May 30, 2010

Came down the back path when I heard Kelly whooping and shrieking next door. She ran up the hill as I was walking down. The drama was this: she had uncovered a big black snake while lifting a pillow in the back yard. Now, I have long coveted a snake or a toad on my property, and wondered why my unmown lawn and multitude of hiding places had not attracted some before now. Zach and I maneuvered the snake under the fence into my tangle of ivy, and I was at last fulfilled, though it is possible that it has always been my snake and, for the reasons mentioned above, it was never noticed until it wandered into the neighbors’ trim and light.

Wrote yesterday morning on my new play, then painted well–I think–then returned into the evening to Phil Mechanic to a community benefit festival with a collage theme. It irritated me for the first few minutes–the chaos, everything late and ragged and cobbled together, the studiously unwashed lesbians, the squall and drama of children tumbling onto concrete, the self-importance of minor artists on cell phones, the general conviction that slovenliness proves authenticity, but the judging demon passed and I began to enjoy myself. No one had suggested it was anything other than it was, and everyone who willed to do so was having a good time. So, thus I willed. M, the puppeteer with whom I have thought to collaborate, was the first thing I saw. The puppets are truly magnificent, and he manipulates them beautifully. His ad-lib spiel was not working for him, and I kept thinking that a good script would create an evening of glory. There were many tiny kids in their fathers’ laps–the scene was quite beautiful for that, actually–and their eyes were rapt, their attention unwavering. The dads smiled over their heads, every bit as engrossed. Richmond was there, encouraging a community mural, and the sight of him gladdened my heart. One little girl wrote “You poop” under Mitch’s portrait. I snuck up behind her and said “Did you just write ‘you poop?” and she burst out in a giggle of “yes.” The buffet was exquisite. I wonder who provided it? There was a fashion show with one of my studio mates showing her recycled clothing– that is to say, clothing made from bits and pieces of other things. She had found a considerable number of very pretty girls to model for her. I’d hardly seen MB since she and Ellen parted, but there she was, doing exactly what I had known her for before, bulldozing to the left and right, pushing chairs and wrenching lights out of their sockets to alter the environment to suit herself. These changes are never improvements, but at least we can be certain that MB was there. There was unattractive drag. The bearded chubby boy was meant to be Dolly Parton, I guess. I’d actually come to the event to see Thomas’s play, but there was a misunderstanding about adult content (the audience was conspicuously NOT adult) and I left to get off my swollen legs before the play went on or was cancelled, whatever finally happened. In some ways I didn’t get it– why present to the public things that are not the best they can be, things that need to have excuses made for them, that need to have an alibi? Yet I see the attraction of doing arty things without the burden of actual ART-- of juggling and dancing before the temple door. People were having a good time. I was having a good time, too, though it was mostly from watching them have theirs.

Thomas Murphy served his first morning as deacon, and he did lavishly well. His benediction at the end was so full of young male assurance that the whole congregation left smiling.