A Bad Day

November 24, 2008

Anna Livia gets a third and worst review in Chicago, wherein I’m again blamed for what I did not write. I will never forgive KM (even if I sensed he sought forgiveness), who must, in his mind, have been proving some point or other. I’m blamed for its being humorless when the play is full of laughs which production ditched each time. I’m blamed for “failed imagery” when one main actor could not speak the lines and the director made a habit of cutting off either the root or the flower–sometimes both–of every idea, leaving so many barren stems, the reviewers observe correctly, flapping in the wind. Each time I think I’ve put this behind me someone else chimes in–“ignorantly” I want to say, but, aside from the tone of faggy superciliousness, I don’t know what else they would have said. I know I demand a good deal from actors– or do I? Basically that they understand the lines and say them audibly. That was too much to ask in Chicago, and I wish the Internet didn’t make it so easy for me to chew the rags of that increasingly exhausting experience.

I had looked at my new Prius once too often and thought what a beauty she was. I knew this. I knew I was tempting the gods. As I waited to turn right into Walgreen’s to buy medicine for my throbbing head, I was rear-ended by a van with Tennessee plates. The force was remarkable, and the sound of one heavy metal body hitting another was quite sickening. The back of my car is a horror show. The front of her van is wiped out. But both of us are well. All was amicable, and she admitted culpability the minute the police made their appearance. The streets were wet and her brakes did not engage, is her thought. I would have been out of the way had some glum-looking hippie not been taking her time across the sidewalk at the mouth of the parking lot. I stopped to let her by, and the break in the rhythm of turning threw the van driver off, is my guess. The collision did cure my headache, though my whole body is a little rattled now. And, my lovely little car. It is too sad to think about. I want to blame the hippie girl on the sidewalk, if only because her expression was so sour. I wonder if she turned around and looked at the mess behind her?