June 19, 2015

Woke late, having had a late night. Drove through the skirts of thunderstorms to Hendersonville to see Over the River and through the Woods at Flat Rock’s downtown location. I did so because S took me aside at the performance the other night and said, “Please come see my play.” I love the theater space there, though it’s extremely deep, and S solved the problems of not making everybody look small and distant all the time. Everything was flawless, the acting exemplary, and so on, but I had, as I knew I would have, no interest in the play whatever. It was skillfully and professionally written, but one knew at the first of the first scene exactly what emotion of tender nostalgia one was to bear through the entire show, anticipating a little orgy of smiling sadness at the end. It was like picking up a birthday card from your grandma twenty years later– enough for a moment, but not an entire play. I don’t mind memory plays– where a character at one point in time comes out and tells you what happened at another point in time– but even the best of them–The Glass Menagerie– is a little bit of a cheat, providing a guide to inform you of your emotions rather than a situation actually to create them. Everything S was responsible for was brilliant, so I’ll tell him that. Adding in the wine needed to get through, it was an expensive evening. Hendersonville was packed with strollers and merrymakers and people eating under umbrellas. Fell asleep on the sofa, my glass of tea still perched precariously when I awoke,
   
Reading at the Albee bio I picked up in Nebraska. I napped after one session, and in the nap-dream I was Albee drunk and obnoxious at a party. The very next chapter was about Albee being drunk and obnoxious at a party, quarreling with Jospeh Papp like to weasels in a hole. Maybe my soul read ahead as my body slept.

Borage in hazy blue bloom.