Shoe Dreams

“Shoe Dreams” is a short cinematic poem-movie I shot and edited for a portable video production course while in graduate school at Boston University. I rented a zillion pairs of shoes, a black top hat and some other colorful items from the American Repertory Theater costume department in Cambridge and took them to a beautiful, hidden beach in a cove at Nahant, which is a little coastal town north of Boston. (You had to hike down a treacherous hill full of boulders, sharp rocks and rounded stones to get to the Nahant beach—which took some effort to avoid serious injury—but the views on the beach were outstanding, as were the views from the top of the hill.) I really had some fun creating some elaborate scenarios there for a dreaming shoe, using the many pairs of shoes to form a “chorus line” of dancing shoes, as well as words on both the beach and the rocks. Then, back in the Boston University video production studio, I recorded the “Shoe Dreams” poem over some bluesy guitar chords and extended background guitar solos on a four-track recorder and put the whole “shoe package” together in the video editing room! It’s an offbeat, fun video and I hope you enjoy it, too! (Incidentally, for the shots of a tree full of shoes in the video, that was a cinch; my sister, Elizabeth, was attending Boston College while I was at Boston University and she tipped me off about a tree on the Boston College campus where everyone threw shoes up over the tree branches! I recall, too, now that I really liked the comfortable pair of shoes that stars in the video—possibly made by the Clark Shoe company—and felt a little sad when the company stopped making the shoe! Luckily, I had stocked up with a few pairs of those same shoes while working as a shoe salesman one summer in the Men’s Shoe Department at a Marshall Field’s department store in the Chicago suburbs. The two shoe salesmen I worked with there were a lot of fun, full of stories about customers and the shoe trade—and they were always schmoozing me to put any sales I made on their individual Salesman numbers so they could get the commission!)

“Shoe Dreams” is also a tribute to the work of “Word Jazz” creator Ken Nordine. I had come across some amazing “Word Jazz” albums by Ken Nordine in the Iowa City public library while attending the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and saw a poster broadcasting that Ken was going to be performing his “Word Jazz” wizardry in Boston at a local college, so I tracked him down and set up an interview while he was in town. Ken and walked through a beautiful park and spent an hour or two talking about everything under the sun. At the end of the conversation, he advised me to get a 4-track recorder and mess around with poems and music to have a little “Word Jazz” fun and I took his advice to heart (the result of which was “Shoe Dreams.”) I wrote up a piece about Ken’s Boston performance for “Sweet Potato,” a local rock magazine (where I somehow found myself the resident jazz critic!) and mailed it to Ken and he loved it! We became friends after that and I kept in touch over the years, visiting his big, rambling red brick house in Chicago on several occasions and attending three or four of his wonderful big birthday parties (which usually included a top-notch jazz band and many local Chicago newscasters and personalities). The last time I visited with Ken, he was 95 or so, and we watched some of his inventive “Word Jazz” videos together in his house. I gave him a beautiful carved six-foot-high walking stick to help him navigate around the rooms, but I have a hunch he just kept it in a corner as an eye-catching decoration. He was an amazingly inventive guy with an astonishingly deep voice (when you spoke to him on the phone, you thought you were talking to “God”!), which served him well in the television and radio advertising business, too! His wife, Beryl, was wonderful, too and I miss them both dearly. (Ken even kindly contributed a “back of the book” blurb for my first poetry book, “Postcards from Poland,” which gave me a thrill!) “Shoe Dreams” is most definitely a “Word Jazz” influenced work and I hope I’ve honored Ken Nordine in some small way with this video, since his work has greatly influenced my poetry and writing. (There’s also a playful sing-song use of the word “shoe” at the end of the video, which I think resulted from my singing with Kirk Nurock’s “Natural Sound Ensemble” one summer to the animals at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago while I was in graduate school. I think there was an experimental music festival of some kind going on in town and to my surprise, composer John Cage came out to see us sing Kirk’s inventive vocal/harmony compositions to the penguins, giraffes, lions and other animals there as we moved around the zoo on a hot summer’s day. I even got to shake John Cage’s hand as he walked by and ask him if he had enjoyed our singing! He said he did.).