Elvis Monologues
Edited by Lavonne Mueller
I’m becoming such an adventurous reader, reading more and more different forms of literature. I recently stumbled onto the Elvis Monologues, an anthology of theatre monologues. Ms. Mueller has put together a serendipitous collection of unique work from 34 contributors linking incidents, real or imagined, to the King.
The monologues are ideally suited for stage performance, but they also make for delightful reading. You don’t have to be an Elvis fan to enjoy them, but if you are, you will love them.
They are as diverse as receiving a wink from Elvis, thoughts of what Elvis isn’t, the King’s relationship with food, Elvis as a soldier, and my favorite: Elvis’ First Bike, by Karen DeWitt.
Imagine Elvis as a little boy, standing in front of the Tupelo Hardware Store, talking to his best friend. The subject is the red Western Flyer with the chain guard shaped like Flash Gordon’s spaceship. Think about how much that beautiful machine cost, how hard his Pap has worked and saved for it, and how hard little Elvis has prayed for it. You just know he’s gonna give that bike some lovin’.
I loved this story and this collection and I think you will to. It’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Interview with Karen DeWitt, Award Winning Journalist
Karen DeWitt has a long and distinguished career as a journalist covering politics, but also working on political campaigns. She’s covered the White House and national politics for The New York Times, foreign affairs and the White House for USA TODAY. She switched to television as a senior producer for ABC’s Nightline, where she wrote and produced the award winning Found Voices about the digitization of 1930s and 1940s interviews with former slaves. She returned to newspapers as Washington editor for the Examiner newspaper and eventually left to help with local political campaigns. She has several blogs, but contributes mostly to a food blog called “I don’t speak cuisine” at peacecorpsworldwide.org and theroot.com.
MJT: Karen, tell us about Elvis’ First Bike. What spurred the genius behind that monologue?
KDW: I knew next to nothing about Elvis Presley’s life, except the most obvious things depicted in the news: drafted into the military, marriage, movies, and, in the end, overweight and drug addicted in Las Vegas. Playwright Lavonne Mueller, whom I’d met in Tokyo at a weekend course she taught in playwrighting, had earlier asked me to write a one act play on baseball, which I also know nothing about. I didn’t follow through and when she said she was doing another collection on Elvis and invited me to submit something, I thought, this time I’ll do it. I went out on the Internet and read about Elvis’ early life: his first public singing of “Old Shep” (he placed fifth), his family living with relatives because his father was frequently down on his luck and had been jailed for fraud, their fundamentalist religion, and that he was hoping for a bicycle or a gun for his 10th birthday, but was given a guitar.
There was the outline of the story, but the feeling came from something we’ve all experienced: anticipating for something that we didn’t get.
I thought about how excited Elvis, who was a shy kid who didn’t put much stock in his singing, would be about getting a bike. I incorporated some of the lyrics of Elvis songs in the 10-year old’s poignant longing for a bike, knowing that the reader will recognize those hopes will be dashed, but his career will be made.
MJT: You career has been distinguished by writing about facts. How difficult was it for you to switch to a fictional account?
KDW: Whenever I can slow myself down—during a long, solitary walk, driving by myself–I often hear a fictive voice begin to tell me a story. The problem has been that I just don’t have the time, or make the time, to follow the thread. Whenever I have slowed down– to write poetry or fiction– I’ve done well at it, by which I mean that I’ve sold a piece of poetry or fiction.
So it wasn’t difficult to switch from non-fiction to fiction, only to slow down enough to listen to that inner voice once I’d done a little research.
I’ve taught writing to college students and they often have the same difficulty in finding their own inner storyteller — the tale they could tell if they weren’t so overloaded with TV, digital gadgets, Face book postings, texting, life, etc.
I think I was lucky to be born before all that, to be a reader as a kid, because it opened the door and allowed me to fall into other worlds, using my own imagination to fill in the details.
MJT: One of the facts left out of your Bio, is that you once hosted your own cooking show on television. Give us the details of that bit of your history, including your favorite recipe.
KDW: As with so many things it life, it was serendipitous. I’d left The New York Times in 1981 to allegedly write fiction, but ended up being hospitalized for six weeks which used up the savings I’d put aside for a writing stint. Black Entertainment TV was just starting out on cable and a friend, who knew I was a good cook (and I am superb– not modest in that area) asked me if I’d be interested in hosting a cooking show. Bob Johnson (who started and owned BET and is now a billionaire) came by my house, we chatted and for a season and a half, I was host of “Karen’s Kitchen,” a BET cable show seen on 225 markets across the nation. This was before the Food Network and HGTV and all the proliferation of cooking shows on cable. How I wish I’d followed up on that area of my life because I love to cook and if I were younger, I’d be a chef and run a restaurant.
MJT: On a more serious side, you also served in the Peace Corps. Where did you serve and how has that experience impacted your career and your worldview?
KDW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. I was part of a new program called Advanced Training Program that took people when they were juniors in college, hoping that they’d learn the language of the country they were going to serve in because the agency had learned– what a surprise– that volunteers did better if they knew the language of the country they were serving in. So I spent the summer before I graduated at UCLA studying Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia, then another year with language tapes and another summer before I left for Ethiopia,studying and living in the culturally different community of Chicano East L.A. I spent two years in a Wolliso, Ethiopia, teaching 7-11th grade English. The experience was incredible in ways that it would take too long to explain, but I wrote about it in a Peace Corps book, its impact, how it changed my life, how I view the world, what it opened up for me in “The Right Way of Growing Tomatoes” which your readers can, if they wish, read about here http://www.ethiopiaeritrearpcvs.org/pages/stories/kdewitt.html.
MJT: Your current project is a novel entitled March Madness. What can you tell us about it and when will it be available?
KDW: Lord, I wish I knew. Gotta finish it before it’s available. LOL. But it’s about two ex -NBA players, both gambling addicts, who skip out on their bookies in the States, move to the island of Antigua and set up a gambling site, BigKahunah.org. Unfortunately, their Ukrainian IT guy has been skimming from the money he’s been laundering through their site for the Russian Mafia. Needless to say, this is not a good thing, especially when $500 million goes missing. It all happens in the last two weeks of March Madness when gambling on the games is intense. There are some teenage hackers, a pissed off Antigua cop; one of the guys’ former girlfriend, now an ESPN anchor, a couple of hit people who fall in love, and a very lucky English gambler, in Dutch to his bookie as well, who suddenly finds his bank account flush with money.
