April 20, 2022

Dress rehearsal in Black Mountain. Everyone was there, I gather for the first time. Muscular Asian kid whose family owns the Japanese restaurant in Biltmore, peacocky mixed-race kid with many necklaces and black fingernail polish, couple of others missing the night before. One of the new ones is one of a kind that makes me berserk– the uncontrolled question-asker: a query at every pause, a request for clarification the third time just to be sure, attention drawn to self because of one’s anxiety for everything to be done right, inability not to have her say at every occasion. She argued for five minutes because someone else had been given one of her lines. She is sixty, I guess, and the line was clearly written for a teenage boy. What will an audience think? Because of the subject matter, they will say it’s “powerful” whether it is or not.