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


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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.

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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.

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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.