Houston 4

March 8, 2010

Rain against the high windows.

Trent in the Galleria confided in me, while pausing in ringing up my purchases, that his young life was not turning out the way he wanted, that he was trapped in retail while his heart belongs to psychology. His mother’s family is rich, and they thought he should be prepared to deal with that, so he went into finance in college, but there were no jobs. He is bitterness needing ten more years to flower. Maybe he can get out. I said “Get out, then,” and his eyes shifted the way they do when there are too many conveniences that must be left behind if you are to attain the Great Goal.

Met a woman in the hotel bar from Billings, Montana. Her husband has been dying since 1994, but they are in Houston because they never had a honeymoon and now they are having one, come to see some Country singer at the rodeo. “He has every disease there is,” she said, grasping the glass of whisky she was taking to him in their room. “It’s the only thing that keeps him alive.” She reminded me of Aunt Marian, of those elderly female relatives who have acquired a general and particular rhythm and tone through much rehearsal, turning into a kind of Chinese opera the tale of their hardships.

Richard was sitting at the bar again, and I was glad to see him, glad to have even a temporary friend in Texas. The Oscar pre-show had come on, so we talked about the movies. Why on earth this apparent interest in everybody’s gown? Burt Lancaster was his favorite.

Rehearsal in the afternoon for Bronzino’s Gaze at the Main Street Theater. I had the same odd impression I had the first few nights of rehearsal for The Beautiful Johanna: I could venture no kind of qualitative judgment. I didn’t know if the show was good. I couldn’t form a unified impression. Part of the reason for this is that the words seemed foreign to me. I remembered the circumstance of the writing well enough, but I couldn’t recognize the words as my own. It was very disorienting. I do wish I had not suggested British accents (most of the characters are, after all, British) because it’s coming off like a B-level episode of Masterpiece Theater. How much does an actor get paid for a reading? Enough to take notes from a playwright, whom they probably mistrust anyway? I don’t know if the play is good, though if someone said, “Well, compared to something else, how good is it?” I could say unblushingly “ten times better than what I saw last night, anyway.”

The weekend has been keenly labor-intensive on all sides, and I will be changing, after it, something I knew was wrong when I reread the piece last week prior to coming. What was the use? Meeting new people and seeing new places? Yes, that, primarily, yet who knows what is coming? I did get breakthrough thoughts for Voices on the plane. I am considering a play which I’ve barely considered since I typed the last period, and I do know now it deserved more than that.

Susan volunteered to pick me up after the rehearsal. She was very anxious that I have someplace nice to wait for her, so on our cell phones she had me walking all over to cafes which turned out to be closed, until she was satisfied with Bell Park. I waited there for her, cold, the rain impending, a derelict asleep on a bench under a camo tarp. With my heel I demolished a rotten tree stump, thinking–I realized in the midst of it– that such an action would bind me a little to the life of that little space.

Afternoon: Completed an interview at KUHF FM on the University of Houston campus. The questions were interesting; here’s hoping the answers were too.