Way

"I'm asking everyone around me
How to live my life
I know the answers I keep hearing
But I listen close each time."

-- Rooney, "Help Me Find My Way," Calling the World

--

At the end of season three of The Wire, McNulty trades the detective life for the beat cop life. He talks with old ladies sitting on stoops and laughs at kids who live on the block. The smile on his face is so shocking, because it's the first time you see him happy. He's been good at his job, but he's hated it. It was almost simply matter of finding out where he wanted to be, not what case he was working or how.

Earlier in the series, a woman at a community meeting says she misses knowing who the cops were, and having them know who she was. McNulty, it seems to me, makes amends.

I watched the end of this episode on Friday morning. Driving to work, the wheels started turning in my head. Am I where I want to be?

The answer is no. So then, where do I want to be? That is the question. The answer is, I'm moving back to Nebraska in September. I will be there for a time. For how long, and while doing what--this is on my mind now.

Maybe I'll start the Children's Theatre of Omaha someday.

--

After lunch, I am meeting with an Orthodox priest. I scheduled this meeting for one o'clock so I could miss the Monday staff meeting. His name is Fr. Steven. I don't know what I want to ask him, but I do know I want to get to know him. Or I want him to know who I am.

It's a bit like buying a car. I don't need him to tell me that I need a car, or that one car in particular is the car for me. I think I already know what I want; I just need to know how to get it.

What I think I already know is: I want to become Orthodox.

--

Talked with my dad last night. My Grandma's not doing well in Pennsylvania, and she will have to go into surgery soon. My family is planning to drive to see her, and I'm planning to come along. The only question is, when.

Whens abound. Friends want to meet on weekends this summer. The possibility of a camping trip in Kentucky. Going to visit Johnny and Ari in DC before they leave the country in July.

Schedules from all sources, GoogleMapped itineraries, money for gas. And it's because where you want to be is around friends and family. Location, location, location.

--

This post kinda sucks. I've been blogging less often. I might be out of practice.

--

Went to a tea party on Saturday to read a book and teach British tea manners to twenty eight-year-old girls in frills and white gloves. They betrayed their age despite the finery with chocolate smeared on cheeks. I had our costume designer make me an ascot for the occasion. As an actor instructing girls on how to float their hands and converse like dainty Englishwomen, I probably came across as a very gay man.

This is a very singular time in my life, in a very pluralistic kind of way.

Starfire

"Mistakes on the part of nature
The living proof of what they're calling love
On certain sideway streets
Where things that don't match meet."

-- The New Pornographers, "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk"

--

I want to get this down while it's fresh:

Next door to this building is a center for those with disabilities. They call themselves Starfire. Their parking lot is separated from ours by a healthy thick hedge, so that generally we forget who our neighbors are. Occasionally we'll see teachers and volunteers leading small groups on outings (little more than slow processions up and down the street--and I mean slow in terms of speed: they are so fascinated by the flowering of grass or the color of the sky they forget to keep up with the group), but that's about it. Our spheres of influence don't really mix: us with the talented kids, them with the mentally-challenged adults.

In terms of visual surroundings, the eye is much more quickly taken in by the attractive dance studio across from us, or the unsightly autism center on the other side. Our building itself is rather drab at the moment, mostly obscured from the road by trees and lacking a sign announcing our presence. Behind us, there is an annex to the parking lot with a storage shed, and beside that, an open field of tall grass which was partially converted into a fenced-in playground.

Relatively speaking, it's an isolated location. We like it that way, to be honest; a certain comfort comes with anonymity, a sort of assurance that keeping your head low is evidence of good judgment and humility. Other arts organizations find themselves on busy streets with lots of foot traffic, and there they thrive. We thrive in near obscurity.

All this goes to say: Before today, I had never been next door.

--

The workshop is "Self-Esteem through Self-Expression," and I've done it dozens of times. It's our most popular one; it's always a hit. It's basic: we use five tools of an actor--voice, body, imagination, focus, and cooperation--to boost self-esteem through fun, interactive games. I have another SESE workshop this evening, actually, with a local Girl Scout troupe.

I've never done it with mentally-challenged adults. I leave our building and walk across our parking lot, past the hedge, and am surprised to find an impressive little building next door. I do not know why exactly I'm surprised. I walk in the front door and step into a wide-open reception area, where I meet two teachers and one of the students (do I call them students, patients, or just "them"?) who enthusiastically greets me with a handshake. They lead me down the hallway to another wide-open area, this one populated by stuffed chairs on wheels and movable plastic tables scattered into faintly discernible sections. I realize this is the miscellaneous room, the space for activities and group meetings. Or visitors. Surrounding this space are conference rooms of various sizes, some in use and some empty and dark. There is some kind of seminar going on in the largest one.

We move the chairs into a rough circle. We get started. I am immediately struck by lack of conformity in this group of ten, aged 30-50: some slouch, staring at the ground; some sit on the edge of their chair, hands folded, smiling expectantly; still others study my person, every expression and gesture noted with almost dreadful attention.

We do a voice warm-up, sirens, and while everyone stands, not everyone participates. We do a physical warm-up, crazy 8's, and not everyone keeps up. We sit down and I take out a brown square piece of fabric. This is for the imagination game, which is much like charades. We will pass this sheet around and transform it into different things, and the others must guess what we have made. I begin by swaddling the cloth into a baby shape, swinging it gently in my arms.

"Baby!" they cry, delighted. I pass it off to a wide-eyed older woman who seems to smile eternally. She folds and unfolds it a few times before inspiration strikes--she folds three sides inwards to make a door shape with the edges. She holds it up proudly. A teacher guesses that it is the building we are in. The woman squeals and giggles: "Yes!" And we pass it on. And on, and on.

This game never fails. No matter what the group, I find that everyone is easily captivated by every fold, every crease, every rotation of the sheet. As an observer I am always fascinated by not only what they create but how they go about it. What strikes me most today during this game is the care with which they handle the fabric. Such deliberate folds, conscientious matching of corner to corner, constant thinking and rethinking. Children fold quickly and callously, depending more on giving hints to the group through physical action than by sculpting the fabric. Not so today. They take two to three minutes each just to create their object.

A man in an Elmo T-shirt takes his turn. He folds diagonally twice and lays it on the floor. We stare and ponder. "It is home plate?" I offer. He says no and chuckles. A teacher asks if it is a slice of pizza. No. The other teacher asks if it is an ice-cream cone.

"No," he says. "It's a triangle." He chuckles, relishing his joke.

One man surprises me most. He is the first to leave his chair and step into the center of the circle. He lays the fabric down like a picnic blanket, spreading hands across the surface to smooth out ripples. Once it is flawless, he folds two sides towards each other, halving the diameter. It is a rectangle. He takes one of the short sides and folds it in a few inches, giving the impression of a pillow on a bed. Then he holds up his hands ("Don't guess yet, watch this"). He kneels beside the sheet. He crosses himself three times and folds his hands to pray.

"Bed!" But he shakes his head. He repeats his motions, crossing himself and praying. "Praying by your bed." He shakes his head. He repeats his actions a third time.

We're all at a loss. "Coffin," he says.

--

After we finish, I am led back to the office by one of the teachers and one of the participants, who reintroduces himself as Steve.

Steve is the one who made a sheet into a coffin. He shakes my hand.

I am sure I will not forget his name.

Struck

"Nearly everyone struggles with the mania for a time; the wise conquer it, the foolish make up the comic opera choruses, the unimportant road companies, and the stage-door-keeper's list of 'extra ladies and gentlemen.' From every class and walk of life, from every town and city troop the victims, abandoning their vocations and their homes, as though they had heard the witching notes of a siren song. They come with high hopes and bright dreams...they besiege the agencies, and the managers, and the teachers of acting until their dreams fade, or their money runs out, or they are smitten with realization."

-- Channing Pollock, in his essay "Stage Struck," originally published in The Footlights Fore and Aft


--

Friends in and of the theatre, I have just read a depressing article about people who perform. Granted, the essay comes to us from 1911, and its main target is the advent of crappy vaudeville, but consider the following and see if you are as struck as I was by sad truth:

In nine cases out of ten the mania to go on the stage is prompted by pure desire for glorification. Love of excitement, the fallacious notion that the profession is one of comparative ease and luxury, may be alloying factors, but the essence of the virus is vanity.

In the course of time [the mediocre actor] even begins to arrogate to himself the heroic virtues of the characters he impersonates. It is sweet to see one's name on the cover of a novel, sweet to scrawl one's autograph in the lower left-hand corner of a painting, but O, how doubly and trebly sweet to meet one's own image lithographed under a laudatory line and posted between advertisements of the newest breakfast food and the latest five cent cigar!

Of dramatic schools the number is legion, but only those conducted by dishonest adventurers promise employment to the enrolled student.

This system [in which actors are selected by agency managers] is undeniably hard, and perhaps unjust to the beginner, but...the investor in drama has the fullest right to minimize his risk.

[The theatrical profession] is the one vocation in which the worker must begin again every year.... Unless he has made a prodigious hit--and prodigious hits are very rare--he finds himself no farther advanced next June than he was last September.

Lost to his best friends and companions, travelling at all hours of the day and night, grateful for board and lodging that would not be tolerated by a domestic servant, the player with a small road company has ample reason to repent his choice of career.

No person can possibly succeed on the dramatic stage without the foundation of genuine talent and a superstructure of culture and education.

--

Regardless of what Pollock wrote 99 years ago, I'm back at work, trying to finish the script for the Mark Twain show which I will perform tomorrow morning. I will drive almost three hours, almost straight east, and almost clearly understanding what it is I will say and do in front of "~400ish" students.

After carpooling to Hillsdale, we spent more than a weekend there. Despite a predictable keynote speech, commencement was a solid ceremony, running under three hours this year thanks to the quick name readings from Dr. Moreno. That morning at the Palace, we constructed a sort of commencement bingo sheet; while we heard no slighting of China, we observed everything else on the list. The college President is delightfully predictable in his consistency, especially as pertains to remarks about female students getting married to slovenly male students, throwing out non sequitur statements (this year's: "I just tried snuff for the first time this week") and interjecting Hillsdalian beatitudes that are too simple to be disputed ("You also believe in beauty").

The real joy was found, as always, in company. Saw Reist and grabbed lunch with Jackson. Listened to Evan playing keyboard while Seth demanded, repeatedly, "Play 'Trolley.' " Smoked--a lot. Stole beers at Econ's place. Arrived on Friday night to a party where everyone seemed to A) have a bottle of liquor and B) be thrusting said bottle at you. Grabbed coffee at the Coffee Cup, Palace, and the newly reformed Broad Street Market. Walked most everywhere. Ran almost all the way to Baw Beese on Saturday. Enjoyed everything.

Joke of the weekend, I think, goes to Zach, who informed us that militant abolitionist John Brown was a chronic masturbator.

"He calls it 'bleedin' Kansas.' "

We must have laughed for ten minutes.

It was a lot for three days and nights. But good, good, good.

--

Attended Orthodox Liturgy at Holy Ascension in Albion. It's the definition of beauty, its congregation the epitome of charity. Seeing professors and students and other folks worshiping together before a white iconostasis in a room with only a few pews in the back--feeling so implicit in worship and organic within form--it was too memorable an experience to cheapen here, but I will say this: If I had attended while I was at Hillsdale, I would have become Orthodox by now.

Quiet

"It occurred to me around dusk
after I had lit three candles
and was pouring myself a glass of wine
that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day."

-- Billy Collins, "Quiet" in Ballistics: Poems


--

Read the full poem here. Preview the book here:

The whole book is great--each poem, too. For what it's worth, my favorites are "August in Paris," "Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles," "The Four-Moon Planet," "The Poems of Others," "Quiet," "Tension," "(detail)," "Baby Listening," and "The Great American Poem."

--

Just as I was starting an episode of The Wire, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pushed Pause and then Talk. "I've just had a really crummy day," said a friend, who then asked if we could meet somewhere, a coffee shop, maybe. "Absolutely," I said, and suggested the café on the second floor of a Barnes & Noble nearby. We met and read--aloud in the bookstore café--a Dryden poem, "Religio Laici," while close by a group of middle-aged students recited Italian around a book-covered table and laughed at mispronunciations.

She picked the poem because of the day she'd had: the rigors of graduate school are getting to her. We read it taking turns, stopping arbitrarily after stanzas and spinning the old blue hardcover book around. I'm not usually one to read Dryden (or any Reformation poets) aloud, preferring the Elizabethans or modern Americans with that wonderful emphasis on how this stuff sounds, but this one surprised me. I found myself muttering, "Mm," after certain phrases, marveling at those intellectual rhymes.

Also talked about Orthodoxy (of course), and Thornton Wilder and the final scene from Our Town. (See? Bookstore conversations are never a bad decision.) During our talking I asked how old she was.

"Twenty-four," she said, and then I said,

"Huh, I'll be twenty-four this Mother's Day."

"Enjoy it," she said. "It's a good age. It's the last year that you're officially 'in your early twenties.'"

Which, naturally, gave me some pause.

She's a grad student; I'm a working, acting stiff. It's strange to feel so removed from school after only two years. Last night I realized that I could have easily been the one calling a friend in the evening after a crummy day of grad school.

--

Before all that, I read aloud the entirety of Billy Collins' book. Not a huge achievement--only 110 pages with plenty of white space--but it was still good to do. I can't remember the last book I finished in a single sitting. Let alone, out loud.

--

Still working on the Mark Twain show. The rub is that entertaining 400 kids for 45 minutes while reading 150-year-old stories seems so daunting. I scoured the bookshelf at work (mostly anthologies of plays and non-pertinent books about how to act) for inspiration and came upon a sort of textbook called Storyteller, by Ramon Royal Ross, which I had picked up for 25 cents--or less--at a recent library book sale. I scanned the contents and flipped to the last chapter, entitled "Ten. Reading Aloud."

Ross writes:

The oral interpreter has three duties. The first is to the author; and the duty here is to do more than simply read the words without mumbling... The second duty is to the audience, and for them the reader provides not only entertainment but also understanding and excitement--a sense of the meaning of the selection in their lives. Finally, the reader must be faithful to himself. He must choose literature that has relevance to his own experience... He creates, in his reading, a bond between himself, the audience, and the author.

With its lively adventures and youthful narrator, Treasure Island, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has found its primary audience among children...

And if you are a teacher... I remember, as a boy, coming in from lunch recess at Springdale School and listening to my teacher read to us from Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Under the spell of those words, stained plaster walls and a blackened wooden floor changed and grew into a deep forest, with the broad Mississippi flowing by...

There's no question that books, carefully chosen, shared throughout the years, create worlds in the classroom that would otherwise be impossible to reach... So, read aloud. Read to your children for a half-hour each day. Read only the finest, for you send a signal with what you read. Read poems. Read long, difficult books--books they'd not read themselves. Read portions of books--"book bait"--to hook potential readers. And after you've finished reading, leave the book in the classroom where it can be read again. And again.

I don't know whether to feel more inspired or intimidated--though the best intimidations always inspire us. This Mark Twain show is going to be comprised of "book bait" (what a wonderful phrase), and so the challenge turns from deciding the format of the show to picking worthy excerpts.

What, then, from Tom Sawyer? The first chapter is dynamic but only involves three characters seriously; the fence-painting scene is popular; the pirate section ought to get a few laughs. Doing the graveyard scene would probably get me into trouble.

But if I was worried about trouble, wouldn't I steer clear of Huckleberry altogether? I've already decided to replace all N-words with "slave," because for the most part it gets the point across without risking offense. Twain would roll his eyes or punch me in the face for this, but you have to pick your battles.

--

Orthodox pray frequently for a "peaceful, quiet, sinless Christian ending to this life," but from what I've seen this is generally how they would like to live, too: in serenity, quietude. It's a very different view--one concerned with privacy and humility--from the evangelical pomp I grew up in.

How many times was I told to "take it to the streets," "shout it from the rooftops," or "praise him with your lungs or the rocks will cry out"? This, of course, translates to a number of things which have become stereotypes of young American Christians: in-your-face, on-the-street evangelism; tracts left on public toilets; asking strangers the infamous questions, "Would you like to be born again?" and, "Have you asked Jesus into your heart?" and, "Are you going to hell?"; altar calls with syrupy keyboard underscoring; electric guitars and full drum sets during praise-and-worship (at one church I remember the praise leader switching guitars and taking solos during a single song); and a kind of motivational-speaker approach to church sermons (wireless ear microphones, stylish but conservative attire, canned gestures) that I can't let myself abide any more. I'm not judging it; the proper attitude would be to say, simply, that God is surely at work there, too; but it's not for me. I doubt it ever was.

Give me, instead, a peaceful, quiet, sinless Christian life. Or, at least, as close to it as is possible in a world of war, chaos, and guilt. Let me light a candle, kneel in the corner, and pray.

That being said, telling stories aloud is something I love to do--on a stage, in a bar, at a coffee shop. The quiet of life contrasts with the loudness of fake-life. The arts of language and theatre have always been fused, for what is a silent language but bird tracks on a page, and what is a wordless theatre but an incomplete spectacle?

I will not say the silence exists for the noise; I think it's the other way around. We please the ears to make the silence deafen. We play at life to make reality better, and we pray aloud for the quiet life.

--

And now, back to Twain.

Toads

"Dmitri says of you--Ivan is a tomb! I say of you, Ivan is a riddle. You are a riddle to me even now. But I understand something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning."

"What's that?" laughed Ivan.

"You won't be angry?" Alyosha laughed too.

"Well?"

"That you are just as young as other men of three and twenty, that you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact! Now, have I insulted you dreadfully?"

"On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence," cried Ivan.

-- Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, Trans. Constance Garnett

--

Saw five old friends in four days and then slept for twelve straight hours. Ate crepes with the ones who came to Cincy, and ate at the Bonefish Grill for the first time with those who came to Dayton. Watched two movies I've seen before. Drove several hundred miles around southern Ohio, chaperoning or meeting up.

Saw a bad production of The Baker's Wife and a good production of The History of Invulnerability, which Philip Seymour Hoffman also attended that very day. (So we are told: we didn't see him in the house, so perhaps he watched in the shadowy stage manager's box, but purportedly he was wearing an orange hat. This story comes so close to being worthwhile.)

Sometimes, it's hard to find "things to do" in your own city when friends come to visit. But with some friends, you don't have to do anything; it's just enough to breathe the same air. That's what happened this weekend.

--

Reading and running effectively stopped, though. In a few hours between visits, I went to a friend's house near the University for a night of poetry readings. Small group, a very nuanced and quiet gathering. We sat on couches and brought-in chairs and commiserated and performed. We had coffee and special applesauce and many poems that ranged from the theological to the whimsical to the deathly. A stack of anthologies became a spread after a few readings--poetry geeks flipping pages hoping a touchstone verse will catch their eye--stacks becoming unstacked, books left open on the floor, some people reciting from memory, others not trusting themselves to be the sole producer of weighty words.

I got to read "The Bells," by Poe, aloud. Something I must have been subconsciously waiting for years to do, and it was a true rush. That last thirty lines or so is thrilling to speak, and as it was near the end of an evening, it was the thing to do.

I'm already putting together a playlist, as it were, for the next poetry night. Many selections are from Reist's classes, but I'd like to think it's because of the poems, not the professor. These are, as Moore would say, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

Last poetry night's playlist:
- "Departmental," by Robert Frost
- "The Revenant," by Billy Collins
- "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens
- "To a Mouse," by Robert Burns (performed in Scottish dialect)

Next poetry night's playlist (suggestions welcome):
- "Poetry," by Marianne Moore
- "Lucinda Matlock," by Edgar Lee Masters
- "Mr. Flood's Party," by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- "Theme for English B," by Langston Hughes
- "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," by Elizabeth Bishop
- "The Unknown Citizen," by W. H. Auden
- "Musee des Beaux Arts," by W. H. Auden

(among others)

I like poems that are not just good on paper, but ones that need to be read aloud. Poe's "Bells" is a perfect example--on the page, the eye wants to skip over the repeated words, but aloud, you realize the text gets frantic and horrifying because of the repetition. There's a kind of movement you can't really get on a page.

--

Also: Read this.

--

Poetry has jolted me back into literary mode. Friends have brought me back to life (or something like that).

My future is the imaginary garden right now, and my friends are real within it. (I will not call my friends "toads.") Will I seek other gardens? That's the traveler's dilemma--the people, or the path. Granted, there are people along every path, and every path leads to many people, and not everyone cares about being on your path necessarily...too abstract, sorry...but still.

Still.

It's poetry for life's sake that poets have in mind. It's one thing to read, another to speak, and another thing entirely to enact, to incarnate, what you read and speak. Lucinda would have a thing or two to say right now, and so, I imagine, would the Unknown Citizen.

However, it is Eben Flood, drinking on a hill outside of town in the middle of the night and imagining his friends to be with him, whom I fear.