The Bay Today: Welcome to the Bolugi Bay Company Papers

From the editor:

September 12th, 2011

The Bay Today, for a change, is very warm and sunny. It’s September, the first month of our two month false summer at the coast. We Californians can take our sweaters and jackets off for a bit while the rest of the country puts theirs on. The fog has receded for a few weeks during the day and you can see beyond the next block for a change. School is back in session and baseball leagues are over. (Not a great softball year for us with all the injuries and season shortening collapses of expected output, however. We came in a far distant second to the Power Players of the Electric Company who seemed always to be, well, on, while we were not.) They’ve cleaned up the fairgrounds inland after the county fair and most of the summer campers have gone back to their city homes. But the knowledgeable early Fall tourists are filtering into the bed and breakfasts for more than just weekends during this annual spate of good weather. The Bay Arts Festival and the Fiddlers on the Green are about to go up using Oxley Field and the antiques stores and Quilt Guild will use our parking lot for their annual Old Time Comfort Stroll along with the Altrurian Dreamers’ Perfection Point Cake Walk for these pre-Fall visitors. We have Clarence’s matinee puppet show, Cinderella on the Half Shell, on here at the Barn Theatre for the kids. Inside we’re fully absorbed with our rehearsals and preparations for a big musical to go up in November.

We’re doing Mame for the first time. It will stretch our costume budget but it promises to be a crowd pleaser with Adohra in the title role. Karnelle is her overly theatrical “bosom buddy,” Vera Charles. Zaticker plays Mame’s millionaire husband, Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, who leads the chorus in the title song. There are parts for everyone in a show like this. Dell is the exuberant but bigoted father of the empty headed girl that Mame’s nephew, Endicott as Patrick, would marry against her wishes. She is satirically played to a T by Rita. Barbara is already hysterical as Agnes Gooch, Mame’s frightened housekeeper, governess, and at first unwilling protégé in Mame’s ever wilder and wilder life. Besides directing, Jonathon is lending his talents as Mame’s faithful but love struck publisher, Lindsay Woolsey. Clarence is her energetic butler, (we’ve changed the play’s original ethnic insensitivities,) and even Simon Moylene has been persuaded to step onto the edge of the stage to be a delivery man, while Trotwood will play several minor roles in and out of various costumes and accents. Young Darryl Riddler is Young Patrick, and his ten year old brother, Jared, is Patrick’s son at the end.

And, most important to me, I get to rage across the stage often as Babcock, the staid banker trustee who is the major barrier to everything Mame holds dear. It’s actually hard to yell and be mean to someone you absolutely love but Adohra and I face off mostly in character.  Fortunately, it is a non-singing role and a nice shouting one. It’s a blast and in the midst of all this some of us are looking forward to some new lifelong learning classes from the Cayatoga College satellite location at the Bolugi Bay community center. With the daily walks, exercise programs (for me and my new dog,) and bocce, horseshoes, and golf to keep up with, as well as political involvements while the country is going to hell in a corporatized hand basket, I’m barely finding time to get all this Bolugi Bay Company writing and editing done.

But it’s coming and getting down to a routine again. From here out I imagine we’ll regularly be able to put up four installments a month. Here are the four for this month:

Zaticker Riddler – Berserkeley Bus – Chapters 2, 3, 4

Barbara Riddler – The Bitter Light of Dawn – Chapter 2

Wendell Eiman – Ghost Trolley – Chapters 4, 5

Clarence Bibuli – Abulian Nights  -- Act One, scene 3

As always, enjoy!

Installment Two- July 19, 2011

It’s over now, we hope, for a while. Devastations and commemorations of lives lived and travelers lost have ceased. At last the whirlwind of agents, contractors, inspectors, sheriffs, retailers, nurses and doctors have settled down in Bolugi Bay, allowing literary and theatrical life to go on.

We had auditions for Mame last night and our team is leading the league again after undergoing so much loss of player time and ability to play. The food co-op has got back to its feet again and has hired on someone to help them go ahead. There was more rain than ever this last Winter and Spring; in fact Winter lasted long into Spring, and the creeks are still swollen because it rained around here in late June. They tell me people skied in the mountains on the Fourth of July this year. It is the year of the hundred year flood, and even though it hasn’t happened yet, it still may. Fog has been humungous this year, getting in the way of everything.

We apologize for being so inundated that it took a full half year to get some second installments up that we thought we’d be able to get done in a month. Such are the problems of live production and serial publishing. Things have settled down and the literary streams should flow more normally now.

So here are four new installments, and more, more, more, on the way, a bit faster than before. Not much, much faster, just a little bit more frequently. Thanks for your indulgence, but as I said, this is just to let you see works as they get written.

Thirdson – Bolugi Bay

Brewster – Good Old What’s His Name Act Two (of two)

Thralle – Cayatoga Citizen

Bailey – Free Dumb

Enjoy, BT.

Installment Two - May 21, 2011

We apologize for the inordinate delay in posting second installments.

Flood damage nearby at the old Tiny Town golf course.

Recent devastation to our building. (Not a sprite image at right!)

Is this upheaval to Bolugi Bay and its environs an early portent of the promised earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and plagues that mark the beginning of the end of the world over the next few months? Most of the Bolugi Bay Company players and writers say no; one says yes. He has already been transported to four different corners of the country and back, he says, and doesn’t know when all the whisking away of time and energy by forces beyond his control will be done.

Of course, we’ll get past this, and everyone, save one, promises to get more installments up on the web site very soon. If you’re looking for the continuation of any of our stories, do not fear. They are on the way and will show up within just a few weeks. We’ll see who gets back to writing after the laborious clean up and who evaporates. (Seriously, the ghostly image to the right above is simply the sun shining into the lens, regardless of what any otherworld believers may try to claim. I know. I was there.) Those of us who will be left behind are committed to a more timely schedule of releases from here on, not withstanding acts of nature, divinity, or ethereal origin as they may occur.

Keep reading, please, if you are. And please do let us know that you are by emailing the editor.

Installment One

The Bay is excited today. The waves are lively and strong. The air is brisk and the wind is soft, yet insistent from moment to moment, as if it were gently pushing you to get on with something you know you have to do. One can’t help but to feel optimistic today.

Today is the day we begin to put these serial installments out there for you to follow.  We hope you will enjoy them and ask for more. But ask gently, please. The characters inside these writings are pushing just as fervently to get out and find employment elsewhere.* An author is only human, after all, and can take pressure from both points of the process only so long as his fingers can still dance over the keyboard, and as long as his head stays poised to the task and not upon a pillowed rest.  As mentioned before, installments will be posted as they are completed. What you read is in the process of being written.

I’d like to say serial writing is hard, but, for some of us, perhaps like our glorious predecessor, Charles Dickens, it is not. For some of us it is the way our mind works, and the piece by piece assembling of a jigsaw puzzle of our own creation is a delightful relaxation; an exuberant retirement from other pressing matters of life. As a serial audience, however, the web serial reader, used to instant gratification, may find frustration in that delight as the next installment  of what you’re reading may not show up for a month or so. Don’t  worry; something will.

In Dickens’ time his chapters for a novel came out in papers each week until the novel was complete.  However, his novels came out one at a time.  And many web serials are only one novel at a time. This site is different. The Bolugi Bay Company Papers offers a dozen serials of various genres. Something will likely come out each week, even if it’s not the novel you were last following. Those of you who leave several volumes by the side of the bed and open whichever book you’ve a mood for will find comfort in this format. While we do hope you sample all our Bolugi Bay genres, we’ll understand if you just like one. Please be patient. Your story will continue to its conclusion, if it has one.

For those who would like to read the whole magilla, I will post an editorial comment at the beginning of each member’s contribution whenever they have something to put up. And I will allow them to respond to what I or readers wrote about them.  In that interplay you may also get a sense of the ongoing lives among the Bolugi Bay authors and other characters in Bolugi Bay. You see by our choice of representing our authors that there is still a shyness about being revealed to ruin the safely hidden aspects of this wondrous alternative way of living.

But, you are free to email comments, (in civil, decent language only,) to our authors and the editor. They may or may not respond to you, depending. As editor, I will try to umpire the proceedings with as much fair play as I can muster and I will keep everybody abreast of what’s going on in the Bay Today introductions each month. Please enjoy. We’re having loads of fun working hard to bring them to you. And it will all add up to something wonderful in our magical community’s existence. – Bill Thirdson, editor, The Bolugi Bay Company Papers.

*ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR OF EACH PIECE. BUT IF ANY PUBLISHER OR PRODUCER WISHES TO TURN ANY OF THIS INTO PRINT, STAGE, MOVIE, OR TELEVISION EPISODICS, PLEASE CONTACT ME AT This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . (CONTENTS OF THE BOLUGI BAY COMPANY PAPERS ARE REGISTERED WITH WGA.)

Charles Dickens in his study at Gadshill

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-117829 (b&w film copy neg.)