October 27, 2015

Got ma’am-ed at the grocery store last night– odd, because I think I’d make a right hideous woman.
   
Only three in class last night. We talked & talked. Sam revealed that a copy of A Dream of Adonis is listen on Amazon for $2600. I therefore have a fortune in storage.
   
One of my Humanities students remarked, “You sure know your stuff.” I reflected on the fact that I do, and I may never be able to use that accumulated information–some of it outright wisdom–again. May be good for me, passing on to the next thing and all that, but I don’t think it’s good for the students, to be barred from a garden in full ripeness. I hate that little man. He should be widely hated on my behalf.
  
Up early and accomplished much. Still dark– which is a little disturbing.
   
Terrible hoarseness upon waking, despite the vaporizer.
   
Full days and nights to the threshold of Christmas. This relieves me, somehow: less occasion for introspection.
   
The cats watch from the windows as I tend to the trash. I need to assure them that their world is as mysterious to me as mine is to them.

October 26, 2015

Pretty flawless matinee. I left before the curtain call in my desperation to get to rehearsal for All Is Calm on time, an effort made futile by traffic stopped dead on I-40.  There seemed to be no reason for it except a lumbering truck in one lane, or that was all that was left when I got to the place where the snarl finally broke. I’d gone to Waynesville early to look around and shop a little, not having noted the last time that the shops don’t open until 1. So, I had nothing to do, plus suffering an attack of sudden bowel urgency. I dived into the Baptist church, where the bathroom was occupied; into the corner service station, where the bathroom was out of order; finally, after a long and anxious search, in the Episcopal church. They were having a congregational meeting, so I was visible to all as I came in. The one person I would conceivably know in town saw me, left the meeting to talk to me. He had seen The Weir the night before and was praising it. All dignity was gone by then, and I said, “I’ll just use your bathroom and I’ll be on my way.” All in all, a day of multiple frustrations, not all of them, at the time, petty. Sitting still on the superhighway I asked the rainy air around me what a person could possibly do to insure what needed to get done got done, what precautions could possibly prevail in a world so disordered. It is not my fault. The rain shrugged and went its inevitable way down the windshield.

I’m the only bass for All Is Calm. Didn’t expect that. Had punched my holes wrong so I could hardly hold the score. Again, I hissed to the dim and holy air. Hoarseness. Long time calming from the harried drive.  Retreated to Avenue M and ate the largest meal I’ve eaten in 4 weeks.
   
Talked about the Celts this morning. Thought about telling my Humanities students I had been fired, just to trouble the waters. Let it pass.

October 25, 2015

Active crowd last night, laughing at things that hadn’t seemed funny before. We laughed so much in the dressing room that some of our energy was dissipated before we got on stage.

October 24, 2015

Big crowd of All Souls and Cantaria friends at The Weir last night. They claimed to like it. Oddly misbehaving crowd, with a lot of talking in the middle of scenes, a lot of commotion. In the midst of Valerie’s dramatic monolog, one old hag was unwrapping a candy with remarkable volume and infinite slowness.  Drinks, me gobbling up a salad at King James’ afterward. The Mountain X review is out, not making too much of our faults, and remarking that I am “always a delight to watch on stage.”

    Pink and gray light through the window at dawn.

    Revelatory morning at the studio– two important discoveries, and a first visit to the new Cheap Joe’s Art store.  Steve wide-eyed and hard at work in his cube of light.

October 23, 2015

Fat white planet over the YMCA parking lot.
   
Did 1/3 of my lines from memory in the weight room of the Y, 1/3 (my monolog) in the parking lot of Starbucks, have 1/3 to go some time today, probably while my class is taking their exam.  In any case, I’m more confident than I would otherwise have been about the renewed run of The Weir. I think the All Souls folks are coming tonight. We were hoping for a review, but so far as I can tell it has not appeared. I’m thinking Jeff thought it was more merciful to say nothing at all.
   
Drove to the Presbyterian church in Marshall last night for choir rehearsal. They’re doing a pastiche Christmas cantata called Joy, Unspeakable Joy. There must be an industry somewhere churning out cantatas for bad church choirs, for the back of the book displays many other options. I’d allowed myself to forget how bad the choir is there, or maybe it’s worse this year than last. The women sound pretty good, actually, but the men are an undifferentiated smear of unrelated and tuneless sound, luckily feeble. The gentleman next to me is clearly a pillar of that community, and is the yearly narrator for the Christmas Story. Some conflict kept him from singing with us last year, but he’s there this year, and, dear God, one has never heard the like. I want to say to him, “You do know that one note is different from another, don’t you?”  I want to say, “You don’t have to make stuff up; it’s actually written there on the page for you.” I want to say, “Just sing what I sing.” I don’t think he can. He can’t or has never been required to match pitch, and the idea that a tune or a note are objective qualities and not just some noise you decide to groan out seems never to have crossed his mind. I want to quiz him about this. I want to say, “What do you think you’re doing when you’re singing? How do you suppose that all works?” My guess is that someone along the line was so grateful for low voices she didn’t care what they sang, and then no one corrected the misconceptions thus set in stone. The lad next to him is a Down syndrome man, and actually has quite a good sense of harmony. He is almost never on the right note, but what he’s singing is usually in the key and harmonizes with something somebody is singing.  We are the basses. The tenors are large men who seem to produce no sound. The new choir director is perfectly competent. I don’t know how she keeps herself from collapsing in tears. Last year the men beside me would eventually give in and follow me. Mr Pillar evidently thinks it’s a war and he’s not going to be coerced by some outsider into singing something outside of the two flat notes he has chosen for his own. I left quite angry. That is not the right spirit. Marshall is closer than I think it is, so I sat on a rock watching the river roll by until it was time for choir.

October 21, 2015

Alexander and Zarathustra in Humanities. The one question I got after introducing the fascinating topic of the conquests of Alexander was “Is this going to be on the test?” Later in the day I saw a man in a t-shirt which read, “Everything I say will be on the test.” Came home to find that the ladyslipper roots had arrived. It’s probably mad to try them, but I laid them in the shady ground covered with compost and mulch, and so one hopes for the best.

Upheaval of an old memory: I’m in 5th grade, I think, because we’re still a Goodview Avenue, and I’m planning my trick-or-treating with my friends, and my father says, “There will be no more of that. You are going to work on Halloween night.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I said so.”
So on Halloween, while the ghosts and princesses range up and down the Avenue, he has me cleaning out the side garden. Whatever lesson he was meaning to teach was lost, for I couldn’t think of any trespass that had warranted that (nor did he mention one). Was there some time when the things of childhood must be put away? If so, none of my friends were affected by it. I was miserable, thinking that something magical was being torn away before its time. He had strange eruptions of arbitrary cruelty, which he must have thought of as proving some point or asserting his authority in some way, though their actual fruit was simple-- and apparently long-lasting-- hatred. Could he have articulated his intentions if I had found the right way to ask?  I think Blake’s Nurse of Experience shows the way here, an internal bitterness seeping out to embitter the world.

October 20, 2015

So far the cold has taken only the angels’ trumpets, which sag over themselves sadly. The cats lie n the sun as though carefully listening to its instructions.