So Say We All

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SSWA Presents

So Say We All (SSWA) is a San Diego - based arts advocacy organization. We produce several multi-media variety shows a month to promote local artists, of all mediums, by staging their art in unexpected and accessible places.

How does it work?

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So Say We All produces monthly shows based on themes such as “Mortal Enemies,” “Love is for Suckers”, “Wanderlust.” SSWA welcomes to the stage comedians, singer-songwriters,photographers, animators, musicians, playwrights, performers, actors, writers, and filmmakers for a surprising and original evening of entertainment. Works from theseshows are then revisited to better theirquality and help place them in print, radio, television and stage.

Workshops

SSWA hosts bi-monthly, open workshops where local artists can bring their work for review and critique. Workshops, along with allother compenants of SSWA, are offered free of charge to artists.

SSWA Mainstage In addition to the monthly shows, SSWA also produces music showcases; “Freedoms of Expression”, a collaborative night with San Diego’s American Civil Liberties Union; and Mainstage theater productions of its best anthologies. SSWA also works closely with San Diego’s Writers’ Ink to teach and recruit local talent.

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Submission Guidelines: All submissions must be sent to info@sosayweallonline.com. Deadlines for shows are two weeks prior to the performance deadline. It pays to be early so send us your work as soon as possible! Average length of submissions should be around five-minutes, but we will consider longer pieces that merit the additional time.

Get involved with SSWA

SSWA offers local artists a forum to submit their art, a stage to perform on, and an audience to listen. We cultivate a community of artists to workshop and develop one anothers pieces, and develop industry contacts to provide assistance with contacting the publishing

world. SSWA has collaborated with local organizations such as Writers’ Ink and the American Civil Liberties Union to bring artists into cultural and political discussions.

Uncle Jimmy has always looks like he is dying. The cystic-acne he had as a young man left potholes all over his face. He is obsessed with his physique; he went a whole year only eating green things. His shirts and Levi’s catch on bones, air fills his clothes where muscle and meat should be. Jimmy does not sleep. I am not talking about a late-nighter or an early bird. I am talking about a grown zombie roaming about his girlfriend’s houses. It has to be black, pitch black to convince Jimmy it’s night-time. So there he is, Skeletor creeping around in the dark. Jimmy confesses to me that when traveling, he brings a sleeping kit. “Some motels, well they can never be dark enough,” he explains, “so I bring my box of tacks and take the extra blankets and cover the windows.” Insomnia is expected in my family. Sleep is like dessert at a restaurant, only enjoyed on rare occasions. But, me, I love sleep. I want to feel rested; I want to dream. But I have to stay up with the Zombies, what if they have a party without me? My father, Timmy, was the king of midnight snacks. In his younger days he lived at the gym, so 14 cheese tacos never took their toll. In our home on Alamo Street, I would sneak down the hall and poke my head into the kitchen. My father’s radio would be blaring sports talk. The pan would be spitting grease, his big hands reaching down to pull out a cheese taco. When it wasn’t tacos, it was fried hot dog sandwiches. Hebrew Nationals, pickles, mayo. I would beg him not to put the onion on. He would remind me that it was 1 a.m. and I was watching the Padres and eating a hot dog. It could only get so good for a 7 year old. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Starr was the song I wanted to lose my virginity to since I was fourteen years old. I still want to lose my virginity to that song now that I’m twenty-eight and can’t recall the names of some of my partners. Back then, puberty mixed with Mazzy Starr’s slide guitars conjured images of elfish, black-haired, large-eyed, slim-wasted girls, girls who would gasp upon being entered and hold my hand in front of all my friends afterwards. There would be a gentle breeze and a summer night involved, and des-peration worthy of a 1970’s Italian movie. I managed to get the part about the summer night into the contract when I lost my virginity at the ripe age of sixteen, but there was no music to be heard. There wasn’t a lot of sound at all except for crickets and helpful suggestions and apologies. The elf-child I’d hoped for was replaced by a community college dropout three years my senior. She practiced witchcraft and gave me homemade beeswax candles as a consolation prize. We were not boyfriend and girlfriend, this point was made crystal clear to me, and I did not argue it. Later that same night, after she’d dropped me off at home and I’d had myself a good cry, I curled up in a beanbag chair to reflect on how the fantasy and the reality had managed to manifest themselves so far apart. I’m not quite sure why people call it “The Hand of Fate”. A hand seems too genteel, too steady. In my experience fate works more like a bull terrier on a rat. Biting you on the neck and pitching you around at random, unknowable intervals, until you hear the crunch of hope snapping. A hand has form, it has an owner, a purpose. If someone has absolute control of your life, I suppose then, the hand of fate would be appropriate, as your minds eye has the perfect picture of whose clasping you like a dirty rag doll. When I speak of the crunch of hope breaking, it is an admission that I believe fate and hope are by their very nature, exclusive. To have hope means you truly believe that you can affect a change in yourself or the world. Once those jaws are in your spine though, the only control you have is whether you are going to shit yourself now, or after you’re dead.Yikes, this sounds grim. But I blame the world for giving hopelesness such a bad name. Hope can be such a crippling thing, setting you up to be knocked down. Blind-ers on a horse with leather straps on his balls. So whats wrong with taking off the blinders, unwinding that length around your sack, and moving forward without hope? Isn’t it far more heroic going forward expecting nothing then proceeding with dreams of things that can’t be? I think a lot of this comes from the unsteady nature of life. When events, joys, and horrors come in such chaotic staccato beats, the steadiness of hope seems the most sane thing around. When the dark in the tunnel comes alive, the light at the end seems the last steady thing. There’s only so much an artist can do by himself or herself and sooner or later they have to get out there and expose themselves. Greedy art does not exist. Lonely art does not exist. Especially for writers, because writing is the great indicator that we are not alone. That others understand and might be able to say what we are all feeling. I never wanted to be a producer, I just wanted to constantly be surrounded by creative people who love what they do. If you get other people to do that, then, hey, I guess you are a producer, but at the end of the day, I’m just sheepherder for a creative flock. But I’ll be damned if I’m not the proudest sheepherder alive. Adding insult to injury, the Chaplain was lying to us. My grandmother had been afraid of death her whole life and this persisted even in her final moments. I knew this because she’d told me. My Grandfather spent World War Two in the Navy as a radioman, listening for Japanese voices from a cramped radio shack floating in the middle of the Pacific. He wanted to be at home alone after my Grandmother died, where he spent hours fiddling with an old radio, hovering around an AM station broadcasting black hymnals, restlessly tuning the dial as if he were searching for the signal that would bring word of what had become of his wife of sixty years. Meanwhile my mother and I sat in the backyard of her house, drinking and smoking the cigarettes she would become addicted to, never fully regaining control of ourselves. “I want to believe she’s out there somewhere,” she said, waving her smoke into a clear December night sky. “But I just can’t.”She remained in a deep depression for months. “I don’t even want to get over this,” she said. “She was my mom, why would I ever leave her behind?” This was when her obses- sion with Ghost Hunters began, and after that, the hauntings. I had returned to my job in New York and my apart-ment in Brooklyn. My mother had never seen my apartment and was curious, so I e-mailed her a reverse handheld shot of myself sitting at my desk and received a phone call from her in return just minutes later. “Do you see it?” she asked. “See what?” “The face. There’s a face looking at the camera just over your shoulder. It’s clear as day.” Exhibit E: The picture in question. Do you see it? Neither do I. I’ve never seen the face she was talking about, or the horse-drawn carriage with driver she also discovered after magnifying it 200% in P hotoshop.

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