January 22, 2017

My people made up 1/3 of the Night Music house Saturday night. Tom and Laura motored down from Blacksburg; Linda and Jim were there, as well as James the political hotel employee whom I invited without ever anticipating he would come. Linda felt he was flirting with me. If so, it’s saddening that I don’t notice such things any more. I suppose they all liked it. I liked it better each night I watched. I appreciated Cleve’s skill and Phil’s naturalness, and Jesse’s beautiful eyes, the more. I even began to think it was a sort of masterpiece, a jewel of a play served up to, maybe, in all, sixty or seventy witnesses. What does that mean? I think it is not absurd to say no one in the theater is writing better than I, and few are more obscure. Am I paying for some forgotten karma? Am I neglecting the one thing I should do, the one door I must knock on, to turn this around? It is a beautiful play, as if it were not actually mine. I saw this once I got over my terror of boring the audience. But, so what? It’s a ring of infinite price on the hand of a dowager in a decaying mansion, where only a few retainers ever see it. Guessed my way out of Greensboro before dawn, drove home through constant rain.

T emails:
We had a tough drive home, in the dark and rain, but made it. A good bit of talking about the play, so that's good. It keeps on living that way. Would you mind sending me a copy? If it's easy to find. 
The last image was fascinating. As if it were possible to keep the whole flood of emotions set in play but not yet fully enacted there, in this space we all shared, unnamed. It seemed very intimate, a shared secret--the whole play. So Laura and I tried to talk about it some--the sadness under the always good at things feeling I've always had; the close unnamed relationships, outside of our marriage, even before it. I tried to talk about those years we wrote letters so intensely (at least it seemed that way to me) and how it changed my life, gave me a part of my life really. A part that's still there and alive, though obviously I didn't honor it properly by just drawing into my own little world of family and books and church. 

The one review that means something.