{"id":589,"date":"2012-09-30T23:11:47","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T23:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaeltuckerauthor.com\/aquarius_falling\/?p=589"},"modified":"2012-09-30T23:11:47","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T23:11:47","slug":"elvis-monologues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/2012\/09\/30\/elvis-monologues\/","title":{"rendered":"Elvis Monologues"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"Michael$ <\/a><\/p>\n

Elvis Monologues<\/em><\/p>\n

Edited by Lavonne Mueller<\/p>\n

I\u2019m becoming such an adventurous reader, reading more and more different forms of literature. I recently stumbled onto the Elvis Monologues<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

The monologues are ideally suited for stage performance, but they also make for delightful reading. You don\u2019t have to be an Elvis fan to enjoy them, but if you are, you will love them.<\/p>\n

They are as diverse as receiving a wink from Elvis, thoughts of what Elvis isn\u2019t, the King\u2019s relationship with food, Elvis as a soldier, and my favorite: Elvis\u2019 First Bike<\/em>, by Karen DeWitt.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/em> for it. You just know he\u2019s gonna give that bike some lovin\u2019.<\/p>\n

I loved this story and this collection and I think you will to. It\u2019s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

Interview with Karen DeWitt, Award Winning Journalist<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cI don\u2019t speak cuisine\u201d at peacecorpsworldwide.org and theroot.com.<\/p>\n

MJT:<\/strong> Karen, tell us about Elvis\u2019 First Bike<\/em>. What spurred the genius behind that monologue?<\/p>\n

KDW: I knew next to nothing about Elvis Presley\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t follow through and when she said she was doing another collection on Elvis and invited me to submit something, I thought, this time I\u2019ll do it.\u00a0 I went out on the Internet and read about Elvis\u2019 early life: his first public singing of \u201cOld Shep\u201d (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 10^{th<\/sup> birthday, but was given a guitar.<\/strong><\/p>\n}

There was the outline of the story, but the feeling came from something we\u2019ve all experienced: anticipating for something that we didn\u2019t get.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought about how excited Elvis, who was a shy kid who didn\u2019t put much stock in his singing, would be about getting a bike.\u00a0 I incorporated some of the lyrics of Elvis songs in the 10-year old\u2019s poignant longing for a bike, knowing that the reader will recognize those hopes will be dashed, but his career will be made.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MJT: <\/strong>You career has been distinguished by writing about facts. How difficult was it for you to switch to a fictional account?<\/p>\n

KDW:\u00a0 Whenever I can slow myself down\u2014during a long, solitary walk, driving by myself–I often hear a fictive voice begin to tell me a story.\u00a0 The problem has been that I just don\u2019t have the time, or make the time, to follow the thread.\u00a0 Whenever I have slowed down– to write poetry or fiction– I\u2019ve done well at it, by which I mean that I\u2019ve sold a piece of poetry or fiction.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

So it wasn\u2019t difficult to switch from non-fiction to fiction, only to slow down enough to listen to that inner voice once I\u2019d done a little research.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve taught writing to college students and they often have the same difficulty in finding their own inner storyteller — the tale they could tell if\u00a0 they weren\u2019t so overloaded with TV, digital gadgets, Face book postings, texting, life, etc.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MJT: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

KDW: As with so many things it life, it was serendipitous.\u00a0 I\u2019d 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\u2019d put aside for a writing stint.\u00a0 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\u2019d be interested in hosting a cooking show.\u00a0 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 \u201cKaren\u2019s Kitchen,\u201d 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.\u00a0 How I wish I\u2019d followed up on that area of my life because I love to cook and if I were younger, I\u2019d be a chef and run a restaurant.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MJT: <\/strong>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?<\/p>\n

KDW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia.\u00a0 I was part of a new program called Advanced Training Program that took people when they were juniors in college, hoping that they\u2019d 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I spent two years in a Wolliso, Ethiopia, teaching 7-11^{th<\/sup> grade English.\u00a0 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 \u201cThe Right Way of Growing Tomatoes\u201d which your readers can, if they wish, read about here <\/strong>}http:\/\/www.ethiopiaeritrearpcvs.org\/pages\/stories\/kdewitt.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

MJT:<\/strong> Your current project is a novel entitled March Madness<\/em>. What can you tell us about it and when will it be available?<\/p>\n

KDW: Lord, I wish I knew.\u00a0 Gotta finish it before it\u2019s available.\u00a0 LOL. But it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Unfortunately, their Ukrainian IT guy has been skimming from the money he\u2019s been laundering through their site for the Russian Mafia.\u00a0 Needless to say, this is not a good thing, especially when $500 million goes missing.\u00a0 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\u2019 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elvis Monologues Edited by Lavonne Mueller I\u2019m 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… Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltuckerauthor.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}