March 8, 2008

Father/daughter Saturday at the café.

When I rose this morning I was suddenly filled with the inspiration I was hoping for all the spring break week, when I would have had time to bring things to fruition. But, my life is still my life, however interrupted, and I welcome the opening of the new doors, and wonder what I will neglect in order to go through them.

Climbing the stone steps to my house this morning, I saw a strip of shadow thrown by the banister rail, and a slug which had arranged itself exactly within the shade of the rail, horns to one edge, tail to the other. It was elegant, but desperate. The sun moves. I do not think the creature can survive.

As I sat in the café writing this and drinking my bitter coffee, a ceiling of darkness came out of the west and covered us. The day began as one day, blue and bright, and continues as another, gray, glowering, wintery. I’m glad some good spirit kept me from walking here.

The urge to record these things is reflexive and inescapable. I am God’s diary.

Darkness: a night so cold the air gives you a the same headache you get from drinking an iced drink. Schlepped downtown in this cold to see Moonlight and Magnolias at NC Stage, a script with the interesting conceit of featuring the character Ben Hecht in a play in the style of Ben Hecht. Impeccable acting, flawless production values. The script was funny in oddly matched ways, sometimes like a frat house skit, sometimes like His Girl Friday, the club and the stiletto, but both getting the job done. The three main actors have widely divergent techniques and, I suppose, theories of what one should be doing on stage, but the more I thought about it, the better suited that was to a script which itself exhibits three almost irreconcilable worldviews–or, more exactly, three worldviews the reconciliation of which is its central struggle. Selznick is an attractive, eloquent apologist for mediocrity, Fleming a solid American pragmatist, Hecht a self-delighted idealist. Something in each of the actors– Scott’s apparently infinite adaptability; Charlie’s intelligence-- which cannot hide while playing the role of a stupid man, but makes the stupidity seem chosen and expressive; Willy’s edgy experimentalism, perfect for someone who is simply not going to play the same game as the others–alloyed beautifully with the characters and made more magic, perhaps than the script deserved. The Selznick character lets fly with expansive, almost sublime, passages in defense of cheesy writing and conception aimed at the lowest common denominator, at "Joe Blow and Jane Doe," thus preemptively deflecting the criticism to which the script is most vulnerable. Clever.

Came home and the cats were watching for me out the kitchen window.