November 3, 2015

Voted at Saint Eugene’s. Received a doughnut.

Humanities debacle yesterday. Will talk it over with the class. The theme was “Disability as Diversity,’ which has nothing to do, they admitted, with our study, but provided a day which didn’t have to be planned. My belief is that a person with a severe speech impediment should probably not take up public speaking. To replace speechmaking with writing or painting or teaching or any other thing in this world is overcoming the handicap. To take up public speaking is to impose it.  If I were a bad actor, would I expect to be cast anyway on the basis of my wanting to be an actor? Should my bad acting be taken as noble defiance of the gifts which were dealt me, and the others which were withheld? Or just a test of everybody’s patience? Just willfulness? Our speaker could barely be understood, and much of his testimony– about forced sterilization in the 30's-- was lost. Nor could I quite understand why it was scheduled in the first place. The topic is not provocative, for not one person in the room could be expected to disagree with him or have another reasonable perspective. Another opportunity for easy indignation? He couldn’t mention the perps without identifying them as “white men,” a buzz word that sank immediately into everyone’s receptors, whether it was relevant or not. He victims he spoke of were white women. But if you didn’t know about eugenics, now you do, if you had the patience to unravel the smear of sounds.

Three nail-spitting blaspheming meltdowns already, and the day is little more than half over.

November 2, 2015

Truly remarkable downpouring from the heavens. Lakes shimmer in the dark under the streetlamps. Soaked between my car and the door of the Y.

Put The Weir to bed yesterday afternoon, a good experience which I am not sad is over. The drive– too much. I think we’re up on the “success” wall. Huge attendance for a “drama.” We were talking in the dressing room about how the play is not quite as good as some people seem to think, but then decided it might be just that we were doing it badly, and it was better to shut up about it. As a playwright, I see missed opportunities on every page. The interplay between the characters is better than the monologues, and yet the monologues are the meat of the play. Our Haywood County reviewer observed that men’s stories are not particularly scary.  The test is, did we slip in our own vomit? And we did not.

November 1, 2015

Our best performance yet last night, with a responsive and attentive crowd worthy of it. As an actor I find I cannot be completely “in the moment,” for if I am, I miss lines, because the lines are not always what one would say if one were fully in the moment. It has to be a compromise between being “in the moment” and reading the script at the back of your eyes. Hit that compromise last night. L was in the audience, said it was the best thing he’s ever seen me in. Of course, one takes that not as meant, but as a judgment on all that came before. They handed me a check, a big one, which was a nice surprise. For someone like J, it makes all the difference in the world.  E keeps her mind in the game by not speaking to any of us from the time she walks through the door to the time she leaves. Hope it’s working for her.
   
Dark morning slick and gleamy with rain. I slept the extra hour the Time Lords gave us.

October 31, 2015

Halloween.

Glad morning in the studio I painted well, with Steven coloring with fiery intensity a few rooms away. Good work in the silence. A couple from Nashville prowled around, saying, “this must be an inspiring room to work in.” Anyone who mentions the room and not the work is instantly my enemy.

My yard is essentially self-mulching, with a fine rain of pine needles shivering softly down.

Gigantic moon.

Five rejections in one day. I am sorry for my hatred, for my obsession, for my Satanic rebellion. But, Lord, I cannot move until you let me move.

October 30, 2015

Tense leaving Marshall Pres under moonlight. Decided that choir is not the place to encourage service that gratifies the congregant but offends the art. The old man beside me sang not one right note (though his counting is pretty good) and even the suggestion that he just sing what I sing brought but a confused smile. The Down syndrome kid blats just any old thing at the top of his lungs. I do not have the courtesy in me to countenance that. Surely some other service is available. What goes through peoples’ minds? I mentioned this to the director–of course she knew before I mentioned it–and she said the old guy said my strong voice was helping him a great deal. Since he sang not one note that I did, I don’t know how I helped. Yet one trusts that some good is being done somehow.  And so one goes down into darkness with nothing certain.
   
Marshall is scary and empty at night.

Brought down from the study yesterday afternoon by strong and persistent knocking on the door. Got down just as the knocker was leaving– a young black man who turned and began testifying as he moved across the drive. “Has Jesus yet blessed you today?” through such-and-such a thing that I didn’t hear. He was selling something that he was presenting as a blessing, but I didn’t have time to get pissed over being interrupted for that, for he tried to get between the parked car and the house, which means he got tangled up in the rose bushes. There he was, testifying to a fare-thee-well, trying to get his sleeves unhitched from the rose thorns. I closed the door behind me, smiling.

Went over my Weir lines on the elliptical. I was alone in the big room. Even now the morning darkness has not broken.

October 29, 2015
  
Thinnest of all rain, the brush of cold lips against a cheek. Most of the night was flooded with moonlight. Drove the pick-up for coffee to empty the bed of collected rainwater.

Smitten by inspiration for the music for Dinosaur Movie.

At the theater last night for a run-through of Washington Place. We open a week from tonight, and there were a number of things to be panicked about, but when the run-through actually started, when I heard those sure voices saying lines of which I am also sure, anxiety drained away. For the most part. Now I’m picturing an empty theater, crickets calling in the hallway.

A was there, being wondrously and inexplicably useful.

Singing along with Russian basses on You Tube, confirming that I, too, have a double Low C. At least today.

October 28, 2015

Cold rain.
   
Last night at the Magnetic for a rehearsal of Washington Place. It was necessary agony. The direction is precise, the actors dedicated to their roles. All’s well there. I might go again tonight to see a “stumble through.” Listening, I tried to characterize my style of writing, and I couldn’t. The most I could flatter myself was by saying the speeches seemed appropriate to the characters.
   
E-mail account hacked, so I was sending weird messages out to everybody. Didn’t read it myself, so I don’t know exactly what it is. Ste in Cambridge says it’s “terrible.” .
   
Margaret Spellings is the new president of the university system, a bad choice replacing a good choice who was ousted because the Republicans (by definition Vandals) wanted some unspecified change.  If you had deliberately laid out a list of things you didn’t want in a university president, you couldn’t have chosen closer to the mark. She prides herself in knowing nothing about education. Brags on it. It was a gesture of contempt for education on the part of the legislature. Today’s Republican majority is like Melkor or Ahriman, incapable of creating anything, only of ruining and destroying. Lincoln and Roosevelt and Eisenhower cry out from Eternity.
   
But I will not let those thoughts guide me through the day. What bothers me more is that the passages of public stupidity and vandalism seems never to get so extreme that people begin turning away. Carson or Trump will say some clearly idiotic thing and the response is “Yeah, well, I like his style. He tells it like it is.”  Stupid people want their say. Stupid people want to hear others saying stupid things so that they might “like their style.” It’s not that I’m not stupid, but I don’t rejoice in it. I want a cure for it, a correction, not flattery.