It's All In the Playing

by Shirley Maclaine

  Bob Butler seemed quite comfortable on the taping floor. I wondered how he’d be with a film crew instead. He directed from the booth, and fairly soon Kevin became accustomed to the voice above him instead of an actual face in front of him.

  Everyone was set. Kevin went through some motions with his hat and coat, since he had an entrance to make through my door in Malibu. It was funny and dear to observe the vanity of even so unassuming an individual as a medium who allowed other beings to use his body without regard for how it looked.

  Bob gave the countdown to tape rolling and then we began. Kevin walked through the door and began his lines. He was nervous. I in turn became immediately supportive. With my prompting he acted out his lines. He told “Shirley” what to expect, explaining that he was really acting as a telephone for disincarnate beings to speak through. I snuck a peek at the dumbfounded crew. No one blinked. (Hollywood crews have seen it all.)

  Then I forgot my lines. Someone handed me a script. By now I was definitely out of character.

  Kevin went into trance, as per script. The crew didn’t know what was going on. They waited. A few of them adjusted the lights.

  John of Zebedee came through and said, “Hail. Greetings. State purpose of gathering.”

  Several members of the crew very gently backed up. I chuckled to myself. John proceeded to play his lines letter-perfect—not with any great dramatic flair, mind you, but with precision. When he paused and said, “Pause. There is another entity desiring to speak,” there was another almost palpable reaction from the crew. I heard one of them murmur, “Should this guy get the Academy Award or is this real?” I found myself whipping between playing the scene and watching the crew react to an honest-to-God channeling. It was really difficult for me to get the concentration I needed.

  Tom McPherson, in all the glory of his Irish brogue, came through. “Tip o’ the hat to you,” he began and proceeded to introduce himself and launch into his portion of the scene. He was as letter-perfect as John. Kevin had had trouble remembering his lines—the entities had no problem. “Earth plane anxiety,” Tom would explain later. “When the director yells the word action, the aura of every person on the set goes muddy. What are they so worried about? All of life is a movie, not just the one you’re making.” Sure, Tom, and we all wear IT’S ONLY A MOVIE buttons, too.

  Tom then proceeded to pad his part a little by turning to the crew and saying, “I’d like to encourage all of you out there to enjoy having a body. I haven’t had one for four hundred years. I miss it. When you’re floatin’ around up here you’re like a saint or somethin’. All you can be is good, gooder, and goodest.” Some of the crew laughed.

  Tom explained his identity per script, Irish pickpocket and all. The crew gaped. How could a pickpocket be a spiritual guide? “He’s working off his karma,” said one of the guys with long hair and an earring. I made a note of his identity—we should definitely take him to Peru, I thought.

  We were well into the scene when Tom suddenly reached over and took my hands. I felt a surge of warm, almost liquid, electricity go up my arms and through me.

  “Would you like to do an Irish jig now, lassie?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled and completely out of character.

  “Well,” Tom went on, “help an old pickpocket to his feet. You have an advantage over me up here. Just get me to my feet and I’ll be fine, don’t ya know.”

  I helped Tom to his feet. He looked down.

  “Good floor,” he said. “It’s not the hardwood deck of shipboard, but it’ll do.”

  With that, Tom began to direct me in an Irish jig. He held my hands loosely and told me about the incarnations we had had together as pirates. I wondered how much karma he would have to work off before he was done with it.

  I was laughing as Tom improvised even more lines. Then I began to be aware that I was becoming nauseated. It wasn’t the physical activity. It was something else. I really began to feel terrible, as though I would throw up right on his hardwood floor.

  “Tom,” I said, “I’m getting really sick. I have to sit down.” I looked around at the crew. They thought it was part of the scene. Nobody did anything.

  “Yes, lassie,” said Tom. “We must be sittin’ then.” He guided me to my chair. The crew was mesmerized. I started to hyperventilate. I heard a crew member say, “These two are really good.”

  Tom sat down opposite me.

  “How’re ya feelin’ now, lassie?” he inquired, quite concerned.

  “I’m really ill, honestly. Why? What’s happened here?”

  “Well,” he said, “if you really want to know the truth, I thought you’d be playing your part from the emotional frame of reference of ten years ago. That carried with it a lower frequency in your being. You’ve been out of character for the last fifteen minutes and I didn’t pull back my frequencies in time. I thought you’d snap into character when we danced. But you didn’t, so when you came into physical contact with my frequencies it was too much for you. I’m sorry.”

  The crew shook their heads in disbelief.

  “Oh,” I said, understanding what he meant. “I’m sorry too.”

  “Yes, lassie,” he added. “I thought we were dealing with professional acting here. Forgive me, but if you had stayed in character this wouldn’t have happened.”

  One of the guys in the crew lit a cigar.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. You don’t have to humiliate me in front of the crew.”

  “Oh,” replied Tom, “a little humility never hurt anybody. Keeps your feet on the ground, as I am constantly reminded myself.”

  I pushed him in the shoulder and retracted my hand quickly. I didn’t want to risk any more contact just now.

  “Shall I be goin’ then?” said Tom. “Or will ya want to be doing it all again?”

  I was really nauseous now. “I think we’d better quit for a while, Tom. If we need to do it again, I’ll talk it over with Kevin.”

  “Saints be lookin’ after ya, then,” said Tom. And he was gone.

  The lights went off on the set. The crew just stood there. Kevin rolled around to consciousness. “How’d it go?” he asked with his familiar curiosity.

  The guy with the cigar walked up to him and very politely said, “Excuse me, mister, but where were you during all this?”

  “Where was I?” asked Kevin ingenuously.

  “Yeah.”

  “I was asleep, I think you’d say.”

  “Asleep?”

  “Yes. That’s what it feels like anyway. My own personality moves put of the way for other personalities to come through me. That’s why they call me a medium.”

  The guy puffed seriously on his cigar.

  “Yes,” Kevin went on. “I’m one of the few people in the world who gets paid for falling asleep on the job.”

  Kevin and I left the taping studio. Everyone adjourned until another day when I would rehearse in character. We had a quick dinner together. I didn’t feel like eating much and discussed matters in relation to what happened to me. When Kevin dropped me off at my car, I forgot and left my flowers behind.

  When I walked into my apartment in Malibu a floral smell swept over me. I went to the living room and dining room, wondering where the smell was coming from. There were no flowers to be seen; plenty of plants, but no flowers. I sat down, quietly perplexed. I had heard many tales of floral scents in relation to spiritual visitations, and even from people who claimed to have been in the presence of a UFO. Something about high vibrational frequency causing an identical smell as that of another nature. It made sense, I guess, but I didn’t understand how it worked. Then the telephone rang. It was Kevin.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been sitting here thinking real hard how I can get your flowers to you. You left them in the trunk of my car. I took them out and watered them, but not knowing when I’d get back out to Malibu, I’ve been sending them to you telepathically.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Until that moment
I had forgotten I’d left the flowers with him.

  “Yes,” Kevin went on. “I was wondering if anything unusual had transpired in relation to your flowers.”

  I gulped. “How about there’s this pronounced floral smell all through my apartment, and I don’t have a flower in here except silk ones.”

  “Oh,” said Kevin calmly. “I’m getting better at it. It’s not at all unusual when two people are in tune. This also bears out what McPherson’s been saying about your developing mediumistic potential.”

  A rush of concern went through me.

  “I don’t want to become a medium, Kevin,” I said. “I like knowing what’s happening to me all the time.”

  “Oh, my goodness, of course not,” he assured me. “First of all, there has to be an agreement between beings for me to be used as an instrument. I’ve told you often, it’s probably my karma to be a human telephone this time around, and I have certainly given my permission.”

  I thought a moment about the day’s events. I could feel the understandable skepticism of the crew. Was Kevin just acting or might it be something in his own subconscious he was expressing? I finally thought of a question which, if properly answered, would serve as a point of proof for most people regarding the legitimacy of channeling. So I asked him: “Kevin, are you the only medium who channels Tom McPherson?”

  To my surprise Kevin replied, “No. Actually I knew about at least one other man, whom I’ve since met, and probably another whom I haven’t checked out yet. Any time you’d like to talk to Tom through somebody else, let me know.”

  Oh, boy, would I take him up on that. I thanked him for the telepathic flowers and hung up, hoping to get some rest.

  The telephone rang. It was Jach Pursel’s two partners from San Francisco. Jach was the medium who channeled Lazaris, a high-level entity who, according to him, has never been embodied. Therefore he doesn’t speak from earth-plane experience, which he claims doesn’t necessarily diminish his physical understanding. Anyway, Michael and Peny and I began to chat. They were interested in how the screen test had gone with Kevin; a little friendly medium rivalry, you might say. I told them what had happened when I danced the jig with Tom: my nausea and so on. There was a long pause.

  “Well,” said Michael. “We don’t feel that that was very advanced of McPherson. I mean, why was it necessary to put you through all that?”

  “Well,” I answered, slightly taken aback, “I don’t think it was necessary. It was just a mistake—mine as well as his.”

  “Well, he shouldn’t have made that mistake,” they insisted.

  “Oh, well,” I tried to assure them, “it was nothing, really. No harm done.”

  “What do you mean?” said Peny. “Aren’t you angry and outraged about it?”

  “Me?” I asked, startled at her intensity. “Why, no. Not at all. For what would I be outraged?”

  “Well,” she continued, “because McPherson really came on strong and he had no right to do that.”

  “But, Peny, he didn’t mean to. He apologized. And besides, I told you I wasn’t rehearsing my part with the emotional frequency of ten years ago.”

  “No,” she said. “You deserve better than that. You should face your anger and hostility and allow yourself to feel it.”

  “But I don’t feel any anger.”

  “Then you are holding it at arm’s length. That way you don’t experience pain. But you’ll prevent your growth that way.”

  I stopped and thought about what she and Michael were saying. By now they were on two phones. I didn’t know where Jach was. What they were saying was a little like the early days of psychoanalysis and est training. If you don’t feel anger and rage, it’s because you’re suppressing it.

  I tried very hard to conjure something up. But I couldn’t get mad at McPherson.

  “Listen,” I finally said. “I’m really trying to get mad and pissed off, but I can’t get it up, so I can only say maybe you guys are mad and pissed off. Maybe you have a problem with McPherson, and I can understand that perfectly. After all, I guess everybody wants to believe their spiritual entity is the best.”

  Soon after that we politely hung up. It was my first taste of what would soon develop into the competition of the entities, or as someone put it more succinctly, “the battle of the Gods.” And because I was in the eye of the hurricane of the rapidly developing metaphysical movement, I and my endorsement would be a prized trophy. It was indeed a lot like Hollywood studios. Each was creative, knowledgeable, accomplished, and useful, and each dealt with the stuff dreams are made of. There was no way to choose. I loved them all.

  Bob, Colin, Stan, and I had still not decided whether Kevin and his entities should play themselves. We had some trepidation that “talking heads” would become boring. It was fascinating to witness in person, but how would it translate to film? The entity John was of particular concern, because he lacked “a certain comedic or dramatic flair they like to see on TV.”

  We were sitting in the rehearsal room discussing the problem when, as though on cue, the telephone rang. It was Kevin. (The guy definitely had a hot line to God.)

  “Listen,” said Kevin with no preliminaries, “John will very likely come through ‘on the day,’ exuding an energy overtone with more earth-plane personality, which the television audience would find more similar to the vibration of the present day.”

  I relayed the message to the guys word-for-word, without sarcasm. I hoped they would understand it. They rolled their eyes. I guess they didn’t get it either. I went back to Kevin.

  “So you’re saying John will put some modern-day oomph into his performance?”

  “Yeah,” said Kevin. “By the way, does Butler still think he’s the only sane one on the project?”

  I laughed.

  “Well, then,” said Kevin. “He was just on a location hunt in Peru, was he not?”

  “Yes,” I answered curiously.

  “Get him to tell you what happened to him up there.”

  Kevin hung up and I looked over at the guys. Stan, Bob, the production manager Dean O’Brien, and the art director had done a location reconnaissance since we last met. We had not yet had time to discuss the results.

  “So how was it in Peru?” I asked.

  “Sit down,” said Stan.

  I sat.

  “Okay,” he began. “The four of us were being driven in a car by our interpreter and scouting organizer. We were looking forward to seeing the UFO CONTACT POINT sign that you described in your book. We had taken pictures of towns, llamas, babies, mountains, and every rock we ran across, so of course the pièce de résistance would be the UFO sign.”

  I didn’t know what he was driving at.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Well, the four of us fell asleep in the car at the same time, like we had lost consciousness or something. And when we woke up an hour or so later, we asked our driver when we were going to get to the sign. He looked at us very strangely and said, ‘what do you mean?’ I repeated the question and he said, ‘But Mr. Margulies, you did see it. You all saw it. You got out and took pictures of it. You talked about it among yourselves. Don’t you remember?’ Well, none of us remembered. It was as though it was wiped from our minds. We still can’t remember, and there is nothing on the film we took.”

  I stared at Stan.

  “So,” he said, “Mr. Butler no longer thinks he’s the only sane person on the movie. Apparently either we’re all losing it or something else is going on. Didn’t Tom McPherson say we would get UFOs on film if the collective consciousness is receptive?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Stan and the others exchanged looks.

  “Maybe the message was we’re not ready.”

  “Maybe,” I said disappointedly.

  “But that’s not all,” Stan said.

  “What else?”

  “After we got back, we asked for someone in our Peruvian office down there to take pictures of the UFO sign so we could dupli
cate it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Only half of the sign is visible in their photos. It’s as though it doesn’t fully exist for us.”

  I thought a moment.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe that’s true.”

  “God, Shirley,” said Stan. “How could we all forget what we did?”

  “I don’t know. I guess somebody is trying to tell you something.”

  Stan rolled his eyes again. “The question is: who?”

  Chapter 6

  In mid-September, Dancing in the Light was published. I had promised my publisher, Bantam Books, that I would do a promotional tour of several cities. So in between preproduction chores for “Limb” I once again experienced the hustle of American cities and I freely discussed the evolvement of my spiritual and metaphysical search. It was entirely different from the tour I had done two years previously. I don’t know whether newspaper and magazine editors were taking me more seriously or whether the reporters they sent to interview me were chosen for their open-mindedness about spiritual search. I only know I was so pleasantly surprised that most of them had done a great deal of metaphysical reading on their own.

  They had evolved into being more aware of past life therapy and past life trauma, chakkra energy sources, the way karma works, and so on. Some of them had sought out their own trance mediums because it was common knowledge that really fine mediums were developing their psychic talents and instrumentality at a greatly accelerated rate. The information coming through was nourishing, knowledgeable, highly sophisticated, and, more often than not, completely accurate. Some of the finest skeptically astute reporters in America were on their own spiritual path of investigation; so much so that our interviews often turned more into shared conversations than interrogative questions and answers. I noticed, however, that these reporters found it necessary to evidence the most skepticism in their written articles. That was okay. They had bosses and needed to appear doubly objective.

  The call-in TV and radio shows, particularly Larry King’s, were truly phenomenal for me. All told, I must have talked spontaneously and live to about three hundred callers, and except for a woman on Phil Donahue’s show who said what I was talking about was witchcraft, not one person said “this stuff is crazy” or anything even resembling such a point of view. In fact, just the opposite. I wondered myself why I wasn’t getting more evidenced adverse reaction. The talk-show hosts couldn’t explain it either. Maybe people somehow sensed that there were unseen realities in their lives, too, just as I was experiencing in mine. They called to discuss past-life recall, what happens to them during meditation, how color therapy works in healing, what mediums I could recommend, what other books I suggested, visions they had experienced after a loved one left the body, and, of course, UFO experiences—which were becoming more and more prevalent.