March 8, 2015

Sick after 9 hours of rehearsal– during which we had not yet teched the entire play– crashed to dreamless sleep. Starts again in a few hours. I remember meeting big John when he was running a theater company at the Wortham, in the brief golden days of Derek. He was SO handsome and so jolly. Still is, though the raven hair is silver. He has been feeding me fragments of the legend of myself, which is the more remarkable because it never occurs to me that anyone is ever having a conversation about me, and if they are, it is bound to be cordial and kind. My history is remembered in some detail, which is most odd. Most of those details are wrong, which is not as bad as it sounds because, in general, my motivation in legend is remembered purer than it was upon the moment. The subject of the hateful and devious Tina Maguire came up, and I mentioned that among her sins was vetoing a grant the Arts Council had voted for me. I thought her malice was mysterious, but John remembers the details as presented then, and told the story of the male nude in the window when I had Urthona Gallery on Patton Avenue. Tina (who was the self-appointed queen of Asheville arts until we came to our senses) reportedly sent a delegation to me to remove the painting, at least for Bele Cher, and I refused to do it. The one point of that story that is true is the painting. It was on the back wall, and you had to work to see it from the street. Passers-by when I was at the studio smiled and gave me the thumbs-up, so I assumed it was a popular hit. But one day I received a call from Stephanie, my employee, who said a firestorm was gathering around that painting, that the women upstairs from Help-Meet said it was encouraging rape and the City Councilman from the bank across the street was in a froth about it, and the management of the building had received all sorts of complaints, and on and on. NOT ONE OF THOSE COMPLAINTS HAD EVER been whispered to me. Not one. I thought people liked it. When I learned it was upsetting people, I removed it INSTANTLY and put it on a wall where you’d have actually to enter the room to see it. So much for any attitude of defiance on my part. AND, all this happened in February; Bele Cher was in July. I’m capable of boiling about this twenty years later. I never got to slap Maguire across the mouth, which is the action which would have come near to settling our scores. Do I take it as a sign of innocence or stupidity that I am, for the most part, flabbergasted by the things I do that irritate people? Causing irritation almost never crosses my mind. Maybe it should.