Run-through

 

October 1, 2022

Cold. Wet cold. I’ll spend the next six months pulling sweatshirts around myself and trying to finesse the furnace. 

The salmon bagels I used to look forward to weekends at Geraldine’s have become mean and skimpy. No need to keep that space on the menu open.

Ian and his rains pass east of us. Several Florida towns apparently obliterated. That it misses Mar-a-lago and the governor’s mansion is proof of the lordship of Satan. 

Was meant to hear the Bach Akademia last night, but first L bowed out because of the death of her daughter-in-law’s grandfather (she keeps track of those things better than I) and then because Doug, my director, invites me to a Frankenstein run-through. Sitting waiting for it to begin, I recall that I don’t “love the theater” as theater people claim to do. It’s messy and grubby and time-wasting. I like to act and to write, and wish that both of those occupations were purer of the mess than they are. But the cast of my play like each other, and played a kind of volleyball together before the rehearsal started. I have never been more apprehensive about a production than I was about this one. It was never of a piece. I couldn’t myself say what it was “about.” The surprise is that, however ambiguous, it’s gripping from the first scene on, and I’m neither a blind nor an over-generous critic of my own work. I think it will fascinate. Intrigue. Impress. Inform. Compared to the rest of this year’s fare at that venue, it is an agate lifted from the mud. I should just leave the evaluation with the word “relief.”