The best thing about being away from home is the time you spend imagining what you’ll do when you get back. Of many other things, I’m going to finally get the newest tattoo I’ve been wanting: a dog footprint on my inner right forearm, just above the heraldric rose I have on my wrist. I also have a hot lead on a ritzy pet store around the corner from my house for some nice ‘n easy part time work. On top of that, there is a strong potential of getting a gig at a local bar working the door. In conjunction with that, I may also finally give in to my aikido urges, although who knows.

In the meantime, I’ve been passing the hours after working with Richard Greene as Robin Hood in the 1955-1960 television series, The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I bought the entire first season of (39 episodes at 26 minutes each) at Walmart from their $5 DVD bin. Here’s an episode about a juggler, or Jongleur to use the fancy French term.

This episode features all the best things about this series: from Robin Hood’s sparkling wit to the references to medieval feudal living to the hilarious theatrics, trickery and disguises which Robin Hood typically employs to confound his foes above and beyond using outright violence - which is seldom employed. The series is phenomenally fun because in their portrayal, Robin Hood always wins and he’s always in the right in everything he does. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently in a pub that’s going out of business on Charles Street in Baltimore with an old carpenter who works in theatre, and who expounded at length on “French puppet bagmen” - which I’m still not totally sure what they were. In any event, he got to talking about Punch and Judy and explained:

“Punch always wins. He may get beat up along the way. He may end up before the Devil himself, but he always wins.”

It was sort of a relief hearing that. In the same way that watching these Robin Hood episodes is. Robin Hood is sort of this forest god, some entity embodying the Tao, leveling out and correcting iniquity, making perfect use of whatever resources he finds and always escaping back into “the greenwood” - a term they’re always using in the show.

Interestingly, a bunch of people who worked on the Adventures of Robin Hood series were blacklisted as Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee - ie, the sheriff’s men.

The Adventures of Robin Hood was produced by Hannah Weinstein, a member of the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party USA, which helped to finance her production company, Sapphire Films. Weinstein hired many blacklisted American writers to script episodes of the series: these included Ring Lardner Jr., Waldo Salt, Robert Lees and Adrian Scott. Howard Koch, who was also blacklisted, served as the series’ script editor. The blacklisted writers were credited under pseudonyms, to avoid the notice of the House Un-American Activities Committee.[1]

After the blacklist collapsed, Lardner said that the series’ format allowed him “plenty of opportunities to comment on issues and institutions in Eisenhower-era America”. In addition to the redistributive themes of a hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, many episodes in the programme’s first two seasons included the threat that Robin and his band would be betrayed to the authorities by friends or loved ones, much as the blacklisted writers had been.

Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe opened last night at our theatre. It’s our second G&S show this season, the other being The Gondoliers. Aside from those two, I’m unfamiliar, as a whole, with their work. But the music for these two is fantastic, and the storylines - while being pretty flimsy - tend to be riddled with fairly biting social critique and the lampooning of political institutions. This one is a direct, if silly, slap at the British peerage system and the House of Lords.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Robin Hood character and its American counterparts in the outlaw genres, but also in the populist rock everyman figures of people like Bruce Springsteen of John Cougar Mellencamp or reaching further back to people like Woody Guthrie. Robin Hood’s men are continously referred to as a “band” by the sheriff’s men in the series, which makes me think that they are sort of the prime model for a rock n roll band in some regard: people living out on the edge, in the wilds, according to primitive instincts on the one hand, but high ideals on the other and living always with freedom in their hearts…

More as I find time. My day off is wearing to its close. I expect the rest of this month will fly by and I’ll find myself back home before I know it.