Books offered Reinaldo Garcia salvation in the “arid” San Fernando Valley in the 1950s. One of the first stories his father read to him was Jack London’s harsh survival tale “To Build a Fire.”
“I sailed on tramp steamers with Howard Pease’s Tod Moran,” Garcia says. “I trekked across Alaska with Jack O’Brien’s Silver Chief.”
When he published a short story at 17, he decided to become a writer, and to live the kind of life that would stoke his work. He says he avoids political correctness, which he calls a destroyer of creativity.
He reviewed record albums in the 1970s. “After I trashed everything sent to me by the record companies, I dared myself to write my own material,” he says. He’s amassed more than 1,400 songs and released 10 CDs.
Dream Butchers: The World of Reinaldo Garcia comprises three of his one-act plays, interspersed with five of his songs.
Low & Inside is a baseball tale of woe an umpire (Ron Genaur) tells to a bartender (the audience), based on the real-life story of a Salinas-born professional umpire who blew a shot at the Major Leagues.
The second play is Hunger, a “metaphysical comedy based on a Sufi aphorism” between a sheep (Mindy Whitfield) and a wolf (Jason Roeder). Really.
Let Me Look at You is also based on an actual event in which a Garcia says a “middle-aged Sunday school teacher formed a bizarre ‘attachment’ to a Pacific Grove actress, whom he stalked by placing a GPS device under her car’s chassis.”
It’s the Reinaldo show, all emanating from a prolific mind. The question for audiences is whether the work reaches the heights and depths he lived his life to find.