Huron

"PLAY BAWWWWW!"

-- Philip Roth, The Great American Novel

--

Brigadoon opens in a week minus one day. It's odd to be in the show again, in a different place, with different folks, from a completely different perspective. I'm a sword dancer, which fulfills for me some small dancer fantasy, and at the end of "The Chase," I and one other first-tenor sing a high C. Which, he said sheepishly, I really kind of love.

The Mousetrap, a murder mystery by Agatha Christie, opens in two weeks minus one day. I'm Paravicini, a scuzzy Italian stranger who tries to have an amour with the matron of the house. Tune in to see whether I'm the culprit or not...

And in Honk, opening in three weeks minus one day, I have been given a brief but fun cameo as a mandarin duck with "Oriental charm" which is referred to in the opening number but whose role was created for this--and this only, folks--production, at the wonderful Huron Playhouse, where everything is possible if you believe. (He said, once again, sheepishly.)

--

Strange magic of late, as well. Along with swarmsy Scottish brogues and putting slashes in scripts, the world has looked awfully lovely lately. (That's three words with the -ly tail, ladies and gents, and don't judge me.)

"The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark."

-- Wallace Stevens, "On Modern Poetry"

--

Day Three at the Huron Playhouse. We've loaded in the theatre equipment, set up shops and offices, and just now, today, has the acting company arrived. I was on the welcoming crew at the elementary school which serves as our summer dorm, and I had the distinct pleasure of greeting (judging?) each newbie as they pulled into the parking lot, duffels and satchels and pillows piled in their trunks; I, who installed seventeen air-conditioners yesterday, who assembled freestanding walls and metal bedframes, shook the manicured hands of people who will become close friends or fervent enemies in the next two months. In other words, auditions start tomorrow.

The first few nights in Bowling Green and Huron involved alcohol, earning a few of us returnees the collective name "Team Drunk." Our hand sign is a double hang-loose gesture tipped twice toward the mouth. And a big smile.

Already, the lines are drawn. We judge from the corner as people show their fake colors and try to out-intimidate each other. God loves us best without our masks, said a friend. We think that's when people love us most, when we're so concealed we're no longer vulnerable. A sea of performers, and no one's aware of nothing.

I love this place.

Blubber

"Vassar, Moby Dick is a book about blubber, with a madman thrown in for excitement. Five hundred pages of blubber, one hundred pages of madman, and about twenty pages about how good n----rs are with the harpoon."

-- Ernest "Hem" Hemingway, in Philip Roth's The Great American Novel

--

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

Friday's roadtrip from Nebraska to Michigan, quite possibly the last line I'll draw between those two points, took three hours longer than I'd hoped. Halfway through Illinois, my front driver's side tire blew. The car didn't shake; it buzzed and vibrated violently, and I thought for a second that there was something wrong with the speakers. I'd been making my way through the Led Zeppelin canon, and it was "Gallows Pole" from their third album that played as I swore, signaled and slumped to a stop around mile marker 94, on Interstate 80, a Friday in Illinois on which the heat index may well have been 94. Kneeling in front of an engine sick with heat, I saw what looked like some kind of metal bar hanging down from where it should have connected to the wheel. My first thought was, Oh my God, I've broken the axle.

Nothing so melodramatic. I wrenched the smoking rubber tire from its spot and rolled the donut in place, repacked my suitcases and boxes (I'd had to remove them from the trunk in order to get at the spare) and called my dad, who MapQuested me to the nearest Wal-Mart with an auto center. It was a fifteen-minute drive away if I kept the car under 50 mph, which I did, so I put Zeppelin back on.

At the Wal-Mart, the two old fat women at the auto center took care of the order (one Goodwill tire, along with a handful of Illinois "tire taxes" brought my total to over $80), and I flipped out my cell and talked to friends while I walked around and studied DVDs. Normally, I'd go for the books, but let's face it, searching for worthwhile reading material in Wal-Mart is like looking for art in a furniture store. Within an hour, I was back on the road, cruising through a halfway enthusiastic rainstorm from Chicago with everything I owned in that car. I got to Hillsdale and walked around town with Zach for quite a while, and soon I wanted nothing more than to crash on a couch. Which I did.

Yesterday we slept late and watched 3:10 to Yuma and Death at a Funeral, both of which I thought were great examples of their genres. Alan Tudyk was in both films, which adds a sort of theme to the day's entertainment. Yuma I was skeptical of, because of the two UK actors playing backwoodsy American roughasses, but it has a good plot and fresh things to say about frontier violence and partners. The plight of the rancher is easy enough to understand, but the real question is why the outlaw doesn't just escape. Death is a perfect farce, on uncharted ground. Everyone does farces at weddings, reunions, shows of all kinds, balls, galas, etc. This is the first farce I've seen that dares to attack funerals, with an arsenal of midgets, acid, and literally, an elaborate poop gag. Doors swing open and lock shut, with the intensity of a funeral but with none of the solemnity.

Between the films, we attempted to fly a kite. The wind died, though.

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This morning I finished Winesburg, Ohio, a book that seems to explain American grotesqueness in vignettes of a small Ohio town. It's about ordinary people, so it is also about extraordinary dreams, lusts, and absurdity. Anderson has plugged himself into his own book in the character of George Willard, a young newspaper boy whose life intersects briefly or deeply with every person in town. George takes the time to look at the small alarms in a person's life, those little chinks in the mosaic that make something disturbing and beautiful at the same time. And yet at times, the writer seems to be giving us parables: a semi-absurdist/cynical/sentimental version of an American Old Testament.

Zach and I lunched with Dr. Jackson at the Hunt Club, and we talked of theatre, literature, voyeurism and Alcatraz. I think one thing is true of basically everyone you meet: you always remember the first time someone says "fuck" in your presence. If you're like me, it fills you with something like amusement and fear, as if that one word has suddenly deepened the relationship. You haven't so much ascended to a higher plane as you have found the courage to sink lower with each other. Now, you think to yourself, we are so tight that we can let each other say Fuck. All else follows, then: ass, bitch, damn, God damn, shit--they're all fair game once the magic word rears its perfect, ungodly head. It is similar to the first time someone gossips with you. In the taboo is a kind of kinship.

Now the rain has come (again), the trees are waltzing and the sky has grown dark. We could take the kite back out and rediscover electricity.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

Bags

"When you're here, you're family."

-- Official Slogan of The Olive Garden Family Restaurant

--

What is soon to be the sad sum of my possessions lies packed and stacked in a corner of the basement, a neat mess of suitcases, crates and packs. Everything is black, blue and red right now: shades of hurt. Somehow, though, this final (?) departure from home doesn't hurt so much as it just doesn't seem to fit. In the same way, shoes that are too small hurt; if they're too large they just feel awkward. Perhaps it's a cliche, to wonder whether one can fill shoes that seem too big. I guess the idea of watching one's packed bags sit there ought to become vapid with time.

Maybe so. I just hope that what seems to come out trite, in fact, will come out right. There's something good in trying to feel the brunt of a thing, no matter how many times you go through it. Making it new, staying in the moment, and all that. It's sort of like balking at a blinking yellow even if no one else is on the road.

--

We had a jovial final family meal at the Olive Garden tonight, one last stomach-stuffing as a clan. Four Styrofoam boxes sit lamely in the fridge, distant cousins of my basement bags. They are things you put other things in to protect them until "later," when you remember what you've forgotten. It's amazing how much has been created solely for that purpose; personally, I sometimes feel like my life is a series of forgettings and remembrances, and my great task is to orchestrate that as best I can, like a skier hopping moguls on a path.

One final thought: my books. Space is limited in my pile, and my regiment of books must send a single squadron to stave me over for a year. It was as if I were saying to every book, Can we still be friends? I mean, we see each other every once in a while, but we both know I haven't exactly paid much attention to you lately. Plus, I just don't see where this relationship is going...you interested me once...what happened to those days?

I can't explain why I like owning a big pile of books I haven't read.

Warnings

"If I had my life again,
I would not think of gain and pain,
Or if all's slain but for the rain.
I'd simply live it all again."

-- Anonymous

--

Three things of note today.

(1) I am finally the sole owner of my bank account. Mom and Dad signed their names right out of prowess and power, and I feel a little like a stringless puppet, either about to fall down the steps or become a real boy.

(2) I worked out in the Offut Field House. I played basketball, lifted, and cycled. I feel pretty.

(3) There was a tornado warning while we were at the gym. I discussed the Koran with the guy squatting next to me in the men's locker room while middle-aged sweaty men fresh from the racquetball court spouted Anti-Communist Domino Theory.

--

Horton Hears a Who is so darn cute, and Vantage Point is awful. Horton asks the ultimate questions with bugged eyes and tongue calmly wagging, a sort of Einstein in children's clothing: the great triumph of the film is that it makes real the tension of believing in the unbelievable. Horton believes in the invisible community on the surface of a speck, and this belief controls his actions. The struggle of the Whos is that they must choose to believe in the same thing, infinitely larger than them, which controls everything but their actions.

Vantage Point's central problem is that it provides opposing and concurrent perspectives on the same event without saying anything at all about the question of perspective. That question is, simply, What did this person observe, and how did that affect their actions, versus what that person saw and what they did, and how they intersected. What ought to be innovative is essentially trite and empty, a series of events that connects several people who experience a lot of turmoil but apparently take nothing from it. Not only that, but after providing exclusive points of view (the media, the agents, the tourists, etc.), the film devolves into a free-for-all omniscience, so the whole idea of piecing together an event from different perspectives gets completely forgotten. And frankly, any movie that ends with dialogue like, "Thank you, Barnes," "You're welcome, Mr. President," is just asking for it.

Chess

“The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature and the player on the other side is hidden from us.”

-- Thomas Huxley, English biologist, "Darwin's Bulldog"

--

Halfway through our first chess game in years, my sister said to me the other night that she always wanted "to be one of those people who plays long-term chess games. Like, they have a chess board in the house that they never touch except when their opponent comes to visit, like a friend or relative. Or they play through mail. I don't know, it just seems cool."

Ironically, we didn't finish that game. The pieces have since been reset.

I sometimes feel that a lifestyle of leaving home and coming back is a sort of ongoing war between the person and the family, a long-distance chess game. You come back, you make some moves and they counter, then you leave. Every return begins with a reassessment of the board and its pieces, often mistaken for nostalgia. You start scoping territory and wondering how this got there, why you feel so hampered and pinned down, why this gambit is of no further use and ought to be abandoned. You hop back into the game and, recalling rules, you try to win.

It's the sort of game that lasts a long time, uses a lot of mental energy and in the grand scheme of things is little more than a false little quibble blown way out of proportion. It's fun, it's frustrating, and it's fake. The chess game is its own little bubble, and once you pop it, the tension in your brow dissipates and the smells, sounds and sights of life come stampeding back. The fury is welcome at that point. The little escapes and escapades you had during the game--little walks, drives around town, movies watched alone after midnight--are nothing compared to the sudden wealth of freedom.

Here it is, three days away from my Big Move (which will be a lot like the first Big Move of my life, college), and I just want to resign. I find myself thinking about starting this acting career, of learning lines and curtain calls and the supreme loneliness of the traveling performer, and I wonder how Nebraska will treat me once I come back for the holidays. Never underestimate the power of a second thought; it can kill dreams with ease. I see ads for shows at the Omaha Community Playhouse or the Rose Theatre and I wonder, Why not stay home? Why move half a country away to do essentially the same thing? Why the hell didn't I look into my own backyard when I was still at home?

Am I doing this life-thing right? Would I have more success as an accountant, a reporter, a banker, a spy? Why did I sentence myself to a life of moments, glimpses and afterthoughts? Was it even my decision?

And I think about chess games and gambits and pitfalls. There is glory in the world, for those who seek it, yet too much lof and dom (or the very taste of it) will bring you to your knees sooner or later. And I know, sitting in this basement, between a chessboard and my bedroom, that it will be the greatest struggle to come home. The rub is this: I love this place, and I love these people. It's a sad irony that whenever I come back, we quibble and squabble like migrating ducks and geese in a small pond. I need to remind myself that the pieces are fake, and so are the battles. It's all "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Or maybe, like many chess players, I just think too much, trying to see too many moves into the future, all to protect that little king at all costs.

--

"The plans
of kings and queens are like dust on the moths wing,
and nothing matters
except laughter and tears--laughter, laughter and tears!"

-- Forgael, in W. B. Yeats's The Shadowy Waters

Charge

"Whoever you are, you must wait."

-- Alice, in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

--

My sister just asked me if I knew where the charger for her cell phone was. I didn't. I started thinking about cell phone batteries.

Sometimes, when I'm down to one bar or zero, I get a phone call and I answer it. I'll save power if I don't answer it, but you never know what's happening to someone on the other end of a ringing phone, so usually I answer it. The time on the call, I know, is short.

Maybe I'm sad for the other person, or I feel pity, or maybe I share their joy. There are lots of reasons to be engaged with another person. It's when you forget the reason, or realize you didn't know what it was before you started, that conversations can turn awkward, short, and ultimately, terminal.

As a dying phone struggles to keep the two of you talking, it begins to protest, beeping, reminding you that the link between people needs to be recharged regularly. It's a commitment you make to the phone, and in return, your connection to another person can go as long as you both please. My phone is set up so that I hear the beeps of protest but the other person does not. I wonder if that is a setting I can change, or if that is simply the way phones are built.

The first beep can fill you with alarm, the second with panic. You begin to doubt the worth of the conversation, and you seek a hasty end. You clip sentences, like cutting off the tails of mice, and they writhe and bleed. Your guilt outshines your virtue. You are no longer a part of this conversation.

You realize that you have to tell the other person that the connection will soon be gone. The only thing for it is to exchange pleasantries, perhaps plugging up what needs most to be said, and let the other person go.

My phone is beeping right now. It's beeping because it hasn't been charged, and therein is the dilemma. If I stop the connection, I save the charge, but I'll still run out eventually, because the charger is missing. But if I leave the phone plugged in at all times and never use it, well, I may as well never walk out the door.

It's perhaps sad, but the phones on either end will soon have enough power again, and they will call other people, make other connections, use up the latest recharge. It's the way a cell phone works: isolated from its cord, searching for signals, relying upon the strength of a connection and a battery.

And that's really the only way to look at it.