
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Welcome. Welcome. Thank you for coming out today.
Mary Claire Buchanan:
Oh, it was a pleasure. Yeah. I came to see my husband in the first piece and everybody, and it was just so beautifully done. The, like just the stories were so real and connected and brought everybody together. So
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Thank you for coming. Thank you for, uh, for, uh, lending your husband to us.
Mary Claire Buchanan:
He regales me with amazing stories of Venice, cuz he, he immigrated, um, from Britain in like 1974 to Venice and he, his first apartment was like $95 a month with a, uh, a bathroom down the hall. And he said he had to put his shoes on to get to the bathroom cuz the floor was so sticky. But I mean, yeah, it’s changed so much, but he he’s, he can be shy. So this was like him stepping out and taking some of his wonderful, uh, part of his wonderful story to the neighborhood and it was really special to. Be supported, see him supported like that.
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Great. Well here for the next story. Thank you so much. Bye.
Bruce Lemon, Jr.:
Thanks for joining us folks. Theater is a collaborative art form that takes a lot of people and we wanna honor everyone’s contribution in our credits roll. Uh, Hey John, do you got something funky we could put under the credits role to bring us home? Oh yeah. I like that. Let’s get into it. When The Fences Were Only Three Feet was written by Fran de Leon and directed by Michael Garcia featuring Mick Buchanan, Herman Duncan, Hector Garcia, Lindsey Haley, John Mooney, Daniel Penilla and Dov Rudnick with production support by Kamilah Cooper-Charles, Paula Donnelly, Ilana Elroi, Michael John Garcés, Peter Howard, Leo Korf, Bruce Lemon, John Nobori, Curtis Scheu and Megan Wanlass, with thanks to Sandy Adams, Baja Citizen, Steve Clare, Steve Clark, East Venice Neighborhood Association, Betsy Goldman, Bruno Hernandez and STP Foundation, Dr. Naomi Nightingale, Keith Rice, Mike Suhd, The Beachhead, Kristina von Hoffman and Venice Heritage Museum Foundation. Uh, Trevor, we don’t have your last name, but thanks for joining us that one day. We’ll see you next time. A special thanks to Carmen Navarro, Jataun Valentine, Sue Kaplan and the Oakwood Recreation Center and their staff. Venice Storytellers was made possible in part by grants from the Annenberg Foundation, the Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation, the California Arts Council, a state agency; Capital Group, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles Regional COVID-19 Recovery fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Muriel Pollia Foundation, the Shubert Foundation, the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation and individual donors. If you’d like to become a supporter of Cornerstone’s work, hit the link in our liner notes. Our intro music is the song “40 Feet Wide” by company member Shishir Kurup with song orchestrations by David Markowitz from the play Ghost Town. This podcast was produced by Cornerstone ensemble members, Michael Garcia, John Nobori, and me, Bruce Lemon. Thanks for listening, til the next episode.
Paula Donnelly:
Everybody say Venice!
ALL:
Venice!
