Dear Baby Jessica Play,

I wish I could work on you right now. I put you in the freezer a few months ago because we had a fight, and you wouldn't just fix yourself. But now I'm going to do this National Playwriting Month thing, and see, I have to write a BRAND NEW play in just one month. Hopefully it will give me the kick in the pants I need to come back and work on you again.

I still love you Baby Jessica Play, even when you won't just write your own darn self.

Love,
Laura

Baby Jessica First

Oh wow. The stars & stripes graphic on the background of McCain's website are so small town pageant, just like Sarah Palin's hair. They would totally be invited to the Baby Jessica festival.

What now?

This poster embodies one of the main themes from my Baby Jessica Musical workshop.
Via Eric Lodwick

Chip, Reba & Jessica McClure in the hospital after the rescue.

Baby Jessica 08!

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. "
- Friedrich Nietzsche

life, liberty, and fame

" …one of the rights of being an American is the right to be famous."

-From a Today Show clip about people paying for “Paparazzi Parties.” Basically you pay $250-$2,500 for paparazzi to follow you around while you’re out on the town. You can even hire a bodyguard to “protect” you from the fake paps and be on the cover of a fake gossip rag.

Is fame part of the pursuit of happiness?

Is Baby Jessica responsible for the Britney Spears crotch shots and the death of Princess Diana?

According to a report by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in 1997:

"In an era in which virtually all Americans share very few things, the story of Princess Diana's death captivated the nation. . . Modern communications have spawned an ever increasing diversity of tastes and interests and decidedly smaller audiences for everything from news stories to sit-coms. Add to this growing public cynicism and distrust, and the consequence is that there are very few things to which everyone pays attention. . . Jessica McClure is the only other individual to have ranked with Diana in news interest."

One of the most interesting conversations I had with D. Lance Lunsford in Midland was about how the Jessica McClure rescue was the first story that all the networks covered at the same time. I don't have all the research to back this up, but apparently it was when CNN's 24-hour coverage was still new (CNN started in 1980 but wasn't profitable until 1985.), and the other networks discovered that when they didn't continuously cover the rescue, their ratings went down and CNN's went up, so the other networks had to cover the story incessantly in order to compete. As Lunsford put it to me, the Jessica McClure rescue was the "proving ground for the 24-hours news medium as a conduit to the masses."

I know that nothing exists in a vacuum and no one person could be a single contributing factor to the insanity surrounding us today. BUT, I also wonder if, in a very broad sense, the Jessica McClure rescue was a catalyst (perhaps even a partial genesis) of our modern Us Weekly mentality? Did the coverage of the rescue help to feed the frenzy that led to things like the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase, and even more tragically, to the paparazzi chase that ended Diana's life? It's a rolling stone that only gathers more moss when you think that coverage of Diana's death further fueled our culture's demand for incessant media coverage, the kind of coverage that leads publishers to introduce to the world the "gift" of the Britney Spears crotch shot?

If Baby Jessica and Britney Spears are both All-American Girls, America's-sweetheart types, how did we get from rescuing a baby to publishing pictures of a pop idol's snatch?

Did Baby Jessica, in a metaphorical sense, grow up to be Britney Spears?*

*more on this later. I've got a billion Baby Jessica=Britney Spears theories.

Where were you when Jessica fell down the well?

". . .I remember very clearly when the whole Baby Jessica thing went down (no pun intended). I was seven years old and it freaked the bejeezus outta me. I didn't understand how the grown-ups in her life could have allowed her to fall down the well. It scared me to think that something like that could HAPPEN in this world....wasn't it the job of grown-ups everywhere to keep children--especially babies--safe?? If something like this could happen to a cute little baby, what could happen to ME???"

- The Milkman's Daughter.

Brooke covers in her post a lot of the initial thoughts and questions I had when I first started my Baby Jessica research.

If anyone else remembers where they were or what they were thinking when Baby Jessica fell down the well, please email me. I'd love to hear it.

"Lightness isn’t stupidity. It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them."

- Playwright Sarah Ruhl in an interview with John Lahr in The New Yorker.

abyss

A well is also an abyss.

If your whole being is dedicated to an abyss, what does that leave you with at the end of the day?

And if you stare into the abyss, what does it reflect back?

Halo Over The City

Baby Jessica's Dad, Chip McClure, co-wrote a book about the Jessica McClure rescue, and now I get to read it!


So far my favorite part is a letter from a little girl to Baby Jessica that says, "I've been watching the news when you were on and I saw you at your parade even my stiuped [sic] brother did."

Wells in Folklore & Fairytales

3. Fountain: In some versions of the story, the fountain is a well. Traditionally, good spirits live in wells, and from thence came the tradition of throwing coins into wells in hopes of having a wish come true (Philip 1997).

-SurLaLune
Notes on The Frog King

The Middle Land of Texas

Adrienne made this video of our pilgrimage.

Sending Our Love Down the Well

Thanks to Eric for finding this Simpson's Parody for me!

Jessica?

I looked in trash cans, cemetaries, Wal-Marts, Goodwill, Walgreen's, a hot tub, at stoplights, on sidewalks, in parking lots and even at her own house, but I didn't find her.

I left her a note with my phone number and email. Maybe one day she'll call me.

36 hours for Jessica

Jessica was in the well for 58 hours, we were on our pilgrimage for 36.

We're back in Austin now, but stay tuned, because I've got a lot more blog where that came from.

I'm going to leave you now with a very special song and photo montage:

Jessica's House, Round 2

We tried again at Jessica's house, but she was not home. I left her a note and some Kona Coffee. As I walked away I noticed this:

That's a well in her front yard.

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Jessica's Well, Round 2

Remember that ferocious St. Bernard who made my first attempt at peeking over the fence around the well so lively? Well, someone must have given him a Xanax, because this is what he looked like today:

I swear he was much more fierce the day before.

Here is a better picture of the well and also of the backyard. Imagine it filled with drilling equipment, rescue workers, paramedics, firemen and cops. The rescue literally took over the neighborhood.

Do you see how small the well is? It's hard to believe that someone actually fit inside of it. The rescue shaft was dug parallel to well. After the rescue, the shaft was filled with dirt and a redbud seedling and chrysanthemums were planted above it, but those have since died and you can't really tell which dirt patch was the rescue shaft.

Here is a tv screenshot illustrating what was dug to rescue Jessica.


The entire rescue took 58 hours, largely because the soil was hard calachi, which is basically prehistoric cement, and very hard to drill through.

Midland Fire Station

We happened to drive by the Midland Central Fire Station, which I believe was central to Jessica McClure's rescue. Also, I am obsessed with firemen and I really wouldn't put it past myself to make up the whole Baby Jessica play just as an excuse to get to chat up some firemen. We didn't see any firemen, but the fire museum was open. Strangely enough, there were plenty of pictures of Midland's biggest fires over the past century, but there was no mention anywhere of the Baby Jessica rescue. There was however, this awesome fire truck and a real fire pole, which I took full advantage of.

Robert O'Donnell

Robert O'Donnell was a paramedic with the Midland Fire Dept. and one of the men who rescued Baby Jessica. He was chosen to wriggle into the rescue shaft because of his wiry frame. It took him two attempts to finally rescue her - the first one was aborted because the hole connecting the rescue shaft to the well was too narrow for him to reach Jessica. O'Donnell was able to touch her leg, but couldn't get a hold of her. He had to come back above ground, empty-handed. After he told the drillers what work had to be done, it was reported that he sat on a curb and wept. On his second attempt, he was able to lube the well with KY Jelly, reach Jessica, and bring her out. He passed her to another paramedic, Steve Forbes, who brought her above ground.

After the rescue, Robert O'Donnell was considered a hero. He was asked for a lot of interviews and made a lot of appearances. There are a lot of things that contributed to the stress of his sudden fame, which are well-covered in Lisa Belkin's article "Death on the CNN Curve" and even better covered in D. Lance Lunsford's book, The Rainbow's Shadow. In the end, it appears he suffered from Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, which led him to commit suicide on April 24, 1995, just a few days after the Oklahoma City bombing and less than eight years after he rescued Jessica McClure from the well.

I went to Resthaven Memorial Park today to pay my respects at his grave, which was located next to a mausoleum that was twice the size of my New York apartment. Normally, I would consider it tacky to post a picture of a tombstone on a blog, but there's something on it I think you should pay attention to.


See, if you're following the Baby Jessica story, and if you follow the story of his life, it would seem that O'Donnell's rescue of Jessica McClure was the defining moment of his life. It certainly shaped everything that came after it and ultimately led to him ending his own life. So you would expect to visit his grave and find an Eternal Flame or some sort of hero's tribute. Instead, on his tombstone are cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a fireman's helmet and the Star of Life, the symbol for emergency medical services. The only other text besides his name and dates of birth and death are the words: "Loving Father."

I like that. It seems like we spend a lot of time in our lives trying prove something to the world, trying to be a hero for someone. In life, everyone's got a Jessica to rescue, and everyone has a well they're trying to get out of, but are those the things that really make up who we are and what our impact is on the world?

Robert O'Donnell was a good paramedic. One time he got a baby out of a well. But I think that, somehow, his life as a father will resonate further into the world than his life as a hero. I just wish that, for his sons' sake, he had stuck around long enough to see just what that impact could be.

Rude Awakening

Just as Adrienne and I were getting up this morning, we were disturbed by a knock on the door. It was the Secret Service needing to sweep our room with their dog. There were cops all over our floor. Adrienne and I figured it was either Dubya coming to visit his hometown, or some oil sheik. Regardless, we didn't think it was a good idea to stick around all that mess, so we bounced. Turns out, it wasn't Dubya, it was the President - I mean, vice President - in town for a fundraiser. Yup, we were thisclose to being suitemates with Cheney. Good thing I left our complimentary bottle of vinegar-masquerading-as-prosecco behind for him.

Before Adrienne and I left Austin, we were a little nervous about traveling through so many "podunk" towns, because, well, Adrienne and I are, to put it nicely, a little hard to miss. However, here is a little tip from me to you:

If you are nervous about being in a podunk town because you are most certainly not from around there, wear hot pink. People in podunk towns have too many manners to kill anyone wearing pink.

Dinner with a Local

I had dinner tonight with D. Lance Lunsford, a reporter from Midland who wrote a book, The Rainbow's Shadow, which is about the Jessica McClure rescue and does a wonderful job following up with the people who were involved. His grandparents lived just a few doors down from Jessica's Well, and he remembers his mother picking him up from school and talking her way past the police so they could get a good view of the action. He remembers watching Jessica come out of the well on TV, and then running outside to follow the ambulance down the street. After Jessica was rescued, his boy scout troupe marched in the parade.

There are a few grassfires around Midland, which are not being helped by the wind, so we decided to just eat at the hotel rather than brave the tempest and the smoke. I was too busy laughing at Lance's wild tales about Midland's long history of, how to put this delicately, "colorful characters" to remember to take a picture with him, but I did send him off with Kona coffee. He couldn't have been nicer to me or more helpful. He drove two hours just to chat with me, and then he bought me dinner.

Anyway, I learned all sorts of juicy gossip which was, of course, off the record, so now when you see the play you'll just have to guess what I made up, and what is real.

Jessica's House?

The address I had for Baby Jessica was definitely is not a car wash. No one was home and the paper was still on the front lawn, so we are going to try again tomorrow. In other news, Adrienne's windshield is filthy.

Jessica's Well, or, Where It All Went Down

The well is located in the backyard of a house where Jessica's aunt lived. It was a sort-of-daycare situation. Several people have lived there since. When we pulled up to the house, the owners' cars were in the driveway. We drove around the block, and discovered the back alley. This is the back fence.


Who knew Baby Jessica's Well had a guard dog? I didn't. He was pretty ferocious for St. Bernard. Adrienne and I pretended to read road maps until he lost interest in us.
This is a video I made while trying to look through the fence without alerting St. Vicious.

Finally, I got a glimpse of the well through a crack in the fence.

Here is a closer look.

After the rescue, the rescuers put a cap on the well that says:

For Jessica 10-16-87 with love from all of us

And here is the well with the swingset in the background. I wonder if this was Jessica's swingset.

Just after this photo, St. Vicious caught on to me, so Adrienne and I hightailed it out of there. We're going to go back tomorrow to see if we can get better documentation.

TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Inside the Midland Center is A Triumph of the Human Spirit, the painting of the Jessica McClure Rescue by Jan Johnson Sheets. The plaque next to it reads:

A Triumph of the Human Spirit This painting is a tribute to an event that lifted
the entire world to a higher plane of human consciousness
and helped us to better understand the human spirit with its
boundless capacity for compassion and love.

Thanks to the men and women who came together in
Midland, Texas, the world shared in a God-graced victory that came from faith and self-sacrifice.

-Jan Johnson Sheets, Artist

Underneath that it says:
A special thanks to Jim & Landa Williamson and Doyle Ballenger

And underneath that is one of my favorite parts about the painting:

Framing courtesy of
BILL LOVE FRAME A RAMA
Odessa, Texas

Here is the artist's interpretation of Jessica being rescued.

And here is the well into which she fell. It's small, just like she was.

Here is how I found the painting. I don't think Baby Jessica would be very happy to know that a ficus is blocking her painting. I thought the vending machine was a nice patriotic touch.

Jessica McClure Memorial - Live!

Back in New York, I was researching the locations of the Jessica McClure memorials, and I thought, How am I going to find these when I get there? So imagine how excited I was when we pulled into the Hilton in Midland, and the memorial and Midland Center were directly across the street.

Now I have my very own picture of it!
See the man giving the thumbs up in the left corner? I'm not sure which rescuer he's supposed to be, but that's the sign they gave as they were pulling Baby Jessica to the top so all the other rescuers, reporters and bystanders knew they had her.

On the Road Again

First, a big shout out to Adrienne Dawes for being brave enough to accompany me on this pilgrimage. We left Adrienne's house in Austin at 6:19 a.m. Here we are on the road, outside of Austin, approx. 7:30 a.m.

The view from the car, on 87 from Fredericksburg to San Angelo.

Adrienne has much better footage of the road trip on her camera, but it's almost midnight in Midland now, and she's asleep, so I can't show it to you.

Does Baby Jessica live here?

Thanks to some super sleuth work by my very intelligent roommate, I found a property record for Jessica McClure. However, upon cross checking it with WhitePages.com, it's either her house or her husband's car wash. So either I am going to meet Baby Jessica, or Adrienne's car will be very clean.

Baby Jessica song

Baby Jessica songs are always amazing.

The latest one I have come across is "Baby Jessica" by Grandpa Griffith. I couldn't get a direct link to it, but you can find it on iTunes.

conspiracy theory

Adrienne found this for me on Flickr.

A really bad joke

Me: I can't find Jessica McClure.
Friend: Did you look underground?

Jessica McClure memorial

Photo by dustdevildiver.

The inscription reads:
Nothing the heart gives away is gone
It is kept in the hearts of others

I'm going to Midland from February 25-26. This is the kind of stuff I want to see.

Baby Jessica's Well

Thanks, Google Maps!

3309 Tanner Drive

It only took me 2 hours of Googling, but I finally figured out the current occupant of the home at 3309 Tanner Drive where Baby Jessica fell down the well. I just composed a letter to the residents. I hope hope hope they let me visit.

I am glad I have never been "Baby Jessica'd"

1.	Baby Jessica
	1. a reference to "Baby Jessica" Mcclure, the Texas infant who fell down a well in Midland, Texas on October 14, 1987. This created a national shitstorm of attention as rescuers worked for 58 hours to release her. 2. A sexual act that involves placing one's testicles into another's asshole, to the point where they get stuck. Thus the oft used saying "I baby jessica'd her (him) last night" Chris tried to put the "dog in the bathtub" last night, but he ended up Baby Jessica'ing her. - Urban Dictionary

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

"Midland Texas is the home town of President George W. Bush. " From the Midland Texas Visitors Site.

How many different types of wells are there?

from the mouth of the babe

“I explain to myself that I believe that people cared so much because they would hope that somebody would care that much about them. In a way, helping me out and caring about me helped them out.” - Jessica McClure Morales, in an interview with Matt Lauer.

Bobby George - Jessica's Rescue

This guy has based his entire musical career around a song he wrote about Baby Jessica .

"Everything took a big change in 1987." - Bobby George Dynes.

anarchist marching bands

I am inspired by these:

Hungry March Band
&
Rude Mechanical Orchestra

Hungry March says: Fear shall lead you to the place you most need to be. When you arrive, dive into the sea of the unknown, we will be there cheering you on, furiously playing in a state of absolute delightful madness

it's so beautiful

Everyone wants to think they matter. Everyone wants to believe that you could fall into trouble and the entire world would want to rescue you.

Collins, Iowa

"4 streets, 5 avenues, a few hundred people"

pictures by Kimberley Hale

this made me laugh

A city girl's free association of small towns:

im thinking..."small town"

like ummm john melloncamp

and then i think jack and dianne

and then i think debutante backseat of jackie's car.

i also think of inbred children with webbed feel.

and funny looking trees

flannel

whole milk.

i bet they only drink whole milk in small towns

and of course BRITNEY

and Jamie Lynne

duh.

and...

old time religion

come cookin.

biscuits and gravy.

i dont think that there are any sexy people in small towns

unless they ride John Deer

ox

small town America

I'm going to pull a Julia Allison here and put a query on my blog. (Don't read Julia's blog. It is addictive. It will suck all your time and you will start coveting pink furniture. Don't do it. Just don't.)

My question is this:

What does small town America mean to you? I'm looking for images, movies, articles, poems, quotes, books, songs . . . anything. Send it to me.

Other to do:

Oh yeah, right the damn play. Holla!

To do:

Read

Carl Jung
and Uncle Joe (Joseph Campbell).

Jung

LOL. I love it when I hear a term and don't really know what it means. I thought I had invented this concept, and just applied someone else's words to it. Thanks, Jung, dude.

From http://www.kheper.net/topics/Jung/collective_unconscious.html:

Everyone has their own Personal Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious in contrast is universal. It cannot be built up like one's personal unconscious is; rather, it predates the individual. It is the repositary of all the religious, spiritual, and mythological symbols and experiences. Its primary structures - the deep structures of the psyche, in other words - Jung called "Archetypes"; a later-Hellenistic Platonic and Augustinian Christian term that referred to the spiritual forms which are the pre-existent prototypes of the things of the material world. Interpreting this idea psychologically, Jung stated that these archetypes were the conceptual matrixes or patterns behind all our religious and mythological concepts, and indeed, our thinking processes in general.

Actually, Jung's choice of the term "archetype" is in some senses misleading. For in the late Platonic tradition, the archetypes con-stitute a totally spiritual reality; the original perfect spiritual reality or realities which generates the imperfect physical realities; the "thoughts in the mind of God" of Stoicism and Platonic Christianity.

But Jung interprets his archetypes in a biological sense. He says (no doubt due to the Darwinian influence of his age) that they are "inherited", and that they "have existed since remotest times". Yet even "remotest times" can still be located temporally. Such times may have occured an enormously long time ago, but they are still temporal. Plato and his successors would never speak of the Ideas or Archetypes or Spiritual Prototypes coming into being in some primordial past; for they saw these as spiritual realities, and therefore eternal; beyond time altogether.

For Jung then, the Collective Unconscious is not, as many of his popularisers claim, a kind of "Universal Mind" or metaphysical reality, like the Platonic World of Forms, but rather an ultimately biological reality. The Spiritual concepts of Platonism are not seen as metaphysical, but biological, or rather, psycho-biological.

how to give a voice to the collective unconscious

No, really. How?
The voice of the collective unconscious = the media + the town + conventional mores + adaptation to realistic circumstances.

How can the machine rage against itself?
How does the machine rage within itself?

How does everything go wrong when all you're trying to do is go right?

audience configuration

Maybe the stage is a thrust, with the audience on three sides. The "chorus" (a.k.a. "the town"), which is really an anarchist marching band/gospel choir with a lead vocalist who sounds like Janis Joplin, is BEHIND the audience. So all the stuff you hear comes from behind you.
But I don't want you to see them when you enter the audience. The audience needs to feel like they are part of the larger society, like they are the stars hung on the curtain of the night sky. They are simultaneously of the world but observing it.


Hmmmm, must stop visualizing conventional audience space.
When on Broadway, we will perform at Circle in the Square. Hot.