Further Adventures of L. O. Sloan

Further Adventures of L.O. Sloan

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Now, I'm gonna begin this episode with a note to my listeners. You know, for most of my interviews, I do my research and I make notes and I have a general idea of the journey we're about to embark on. Not that it always turns out the way I expected, but there's usually a a little map in my head that we kind of follow. But for this conversation with my lifelong buddy, Mr. Lenwood Sloan, this was not the case.

I think a good way to describe what follows is kind of a ramble, with elements of rant and revelation, reminiscence, and ridiculousness and deep reflection on the beauty and mysteries and absurdities of the world we all share these days. For those of you who know him, and I know there are quite a few of you out there, I think this conversation will be a bit like a travelogue where we visit dozens of the places, people, ideas, and creations that have Leni Sloan's unique fingerprints all over them.

For those of you who do not know the man, welcome to a brief encounter with the legendary activist, actor, dancer, playwright, impresario, and historian that is Lenwood O. Sloan. A man whose extraordinary career has unfolded like a half century long social change musical.

Please know that if this episode, our hundredth, piques your interest and you want to learn more about Leni's story, you can go all the way back to the beginning and listen to our second and third episodes entitled Leni Sloan, a Gunrunner for the Arts.

Act One: A Waltz, a Polka, and a Tango.

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[00:02:04] BC: So did you get a new carburetor or something

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[00:02:13] BC: Jesus Sloan, I mean, wait a minute. That's a lot.

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[00:02:18] BC: Does that mean that you're going to be dancing in a month or two?

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We're gonna work really hard I said I want to be able to do You A waltz. a polka and a tango. Of course. But you know, tango is changing weight, changing directions. Polka is running for the bus or subway. And waltz is a nice cruise along the riverside.

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[00:03:08] LS: Yes, and you know what muscle groups are necessary for...

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[00:03:16] LS: Your quality of life. It's interesting. You see, my family has a remarkably high tolerance for pain, probably because we were poor and you had to really be sick to see a doctor, and you had to be at the point of the tooth coming out before you saw the dentist. So, they’re like “Buck up, suck up and get on with it people.”

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And you were telling me all these tales of the statues and the historic figures that were coming back into your community in three dimensional forms. And the legacy was in some ways bigger than life, which is just amazing. That was not too long ago, although it seems to me it was about a decade ago.

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[00:04:56] BC: And I would say, I'm not gonna be too dramatic here, but it really helped me keep my head above water 'cause you ask someone to tell a transformational story --- I'm going to use a term that you have used many times ---they don't go to the wailing wall. They, they want to do a little celebrating. So, so it has lifted my spirit and my soul to connect to so many people who have persevered and, and triumphed.

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[00:05:39] BC: Yeah, they're joined at the hip. You can't have one without the other, actually in this day and age, if you're not persevering now, you're not doing shit.

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And so, and we're in such a time of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that “I am going to save the baby in the womb, but not feed the baby once it's born,” or talk about the right to life, but not consider the mother's right to life to decide, “I'm going to die from this process.” And so, the notion of trust to me, the whole methodology paradigm of gathering. Which was weakened by the COVID.

We are afraid to gather now. I mean, yeah, there was an official whistle that blew and said, okay, you all can come back now. But there was layers of time it took us not to reach out our hand to shake somebody. And so there is now the instinctive way of pulling back the terror of experiences where we hug somebody and people say, let go, get back.

And so now, the notion of passing the peace in church, we're, we're shattered in the middle of a war on democracy. So, we're not even whole soldiers. And so, the artists that have been speaking. To you and through you. are like lighthouses. When you're working out, out here.

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The instinct to hug, the instinct to hold, the instinct to shake hands. The instinct of, like you say, gathering. Which is a precursor to even having a conversation. You can't do it. You can't do it.

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[00:07:58] BC: And Leni, the other night, I woke up and I, I thought to myself, my God, there's something I've taken for granted my whole life.

It's a very prosaic idea. It's the, the idea of human deciding. We have a past and a future, and in between there's the capacity to decide what's next. I mean, I feel like there's a musculature, maybe a tendon that is connected to decision making that is also connected to the imagination. And that, almost like the frog in the frying pan, for all different reasons, COVID being one of them, another one being a world in which there is a button almost at every turn that has a little saying on it.

It says, “No thinking required.”

You just push that sucker. You just bypass the decision and cripple the imagination.

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[00:08:55] BC: I think you're right.

Act Two: A Seat in the Garden

Leni, you know, in response to that no thinking button, can you imagine what a powerhouse we could be if we didn't squander all those little thinking moments, you know, to exercise our brains and make choices or just invite all those excluded, left out people to the table to join in helping make those decisions, all those others out there whose imaginative muscles have grown exponentially as a matter of survival, and all the geezers, you know, who some feel are past their sell by date, who have been cast aside.

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It was... so, we get to the door. We're about to go in. It says “Seniors, $5 off.” My father says, “Wait a minute. I fought in two wars. I'm a veteran. I should not have to pay.” And it's like, is this, what is this coming on? Is it the dementia coming on? And we're like, what exactly? Is this the old political organizer, the ward boss, or the labor union guy? He was furious. And I, I went up to the lady and said, “Just relax, old man. I'll pay it.” It was like, “No, my country. owes me the dignity of allowing me to sit in the garden in a public building. And this is a financed public building.”

And I thought, “Well, you are right.” You know, this is a highly subsidized institution. Now I've been on the other side of the table where they've said, you know, I gotta fire you because your admissions are down. But he was indignant that “After all I have given, you can't even give me a seat in the garden.”

BC: I get that.

And so, the seat in the garden for elders has become a thing that I've been looking at. Um. The way America treats its elders in general in a culture that is so hypnotized by perpetual youth. And how America treats its aging artists and artisans in particular.

In the first, when we were growing up, every boy wanted to be a man. Every boy wanted to wear a suit and a thin tie and smoke a cigarette with ash and tap it against his... Everybody slicked their hair back. They wanted to look like Cary Grant. And every 13- and 15-year-old boy was trying to look like a man. Now every man is trying to look like a 15-year-old boy with his drawstrings and his t shirt and I'm like why? You hat turned back, you know.

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[00:12:29] LS: Forgive me, but the fashion of women of our age taking on hairdos that are popular, but you can't be Beyonce at at 70 or 80. And so, I'm thinking, what is the aesthetic of aging in America? What are the symbols and the elements that we organize to create an image in America with elders and...

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[00:13:19] LS: they go

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[00:13:21] LS: And for me immobility. Yeah, I mean when I came out of Joffrey and Ailey, I started the dance company called the Celebration of Life and in an old rug store that Harvey Milk owned. And over the window it said, “Every day I do not dance is the day off my life.” I could not think of myself. as anything else. And now moving from wheelchair to walker, and hopefully walk and seeing elders in the street who must have been there all the time, though. But suddenly I'm seeing the wall clingers and people trying to move out of the way of the momentum of youth that it defines America.

“I must be first at the light”, the competitive quality. So, when we had the pleasure of being seeds in a rich soil called in the California art movement, I met Ruth Asawa, a Japanese artist. who, whose parents had been in the California concentration camp, they call it retention center.

But that was a concentration camp and who was surrounded by cyclone fence. But her mother taught her how to pull threads of color from the garments that she wore. So that she could then weave them into the cyclone fences, and she created this incredible art world which became an award-winning fellow artists Respected and yet, you know, she's down in the seat as an old Asian woman.

Hey, you know, my god, my icon Lester Horton who rose to dance with Martha Graham and dies in the New York City apartment and hasn't paid the rent. So, his landlord shovels his belongings out the door. And you think, where are these places of grace? And where are these holding vessels? Where are these tear jars of our elders? And where are these places that we can put the work of people who... Danny Glover, Bill Irwin, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Coyote, like on and on and on, who are coming into this place, Billy, where it's scary being old and still creating.

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And he was saying, spend your money if you want, but none of this stuff works, right? The only two things that work are number one, count your blessings, because all of the precision of a young brain, it melts away a little bit as you get older. Now, that precision, it becomes a little foggy, but something else comes up. And that is, your dot connecting ability is over the top. Because all those little things are not in the way. That's number one.

The other thing he said was, if you want to exercise your brain, have a serious, deep, interesting, listening conversation with someone you do not agree with. And that will wake up your brain, because the parts of your brain you are not using are the ones that are not exercised, because you're hearing the same thing over and over if you don't actually listen to people you don't agree with.

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[00:17:44] BC: I actually have my armor on, and my shield raised.

Act 3: Animating Democracy

So, it's interesting, the next show that's going to be on is two of our mutual friends, which is Pam Korza, uh, and Barbara Schaefer Bacon. And they're talking all about how you use the arts to create a safe place to engage other humans who see the world differently. How do you do that? Because if we can't figure out how to do that again, we're just going to turn into a lot of little bubbles of contained imaginings about who we are and what's okay.

And that's what their work at Animating Democracy is all about, is doing that kind of work.

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She is there in 1838 at the same time that Thaddeus Stevens, a young lawyer is in Gettysburg practicing and he's like, uh, taking on clients who are suing bounty hunters. And he's, uh, working on behalf of Freedmen who were snatched by kidnappers and taken into Baltimore. We know that the courthouse was kind of like, uh, the theater in Gettysburg. So, we can assume, although we cannot prove, that Lydia and certainly her parents were sitting in the courthouse watching this young Thaddeus Stevens.

job with Thaddeus Stevens in: 1844

[00:20:46] BC: So, just to refresh our constitutional memories here, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are often referred to as the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th Amendment passed in 1865, right at the end of the Civil War, and abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all people born in the US in 1868, and in 1870 the 15th Amendment gave black American males the right to vote.

50 years later, the ratification of the 19th Amendment finally gave women the franchise.

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So, her role, which is invisible to us, has been trivialized by the assumption that they were having sex because he was a white man over 40 and never married and she was an octoroon taking care of his house. The best of history writes her as just a housekeeper. The worst of history writes her as a whore. And that is the way that. D. W. Griffith introduced her in...

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[00:22:29] LS: His whole blackface scene is Thaddeus Stevens and his mixed-race whore. Scorsese and those guys started to do a little better in Lincoln. You remember that scene where Thaddeus comes home and he gets into bed. And he hands Lydia the amendment.

So, I'm on a campaign to elevate Lydia Muldoon Smith. She was not just a housekeeper. A, she took care of this man who wrote us the constructs of our civil liberties and civil rights. Billy, she amassed over 180, 000 of property on her own while she was taking care of him, and she lived on for 38 years after him.

So, she is an embodiment of, yes, she had privilege because she was an octoroon. And that's part of the story too. And yes, she was a mixed-race child and America doesn't know what to do with mixed race children. So, we have an opportunity. They're building a new Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith.Museum in Lancaster, and we have the opportunity to empower them to agitate with them to lift her up beyond being a...

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[00:23:56] LS: But an equal partner in the development of democracy.

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[00:24:34] LS: Right. You know, the discussion of whether or not they slept in bed, her doctor wrote records of her having to bathe him when he was incontinent and wrap him and carry him into Washington by 1868.

ntify the chasm built between: 1870

[00:25:39] BC: And we're living in a time right now with the fact that those two things: The idea that, that yes, all men, and all women are created equal, and the enormous struggle to not accept that.

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[00:26:10] BC: God.

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And when people say, why is it so hard? I'm saying, follow the trail. You know.

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[00:27:05] LS: It is this way because it is this way. And I'm worried that when the trumpets sound, we won't be ready for the go-down that's going to happen. America is going to go through a transformation in the next six months. It is going to. In the next six months. And it is not going to be pretty.

Artists, I love Art for art’s sake. I was an advocate of it for a dozen years, but this is not the time for that.

Put on your war shields. Get up, get out your, let your brushes be your shields. Let your feet and your dancing be your message. We have to come out this year,

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So, we're in a rough time. Uh, but Leni, this is not your first rodeo. You were there when the culture wars, which seemed so quaint now, first erupted on Capitol Hill.

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[00:28:34] BC: ...Ron Athey. Yes. All that. Uh,

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I'm like, “These are my Senators?” Like, this is like, “Oh,” you know, like, “Let me get this together.” But I learned a great deal. I mean, the Piss Christ, for example, Andre Serrano spent his life inside the Catholic church. He spent his youth studying the saints in the catechisms and the tombs and all the ancient jars full of saline with parts and relics of saints in it.

There's a child, it's a pretty gruesome place, but you open the door and there's all these jars of bones. So, he's dealing with the modern world, and he fills a jar with urine and he puts his crucifix in it because he's talking about this, this critical thing. And folks go wild. And so that's where I learned the “artivist.”

How do you... I was, I'm very religious. It took me a while to get over his crucifix in his own urine. To understand the source of the culture, the statement that he was making, the ownership of the legacy and the artifact in the end.

Billy, as you know, in the end, it wasn't about the argument. It was about the fact that Sidney Yates made a deal with the Western people so that they could graze their cows in federal parks in exchange for funding the endowment.

They called it “corn for porn.”

Oh, my great argument, my great life. Yeah, it's a deal. We made it. It's not an

[: 00:30:30

I think we have to recognize that this is one of the many tributaries of western civilization. Some rich, some poor. But some rotten. And then we look at the U. S. Capitol. And there's an expectation, I think, in some people's minds based on the civics class that some of us took when I was in 7th grade. is that whatever went on there was going to be edifying.

That some of the best minds are going to be sharing their thoughts and ideas, and as a result of the debates that take place, that insight and wisdom and profundity is going to be the, the song of the day. I think we all know that's not true. And I think coming back to where we are today, And the call to citizen artists at one of the most important times of our lives is that most of us have come to the conclusion.

It's up to the people to get this straight. We the people, because our representatives in Washington can't talk,or listen, or compromise or use their intelligence or imagination to solve the most basic problems that we're all facing. That's their job description and they are not doing their jobs.

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[00:32:56] BC: And are we too comfortable, okay, to get up out of the seat and do something that we're not used to doing, which is to be more than just a cheerleader.

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And so, I, I like to go to Kim when I'm like, what the hell is going on?

There are people in our field and Barbara Shaffer Bacon is certainly one of them where You have to come around and pull off like the race divers do and go into the pit and...

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But these change makers will take that same clay and use it as an act of transformation to teach, to raise awareness, to inspire action, to change the story and quite possibly also, hold the water that both slakes the thirst and acts as a metaphor for a new multidimensional story or a new way of thinking that isn't intrinsically dichotomous. It doesn't default to that win lose either or outcome.

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[00:35:37] BC: And you could say the same thing for the human imagination. It has to get used in order to actually work.

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[00:35:53] BC: I'm thinking kneaded bread and muscles of the imagination are great images to reflect on as we pause our 100th Change the Story interview.

A conversation we'll pick up with No. 101, in two weeks, with the Further Further Adventures of Lenwood Sloan, where among other things, we explore the desecration of woke, the abuse of Juneteenth, the replacement of Confederate monuments, the many uses of the 14th amendment, and nine reports on the arts and race relations.

So please join us. Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape are the product of my musical genius partner in crime, Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235.

So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100 percent human.