December 9, 2007

Deep, foggy night. The fog makes its seem deeper and quieter than it might really be.

Good Glgamesh rehearsal. Cody is suggestible, adaptable, and so beautiful whatever he does looks right.

Good Cantaria rehearsal, everyone quiet and calm and afloat in a blessed pianissimo.

Too much church over two days. Lessons and Carols last night, which at one time I thought was magical. . . which, when I witnessed it at St. Paul’s thirty years ago, when I sang it for the first time at the Church of the Saviour, was in fact magical. How did I get the magic back? How do I restore the sweetness to things which were once sweet to me, but which are now tiresome and taxing?

Favorable, brief (which is, I guess, better than lengthy and nasty) review of A Dream of Adonis in today’s Citizen-Times, as part of an omnibus review of local poets. I am described as charismatic and oracular. The reviewer quotes from the poem which includes both “suck my cock” and “fuck,” though he does not quote those exact lines. Proximity is daring enough.

Brian and Kam had their senior productions at Carol Belk last night, their own plays fully produced by themselves, with a theatricality and professional dedication that made me think they have futures ahead of them. The grit is there; the wit is there; the heart will come. The plays were better than I remembered them – or perhaps better staged than read-- and in several cases when I argued with them about a certain point, they were clearly right. The miles to go between this and great theater is less important than the step already taken.

Juanita Davis is dead in Akron. I diagramed my first sentence for her. I took grammar seriously first for her.