Sparing the Tansy

September 21, 2008

Word in the green room from an old timer last night was that Montford Park’s best attended production in th 90's was King John, when I played King John. This astonished everybody. Last night was my best performance in Faustus. Related, but not entirely the cause, was the fact that it was also our most responsive and intelligent audience. The rest of it was that I felt very good. I was relaxed and precise in my responses. I was confident enough to play and improvise. Some actors can rattle off their lines adequately–even brilliantly--without regard to what’s going on around them. Something in me–I think it’s my memory–doesn’t work that way. For me it’s contextual. I must have the stage around me, the whole feel of an ongoing performance to have the lines at ready, which is why I’m hopeless in a speed-through and no use when somebody wants to run lines.

Blake Smith was at the amphitheater with his daughter. I’m always happy to see his handsome visage, but the fact that he had a daughter– eleven? Twelve? Smart as a whip and already a theater veteran– crushed me a little. My student with a grown child! What have I been doing? Knocking on the same doors to gain admittance to I know not what; cooking the same meals to ease a hunger that was not eased very long by them before. I think sometimes I have wasted my time, even after bringing events to a place where others praise me for success. The best moments don’t always look like success from within, but rather the next step on a winding and endless stair. I don’t even know where the steps are going. Up, I think, but not very fast, and even leaps and bounds but land me on a place that looks just like the one before.

Of course I am being over-dramatic in this. I do perceive how far I have come from where I started. But I wonder if that much effort was really necessary, that much neglect of other things. And the goal I set long ago seems, if nearer, still cruelly remote.

Much brute gardening of late, trying to wrest the land itself into a different shape. In one finished corner I planted sheep’s ears and cat-and-kittens I got at the Farmers’ Market. Very little writing. Like Odysseus on Oygygia, I’ve washed up on a shore which is pleasant enough, but I still have a vague feeling I should be on my way.

Have set up a chair so the cats can watch the fish. Maude paws furiously at the glass, trying to dig her way in to the moving shapes. She investigates behind the aquarium to see if there is a another way in. Titus puts up a questioning paw every now and then, but mostly just gazes in fascination.

The Literature Department is giving a donation to the YMCA in my father’s name.

Caught the groundhog nibbling tansy, thought, "Well, we can spare the tansy."