January 17, 2010

Lazy Sunday, of which I’m taking full advantage before the onslaught of the coming week.

The concept of the opening night reception devolved from a $3000 catered affair to a cast-hosted wine reception in plastic cups, which I convinced myself was actually nearer to the spirit of the play. Tried to get the wine at the Wine Guy, but couldn’t get myself waited on– one of those chatterbox pseudo-oenophile suburbanites was ahead of me–so ended up buying cases at the grocery store, the world itself conspiring to make it as cheap as possible.

DJ and I saw the one-man show, Runt of the Litter ,by Bo Eason at the Wortham last night. The script was good–often unexpectedly subtle–and the performance was charistmatic. That an athlete should make a good actor is as natural as a dancer’s doing so, as they almost always do. I have never seen a bad sports play. Drinks at The New French Bar afterward. The drinks were annihilatingly strong (I’m still recovering) and the company was unlike anything I’d seen before–or at least more condensed than I had seen before: fairy-folk, I think they would say, fantastically dressed, kissy and huggy, the distinctions between genders deliberately blurred. One of them was smoking a stick with a green light at the end. From each puff they exhaled water vapor. It is a device to help you quit smoking, but one might use it for its charm alone.

Several patrons left when Eason began using “bad language” of the type one would encounter in a pro football locker room. I despise people who judge other people’s language, who think they are entitled to go through life hearing only what they want to hear. Why do people that ignorant go to the theater at all, knowing that it exists to prod both ignorance and expectation?

Met Thin Matthew at Home Depot to pick out tiles for DJ’s bathroom. We talked more about his wife’s upcoming ultrasound.

At church this morning something happened that I’d missed for a sadly long time. I guess you could call it emotional engagement, or you could call it worship. It came about because the antiphon of the psalm was the tune of an old camp song, “Lord I want to be a Christian in my heart.” When I recognized it, it went like an arrow to my soul, and I remembered a time when I was not resentful and angry and ambitious and bitterly Jesuitical all the time. For a moment I remembered what I love, what I desire, what where I rest for real, and the years and the sorrows rolled off of me.