January 23, 2011

Filled the birdbath for the crows, whom I had seen pecking futilely at the ice moments before. The water froze over almost instantly.

DJ and I went to the Magnetic Theater to see the second installment of When Jekyll met Hyde. Had excellent pulled pork in the café while we waited. I think I should not have gone the second time, for the B version, though no worse than the standard Asheville dramatic fare, was no better, and I could have kept a memory of something scintillant. Trying to analyze what went wrong, I think it came down to a single actor who threw the balance and coherence of everything off, and not innocently. He has established a figure locally, and he played to that figure rather than to the script, or to his fellow actors. As a playwright I hate the idea that one person can demolish an evening’s theater, but he can. I witnessed it with the production of my Anna Livia in Chicago. Actors were shaky last night who have been solid in everything else I have seen them in. What do to? Soldier on, as I’m sure they shall. Nevertheless, the performance on Thursday night made me rethink my convictions about Ludlum and camp on stage. I still think Ludlum was exhausting, but his disciples, such as SS, might yet adapt his principles into a coherent and brilliant method of satire.

Picked up the Citizen Times for the first time in a year, and read that Judge B is retiring from the court-- for medical reasons, the paper said, but one wonders. By public account she was a bad judge, and I know her to have taken ruthlessness to a level that no one associated with justice–however loosely defined–should have. My astonishment that she was never disbarred diminished through the years, as I learned the ways of the world. Vain, and self-delighted as a teenage boy, she was just smart enough to know how to manipulate the law, and just shady enough to need to. She was one of several exhibits that taught me how different prisons would look if their occupants were chosen on the basis of actual harm done. She may have been the most malevolent individual I ever knew personally. And, she had the power to do real harm. Do I wish her health and long life? I do not. But the justice of the Lord is unlike hers, and if she is meant to have them, health and long life, she will, despite my remembrance.

Maud has taken to digging herself a cave in my T-shirt drawer, where she is visible sometimes only by a paw or the pink tip of a nose.

Sunday work-out at the Y among young gods. I have to remember this.

Treva asks me on Facebook “Do you paint?” I say yes I do, though I never did back in high school. As I’m typing I realize I should add, “It was too hard to keep secret.”