London 5

June 14, 2013

From Aislinn’s report on The Loves of Mr Lincoln:

Hello all, 
Attached and below is tonight's report. 
Thanks, 

An absolutely top-notch show. The audience was incredibly enthusiastic, including uproarious laughter, a standing ovation, and shouts of “thank you” during curtain call.

. . . of course, this couldn’t have happened while I was there. . . .

Fussing around in my black sports jacket, found a tag in the pocket, handwritten. This jacket was acquired (apparently in Germany) from G. Rittberg, Dortmund, by one Herr Borianne (can’t read the name very well) in 1955. I was wearing vintage and didn’t know it.

Tea, as I must do, in the Victoria & Albert tea room, where, as the last time I was there, I began to write a play. This time the play is about the fox in Bloomsbury Square. I wandered to Harrod’s. I found it fascinating this time, as I had not, for some reason, in the past. It has a distinctly Near-Eastern tone to it, and many Islamic women were gliding through in their long gowns. How had I missed the Egyptian Escalator? I mean to eat there someday, on the long sampling counters in the midst of the greatest bazaar in the world. Drank cider at the Swan nearby, where I met Nick, a dark man whose accent I couldn’t place until he told me he was Albanian. There is a great hospital behind the hotel, and Nick was at the Swan with his son, Danny. Danny was having chemo, and they were taking a break until the test results were in and they knew what drugs to pick up at the pharmacy. Danny is six or seven, and has bone cancer, and a bald head covered by a cap. Nick showed me photos of Danny at his worst, and he was a miserable skeleton. I went outside and sat down with my drink, but Nick followed, clearly wanting to tell his tale to somebody. My almost perfect ignorance of Albania made me want to ask questions, but Nick wanted to talk about Danny and his therapy. The shy child brightened as we sat, and I became very involved in the will to recovery. Nick pulled himself onto the subject of religion. He was a Catholic and enraged by Muslim high-handedness in his homeland (the only details I got out of him about Albania) but beyond that he said he could not believe in God. He pointed to his son and asked how God could do that. He could understand if he had done it to him, to the father, who could fight it, but to an innocent child? The greatest theologian in the world would have no answer for Nick, and I didn’t even try.

In the evening it was the English National Opera’s The Perfect American at the Coliseum. Philip Glass wrote the music. The “perfect American” is Walt Disney. It was a sort of masterpiece, and I was mesmerized even through the sameness of the music. Perhaps because of the sameness of the music– who knows? It was a masterpiece with a major flaw– the libretto was horrible. It was like reading the newspaper, but worse. I considered the likelihood that an every-day speech libretto could be presented as a deliberate artistic choice, but even so it was a bad one. I kept thinking, “Why the hell didn’t you ask me?” It was almost pure recitative, epic in some places, silly in others, like Disney himself. But I was fascinated. Maybe I was fascinated because I saw a template to be departed from and improved upon. There is apparently no subject so mundane that work-horse music can’t elevate it at least momentarily. Art-wise, this may have been the most important evening of my sojourn.

Went to bed ill and woke up well. Hope that happens to Danny. Dreamed that I was visiting Ann Dunn at her dream-home in the Western Wilderness, and when I came back to my car it was surrounded by wild animals. It was very dark, so I had to guess what they were. I touched the bear and he lumbered away. I began to pet what I assumed was a moose or a big deer, and he stood and suffered my caress. The animals had wrecked my car, but I didn’t care.