Finished

"And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
to your tambourine in time
it's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind."

-- Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man"

--

Props for Anne Frank are finished. I want to say they're "done," because it feels more fulfilling to say something is "done" rather than "finished," but I remember Mrs. Koehl's fourth-grade English class, where if you had reached the end of an assignment and called out that you were "done," she would ignore you or say, "Cakes get done; children get finished," in a kind of bland, cryptic tone as she continued whatever she was doing (usually grading papers and picking at her green mascara'd eyelashes).

So: they're finished.

And because Henny Penny props have been set aside in storage for months, there's not much--propwise, anyway--for me to do. At this point. For work.

I keep looking back a year to when I started working for this company, trying to recall what were my first impressions as we rehearsed in a library's basement. I remember that optimism and a sense of duty made me overlook some things, namely, that the costumer didn't seem to pay attention to any feedback she got from us or the director (she no longer works for us), and that late summer was an awful time to get acquainted with Cincinnati. It seems to me now that all of that happened to someone else, in the same way that the papers I wrote in high school seem to have been written by someone else. None of this is exactly a new revelation, sure--we all change and stay the same simultaneously--but in terms of doing my current job well, I would like to find advice in memory.

All this goes to say: I know I can make things better, I just haven't figured out how.

Yet.

--

Finished Everyman, by Philip Roth, this weekend. No wonder Reist liked it so much. I could just hear him talking about the main character's problem with eroticism:

"Ever seen a Danish babe? Boom-cha-cha, boom-honk-honk! Hey honey, seen my sleeve garters? So what do you do? You go to Paris, that's what you do. Get away--from what? From clam linguini? For what? Clam bikinis! [fist pumps] Everyman goes to Paris. You know, when I was in the Army, I went to Paris. Those European girls,--behold! they are wonderfully made...no wonder the guy paints when he gets old! Behold--you're old! And what's his name? Even better! No names! No faces! Everyone seen The Last Tango in Paris? If you haven't seen it, you should. That'll make you understand: when you see a Danish woman on a business trip, boy...you get the butter."