April 25, 2009

All winter I raised and lowered a couple of windows in the house to regulate the temperature. This morning a certain gleam of light led me to check, and find that the storm windows had been closed the whole time, and there had been no exchange of air the whole while. I was quite content with the effects of something that made no difference at all.

Colonoscopy yesterday. Immaculate down there. I was supposing that some part of me would be tip-top, and somehow it comes as small surprise that that should be it. Fell asleep immediately, and woke only when one of the nurses touched my hand, when I saw on the screen my own secret self passing rather beautifully, like a tunnel of pink vinyl. The recovery room is a curtained-off space where everyone is supposed to fart as much as they can, because of the air introduced into the gut by the procedure. If I had been less groggy it would have been more hilarious. Whenever an especially loud one ripped, there would be murmurs of acclimation.

Hosted a little theater party last night, DJ, Paul, Jason, Denise and myself. We saw Urinetown at UNCA. The students were full of vitality and exuberance, and acting better than I have seen it there than. . . well, perhaps ever. Cody and Carly were vibrant stand-outs. They have every head-toss and note warble you get from the pros on Broadway, not yet dulled by use. Not one of the many actors was anything but present and engaged every second. Rob’s direction of all those forces was clearly exemplary. When I applauded at the end, it was for them, for effort and honesty and exuberance. The script itself is a load of crap, coiling around and around in many folds of easy irony, genre-loathing, self-loathing, mockery without satire. Cowardly itself, it mocks theater with courage enough to aim at the heart or the mind. It thinks by waving a banner with the word “piss” on it that it wittily subverts the chest-swelling emotions of a show like Les Miserables, which, if not my favorite, leads with its balls and dares all. Urinetown has no balls (if plenty of cheek) and dares nothing except use of the word “piss,” so bold, its authors must have thought, that no further commitment could be expected. “Tyranny is evil” is a stand so easy it hardly counts as a stand. Urinetown presents itself as meta-theater, reminding the audience again and again that it’s but a preposterous musical, so that it cannot be held responsible even for whatever minimal conviction it displays. I had no idea what Urinetown was about until I walked into the theater. Now I think that–not in terms of skill of execution, but in malignancy of concept–it’s the worst that Broadway has to offer. Should the students have bothered doing it? Of course they should: in an effort to conceal an inner emptiness, the show uses every trick in the book, and the kids therefore learned every trick in the book.

Long, sweet, summery day. I worked in the garden until I was sunburned and sore, and quite happy.