May 27, 2017

Whenever I see “new” theater, I come away with the conviction that I am trying too hard.

C worked out hard during the day, and was excited for the pool scene, where he could show off his massive arms and be the “most jacked and juicy” Gatsby that there ever was. The hilarity in the dressing room was based on replacing each use of “old sport” or any other form of address with “dickless fat-ass.”  It was funny every time. The boys are essentially pre-literate. None of their information out of school comes from reading or what one would call “high culture,” but from popular music and movies. How often do they listen to or see these things? They can sing any song anyone of them can mention, tunefully and word for word, and quote long passages of movies, some of which I saw too, without the impulse to remember them at all. It is a verbal culture, intensely historical, in that they have taken Star Wars and Marvel Comics as their own story, and can recite the persons and chronicles by rote. In this it differs not from what one supposes the relationship of some everyday Greek to the gods of Olympus to be. I love them. I love being with them, though my quite different knowledge base puts me on the periphery of most conversations. Right now they are the only compensation for a round trip to Waynesville to blather out fifteen lines.