 People think that I created that when I was in New York, but it really was before that when I came up with the idea of Jabberwocky. Nobody ever thought of doing this before. It was when I was in my sophomore year. Matthew says, I thought there was an N.T.D. actor named Joe Velez who did it. Mal says, no, I taught him. See, this is how it went. He had better movement than I did actually. I never performed Jabberwocky the same way twice in my life. My animals always changed each time I performed it. Sometimes I did a great job and sometimes I was absolutely lousy. So for the N.T.D. rendition, I didn't want to take a risk. And I developed the perfect movements to fit his face and body. And then he took it on the road and toured with it and made it famous. I created that when I was 17 years old, back in 1939. Yep, way back in the day. People weren't really ready for it at the time. A third of the folks thought I was crazy. A third of them thought I was a genius. And the other third kind of wasn't sure which I was. What do you mean? Oh, no, no, no. But let's see. I think I did it for MSSD about 15 years ago. But I didn't do a very good job to tell you the truth. There were eight different cameras, eight different takes. Let's see. Was it the eighth or the ninth? Everything was wrong. And then finally they got all the technology right. But then I made mistakes. I think we got it right on the 12th take or something. But I was just so tired by then. So it wasn't as good as I would have liked it. Peter says they could have taken different angles and cut together different things. Maul says, no, it was the technology at the time. It was just different. And then by the time everything else was OK with the technology, then I screwed up in my lines. And then finally I got it right. But I was exhausted by then. It was a little flat, I think. Peter says, well, you were exhausted. Peter says, well, we've been talking about when you first got into Gallaudet. How old were you? Maul says, 16. Peter says, you were 16. OK, so you get into Gallaudet when you're 16 and you get onto the campus. And did you hear, oh, there's this group who's performing poetry? Or how exactly did that happen? How did that all get going? Maul says, well, there had always been poetry competitions, signing poetry competitions. And we didn't start that. There was a literary society that had been on campus for a long time. And they met monthly. So they included storytelling and a lot of different things like that. Poetry, too. Peter says, was this written poetry that then you would sign? Maul says, no, you wouldn't write it. You would read it and adapt it, and then you would sign it. Peter said, so people would look at it and then say, wow, the signing rendition was good or the written rendition was good? Maul said, always the signing took paramount importance. That was the most important part of it. And everybody pretty much agreed with who were the good signers. And you wouldn't even read a written rendition of it. You would just look at the signing up on stage. But it was very, well, the word I would use to describe the signing style at the time was stayed. Very formal and stayed. Controlled production of signs. You were showing water flowing. It would be very, very calmly produced like that. Until I showed up with Jabberwocky and I started running all over the stage and kind of shook up the signing world a little bit at the time. It was very different than what people were doing. And now you see things like that all the time, but before my time you didn't. Peter said, what did it look like before? As I said, Maul said, you would stand right in one place. Peter said, was it English signing? Maul said, oh no, no, it was absolutely gorgeous production of signing that people did. But I didn't feel they moved enough and I didn't feel there was enough expression on people's faces. There's a lot less expression. Peter says, can you show me an example of what you're talking about? Maul said something like, a big man, large-shouldered. He's very angry. Notice there's no change of expression whatsoever. And I'd say a big, tall man was really angry. I mean, you can see that it bumps it up a lot, but people didn't do that. They would sign it very beautifully. I mean, gorgeous, gorgeous sign, seriously. Beautiful boats on an ocean flowing, you know, gorgeous. Kenny says, excuse me, if you wouldn't mind, Peter maybe if we have a comment on this side of the room maybe you could copy it and then whoever on the camera would be able to capture it better. Is that okay? And Matthew says, so at that particular time in Gallaudet who would decide what beautiful signing was? Who was the authority at the time? Maul says, well, the students. But remember there wasn't anything called ASL at the time. ASL is a pretty new term, comparatively speaking. That kind of came on the scene around the 50s or 60s around there. We didn't use the word or term ASL. Leuphant actually coined the term Ameslan and we used that for a while. And that fell out of usage also. But then ASL finally came up. But before that, even either of those terms, we just called it sign. We just called it a sign. Peter says, okay, would groups of people get together and come up with an idea and then somebody would say, oh, would you sign that to English? Could you maybe sign it more the way we do at home or in the dorm or would you sign it a different way? Maul said, no. All of us, well, almost all of us, I would say, didn't really talk about it. But in conversation or how we signed to anything, it was what I'd call PSC. Nobody did straight English. It was usually PSC. But on stage, that's where we would skew more towards ASL, more natural signing and more pictorial language, I would say. Peter said, but much more formal, right? And Maul says, yes, very formal. Kenny says, well, Peter and I, actually I have two questions. Peter and I and other deaf poets today, we tend to borrow techniques like different camera techniques from films or TV, cinematic ways of signing. We borrow from dance. There's a lot of different things we incorporate. So where did you get your inspiration or what are the techniques or things that you incorporated into yours? Maul says, I can't even really explain that. It was just the way it was, you know? Yeah, I did change some things. But for good or bad, I don't really know about the new changes that I initiated. But I mean, at that time, some people said that I was destroying sign language. They said that. And because they did this very formalized way of signing, if something wasn't clear, they would jettison it. They wouldn't do that. But I wouldn't necessarily do that. I wouldn't necessarily throw things out. So, for example, you know, I wouldn't necessarily change things. I would just make up some signs. I would invent signs, things that you'd never seen before. But they were perfectly clear to anybody who saw them. In my day, people didn't do that. I was pretty much the only one. For example, the song in the South Pacific that's called, let's see, there's this one, Balli Hai, that song. Well, there's a line in that. Balli Hai, where the sky meets the sea. Well, most people at the time, the traditional way of signing would be where the sky meets as in two people meeting each other, the sea. But in my way of thinking, if the sky was actually to meet the sea that way, we're in big trouble. So what I did was where the sky and then sort of meet as in two planes, the sky and the sea meeting each other and becoming one. I have them become each other and then reflect within each other. So I made a balance of the sky and the sea. So I experimented with a lot of different techniques and a lot of different ways. I'm not saying really I was the only one, but I was the only one who was creating signs in that particular way. And then with National Theatre of the Deaf, when that was finally founded, I was part of that. And at first I was Bernard Bragg's assistant. I was supposed to be helping out with the new people there who were just coming on staff in the company, but I had nothing to do, really. And Bob Panera was actually an NTD and he was teaching History of Theatre. And he knew the skill that I possessed and he asked if I would be willing to help him, and I would teach the history of acting as part of the course that he was offering. I accepted that. And then David Hayes saw what I was doing and he said, wait a minute, from now on, what I want you to do is switch with Bernard Bragg. Bernard can teach History of Acting and I want you to work with the company. So I basically worked with Linda Boeve and Lou Font and all those people, Phyllis Freilich, for a few years. Gil Eastman. I taught all of those early NTD folks. I taught them to kind of stretch their abilities and become more creative. Beef it up a little bit more. Theatre says it's interesting because we're talking about borrowing techniques from different things. And for instance, Kenny and I now will go see movies and we'll try a panning technique where houses will pass us by as if the camera is panning or, you know, with sign we can move through trees and have the trees pass us by. We can go above the trees. We can go above the earth that way. Or use things from photography as if slides were being shown on a wall and the motion's being frozen. Those sorts of techniques. I learned that, you know, and because this is the time period that I was born into that's the kind of thing that I like to use. So what year were you born? Miles says 1922. And Peter says, okay, 1922. So there were cars at the time. There were silent movies. That was still pretty big when you were growing up. There were a lot of techniques and then things got faster and faster. People could play with time and speed. And then newer ideas would come into the culture. And I wondered if those would work their way into the sign. You could wave very fast. You could wave very slow. You could slow time down in different ways. Did you see these film techniques or see things that were reflected in the world changing around you and then put them into your sign? Miles said, no, everything I did I found within myself. But there were some people who did borrow in the way you're talking about. I think that there were different techniques that people tried to utilize. Like if you were going to do a western, you had kind of a John Wayne thing. A man walking slowly, showing the holsters bouncing on his legs, pushing the saloon doors open, walking slowly up to the bar, one beer, you know, behaving like what people saw in the movies. There were some people doing that. Not a lot. I think later that came into being a lot more, maybe 40s, 50s, something like that. There were several people who were really good, very, very good. But on stage, well, it seemed that most of the people were very intimidated by their perceived need to follow what was there with the right signs, the appropriate signs, but not me. For example, the first play that I was in at Gallaudet, I was supposed to play a pro wrestler, which is really funny, because I had really long hair at the time. Not as long as yours, Peter, and certainly not that long, Kenny. But the reason I had long hair, I was always busy and I was always broke. I couldn't afford or have time to go to a barber, and that's the only reason. And I was the only one with long hair, and I had it for that particular reason. And so people say in the 50s or 60s, oh, you're just being a bad boy. I said, no, I'm broke and I'm busy. That's all. You know, I'm too broke and I'm too busy, and I'm still too broke and too busy, and sometimes my hair gets a little long, and my wife says, please go get a haircut. You look like a sheepdog, so then I just comply. But anyway, the line from this particular play was, if you're not careful, I'm going to give you a knuckle sandwich. Well, at that time, or before my time, I should say, people would have said, I'm going to give you a knuckle and then sign sandwich, like a real sandwich. Or they'd say, if you're not careful, I'm going to hit you. Well, that works, I guess, but here's how I did the line. If you're not careful, what I would did, me and then I showed my knuckles and then have the knuckles come up and hit the person. Because I really felt it was important to have the knuckle part of this, not just that I was going to hit them, but the knuckles, and that shocked people, believe it or not. And that's kind of how the way I rolled, that's what I would do, for good or bad. My first, well, not my first performance, but my first connection with the Gallaudet Theater was not a great one. I was actually fired. Because there were two groups at Gallaudet in terms of theatrical enterprises. There was the Gallaudet Theater Club. That was for the elite performers. That's the one I wanted to get into and I applied for that because I really felt I belonged in there. And they said, okay, you'll be the curtain puller. You'll open the curtains and close the curtains during the performances. And that was all right with me. I accepted it. It was like an apprenticeship. That was cool with me. That was fine. But the second show, the ropes jammed and I couldn't get them closed and all the actors had to freeze in place on the stage. Everybody froze. And someone else had to climb up the ropes and unjam them because I wasn't agile enough to be able to scale those ropes and undo the knots or what the problem was. So they asked me very nicely to not show up for the third show and pull the drapes closed. But this other group on campus at the time was also under the auspices of the theater club. But it was called Amateur Night. And if you were successful in Amateur Night then they would accept you over to the Elite Drama Club. And that's where I showed that knuckle sandwich line and people saw that and immediately allowed me to go into the ranks of the theater club. And then I was in the plays. And later went to New York. Now one thing I do want you to know about was that people nowadays I think except for maybe you and a couple others and me of course quite often we are limited or they've been limited by the use of voice interpreters. Because way back in the day of course we didn't have any interpreters. Everybody just did their signed performances without interpreters. We didn't have to think about them. I think it spoils us in a way. You know when we went to New York we had a full audience of hearing people at the time. How was this going to get across to them? So we did ask this one woman who interpreted for us from Gallaudet she came to New York with us and she did the whole thing. Now there's interpreters for everything all the time but we didn't have that back in the day. Quite quite different things sure have changed. Kenny said who was the woman who did that back then? Her mouth says her name was Elizabeth Benson and she taught at Gallaudet and there's actually a hall on campus that's named in her honor. Elizabeth Benson. She was a wonderful signer. She was hearing. Yes, yes. Matthew asked. So when people signed poetry did that seem acceptable to the deaf community outside of Gallaudet? Or did they not have any interest in it all? Maul says they loved it. They loved it because it wasn't straight English. It was never performed in straight English. If it had been straight English it still would have been beautiful because they performed it so well. I think it's the same thing today. You go to church and you hear somebody singing hymns and they're just gorgeous, right? But nobody's running around while they're doing it. They're not doing it in a wild way. They're doing it in a very formally produced way. In terms of techniques of, you know, that back and forth of somebody showing different characters and standing in one place the way that Peter does I would have to think that Bernard Bragg is responsible for most of that. Matthew says, do you think you've had some influence on sign performance techniques and development? Maul says, performances maybe not necessarily. Techniques of acting, yes. I think so. Yes. Peter said, Matthew's asking, is there a big influence on signers? Maul says, Bernard has had a lot of influence on people because he travels a lot and he sells himself. I don't do that. And maybe that's my problem. I have a lot of mixed feelings. I mean, who the hell am I to tell people I'm the greatest? I mean, come on, I'm just me. So Bernard Bragg, yes, has had a big influence and I have two in a different way, I would say. Peter says, in what way? Maul says, well, I created signs. It's very free to move around. Had a lot more liberation in my movements. Kenny asks, you talk about how formal and beautiful the signing was back in the day and I'm curious, have you seen Clayton Valley perform? You know his work? Valley? Well, what he's done is take his facial expression and meld it with the signs but without moving his mouth. Peter, can you give an example? Peter gives an example of that. No words needed to go with that. Kenny says, yeah, just like that. So it's as if he's taken this formal classical way of signing and melded it with classical hearing poetry by putting ASL to that and using similar rules and constraints. Have you seen that or what do you think of that? Maul says, yeah, with the expression. Really, to be honest with you, I wasn't thinking about it. We weren't thinking about it the same way you do now. There's so much analysis going on. I just did it, period. Like Jabberwocky, I don't know. I was flying blind, really. I just signed what I signed. Now, you know, Carol Padden, she just published this new book and in it she says, wow, you know, like Maul's, you followed all of these ASL principles beautifully with Jabberwocky. I had no idea what any of this was back then. Honestly, I just did it. And it's different. And here's the difference between Bernard Bragg and me. Bernard is always interested in the technique in a very, I'd say, surficy kind of way. And I always go for what's inside with the emotional resonance. The emotion. I just want to take that out and show the character. I think it's more important to me that I show the true, authentic character. And the signing themselves aren't necessarily perfection, but Bernard takes great pains to sign perfectly. And so, in my opinion, a lot of his work goes flat. It sort of looks robotic. There's no emotion in there. It's so polished. It's so polished and superficial and perfect, but there's no heart to it. And I would practice on my lines until I just had them well enough, just good enough, because when I went on stage, I wanted to come to it fresh. I wanted to feel that it was new. I wanted to capture that audience, grab them every night. I wanted it to be fresh. I wanted to take that audience and make them mine. And so I think that's the difference between us. I don't really follow his work anymore. I don't think he produces much work anymore. Kenny says, so your way of expression and getting the heart out, like you said, you're not thinking necessarily about techniques and whatever. But when you look at Jabberwocky, it looks like there's techniques in there. You're not focusing on them, but it looks like they came out. And Maul says, that's exactly right. Panera said, I don't sign ASL. I sign Maul's SL, Maul's sign language. Peter says, going back to what we were talking about before, back in Gallaudet when everybody was signing this very formal way, were there other popular signers, Goldie and Lohman and all those names? Maul says, no. Don't confuse the written poets with the signing poets, okay? They're two completely separate groups, because, well, Bragg wrote one poem, only one. And I wrote a few more. But while I was at Gallaudet, I never signed my own poetry. I signed things that other people wrote. I didn't sign my own. Poets rarely signed their own poetry. They used their acting skills to adapt from other written poetry, but they didn't do their own. Peter says, I wonder why that was? And Maul says, part of the reason is that you write poetry in English, you get all your lines down. And a lot of people would say, I can't sign that. Well, until I came along, that is. Because I was very aggressive, and I think I can sign anything. I don't have those kinds of fears, but nobody before me had that kind of aggression in them. You know, people would say, I can't, I can't, I can't. I'll only pick the one that I think is possible, whereas I think I could do anything. Like the rhyme of the ancient mariners. I did that one. That's a very long, that's an epic poem by Coleridge. I picked that one one time. The boat upon the ocean with the waves crashing against it. Somebody grabbing the wheel as the spray hits their face. I mean, I stayed in one place and used a lot of expression, not enough. In my opinion, some people, when they do these long poems, but the signs are really beautiful. Some people did that. Most people at that time took acting classes. There was a gentleman named Oliver Castle. He taught printing for many years in Washington State. He's retired now. Do you know about him? No? No, it's funny. There were other people like him. There was Deander Moore. Now, Deander is really, really interesting actually. He was very aware of technique. And not just signing, but body movement. Quite often he would take on this character and he would act as if he had a peg leg. And he would put on this fake appendage and he would stomp around on stage. He says, could you show us what he would look like? What would his particular style look like for us? Well, I said, well, I can't really, but what was interesting about him, well, Oliver Castle, just beautiful the way he produced signing. You know, every generation would have somebody like him, some beautiful, beautiful signer. Every group, every four or five years you'd be able to point somebody out and say, wow, look at that person. And, you know, maybe they would get things going and maybe not in another group, but few of those would become famous. And the reason was that they weren't doing anything new. Everything was pretty much the same. So, yes, they were these beautiful signers, but there was nothing new or groundbreaking until I came along. And I felt free to wrestle with the language and stretch it and mold it and play with the signs in a different way and start something new. And then later, Bragg came along and he felt free to use, you know, VV and use other techniques and he changed things up in his particular way. So I think the two of us had the most influence. But there were these people like Oliver Castle or whoever, but nobody's ever heard of them. Beautiful signs, as I said, but not developing anything new in a different way. And Deander, oh yeah, right, I can give you this example. I can show you something. So when I signed Jabberwocky, Castle and Moore, they watched me and they looked like this. They were just aghast. And they were shocked. Now Moore, he always tried to act and hide himself behind makeup. He would take these on different roles. He would use costumes and different characters and hide himself. And that's why I think it was superficial, in a sense. Then he left college. I think it was, I don't know, sophomore or junior year. And then I went to Broadway in New York and I felt like he should have been there. You know, I think that he was better technique-wise than I was. He was better at acting in some ways and maybe he should have been there. I didn't necessarily have that technical part, but my focus was to project a character, a real resonance of a personage through the signing. So what the line is, I'm telling you to stop. I would move closer to you. So before that, people wouldn't act in that particular way. They'd say, stop, finish, whatever. But I wanted to show more menace and slow things down and I would move towards the person. So I mean, I did these different sorts of things than other people did. I was acting in a different way than other people did. So that's just me. Matthew asks, so were any hearing people involved in any of these pursuits? Like, I mean, did you have any hearing people who were part of this or they weren't allowed to participate? Miles asks, what do you mean by being involved to participate? Was it like in the poetry, signing poetry, or hearing people part of this? Miles said, well, no, rarely. Well, I mean, they probably never thought of it. We never thought to ask them and hearing people never volunteered to be part of it at all. Now, to be fair, we didn't really ask them and we didn't want them to. Do you know at the time that in Gallaudet deaf people couldn't go to grad school? I wanted to learn to become a teacher, I wanted to go to a hearing college to do that because Gallaudet wouldn't let me in when I applied. They only took hearing students to be part of their master's program. So asking hearing people to be involved wasn't really necessarily what we wanted to do. We had our turf, they had theirs. Know what I mean? This was unspoken. Nobody ever talked about it really until I went to New York. And that was really interesting and I was on Broadway. And we needed some hearing people to help them and then the son of the president of the Deaf Club there, John Hall, he came and helped. He helped with the sets and that was great and that was the first hearing person who was really involved with us and he gave us a lot of support helping us with the sets and stuff. Kenny asked, did hearing people go and watch and enjoy it? Miles says yes. Kenny said, you mean on, before with the different signing of poetry and what have you on campus, we're hearing people out in the audience watching you? Miles said, well, some of the grad students would be there. That was called the normal students because it was called the normal school at the time. How many I don't know or if it was all of them, I don't know, I didn't look at the audience necessarily while I was performing. You know, it's really dangerous if you look at any one particular person in the audience when you're performing and that can really mess you up. You can just, if somebody flips you the finger, you're going to lose all your lines and you're going to go completely off task because you lose your concentration. So I always look way in the back, out in the back of the theater. I never look at anybody in particular. So I don't know. I mean, I do know that some hearing people were there and there were some teachers, of course, too. They loved it. My psychology teacher, oh, he was fantastic and he loved coming to the plays and he would say, okay, on tomorrow's exam, I want to know, what did Eric act out in his role as Jonathan? What particular psychologically emotional state was he projecting? So he would use the plays as part of the exams or part of the course material. Now, another person who also went to New York with us was interesting. She taught drama with Hughes, okay, in that class, on drama night and amateur night. She taught with him. She was a hearing woman, just an absolutely beautiful, beautiful woman, an English teacher. That was Elizabeth Benson and she, well, she directed me. She directed me in a play called Chekhov, very good director, this hearing woman. And she signed great. We went to New York and she was the voice interpreter. But she also, she kind of made out as somebody who could, you know, add some ideas to what we needed and, you know, we took in her ideas. Usually we used mine instead, but she mostly was there to interpret for us. But I do have to give her credit because she was the first hearing person to be involved in the Gallaudet drama pursuits. And she also taught classes. It was really sad because, let's see, she was part of things. Other people would come up and be part of it for a little while and then they would disappear. And then they would stop going to class. They decided, ah, it's not worth it. And I know that it really broke her heart or broke Hughes' heart. And they set up the official drama department later. And then those two weren't involved anymore. They picked other people. So they had hearing people run it. They had this one man who was running the drama department and did from then on. But those two were so great. You know, they were wonderful. They were masters, really. Hughes was a master storyteller. He was great and he went all over the place. He went to New York quite often as a storyteller. Signing stories. Just amazing. Beautiful. I learned a lot from him, actually. He went all over Michigan and New York, telling stories, doing poetry, acting, standing on stage in one place, of course. Peter says everybody stood in one's place. Oh, yes. Maul says, oh, yes. You know, that was the way it was, of course. Peter says, person who's performing poetry, move around. Maul said, of course, I think so. And that's what I did with Jabberwocky. I think it's really important to be moving around. And that's what I liked about Joe Velez. He moved around and ran around, too. I mean, I can't run anymore these days, but I used to move quite a bit around on stage. Velez had a better face than I did. He had kind of a rubber face. Now, you get the picture of Velez if you've seen him. He had this better facial expression than I did. And so I took my Jabberwocky, and I picked the best aspects of them to give to him. So they were partially mine and partially his. It's interesting how I felt about my Jabberwocky in 1939. I mean, I came up with it then, and then years and years and years later, it was just mine. It was all mine for the longest time. And it was 1960, I don't know what was, 67, 89 or something when NTD was finally founded. And then all my animals, there they were in their little cages. And I had to take all those cages and then give them to Joe Velez, which is what I did. All my animals were gone. It broke my heart. All my animals were gone. Peter said, you gave them to him? Mal says, well, what I did was, it's like if you become a father and you have this beautiful child, you want them to be successful. And then they grow up and then they go away and you let them go and you say goodbye. And you don't want your child to go away, right? But let me explain what happened exactly. So at first, David Hayes had me working as a translator with NTD. And he said, Mal, have a few beers and then show me Jabberwocky. So I drank a few beers and he said, now, show me Jabberwocky because he'd never seen it before. So Bragg and other people were around and they wanted, for the first show, they thought it'd be really worth it to have Jabberwocky as part of the first thing offered. And so they had never been signed like that ever and nobody had ever seen it signed. So David Hayes really wanted to do it. And I didn't want to volunteer to be the one to do it. You know, I'm a mixture of an egotistical person and a very shy man at the same time. So I didn't want to be the one to bring this forth on the stage. So I drank my beers. He said, okay, now let me see it. So drunk as a skunk, I went out there and I performed Jabberwocky just barely able to stay upright. We wanted to sign the contract. And first Bernard Bragg actually wanted it. But I said, no way. I did not want him to do it. I did not want Bernard to do it. I wanted Jovolaz to be the one. Peter says, was Bernard upset? And Mal says, oh yes, he was very mad at me. He's still mad at me today. He's always mad at me. Matthew says, really? And Mal said, yes. And he wrote tales from a club room. And when I looked at the script, I thought it was awful. So I fixed it up and I gave it back to him. And he thanked me for having fixed it up and edited it. And then this is back in the day. This is a while ago. And I went to see the show. There's no ticket waiting for me in the lobby. Nothing. And I wondered if my name would be mentioned in part of the credits. There was nothing. Actually, in the back of the program, they gave special thanks to Mal's. And I thought, okay, maybe he's just busy. He forgot to put me in the credits. But I thought he should share the credit with me. So the group that all worked together was kind of angry that my name wasn't there. And they fought for me. But that's him. That's Bernard. And so we don't work together anymore. We're not close anymore. But that's the way he is. Okay? I just felt like that's it for me. That's it. I worked with him. It was very frustrating. Like at NTD, I did work with him at NTD, of course. And I gave him a lot of credit for what he did. He's really wonderful. But he's wonderful at what he does. But I don't think he's wonderful as a person, necessarily. But I don't want you to write that, okay? I do not want that to go down in print. He'd come after me to ask if I would be involved with things with him, if I would be part of things. And I'd say, oh, no, my arms hurt. And it is true that my arms do hurt sometimes. I can't sign. Like last night at the performance, it really hurt a lot. But I get through it and I finish it up. But I will not put myself through any pain for him, not anymore, even when he asked me. So that's why he's mad at me sometimes. Let's see. I think last time he was mad at me. Last May, I think, I was working with some interpreters for On The Town, that show On The Town, the musical. And so I was working with interpreters to figure it out. And in the program, they had some paragraphs about the interpretation. And they did have something about me in there, too. And they had something about Bernard Bragan there, also. But I wrote mine myself. I wrote this bio myself. And I had Maul started working in the theater in 1939, period. And that's all I wrote. And he wrote, oh my god, this thing that went on and on. And he should have done what I did. But Bernard came up to me. And he said, oh, you should say that you worked under me and what have you. I just said, Bernie, that's just too long ago. And we don't really work together anymore. And that's just not what I want. And he got really mad with me. And we're not speaking anymore. He hasn't talked to me since. But just put that aside. It just really doesn't matter. I mean, he is key for techniques, I think. And I'm key for the creation of science. And I think that's how it all falls out. We're very different people. But I do admire his commitment to his skill. And I think he's the best mime I've ever seen, truthfully. What bothers me is that he uses the same sort of techniques all the time. There's nothing new in his repertoire. And I want to say, come on, do something new. Do something different. But he rarely does. I'm always interested in new things, what's up and coming. And that's why Jabberwocky was such a big thing for me. I mean, it was a long time ago. It was 1939, as I say. And I'm looking. I'm still looking for new things. But there's so many people who haven't explored potential to do something new. Matthew says, I was talking to Kenny and Peter about how it seems like poetry's been lost in the deaf community for a while. It seems like in the 60s or 70s, maybe there wasn't much. And I guess by that, I mean, yeah, I'm talking about signing, not writing. I'm talking about signing poetry. Now, I understand that back in the 30s or 40s, it seemed like it was quite popular to sign in this very beautiful, formalistic way, and that that was acceptable in the deaf community. While hearing people were still banging the drum about how English was important. So I wondered if deaf people became scared off in poetry, because in their minds, poetry equals English. They conflate the two. And so I wondered, you had this generation of starting it. And I wonder if maybe it's time to revive it, in a sense, because there's a gap, I think, between your time and what's going on now with a rejuvenation of poetry. Would you agree with that? Well, it says I can't really answer that specifically because I was really out of it for a while. For some years, I wasn't involved with it at all. Now, I was busy. I had children. And my children were really involved with baseball. So for many years, 10 years or so, I was focused on driving my kids around to all their baseball practices. I was official scorekeeper for the Little League. All the kids of the kids we were hearing, I was the only deaf person, but I was managing and I was involved in that for like 10 years or so. So people say, were you a hermit? And I say, I'm not a hermit. I'm a father. Once my kids are grown up, you'll see me again. Just wait. So I can't really answer that question. Kenny says, so you said that there were clubs back in the day and maybe there was poetry being performed in those clubs and Gallaudet too. Would you say that did things become more official then, more formal? Like what happened with the Lit Society? Maul says the Literary Society went for the longest time. It's still going. But I doubt that it's the same way. Now I will say, let me just say, I can't speak specifically to this. I mean, I was involved with a certain aspect of it and Gallaudet just a little bit. They invite me to come once in a while and give speeches or give presentations. But I did teach at MSSD and I was more on that end of things. So I lost touch with the main part of Gallaudet. And Kenny said, did you go to other people and talk to them and say, oh, show me signed poetry? Did people want to see that? Matthew says, like, if people now meet you, they say, show me your poetry, show me what you do. Maul says, no. No, I mean, I don't sell myself that way. I don't sell myself as some sort of critic. But I have to apologize because many people do ask me to work with them. They really do. But not for me to show them my work. It's that they want help with an audition that they're putting together. Something like that. They'll come to me and ask me to fix their audition, tweak it a little bit, fix them up. That kind of work. Rita Corey, do you know who Rita Corey is? Rita Corey would come to me quite often. She was a Gallaudet. And she would be doing songs or what have you. And I would help her with refining her product. But others, well, in fact, several, several people who auditioned for the film Children of a Lesser God asked me for help. Marley Matlin didn't ask me. She didn't ask for my help. But there were several others who were my kids who did audition. And I prepared them for their audition for that. Terri Leen. Terri Leen was one of the finalists for that role, Children of a Lesser God. Things got narrowed down to just three or four. Then there were only two, and Terri Leen was the third. Then it came down to these two, and then Marley Matlin got the part. And he says, I'm still hammering away at this one idea that I want to get you to answer. If you went to New York City in 1939, 1940, would you have seen deaf people performing poetry at that time in the community? And all says, yeah, well, hold on. You have to recognize the fact that there was a gap between deaf communities, between Gallaudet and the other deaf community, or grassroots deaf community. In some places, they would not have anything to do with people from Gallaudet. In fact, when I went to New York City to act, I was in arsenic and old lace. And when I got there, the New York City Deaf Club was cold as ice to me in no use. When we showed up, they actually asked us to leave. And the club itself actually did have strong actors as members, good signing, good poetry. Yes, they did. In fact, one of the best-known, well-known actors, and that was Bernard Bragg's father. And I'm sure that Bernard learned a lot of his techniques from him. Probably did. And he signed ASL poetry. He surely did. First, a lot of people didn't know who he was. But he created this. He didn't work from a written script. And he would sign like this. If he was showing water on a shore, showing the waves lapping very slowly. Just really beautiful, beautiful movement. That was Bernard Bragg's dad way back. So Bernard's father, you never know about his father? Oh, boy. Well, he had a company of actors at the time. I never saw them, but I heard that they were pretty successful. And he wrote plays, too. He wrote plays that they put on. And he wrote things for NTD. And then Bernard Bragg was in those plays. Bernard wrote plays also. Matthew says, if there was a time warp, and you could go back to 1939 or 1940, do you think that hearing people would even bother to go see deaf poetry performed at the time? Maul says, probably not. Well, when I was in New York, there was a writer who said that this production was the first time that deaf people were seen in public, on the stage in Broadway, in public. So in terms of the clubs, hearing people didn't go to the clubs at the time. Sign language hadn't proliferated at the time. Now everybody wants to learn it. There were many people who would learn sign where people had deaf parents. There were no classes offered. Nobody had any interest. Now there's so many classes. People say, where's the best place to go learn? And of course, you know, the answer is always to go to the deaf clubs. And of course, then they fall in love with it and they show up. But before we didn't have any of that, so they wouldn't have come. Matthew says, well, how do you feel today about, like, Peter and other young deaf poets? What do you think about the work you're seeing from them these days? Mal says, I think it's great. It's wonderful. But I have to say I'm a little uncomfortable. I'm a little bothered inside. Let me give you an example. Rita Corey, who I mentioned before, she is an excellent signer. But I keep getting on her case and saying, okay, great, fine. I can see your sign, but I want to see you act. I want to see more acting from you. You need to develop yourself and be able to show what's inside you on stage and plays and what have you. You know, you're not doing it. And poetry too, you need to be able to do that. And what I think about Peter is the same thing. I want to see more acting. The poetry's fine. The poetry's actually beautiful. It's great. Okay, now I want to see you grow as a total, complete performer package. I want to see the acting develop. Peter says, that's interesting. Matthew says, well, there's some political disagreement about the relationship of poetry and ASL. Some deaf people think it can only belong to English, and ASL can't create its own poetry. To which other people say, no, of course it can. So this is based on their experience with English. So I just want to know what your thoughts are about that. What do you feel about that particular issue? Because it's a really hot topic right now among folks like Peter, other people looking at each other and saying, my technique, my way, this is ASL, this isn't. But who's the authority? Who's the god of ASL poetry, if you will? Miles says, there is no such thing. But, by the way, I mean, that's exactly what was going on all over Castle back in the day, right? There were people back at that time who had worked so, so hard to perfect their craft, but they had no heart to it, as I said. So my particular way was to... Well, I felt that I could... I felt like I could translate anything. Anything. Other people couldn't necessarily do that. But I felt that I could. I could translate anything. You know, like water to wine, wine to water. I could just keep the beauty between languages. And often when you look at the English, you could still keep it exactly the same, and it would be clear. And other times it wouldn't, if you kept it that way, then you would just have to change it. You'd have to make whatever would make it clear. And so I truly believe in the use of English, mime, photography, everything, every technique, anything, to make it as clear as I possibly can. Whatever I need, I want to pour it into the mix of things and make a picture. And that's not necessarily called ASL. That's called MalzSL. I think that's what Bob was saying. So I don't buy into this idea of like, who's right, who's wrong, this is better than that. I just don't go that way. I think somebody can be right, but everybody could. We don't need this sort of wrangling about that. I will admit that I don't care for C-Sign, except for one sign that I truly love. It's this one. Tree made with the letter T. Do you know what this means? What is this sign? Do you know? No, no, no, no. What do you know? What do you think this is? No, of course you think it's tree. Right. You think it's tree. C people think it's tree. T-R-E-E. But to me, it's outhouse. Outhouse. Bathroom out in the woods, right? Outhouse. So C people hate me for that. They really hate that I do that. But I mean, you know, I don't sign perfectly. But other than that, then anyway, all silliness aside, you know, with people who use C-Sign, they don't realize what they're losing, I think, by not performing things or learning it in a different way. Well, they'll say, I will kill you. Oh my God, kill. All right, I guess you can inflect it. I will kill you. I mean, you could sign it that way. And maybe I'd accept that if you added a little heart to it. But the facial expression's gone. It's so linear. There's a lot lost. And so I believe in marrying these two things. I think there needs to be the signs and the facial expression. I mean, but people separate that out sometimes. Peter says, I saw some kid at a school last year who was a C-Sign kid saying, last fall, using the sign for fall. Last fall, I was. I can believe I saw that, last fall, like falling. Really made us laugh. But I think you're right, things get lost with that language. Matthew says, so... you don't think there's any one or two people who can put themselves up as the authorities for ASL poetry? And Miles says, well, I think that Bernard does. I think he thinks he's the authority of everything. But no, he's not. He had a big, strong influence. I mean, Bragg and I both did. But does that mean that we're the gods of this? No. You know, sometimes people ask me, wow, you know, you are such an authority on this. When did you become that? And I'll answer, well, in 1939, you know, I was either crazy or I was a genius. And if I'm authority because of that and you want to call me that, that's fine. But I don't claim that name for myself and I certainly don't sell myself as that. I'm the authority as a person who can look at things, but I don't volunteer that and I don't say that that's something that I claim. I mean, you might say that about me. Somebody else might say that about me, but I don't say that about me. I don't think it's my place, too. So Peter says before, there was this very formalistic sign and you had a real breakthrough and people were just amazed at that and you could say your influence started from that point, but if you were to look at a timeline in front of you and you see the influence that you exerted and how that carried forward, then there was Bernard Bragg with his technical aspects. Who would you say were the next generations after that? And Mal says, I don't know, maybe you, Peter. Peter says, no, no, no, before me, before me. I'm talking about like the 50s and 60s. Mal says NTD was. Peter says NTD. Mal says, yes, NTD. NTD was. They were considered the authority to most people, but mostly for hearing people. So Peter says, in terms of the style of signing, Mal says, well, okay, I'll tell you something here. There was a famous critic named Sheridan back in the day for Broadway. Okay, keep that in mind. He was a top critic for New York City for Broadway. We went there and he saw us. And this was back in the day. All right, he was one of the top critics. Now, he saw our play of Arsenic and all lace and his response was Gallaudet will be back every year on Broadway. And then I graduated and there was nobody following up to make that push and get that initiation going. And Bernard Bragg didn't do it. So I was the only one who really had that gumption. You know, I dove into it and I told people, let's fight for it, let's do it, and I made it happen. But I was the only one. Now, years and years and years passed and then NTD was finally founded. And of course, people saw them act and saw their productions and they did a production of Jabberwocky with Jovales. And again, one of the top critics at that time saw this and wrote newspaper, Jabberwocky is the key to the future. Now I created that in 1939. And now here we are, NTD coming along in whatever, 1967, 68, whatever, how many years later. And fine, I started that, but I was doing other things by that time. I'd gone on and moved on to other areas. Peter responds to something that Matthew and Kenny said. Kenny says, well, I've been reading in this, I read in Harper's, this is a magazine, and it was talking about English written language poets and they said that back in the 1920s, they would say that the poetry of the 1900s or the turn of the century was much better than the current day, which was in 1920. Twenty years later, in 1940, they would look back to the poetry of the 1920s and say, oh, that was so much better than what we're producing now. And it seems that every 20 years, the critics would look at the poetry from 20 years before and criticize the things that were going on in their own day and laud as superior, the things further back. In the 60s, Alan Ginsberg came along and some people looked the scans at him. And so now here we are in the 80s and people might think that things are going well or not and I just want to bring that forward and see what you think of that. Peter says, do you think that happened then that people said, oh, you know, looking at how Deaf poetry was produced, how we signed it earlier was much better and now we're not doing as well. Do you think that there's the same thing happening with the way people look at maybe Ella and Valley, perhaps, even, looking at their work? You know, people look at Mauls and Galladay. Oops, I'm wrong about that, right? He didn't sign. He wrote it, Galladay. Lohman? Was Lohman written or signed? Wow, this is hard, right? Lohman was written and some were signed. False, is that right? I'm trying to get the names right. This is really difficult. Mauls said, you have to not confuse the two because there was only some people were writing and some people were signing. Well, Peter says, okay, right, but I guess the point is that maybe people down the road would look back at what's being produced now and think it's better than you yourselves do. You look at Patrick Grable and his timeline might look at the people before him and think they were better than the time that he's producing. The same thing happened with deaf poets. That seemed to be happening with hearing poets and their assessment of their skills and their talents. Videographers asking a question that we can't see. Mauls says, okay, I have to accept partial responsibility for NTD because I translated most of those plays myself. I was trying to be creative. Well, for example, if you signed Pumpkin, okay, is that a standard sign all over the U.S.? Does everybody know the signed Pumpkin? So I would use the sign, but then I'd also embody a pumpkin and become a pumpkin head. I would add all these different features to it and some deaf people were completely lost when I did something like that or had the actors do something like that. So I tweaked things. There was one play I translated that was called The Critic. That was the title of it. It's a very old play by Sheridan, older playwright. But anyway, that play has a poem within it where there are seven birds and a poem with seven flowers. And so when I translated it, I didn't want to say red flowers, blue flowers, and you can't do that. It doesn't have any pizzazz to it. I wanted to add my particular mark, so I had flowers and I created different hand shapes for the flowers. A flower like this with a crown of petals around it, a flower with tendrils and vines wrapping around it, and with the birds as well, some with pointy beaks, some with tufts of feathers, some with crowns of feathers around it and sort of a mane of shock of feathers on the head, all different sorts of. So nobody else was doing that and nobody was used to that and so the deaf people were pretty much taken aback by it. I left NTD and changes occurred and they started picking these weird plays to perform. Like, let's see, three stages and four acts or something like that. I think. And the English didn't even make sense. So the signing was even worse. You couldn't follow it. People were just completely lost. You might get the beauty of the sign. It looked pretty, but you know, people just weren't used to this and so those changes occurred and it's more and more simplified, I think. They cut things out, which I did not permit. I wouldn't cut anything out of a script. I would just get creative with the script, but it's very different now. I look back and I remember seeing these beautiful plays, but there's not so much anymore than what it used to be. I mean, I'm just so frustrated with NTD. I really am with their choice of plays. I want to see death of a salesman. You know? You know, I think they understand it. People will be able to do it. What's this three stages with three acts stuff? It's just terrible. That's just crappy. It's bullshit. It gets me so mad. And so that's one of the reasons I left NTD, was their choice of plays. Matthew said, NTD generally is skewed towards hearing audiences and not so much for deaf audiences. And so how do we preserve the beauty of ASL? There are no other companies that are trying to preserve ASL in its purity. There's NTD, which is under control of a hearing director and the deaf audiences don't necessarily understand what they're doing on stage. What can we do to rectify that? Miles said, well, there is another company. There's Fairmount Theater of the Deaf. And there's a new one, I think, in New York that's supposed to be getting going soon, I think. I think there's something like that. Something, something new? The videographer is saying something. Peter's shadowing it, saying, it seems like things start and stop. They try to get going, but then they fold very quickly. There's one in Burbank, I think. Miles says, well, it just depends. Unless, unless you're fortunate enough to get a really huge grant in the same way that NTD did. And then having that continual funding would assure that it would keep going. Matthew says, I'm asking your opinion. I'd like your point of view. Do you often find it's true that the deaf community is not necessarily cohesive? They're not unified? There's a lot of gossip and backstabbing and pulling each other down. I see that now, and I wonder if that was the case when you were younger, too. Well, it's rare, but I think with any small group that's relatively homogenous is going to have that occur. Same in hearing communities as well. There's always gossip. In fact, I want to tell you something. My wife fainted in the store one day. And I got her home. And the next day, a neighbor told me that my wife was pregnant and we were going to have a baby. Before I knew it, the neighbor knew it. And they were the ones who told me. And the reason was it was the doctor who told everybody in this small town that my wife was pregnant. Kenny says, Okay, so today, it seems like it's very difficult to find deaf community support for so many things, almost anything, really. And it seems like if you want support, you have to find it through the hearing community instead. Matthew says that's right. And Kenny says, So was that the case back in the day? Miles says you have to remember we didn't have any TVs back then. We didn't have VCR. What we had were the deaf clubs. And you would go to the deaf clubs. And at the club, there were shows. I directed shows there. There was poetry there. And there were things going on there. But now the clubs are shrinking and they're closing. So there are fewer than there used to be. VCRs. Kenny says, VCRs, you think, are ruining the deaf club culture? Miles says, Well, some people back then couldn't afford a movie projector. But they'd hear there was going to be a movie shown at the club. And so they would go to the deaf club and watch movies. Kenny says, So you feel that technology is actually destroying the unification of the deaf community? If so, what can we do about that? Miles says, Go back in time. Go get a horse and buggy. There's a comment off camera from the videographer. Some of this comment had to do with the videographer Ernest Marshall and that technology was going to be used to take forward his work so people could see what he filmed. Miles says, Well, I was in California. I was working with Peter Wolf. Peter says, He's a filmmaker, right? Miles said, Yes. Back in California, Jonathan Roman and Peter Wolf and I set up like a corporation. And we did a lot of different projects. We focused primarily on the news and we had like a newscast. The two of them would act as the newsmen because they were much more handsome than I ever was. I stayed out of that. I'd stay away from that and I'd work behind the scenes like it were you, you know, you might want to do it or somebody else, but I would get out of that. Other people really wanted that kind of role. But those guys were better friends and they looked better on screen than I did. So I worked with them behind the scenes. I helped out and we did a lot of different projects. But then I was hired by MSSD so I left the company and everybody sort of went their separate ways and the company folded. But, you know, Peter went on to study filmmaking at two different colleges and he did seem to do pretty well. He's made films. But didn't see the latest film that he made and I just want to say you do have to start with a good script. You have to have a good script. Matthew said, but that's difficult. That's what's hard. Not everybody's good at English. There are so few deaf screenwriters who can write a decent English script. And Mal says, well, then find those few and ask them to write the script. I've been asked to write scripts. If you can't do it yourself, ask me, ask somebody else. I can do everything. I can write scripts and I've done that. You know what I mean? Matthew says, well, we in the deaf community have a very difficult problem with the idea of we. It's more me, me, me and never we in attitude. Mal says, well, that's what I mean about the friends that you make. So I wrote a serious play for Broadway a long time ago. It was about a deaf man with a hearing wife and I sent this play off to different agents and I was told, no, no, no, by everybody. No interest in deaf characters or anything at that time. I did get one yes and this was from the actress Beatrice Strait. She was a very famous Broadway actress at the time in movies as well. She never did get the starring role. She was never picked for the starring role in either of those but she was pretty prolific and she said to me, I have to go to Europe but when I come back I will get ahold of you as soon as I touch down. I was thrilled. This was 1950 and I'm still waiting to hear from her. You know, they just throw these things in a drawer and then they go on to other plays. Now the funny thing is that was the first play that I wrote and that had a deaf character and I never had it produced. Never went on stage anywhere but I wrote about, let's see, six other plays after that that I would call junk to tell you the truth. No deaf characters in it but all of them have been produced in different places. In fact, Sweden, one of them put them on stage. So what I think I should do now is go back to my first play and fix it up a little bit and give it another try because there's a new market now than there used to be. You know, you have to know who's in the acting world who you would pick to be the leads in it know who's available. Matthew said, I wish there was a way to set up a deaf network for TV, movies, plays, poetry, production, a deaf network, a center where everybody together could hash out what to do because right now I feel like everything's so factionalized. We're all in our separate different areas and I think that it hurts the deaf community when we're so divided. Do you think it would be a good idea to have some sort of deaf network or some way to do this? Mal says, I do think it would be a good idea. I do. NTD was supposed to be that. They were supposed to provide that as well as be a theater and they were very active actually in networking and recommending actors for different sorts of projects for other people. You didn't know that? Oh yeah, they've been doing that for a long time. Matthew said, I knew they did that for a while but I thought that they stopped. So they used to be very actively recruiting and I used to do it on my own at MSSD but then I've got other people helping me and there's another director I've worked with for the past few years and we very actively do that too. We make a lot of contacts for people in network. I've been involved with a national endowment for the arts for a long time. Peter says, what is it that you do for them? Mal says, I do a lot of reading of plays that are written by disabled people and help them determine which plays should go forward. I've been involved with that. Jean Kennedy Smith, if you're familiar with her, she's involved in that. She gives the stamp of approval of course but I make recommendations to her. That's the way those particular plays are chosen. I've also been involved in the Washington DC commission for the arts and that involves grant monies for the Washington DC area. So I've been involved with that group for a while. I've been helping in my ways by joining these different various agencies and trying to create some networks. Matthew says, in terms of Flying Words Project, they're starting to get out there and they're trying to expose people to their poetry and to the work that they do. Do you think it's important that they continue doing that? Mal says, very important. Yes, absolutely. You have to promote yourselves. You have to promote your work. You know, definitely. If you can afford it, get as much out there as possible. Promote yourselves. You have to. It's the only way. You know, get out there to other places because it's not out there to the extent that it should be and a lot of people have tried and failed and tried and failed. There used to be something called the Frozen Dinner Theater. Peter said, oh yes, I remember that. Mal says, I don't know what happened to them. They stopped performing and I don't know why. And everybody probably went their own separate ways but something like that should be going but they fold so often. Matthew says, what do you think of Peter's work? Mal said, yes, I did see. Peter said, did you see me in Los Angeles or where was it, Boston? Mal says, I saw you at Berkeley and you were wonderful, just wonderful. You know, I've seen Bragg a lot. I've seen you but the difference between you and Bernard Bragg again is that Bernard just polishes things to death. He really does. Peter is more of an internal poet, I think. And as I said before though, I want to see more polished with the acting aspect but not the emotional aspect of it. All that internal stuff. It's very difficult to explain what I mean by that. Like once more with feeling, you know, we're familiar with that. And I think Peter, you're just almost there but then I have to say I'm never satisfied. I'm not satisfied with myself or anybody else. I can always find something wrong. I'll watch something and I'll say that's really beautiful but you could fix it this way. I'd say oh, that's great. No, but there's a world of difference between the way Bernard Bragg works and the way I do. I think if I can give you an example. No, no, no, no, no. I don't want him to be anybody to be offended but I was teaching an artistic sign language workshop at a college in Michigan at one point. I was there for a week, well, four days. I was an artist in residence and I was teaching this one class and there was a very nice beautiful young lady who was in the class and we became really good friends and we spent all day together until into the evening when it was time to part and go our separate ways to bed and she was to be married the following week after this workshop. It was very exciting time for her. It's interesting to note there were a couple of people in the workshop who also got married after this workshop. They invited us to the wedding. We actually went. It was really nice. Anyway, this girl this girl and I actually went to see that went to that wedding and attended it together. It was wonderful. It was a beautiful wedding outside in the woods. Really nice. I think maybe you even know who this is. Ingram? Ingram? You know Ingram the interpreter last name Ingram that's who got married. Anyway, so this workshop was the same workshop I've been teaching for about four or five years and the way I would do this was that I would give a poem or a piece of work to somebody and I'd say go ahead and sign this. Peter says, you want me to do this now? I'm also, no, no, no, no, I'm just saying what I would do. I would give this to you and I would watch your work and I would watch this person. I'd say, OK, that part they're there. That part right there. Let's just take this one part right there and let's work on this particular part. But I would never take away the artistry that was this person's individual stamp. It was their work. It wasn't my ideas. It was their ideas. I would just take it and it would expand upon it. So, OK, back to my story. I was working with this girl and at the end of the workshop she said, next week I'm going to take a workshop under Bragg at some other college someplace. I said, oh, that's great. You're going to learn a lot more. That's very exciting. So she went to that. Now, a couple of years later I flew to St. Paul Minneapolis and I was with TVI giving a presentation there and she was involved with that group too. So I met up with her again. It was so great to see her. She and her husband came to pick me up. We went out to dinner. Had a really great time. And I said, so, how was that workshop you took with Bragg? How was that? She said it was terrible, terrible. All he wanted us to do was his ideas and no one else's. And that's the difference between us. It's just very difficult. And he says, are you ready, videographer? OK. Play ball. Peter, I'm going to pitch the ball to you. Peter catches the ball. He said, OK, I have a question. I'm on a lot at you. OK. Are you ready? You OK for this? OK. So we are looking for some new ideas. So we thought we'd drill down to your core and see if you could give us some new inspiration. OK. So you broke the formal signing rules that were the big deal at the time. And you had a lot of gumption, a lot of internal stuff that you wanted to get out. But I just wondered who influenced you? What gave you inspiration and that impetus to go forward? Mal says, nobody. Peter said, no. There has to be. There has to be something like movies or ideas or a hero or something, something you read, something that gave you the bravery to go attack this and do things so differently. Mal said, I was influenced by signers. And I could say a signer at the School for the Deaf. I went to name Shandan McCarter. He was a teacher and he taught shoe repair. That's what he did. Never went to college. He was an ace shoe repairman, great cobbler. And he got his vocational license. His signing was beautiful, just beautiful. I had a big influence on me. Peter said, for what? Mal said, for stories. Peter said, so you really looked up to him? Mal said, not necessarily as a person, but as his storytelling chops, his style of signing and he said, well, what did it look like? Did he play with language? What did he do exactly? Can you give us a little snippet? Mal said, well, there was a story about a detective called Gray Seal. The Gray Seal. People already knew who that was. They knew the story. And what he would do is the Gray Seal would go to places and he would steal things and he would distribute them to the poor, like Robin Hood. And he'd always leave a letter saying, Gray Seal was here. And that was the story. And so he would act like this, walking very quietly and haltingly with matted hair and a beard, lifting himself painfully up to open a door, get to the other side, close the door behind him, finally be safe, alter his appearance, take off his mask grade. You know, he would sign that way. Then, oh yes, then he goes to meet somebody at exactly nine o'clock at night in the dark with the moonlight shimmering down upon his face. And in the distance he sees an apparition approaching him. It's a girl in a beautiful diaphanous gown. It sways as she approaches. Her hair riffles in the wind. Their hearts beat as one. They meet. They embrace. You know, just really, really beautiful. It's like dance, really. Dance movements. The way he would show lights, flickering all around. And the two of them with their eyes locked in an amorous gaze. So later I took the story and I elongated a little bit, added a little bit more of my style. But he was very formal. Very, very good the way he did it. And later on, I did see Andy Vasnik perform the same gray seal story. And he was really great too. I would say he was equally adept at it. Very similar way of doing it. You know, the best I ever saw. Peter said Andy Vasnik. Mal said yes. You know, really both of them were wonderful. There may have been other people who performed renditions of the gray seal, but these were the only two I saw. But nobody influenced me. Nobody did. I mean, I just had this feeling and I just went for it. I mean, you know, at one point I decided, you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a vet. I wanted to be a vet. No, I didn't actually wanted to work as a vet. I didn't want to go to med school and all that. But I wanted to work for a vet. All right? So I applied and I was told no. And they said because I couldn't communicate with dogs. That's why I couldn't have the job. And later, well, you know, I really love sports. Just love sports. Always have. So then I decided, well, maybe I'd like to be a sportswriter. So I applied for a job in the summertime. I can't remember if it was between sophomore and junior. I can't remember what year it was. But I wanted to write for sports column. And they said, yeah, but you're deaf. And I said, well, so, balls don't talk, do they? Is there any problem with that? And the guy said, yeah, I agree. You balls don't talk. They don't communicate. And so he gave me a trial run. And I did that every summer. I wrote for the sports column in the local newspaper. And he says, did silence movies influence you all? Did you look at those when you were growing up? Silent movies. Did you watch them? Mal says, no, no. Well, yes and no. The problem is when I was a kid, I mean, I didn't have any awareness of where I could go to see a silent movie or where could I get one? But the school for the deaf had them. And they'd show them every weekend. They'd show them on Sunday nights. So we'd watch movies on Sunday nights. Saturdays, we'd go down into town and we'd watch movies. And we wouldn't understand a thing. But we liked them anyway at a good time. Mal says, oh, silent movies. Well, wait a minute. Maybe I did. Maybe I did. But maybe unconsciously they influenced me. Perhaps they influenced me unconsciously. But that's a part of my mind because there are many scenes that I can remember. Years later, I can still sort of see them in my mind. Oh, I'll tell you one movie that I really just loved. The Thief of Baghdad with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. That was poetry. Very, very poetic the way those movements were in that film. And I really like that a lot. Yes. Mm-hmm. But my gumption and whatever came from me. And he says, Peter and I saw this movie that was about El Salvador. This was about three or four years ago. And it really had a huge impact on us at the same time because we saw Peter. Do you remember exactly what it was? I mean, what it was we got from that movie about El Salvador, what it was that got us. I mean, it just like exploded our brains and immediately we came up with a poem that was instilled by it. It wasn't from this movie itself. But the ideas in it somehow are what gave us this inspiration for something else. Have you ever had that happen to you from a movie or from a book or something? You read it and go, wow, that gives me this idea to do this new thing. Miles says, I can't really remember to tell you the truth. I mean, that was all really long time ago. But the whole idea about me doing that on my own, I mean, the sports writing that even though I was deaf, I wanted to do it and writing scripts to sell. And you know, at one point I was a copywriter. I wanted to write ads. I love TV and I love the way ads were and stuff. So I went to somebody who needed someone to do that job. And I applied. They said, you're deaf. I said, so, your point is? So they gave me a trial to be an ad writer. So a month later, the woman who hired me asked me to teach her. So it was really successful. What I would do, I'd go to a store and I'd get whatever the product was that had to be sold. And I would take it to my office and I'd really write it and then I would write some copy and it seemed to work out great. Kenny said, did you ever write a play about baseball? Mal said, good idea. Maybe I should do that. I did a long time ago. Signed Casey at the bat. I did do that. He just said, did you follow line for line or did you change the words or anything? Mal said, well, I followed it. But you know, I added my things to it. I did it my way. He just said, do you have any particular lines you remember from that really stick out in your mind? Mal's, oh, it's been so many years ago. I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, no. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No. The very, very end. I think the very end and this last verse, I think, I think he's standing. There was something in his bearing. Let me see if I can remember this. Okay. This is Casey. Casey. The sneer is gone from Casey's lip. His teeth are clenched in paint. He pounds with cruel violence. His bat upon the plate. And now the pitcher holds the ball and now he lets it go. And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow. So look at that. You know, you're right. I was doing the kind of technique, but it wasn't doing that consciously. Peter says, that's right. Technically, you got that. Mal said, I didn't even realize it. It's just sort of like a natural thing. And Peter said, yeah, it's just a natural thing. You did the VV. So Mal says, so by the force of Casey's blow, mighty Casey has struck out. Peter says, it's interesting. You grew up, let's see, you were hearing until you were 10. You got sick and then you became deaf and then at 12 you went to the school for the deaf and you didn't understand sign language and then gradually you started picking it up and assumed that as your language. But what was the name of that cobbler, the shoemaker again? MacArthur. Right. So you saw him performing things. Did you ever see, hey, look at how he's doing that. I want to do that. Mal said, no, he just signed very, very smoothly. He didn't do a back and forth body shift or things like that. It was very smooth. But Peter said, where did you think you found that particular aspect of going from person to person? Mal says, I don't know. Peter said, the reason I asked is because I was hearing till I was three. Then I got sick. I became deaf. I went to an oral school and I didn't know sign at all. And then I went to the NAD conference, their 100-year anniversary celebration in Cincinnati, Ohio. I didn't sign at all. And there were all these deaf people signing everywhere. Did you go to that? Mal says, no, I wasn't there. Peter said, I just remember that there were these two escalators that crisscrossed. They were diagonal to each other and people were going up to the second floor atrium above the lobby downstairs. And I'm standing there and I'm watching all these people signing as they pass each other on the escalators as they sign all along the atrium up above and the lobby below and I just felt like it was in a forest of hands everywhere I looked. And I was a gog, just deaf people everywhere I looked. But I didn't understand anything because I didn't sign. Then I went into Bernard Bragg's workshop about VV. And I'm watching and he's describing the hunter and the dog where he goes back and forth. And I couldn't believe what I saw. He went back and forth and stayed in one place and my mind was blown. And so immediately I took that technique into myself as if I'd always had it. It was just so natural for me. I had never done it before and the moment I saw it, it made perfect sense to me and I made it my own. Did you ever have anything like that? Mal says, no. And again, I have to explain that, like I said before, I realized that I could be 100% free of English and go into ASL. But I didn't think about it. I just did it. You know, it was very, very different. I came up with new things but I just did them and I didn't think about them the way you do now. I was a freak. I'm telling you, I'm a freak. Kenny says, you didn't feel that you were very technical in a sense but you said the emotion was really important to get out. And I just wonder, you know, if something really occurs to you, you see a movie or you see something very emotional and this flood of emotion overtakes you or something scares you or something inspires you, does that occur to you once in a while to inspire you? Mal said, that was always important to me but I didn't even know it myself until I went to NTD and when I worked there and taught there. I did teach there as I said at the time when Bragg was there too and there was a man there named Gino Lasco. Peter says, yes, yes, I know exactly who you mean. Mal said, so Lasco and he did, well, he really put Bragg and me in the same category. He thought that we were sort of the same. He allied us together and thought that we were very superficial and not very good performers. He didn't really understand who I was but he lumped me together with Bernard Bragg but I went to his class and watched him and I watched him and I got what he was doing and I realized that I operated more like he did but he assumed that I was a lot like Bernard Bragg. Bragg had this amazing talent, you know, of signing whatever my signing wasn't that great but he helped me a lot. Lasco really helped me a lot because what he would do is he'd watch how people worked and he would find what was missing in their performance. Now the MSSD last year I was directing a play and there were two kids in it, a girl and a guy and the girl just had a world of feeling just beautifully motioned but her signing was horrible because she refused to practice. She wouldn't rehearse. I worked with her and I said, come on, come on, let's get it together. As for the boy, he had this gorgeous sign language rendition of the lines he had to perform but he had no feeling whatsoever so I tried to pull the best out of what was good out of both of these kids to make them better consummate performers and I thank Lasco for that. I really do. You know, I think he didn't realize what was in me but he's really, really up on the feeling behind the action. That's what he was trying to get out. Peter said, and what's really amazing was he just really wanted to reflect what the ideas were. He was very good at pulling that out of people. Mal said, yes, he really would. He would watch what people did and sometimes he would just look at these extraneous signs that people were doing and he would cut and he would cut and he would edit and he would preen this until he'd get it right down bare to the bone, very lean performances. And they were always better for his editing, always. He got all the extraneous fluff out and what was left there was a person on the stage doing beautiful signs with a lot of feeling. Peter said, yes, that's interesting. You know, Lasco wasn't a very good signer and didn't know much of anything about deaf culture or deaf community but was so good at pulling out the best in people. I agree. Yeah, that's right. Lasco, not now but back in the day, he used to be a second unit director for the Hollywood filmmaker, Penn, P-E-N-N. The director, he did several films. Arthur Penn, famous director. He was the second unit director for Arthur Penn and he's directed several plays on Broadway but I don't know the titles. Peter said, I think he works for a private company now. Is that right? A private theater company? Mel says, maybe. He just says, now I really remember. I went to summer school at NTD one year and I remember Lasco very well so now that you bring it up I'm remembering all these things about the way he worked. Mel says, yep, as I said, it's all about the acting. I took some acting classes for hearing people with voice. It was supposed to be acting with voice but I took this class anyway. As I said, I was very forthright and I took a lot of different acting classes to improve myself. Peter said, did Lasco ask you to do different sorts of theater exercises? Mel says, well, I wasn't part of the classes. I was just observing them. Peter said, oh, you watched them. Peter said, yeah, I observed him. I observed how he taught. Later he had a big falling out with David Hayes and then he left the company and about the following year there was another director who was hired in his place and they asked me to come back and be part of it and I did. They were pretty impressed with me and again, it was just this internal emotion, not necessarily the signing skill but what you could bring to the plate as far as emotion goes but he never was part of it again. I never saw him again and he never even knew the amount of influence he exerted upon me. He just lumped me with Bernard and thought that I had this very superficial amount of skill, sadly. Well, hit me again. Come on. More questions? Let's go. Matthew said, what's the next big thing you're looking forward to? Paul says, whatever it is I'm doing tomorrow. That's the truth. It has to be. Right now I'm working on Little Shop of Horrors but when that's done they'll be onto something new. I don't live in the past. Never live in the past. Onward. Peter says, I want to talk a little bit about the past a little bit. So if you could imagine yourself as a senior at Gallaudet you're very involved in the literary society, right? Or junior year maybe, right? Let's pretend it's junior year. Here it is that day and you're thinking tonight I'm going to perform Jabberwocky. That's what I'm going to do and you're sitting on your bed and you'd already shown, you showed Panera, right? You showed Bob Panera. Okay. I showed Panera. He's excited. I'm going to go on tonight. Oh boy. So excited. So I'm wondering what led up to that performance. What was the day like and what happened after the performance? Did you go out afterwards, go to a party, to a bar? Tell me about that day. Tell me about what led up to it. You can start with, well I got up in the morning. Mel says, no, let's see. I do know one thing. Always in the back of my mind I'm running lines. Always I'm looking at the script in the back of my mind. I went to Los Angeles with Peter Cook and with, oh. Peter Wolf I meant. Not you Peter Cook. Nope, not you. So I was in, I was Jonathan Roman and Peter Wolf and Lou Font and one other person and we were doing a show there and they wanted me to do Jabberwocky. So I'm sitting before the show and we're eating dinner and I'm running lines in the back of my mind while I'm eating dinner. Jabberwocky's just running through the back of my mind while I'm eating and Peter looks at me and says, wow, Miles, you look so relaxed and I just grinned but in the back of my mind I'm running these lines and I've got butterflies in my stomach constantly fluttering up and down, up and down. You have to have butterflies in your stomach. You have to or you can't do a good job. That's what I think. You know, it would bother me to know that I didn't have butterflies. I have to. But what's interesting is when I went to NTD I taught for a while and I wrote this poem and I wanted everybody in the company to perform it and I asked Gil Eastman to lead everybody in learning this poem. So the whole NTD company was going to be performing this with me. So Eastman said, okay, he would teach them. He asked me how and I said, oh, come on. You know, like, don't be silly. You can teach everybody and he finally said, oh, come on. Just do it yourself. It's your poem. You know it. You wrote it. Why don't you teach everybody? You've got the skill. So, you know, I tried to teach everybody and what happened was we're all signing. I'm signing this along for everybody. And I lost a line. I couldn't remember. I couldn't remember. Now, I said, ladies and gentlemen, that was take one. This is take two. Start at the top. And so we worked our way through it again. But what's funny is the reason that I got, I had that glitch was I hadn't practiced it enough. I'd gotten to a certain point which was very well practiced, but I hadn't rehearsed quite enough for this other part. And that's where I lost it. You know, right in between the beginning and the end, I lost this middle section. There was supposed to be this other song that came in. So at one point, I was signing this and I lost some lines. I forgot what I was doing, but my hands kept going. So even though my mind had a complete blank, my hands just knew what to do because I had that muscle memory and that habit. So I was able to get through it anyway. It's a very interesting experience that my body took over where my mind had a little bit of a gap. Kenny said that night that you performed when you were heading up to it. Did you have any sort of like ritual special clothes you had to wear for good luck or some kind of exercises or movements you had to do to warm yourself up that you thought would be good luck or get you ready so you have the right kind of energy, jumping jacks, or you just sit and meditate. What happened? Miles said, well, Bragg has found some exercises for mimes and that's quite helpful. So sometimes I do that sometimes and I've modified those to fit me. I do things like this with my hands to warm them up get the dexterity going in my fingers, squeeze them together, these sorts of movements. That helps loosen me up. I try that. It's just like vocal scales, right? When people are getting ready to sing. You can try that. And that's what I did. That's what I did at National Theatre of the Deaf. I learned those from Bragg and he made me the exercise boy. I had to exercise. So that was his thing. So he taught the company and that's what we all had to do if we were part of the company. Matthew says, how did you feel after you did it? Miles says, I felt on top of the world. On top of the world. Very relaxed afterwards. Very happy talking with people. Very much so. Peter says, and relieved. Miles said, oh yes, I could finally let go. Absolutely. You know, I was on a cloud for ten years. You know? I felt that everybody accepted me. Peter says, yeah, on to the next thing so you could have more lines going in the back of your head. Absolutely. I went to the University of Louisville at one point. It was a few years ago. I was an artist in residence there for a week and there was a show that we were doing. And it was kind of interesting because, you know, I've traveled. What we did with this show was we traveled to different parks and there was a musician who was singing these songs with a guitar and I wrote some poems to go with it and we were outside in these different parks under the trees with the wind blowing the trees. It was really nice and people who would come to see it didn't know anything about sign language but they would follow along with the signs in the chorus and what have you. It was really nice. That was fun. And also I would teach them how to sign things like the dog shook itself from head to tail. I would teach them how to do little ideas like that. Here's how you do it. Shook its head all the way down the body to the tail. Shake its head. Shake, shake, shake, shake, tail. That's the whole thing. The dog shook itself from head to tail. Kenny says, what about my dog? What about Bob dog? How would you show him shaking himself from head to tail? Mal says, well, head, big, big body, big long tail. Your dog's a big dog. It takes a little longer. I like to create things like that, come up with things like that. It's really important for hearing people to focus it on the face and you can show them well like for the sign pregnancy, for example. You can be pregnant like this or like this or like this or pregnant like this or pregnant like this or pregnant like this. Right? It's the same sign but inflected different ways with different facial expression. It would take a lot of different adjectives and English words to fit to explain each one of those. So there's a lot of experience that I've had like that. I took a class one time at University of California and it was supposed to be Psychology of Communication. It was, you know, mostly psychology classes, I think, are kind of a bunch of crap to tell you the truth, you know? But this one day, there was supposed to be a note taker but I was looking for this note taker and she just was never there as opposed to have notes and there was no interpreter. So I did notice in the class there was this guy who used to be the head of a day school in California in Oakland and I knew him. He had a deaf daughter and he signed okay. He signed a little bit. Not great but good enough and I said, would you mind interpreting for me? The note taker's not here. He said fine. So he sat next to me and the teacher's talking and this guy's supposed to be interpreting for me. He's just sitting there and after about a half an hour he leans over to me. He says nothing new and then another half hour goes by and he said, same old crap. Kind of pissed me off to tell you the truth. So I said, gosh, this isn't getting me anywhere. So I just sat there and doodled. I just drew pictures and the professor gets when to what I'm doing starts getting really mad at me. But what am I supposed to do? You know, he's reading his words. So I just sat there doodling. So he comes up to me and he says, how are you supposed to learn anything if you're not paying attention? And so my friend said, oh, he's reading my notes which was bullshit because he didn't have any notes at all. But this class required a paper. He had to write a term paper. So I wrote this paper and in this paper I explained the importance of communication on the face because facial expression is the same as intonation and nuance. So I write this paper dealing with that and I submitted it. The last day of class I gave it in and he just gave me this cold look. He took my paper and he just looked me up and down and I thought, wow, in his mind he's thinking F paper. And I thought, okay, if I get a C I'll be satisfied with the class. I don't really care. The next week in the mail I get this folder with a postage stamp on it and I open it up and it's got an A plus on it and attached to it as a note and it says, oh, Eric Malza, I am so sorry that I underestimated you. This is an amazing paper and would you please come teach my class? Once in a while would you come give a special lecture to my class? Could you give a presentation for me? And so for several years afterwards every year I would go to his class and give a presentation. So I don't know what he talked about the whole time but I was able to get this paper to follow well enough to be able to do a paper. There was no exam in this class anyway and no book he had to buy so it was just funny that worked out okay. Kenny says, when you're about to perform when you're about to perform Jabberwocky and you were done what happened afterwards? What did you do? Did you go out? Did you go to bars after literary society? Did you just hang out and talk to your friends? What would you guys do after a literary society event? Mal says, well my energy these days is very, very limited so now most of the time I would go home. Peter says, no he's talking about back in the day. Oh Mal says, oh we'd go to a bar we would drink we'd hang out we'd share experiences we would talk we would laugh a lot about what had happened you know we'd talk about blunders we made on the stage and ad-libs we had to do to cover up our mistakes Peter says, oh yeah you know tonight what we did wrong we'd always talk about how nobody even knew what we did and we'd laugh a lot about what we do wrong and how we try to cover it Mal says exactly there was this one play I was in and I had a mustache that came off in the middle of the scene so I was supposed to enter the scene I was supposed to come on stage I was supposed to be a famous film director but go in and it comes off I'd gone in early and then the mustache came off and I looked at it and I yelled at the other actor I said, I pay you $10,000 and you're supposed to act better than that I took the cigar out of my mouth and I shoved it in his mouth and the actor you know the whole thing was an ad-lib I just made up the whole thing and he didn't know what to do because he was so taken aback and that was really funny that was really funny Peter says, I know you've been teaching for quite a while now and you taught Phyllis Freilich and Ella did you teach Ella also? Mal says yep and Linda Boeuf at NTD and of course Dragon NTD also Ella was in California though Peter said okay the videographer's asking a question Mal said I met him at MSSD but I'm not sure if it was through a class or what exactly the connection was no, no, no that was much later much later I had left by then but Peter says so Terry Lean you could say there's obviously like three or four different generations of people did you teach Patrick Grable? Patrick Grable? Mal says I worked with him I worked with him but not much because he was a little bit later but I did work with him some Peter said okay so you got Bernard Bragg and then you've got Ella and Valley in the next cohort and then Terry Lean is maybe in a younger cohort and what's the name of the other person? Bird Bird, yeah then there's Bird and there's Alan Granov? Is that right? Alan Granov, yep was one of my students also and Peter says so there's all these different cohorts of people that you've taught and I wonder when you look at all them do you think that they have a similar sort of flavor in their delivery? Mal says what do you mean by a similar flavor? Matthew says do they develop a different acting style or a different way of expressing themselves? Do you notice a difference in each different group? Are they same? Mal says I find what is uniquely there as in each person I find the beauty in each of their styles and then I try to help them develop that style they don't need to have my style superimposed on them I don't really give them anything I find what they have and I help them cultivate what they have that's uniquely theirs and for a longer play like at MSSD I don't have time for everybody to translate their own lines I just translate the whole play myself and then they have to follow the lines that I do but what I do is later after they're performing during performances I'll say that's beautiful that's perfect keep it, keep it that's not even mine but you added something new and that's the way I roll with the students there Peter says something off-screen here Peter says I'll teach students to do something and I'll notice how they do it and I'll think oh I should teach a different way next time because the way they just did that makes me realize I can improve the way teaching style and different ideas get better each time because when I teach folks I learn from them have you had that happen to you and Mel said again probably unconsciously I don't think I'm consciously determined to be better in it but I'm sure that that's happened to me too because you know at the same time I'm trying to I'm trying to you know use new ideas like for instance fingerspelling I'm trying to find creative ways to use fingerspelling these days and so I like that to be something that they can utilize because okay it's English right but you can still use that so especially for names you can use fingerspelling techniques for names so spell it in an interesting and creative way so I'll teach a class like I'm teaching a sign language class I've done that before and so I'll hearing people and they're learning to spell and I'll say okay so your fingerspelling can be done creatively as long as you don't overdo it so for example like fast F-A-S-T sign fast fast