August 7, 2010

Compact, attentive audiences for the two evenings of the Jane Bingham Festival at All Souls. MA’s play was very smart, very young, gorgeously written in places, sometimes sacrificing the theatrical dramatic for the rhetorically dramatic, though– something every playwright must do the first time out. It was full of “fuck”s and I winced every time the word re-echoed through the holy space, though no permanent damage seemed to have been done. I edited most of the cuss-words out of mine for night two. My play the second night read better than I feared, worked better than I imagined, and is ready for the next thing I ask of it. This festival was the thing I dreaded at the end of summer, and now it’s over. Sam Bingham was in the audience to hear his mother honored. He fell asleep. He acknowledged this, and said it was honoring his mother, too, for it was what she would have done. Facing now the prospect of saying goodbye to almost everyone. Adam is already gone; Cody and Carly and Thomas and Michael are packing their bags. If this were a TV show I’d say “they’ll be back,” but I don’t think they will, and I hope, for their sakes, they won’t.

Excellent work out yesterday took away a measure of the August lethargy. Must repeat today!

Morning spent with Michael and Maria Bettencourt– meeting her and re-linking with him after six or seven years, at least. In those few hours I quadrupled my knowledge of Argentina and social work graduate programs. Ten minutes at the All Souls arts fair, enough time to buy a teapot from a former student.

People who talk about quality of life in Asheville fail to mention that Progress Energy the worst electrical utility in the nation. Scarcely a summer night goes by when we don’t have a flickering failure which crashes computers and necessitates the resetting of clocks. It would be a minor annoyance without the knowledge that we are the only ones (in the more than a few places I’ve lived) who have to put up with it. Did people simply not know how to hang the wires?