June 2, 2013

Dawn chorus. Funny how life changes. I was browsing in a book called “The Joy of Songbirds,” which contains an essay by me about the Carolina wren (whom I, by the way, do not hear this morning). I used to get most of my publications and fame (such as it was) from writing essays about birds. But this morning, holding the book in my hands, I thought, “What an odd thing to do.”

Got into a fit of planting roses, seeing as how I’d bought all the sprays and fertilizers. Climbing the stone steps at the nursery, I felt at my ankles the warm nose of a little terrier who minded everybody’s business. He was much loved. The employees communicated with each other by addressing the dog. “O! Henry! Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a few more pots of marigolds out front?”

Sleeping Beauty at the Wortham last night, Angie’s disciplined and excellently rehearsed (and gigantic) corps. Excellent as all the performers were, I can’t take too much of the Romantic fairy tale ballets, and this dished it out in double handfuls. I tried to suss the cultural message the work was sending. We are the wrong culture, and are likely deaf to the subtleties. But I think it is meant to be a simulacrum of the ideal order, as judged by an enlightened despot. Everything is done for and for the approval of the king and queen, who sit on one side nodding and occasionally doing something gracious. Happy peasants, pretty courtiers exist that the royals might live their fairy tale. If the show is doing its job, we ourselves are momentarily the royals, and nothing like our real selves, the scullions and garden workers and the soldiers at the gates. Little girls watching are always the princess. You could buy wands and tiaras in the lobby to heighten your royal sense of self. Maybe it was an accident of personnel, but the masculine presence on stage was irrelevant. There was a short and pointless hunting party, but that was to get the prince into the woods where he might get entangled in the female intrigue. Centrally, it’s a girl’s dream, where all the attention and all the gifts and all the drama and the biggest tutu are hers. Gentle boys come to court. All they want is to support her while she does her pretty dance. The deadly prick is so obviously sexuality, the bringer of death or, at best, thanks to the Lilac Fairy, prolonged oblivion. The deadly prick can be overcome only by true love, which, again, seems to want only to dance. Marriage is at first the striking of poses, and then sitting on matching thrones watching the peasants and the courtiers make pretty dances for you. When you applaud at the end, I think you’re applauding a girl come successfully to privileged womanhood through many perils. I was fascinated by it mostly in admiration of the skill with which it was done, and for the message sent to us from another day, a day justly now gone.

Drinks afterwards on the terrace of Aloft, a festive evening, with a miraculously ditzy waitress and a salsa-dancing Labrador adding to the show.