{"id":5935,"date":"2017-01-04T10:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T18:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohoproductions.org\/old\/?p=5935"},"modified":"2017-01-04T16:00:47","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T00:00:47","slug":"tommy-smiths-obsession-d-b-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohoproductions.org\/old\/blog\/tommy-smiths-obsession-d-b-cooper\/","title":{"rendered":"Tommy Smith’s Obsession with D.B. Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

PLAYWRIGHT’s NOTE ON “db”<\/h3>\n

I grew up on the Key Peninsula, a tangle of islands and waterways threaded with pine trees.<\/p>\n

Not many people live there.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a summer job, I hired myself out in the local newspaper to do yardwork.<\/span><\/p>\n

This occupation brought me to the furthest reaches of the Peninsula, past Federal roads into dirt-paved rural palaces of people who preferred to live without another soul around.<\/span><\/p>\n

These people were libertarians, anarchists, staunch Republicans, fringe Democrats \u2013 their opposing ethos uniting them only in the fact that they needed <\/span>privacy.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

As I was mowing the lawn of a Vietnam Vet, he approached me with a ham sandwich.<\/span><\/p>\n

We had lunch.<\/span><\/p>\n

He talked about the people who lived in the woods.<\/span><\/p>\n

He mentioned that beyond the trees that surrounded his house lived other people who never left the woods.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said that sometimes they came down to his property and he would have to shoot at them with his shotgun.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was the last day I mowed his lawn.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the idea of missing lives being played out in the forests that surrounded my childhood home thrilled me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since I was young, that\u2019s where I thought Sasquatch lived.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a kid, I used to look out the car window at passing forests and imagine that footage of the Bigfoot swaying his arms past treetrunks.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s also where I imagined D.B. Cooper might be.<\/span><\/p>\n

All I knew at the time was that a man stole money then parachuted out of a plane somewhere near my house and they never found him.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the Vet talked about the forest people, I thought of Cooper.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have had a lifelong fascination with D.B. \u2013 from presentations on the hijacking in middle school history class to writing a <\/span>High Times<\/span><\/i> article about the potential suspects, which then got adapted by my co-story writer Teddy Bergman and I into this play.<\/span><\/p>\n

And though we based this work on the article, everything you see here is imagined \u2013 like every aspect of D.B. Cooper.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only one person ever saw him \u2013 his stewardess Tina Mucklow.<\/span><\/p>\n

And she isn\u2019t talking.<\/span><\/p>\n

She disappeared into the woods too.<\/span><\/p>\n