Miles Morales Behind the Spider-Man Mask

Putting aside that Miles Morales has the super-strength and wall-climbing abilities that naturally come with a radioactive spider's bite, he's also fifteen years old. In the novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man (Scholastic, 2017) the author Jason Reynolds grounds his super-hero story in believable daily reality of a teenage boy of color, a scholarship student boarding at a mostly-white academy.

Yes, Miles can leap above the backstop to dunk a ball, but when he comes down, it's to his dorm room to deal with unwashed jeans, deodorant streaks on his shirt, stubble, eating, working while his friends go to a party, falling asleep over homework. He doubts whether the girl he likes can like him, and whether his poem for English class is any good.

[Photo: The cover of Miles Morales: Spider-Man, and the cover artist Kadir Nelson at work.]

But Miles deals with deeper self-doubts stemming from others' doubts about him. At age 13, applying for school, he wrote

...I know there are people who look at [me and my family] a certain way. The reason why is because my father wasn't always the man he is today. He was a person who didn't have anyone to steer him away from the traps of our community. Even though my neighborhood is a beautiful place to grow up, sometimes it can get complicated. And my father and his brother fell victim to the street, becoming teenage thieves, bringing problems to our neighborhood, and all of New York city. (101)

Miles writes how a life of crime caught up with his uncle Aaron. "This part of my family is also a part of me. The same fearlessness that led them to crime is what leads me to excellence." It's a sweetly earnest letter, weaponized to shame Miles when the principal accuses him of a petty theft.

Miles is not alone with his doubts. In nightmares, Uncle Aaron tells him, You're just like me. When, in his Spider-Man tights, Miles breaks a sneaker thief's wrist and beats him bloody, Miles is ashamed of himself for losing control, and haunted by his uncle's voice, You're just like me (127). He visits the county prison to meet a cousin he never knew existed, who also has nightmares in which the prison guard is "telling me I ain't never gon' be nothing," something the guard says during the day, only "in my dream, he got my daddy's voice [saying] 'You're just like me'" (195).


Finding the source of these self-doubts is the main action of the book. We're in the Marvel Universe, so there's a super-villain conspiracy involved; but we don't need to believe in magic when neighborhood men all share stories of being suspended from school. Had the teachers asked why a black boy might sleep in class, fight, or refuse to read aloud, they might have learned that he worked all night, that a white boy spit on him, or that he was ashamed of his poor reading ability (207).

The cousin in prison tells the same sort of story from his school days, tying school authorities to those that locked him up with men who all look like him, "if you know what I mean" (194). The creepy history teacher, who preaches that slavery benefitted both masters and "grafeful" slaves (117), opines that the American prison system is "the new, much smarter, form of slavery" (155).


While Miles's journey of discovery stretches out over the course of the novel, what keeps us turning pages is just the love of the characters. At school, there's Miles's jovial roommate Ganke and Alicia, the outspoken socially-conscious president of the school's poetry club. We enjoy the eccentric English teacher Miss Blaufuss, and the sympathetic librarian Mrs. Triplett. The dad is affectionate but demanding, making sure Miles learns "Helping your neighbors is the most heroic thing you can do," even if it's just cleaning up garbage left by careless sanitation workers (8). His mother, who doesn't know his secret, is wise but worried:

"I know," she said with a sigh.... "We know you're sorry. But what we don't know is what's going on with you." Her eyes glassed as she stared at Miles.
My uncle's death.
My school.
My teacher.
My newfound incarcerated cousin.
My superpowers.
"Nothing," Miles said. "Well, I mean, I guess I just feel so much pressure. But I'm ... fine."
"You sure?" His mother leaned in, her eyes lasering through the layers of him. Through the mask. (Reynolds 132)

Most of all, we love the vulnerable young man Miles that we alone can see behind his "mask."

[Photo from JasonWritesBooks.com: Jason Reynolds.]

Of course, Miles wears a literal Spider-Man mask, and poet Jason Reynolds sometimes uses literal elements of the story as metaphors. He sets the pattern with his novel's epigraph, a poem by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar that begins "We wear the mask that grins and lies" -- true for Spider-Man, true for a young black man responding to white assumptions.

When Miles asks the librarian about spiders, she suggests "the symbolism of the web" (111). Miles may feel alone with his troubles, but the metaphor explains what we see, how he's integral to his family and community.

The supernatural source of Miles's nightmares is a metaphor for experiences that weigh down black teens of color in real life. 

Then, Miss Blaufuss's poetry assignments draw significant thoughts from Miles. Directed to discover the origins of his own name, he learns that miles means "soldier" and morales means "moral": he's a warrior for good. Given ten minutes to write about love in a Korean sijo -- three lines, each 14-16 syllables -- Miles thinks first of his mother, but "I love you, Ma" is only four syllables. He "finds his groove" recalling what his father said about the neighborhood, and he writes, "To my father, love sometimes means--" when time's up (57). An important part of the plot concerns Miles' effort to deliver Alicia the poem that expresses his feelings for her.


Jason Reynolds on his website addresses the many kids he meets who say they hate reading, when they really mean, they hate boring books. He promises not to write boring books. In a profile of the author for the New York Times (28 October 2019), Concepcion de Leon writes, "The best-selling writer ...wants black teenagers and kids to know that he sees them." He "attempts to portray the scope of their lives -- sometimes including guns and violence but also happiness and laughter." Reynolds says, "There's always a joke somewhere. You don't go through what black and brown people have been through in this country and survive without understanding how to tap into joy." He also shows boys "crying or feeling uncertainty" because "I need boys to know that's O.K."


I hope he reaches black teens. I hope the novel also reaches white teens, like those over the years who've told me that racism is over. We need to see what some classmates may be experiencing behind a mask.

[I wrote what I know about the experience of young men like Miles Morales from my side of the color line in a blogpost The Privilege is Mine (12/2017)]

We Need a Little Jerry Herman

In an appreciation of Broadway songwriter Jerry Herman, who died this week at 88, NPR's All Things Considered ended with a clip from the co-writer of his autobiography. She said that what annoyed Jerry Herman most was others' assumption that his optimistic show tunes were just a put-on. She said he absolutely loved life, and those lyrics were heartfelt.

[Photo: Angela Lansbury, the original MAME, with company, singing "It's Today!"]

NPR's critic Bob Mondello focused on something he called the "Jerry Herman Pulse." In every Herman score, there'd be a number that started small and slow, with a pulse in the bass, that would build to a company number with everyone singing and dancing. He said that Jerry Herman

owned... the cheer-up anthem that reminded audiences that for life to be OK, you just need a little Christmas in Mame or to put a little more mascara on in La Cage [aux Folles] or to tap your troubles away in Mack And Mabel....And again and again, as that heartbeat in the bassline came in, Broadway audiences reveled in what was always the overriding message in a Jerry Herman show - that, yes, life can come at you hard, but hold your head high. Face the future. March to that pulse because when others see your confidence, they will line up in support, filling the stage, arms in the air, singing to beat the band.

Herman's music was all I knew of Broadway during the first twelve years of my life. When I became an afficianado of Stephen Sondheim, I still appreciated Herman's effortless-seeming rhymes over buoyant oom-pah accompaniments, such as "We Need a Little Christmas":

Haul out the holly,
Put up the tree before my spirit falls again
Fill up the stocking
I may be rushing things but
Deck the halls again
For we need a little Christmas...

Puns ("haul" and "holly") and rhymes, opposites ("Put up" and "fall"): these seem natural, no effort required. Jerry Herman paired phrases in significant ways that balanced and just seemed right. Auntie Mame, feeling rejected by her grown up nephew, sings what all parents must think now and then...

Did he need a stronger hand?
Did he need a lighter touch?
Was I soft, or was I tough?
Did I give enough?
Did I give too much? (Herman, "If He Walked Into My Life")

I saw him just once, on TV during the 1983 Tony Awards broadcast. His score for the gay-themed show La Cage aux Folles, with book by Arthur Laurents, was up against Stephen Sondheim's score for Sunday in the Park with George, book by James Lapine. My mentor Frank Boggs had seen both and had written to me that Sunday was a work of art, while La Cage was something done "with crayons." Herman, accepting the award, said something that I and others took as an attack on Sondheim:

This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theater. There's been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it's alive and well at the Palace

[Photo: Jerry Herman accepting his Tony.]

Years later, in an online interview at Broadway.com in 2004, Herman walked it back:

Only a small group of "showbiz gossips" have constantly tried to create a feud between Mr. Sondheim and myself. I am as much of a Sondheim fan as you and everybody else in the world, and I believe that my comments upon winning the Tony for La Cage clearly came from my delight with the show business community's endorsement of the simple melodic show tune which had been criticized by a few hard-nosed critics as being old fashioned…I was simply saying "thank you for letting me be what I am."

Appreciations of Herman today have focused on the positive songs and on his raising vast sums to support those who, like him, were HIV-positive.


My own personal connections are to that song "We Need a Little Christmas," something I sang with Frank Boggs's chorale, and a ballad that I learned from Barbara Cook's comeback album, from Mack and Mabel, a song I've sung at my piano. I don't have to make-believe the feelings; they're baked in:

Time heals everything,
Tuesday, Thursday,
Time heals everything,
April, August,
If I'm patient, the break will mend,
And one fine morning, the hurt will end,

So make the moments fly,
Autumn, winter,
I'll forget you by
next year, some year.
Though it's hell that I'm going through, I know
Some Tuesday, Thursday,
April, August,
Autumn, Winter,
Next year, some year--
Time heals everything,
Time heals everything,
But loving you.

Jumping from days to months to seasons to years -- Herman grows his number in a way that seems natural, effortless, real: I can love that.


I also loved to play and sing "I Don't Want to Know" from one of his flops, Dear World (1968). A waltz with some dissonant chords, the lyrics say that if life is no longer lovely, "then I don't want to know." Written for an elderly woman in a small French town, nostalgic for a way of life that's passed, it could also have been Jerry Herman, whose great successes of the early 1960s were already looking dated.


Kindness, gentleness, craftsmanship, optimism: These are qualities of Jerry Herman that we all need. Rest in Peace.

Christmas Present: Rosemary Clooney on FRESH AIR

On Christmas Day, NPR's Fresh Air re-broadcast an interview with singer Rosemary Clooney that host Terry Gross conducted on stage for a live audience in 1997, five years before Clooney's death. Clooney's warm voice is an intimate instrument, whether wrapped around lyrics of classic songs or stories from her life. Hearing her again was like a visit with a favorite aunt, a present from the past.

[Photo: Mural in Cincinnati painted to honor hometown star Rosemary Clooney]

That's not just because she and all of my aunts came of age in Cincinnati during the 1940s. All of their voices shared the midwestern "r" at the ends of words and a tone of voice that used to be called "brassy." There's affection and joy in her stories, and bluntness that makes you laugh. That's how my aunts were, and how aunts ought to be.

[Photo: Rosemary Clooney in the year after the interview, with her famous nephew George.]

We feel that Clooney draws on real feelings when she sings. Early in the interview, Terry Gross asked her guest to explain what "I'll Be Seeing You" meant to her. Clooney thought a minute, then said, "If I talk about it, I won't be able to sing it." Her "Danny Boy" moved Terry Gross to say that Rosemary Clooney makes a song new, even if you've heard it hundreds of times; Clooney's final "I love you so" moved me to tears.

She spoke with gratitude about a number of artists who helped her. She felt "sad and grateful" for the younger sister who quit the act so that Rosemary could be free to make her own career. She was thankful that producer Mitch Miller made her sing catchy pop songs that she considered to be beneath her: "Young people can take themselves too darn seriously," she said, meaning herself.  Those popular hits made the rest of her career possible. (She did warn Terry not to listen to a song called "Canasta.")  When she was hospitalized for addiction to prescription drugs, Bing Crosby sent a three-page letter of advice, and Bob Hope sent her flowers with a note, "I hope it's a boy" -- prompting her to laugh for the first time during that difficult period of her life.

Asked how she became addicted to drugs, Clooney said simply, "They make you feel real good." Everyone laughed. She added, "I miss them to this day." She bonded with the other patients. There was a woman, she remembered, who spent days painting on a canvas in one corner of their occupational therapy room. When Clooney looked, it turned out to be a portrait of the artist's drug of choice, "a pretty blue on top, and red," Clooney recalled, voice getting a little wistful.


Asked about Blue Rose, her 1956 album with Duke Ellington, Clooney shared her adoration of Ellington's under-appreciated collaborator Billy Strayhorn. Expecting, confined by doctor's orders to her home in Hollywood, she could not get to New York to record with Ellington. Instead, Strayhorn flew to her. "He would knock quietly on my door each morning," she remembered, and then he'd sit at the piano with her, finding the right keys and offering options for arrangements of Ellington songs. Back in New York, he re-arranged pieces and recorded the instrumental tracks with Ellington and the band. He flew back to Rosemary with those tapes, and coached her through her performances. He "made faces" behind the glass of the recording booth to convey what to do. Singing for Terry's interview, she finished "Sophisticated Lady" with a heartfelt dedication, "for Billy." [Read more on my blog about Billy Strayhorn 07/2008]


Clooney prefaced Billie Holliday's "God Bless the Child" with a memory of the great singer foretelling that the child Clooney carried then would be her first girl. Holliday wanted to be the godmother, "because it takes a bad woman to be a good godmother." That's what happened; Holliday died soon after.


Concluding the concert with "Our Love is Here to Stay," Clooney thanked the audience for their "attention" and "affection."

[Photo: During the hour of the interview, I listened on my phone as I walked Brandy along Marietta's new brick walkway, mostly deserted on a sunny Christmas afternoon.]

Christmas Present: Carols and Lessons

"Remember the old Sears wish book?" Father Roger Allen asked the congregation assembled for the midnight Christmas Eve service. Some of the younger people there probably didn't even remember Sears itself, but I share Fr. Roger's memory of circling items in the catalogue for Mom and Dad to use for suggestions to Santa. I remember the anticipation and day-dreaming more than any actual gifts opened on Christmas Day.


At 60, I don't get many boxed presents, but I do try to be more conscious than ever of gifts that come to me every day. So I'm doing a countdown of gifts I've enjoyed this Christmas.

[Photo collage: Christmas morning in and around St. James Episcopal Church. Marietta's streets were nearly empty after the service.]

This year, one such gift this Christmas was the Episcopal Church itself, its liturgy and music. In late morning on Christmas Eve, I heard the 100th Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, broadcast live in America for the 40th time -- though I've heard only the most recent 39 broadcasts. Then I completed my 3000th mile of the year on my bike (see previous post).


I spent many of the following 20 hours in church, where another gift was a three-pack of sermons. Literally preaching to the choir for the final two services of four on Christmas Eve, Fr. Roger generously prepares a different sermon for each one -- perhaps so that singers won't nod off behind him during a rerun. Then, with his assistant Fr. Daron Vroon being down with flu, Fr. Roger preached again Christmas morning.


At the 8pm service, Fr. Roger told us how cute the children's service had been with a flock of little shepherds, angels, animals of all kinds, and a real baby in the manger. But shepherds never were cute, Fr. Roger said. Presumed to be thieves and rogues who skimmed their employer's flock and grazed neighbors' land, shepherds were "unclean -- both literally and ritually." Nor should we imagine angels as greeting cards do, as chubby little cherubs or statuesque winged ladies with benign faces. Fr. Roger quoted Scripture after Scripture to demonstrate that angels are always terrifying the humans who encounter them, alien and warlike.


So the angel's greeting "Be not afraid" has even more impact spoken to social outcasts who had every reason to be terrified. If the angels honor these lowliest of men with their Christmas blessing, we, too, can take heart. Then, the gospel tells us that the shepherds leave the manger eager to tell others what they saw. Fr. Roger concluded with a question, "Will you go out from here to tell what you have experienced?"


At the midnight service, Fr. Roger used the Sears catalogue to remind us how much we wanted things when we were little. What do we want, now? Fr. Roger suggested that, as we outgrow the desires of youth and the needs of early adulthood, we can look to Scripture as our new "wishbook."

[Photo: A page from the Sears catalog of 1965. I did receive that record player, or one very similar to it, on which I played the LP to Mary Poppins over and over and over - along with Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing the Beatles' Greatest Hits. No wonder my parents made me keep the record player in the basement.]

Christmas Day, Fr. Roger spoke to around fifty people about the crowded services of the night before. We might feel that all the preparations had led up to the day, and now it was all in the past. He relayed a conversation that a fellow priest had with a young man who "got" the story of baby Jesus and the manger, but who couldn't feel any connection between that and the church. So, it happened 2000 years ago; so what?


Fr. Roger looked back over the scriptures that we'd just heard read aloud to us, observing that readings appointed for Christmas day are far removed from the baby in a manger. Isaiah anticipates the restoration of Jerusalem, "and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God." Psalm 98 hails the coming of "the King, the Lord" who will "judge the world...with equity." The author of Hebrews writes how God's Son, "having made purification for sins... sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high." The gospel reading was one that concluded every Sunday service in Advent, John 1.1-14, verses that place the birth of Jesus in a cosmic context: the Word that created everything that is "became flesh and dwelt among us." Fr. Roger admits that life seems to go on as it always has, with all the things that bother us in the daily news, but the day's readings are, together, an answer to that young man's question, "So what?"

3000 Miles in 2019

We've had days of cold rain. This morning, fog. At ten, I listened with Brandy to the 40th annual broadcast of Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, 39th that I've heard. As it was finishing, warm sun broke through the clouds.

Temps reached 65.  Cyclists and runners came out immediately to enjoy the Silver Comet Trail.   For me, it was the chance to hit 3000 miles for the year.

Remembering Jo Allen Bradham: Writer, Professor, Character

Author and teacher Jo Allen Bradham has died. A distinguished professor at Kennesaw State University, she taught two of the graduate-level seminars I took for the Masters of Professional Writing program. But my most precious memory of Jo Allen is the magic she worked when I was in distress.
 
Back in January 2000, I'd been transferred from a hospital bed to a rehabilitation center. A teenager speeding in his new car had rammed the driver's side door of my car, smashing his headlight, fracturing my pelvis and several ribs. Before I could go home, I had to learn how to get around a kitchen and a bathroom in a wheelchair.

I was pretty miserable. I'd missed a long-planned Christmas trip to see shows in New York; my seventh grade classes were going on without me; I hadn't seen my dogs Cleo and Bo in weeks (though my neighbor Kathay visited them every day - read about Kathay 04/2007). I'd missed the last few class meetings of Dr. Bradham's playwriting seminar.

The dining hall was not a happy place. Elderly men and women in wheelchairs hunched over cafeteria trays and picked at their food, if they were able. Staff spooned food into patients' mouths. The only sounds were coughs, drips, and clatter of serving ware.

Then, in swept Jo Allen Bradham, bundled in a London Fog trenchcoat cinched at the waist, long scarf trailing, hat at a jaunty angle, waving a hand in leather glove. From across the room, she called my name. All around us, heads lifted and eyes gaped. She stood by my wheelchair, presenting me with encouragement and a souvenir from the class's end - of - semester celebration.

Had she swooped from the sky under an open umbrella, her visit would not have been more magical.

Lessons from her classes have stayed with me. In fact, I've replicated them with my own writing students.

• She wanted us to be resourceful writers. She assigned stories to read and plays to see, and had us write about what we could use.That's how I teach literature, now: What's your way into this? What can you use in a story or poem of your own?
  
• Dr. Bradham gave everyone in the class some Play-Do to shape into something. After we'd played awhile, she made her point: first, you need clay. Generate ideas first; begin to shape them, after.
  
• Dr. Bradham directed us to analyze one page of our plays-in-progress, line by line, to justify every single bit of dialogue and stage direction: What does this do to move the action forward? to set up a joke? to divulge important information? to build tension? I repeat those questions with my student playwrights.
  
• When a fellow student in our seminar fell hopelessly behind, we all knew her idea for a play had been lame from the start. For her, Jo Allen relaxed requirements, allowing her to write short dramatic sketches on a theme instead of one full-length play. The result was best in class, a series of hilarious scenes relating to one neighborhood's Home Owners' Association.
  
• Jo Allen introduced me to the technique of writing a story in modules, a trick that has helped my students transform mediocre ideas into pieces they were proud to have written.
  
• She modeled what she taught, bringing in drafts of plays, a novel, a memoir. I remember one title "Shoe Show," and a freakish scene of a religious cult, described through the eye-holes of a feathered bird mask.
  
• She wanted us to be disciplined and fearless. Her last class was a demonstration of how to submit pieces to a variety of publications, and she shared with us some of her favorite rejections, including, "Dear Miss Bradham, your work has failed to interest even one person on our staff."
  

Always supportive, she came to see my drama club perform the play I'd written in her class, and she attended a church Mystery Dinner Theatre production that I fashioned from actors' ideas. I reciprocated, enjoying her performance for KSU as the hilarious harridan in that comedy hit of 1777, She Stoops to Conquer.

When her doctor told her last summer that she was already too late for treatment, Jo Allen kept her condition secret. I wish she'd given me the chance to tell her what she meant to me.

Apex of Philip Glass's AKHNATEN at the Met

Floating above a vast stage, a sphere wide as an Olympic-size pool shifts color from eerie white to fiery orange to cool blue, while a lone man, robed in sheer fabric, his shaved head daubed with gold leaf, raises his eyes and sings soprano:

Thou sole God,
there is no other like thee.
Thou didst create the earth,
[everything] which walks and flies on high.
Thy rays nourish the fields.
When thou dost rise,
they live and thrive for thee. ("Hymn to the Sun," trans. Winton Thomas)

When the singer deserts the stage at the conclusion of his hymn, an off-stage chorus sings a cappela in Hebrew a portion of Psalm 104, verses that echo the imagery of God rising like the sun. The curtain falls on the second of three acts to Philip Glass's 1984 opera Akhnaten, the story of Egypt's ancient king who staked his reign on worship of one true god. His hymn and its echo from Psalms together constitute an outstanding moment of serenity and inspiration.


I've known the music since it was new, and I saw a staged concert version ten years ago (01/2009); but, until I saw director Phelim McDermott's production at the Metropolitan Opera, broadcast live in HD worldwide to movie theatres November 23, I had not appreciated this moment. Preparation in the libretto, the music, and the visual production align to make this moment the apex of the opera.


I use the term "moment" loosely. Philip Glass famously stretches moments out to explore what makes them momentous; and this one lasts nearly a quarter of an hour.


To prepare for a sunrise both literal and figurative, Glass has taken over an hour to depict oppressive darkness, a rigid society enthralled by death. In his orchestral prologue he builds layer upon layer of interlocking motifs, emphasizing darker colors and the lower strings. (Glass omitted violins to accommodate a large percussion section and small orchestra pit at the premiere production in 1984.) At the Met, McDermott arrays cast and chorus on a dark, looming set in multiple tiers that suggest both the layers of Glass's music and the Egyptian hierarchy.


The libretto, pieced together from fragmentary primary sources by Glass and collaborators, begins with ritual evisceration of the dead king Amenhotep III, whose walking spirit haunts the rest of the opera. The narrator -- "a scribe" in the libretto, but conflated with Amenhotep's ghost in the Met's production -- declaims that the dead king now "dawns as a soul." Timpani drives a militaristic funeral anthem. Men's chorus sings aggressive-sounding bursts of syllables; gradually Glass blends in the swirling of high woodwinds and women's ecstatic "ah-ah-ahs" while the king's seventeen-year-old son is first stripped down, then built up with stiff and bulky ceremonial robes and headdress. Standing on a balcony between his mother Queen Tye and wife Nefertiti, he sings with them an anthem of "acceptance and resolve." According to the libretto, his eyes are fixed on "the distant funeral cortege floating on barques across a mythical river to the Land of the Dead."


As befits an opera that consists of religious ceremonies and psalms, movement consists of slow processions, ritual gestures, and forward-facing tableaux. For contrast, director Phelim McDermott invited participation by the Gandini Jugglers, a choice more appropriate than McDermott knew when the idea came to him in a flotation tank. Sean Gandini would later show him that the world's earliest known depictions of jugglers appear on Egyptian tablets. After seeing this production, Glass himself decreed juggling to be essential to staging the opera, being a visual representation of his music's rapid circular movements in irregular patterns, what Glass once called "wheels within wheels."

The juggling is more than ornamental in the second act. Singing mournfully to Amon, lord of the Egyptian pantheon, priests lay a ring of candles around their temple to protect against the upstart king. The music shifts into high gear when Akhnaten bursts on stage like an action hero, abs etched into his armor. The jugglers grip those candles by the necks and hurl them as juggling pins that spin within inches of the beleaguered priests' heads. Akhnaten and adherents push the priests and the old animal-headed gods offstage left. After an exultant wordless war-cry of victory for Akhnaten and his allies, the tiered set parts to reveal that tremendous sun.


With this dawn of a new era, the texts dwell on the goodness of creation. Glass simplifies the texture of his music. While the narrator recites an ancient love poem twice -- once, as if expressing love of the god Aten, then as expressions of erotic love -- Akhnaten and Nefertiti approach each other from opposite sides of the stage clad in diaphonous red robes with trails dozens of feet long that intertwine during the lovers' slow motion dance and very long kiss.


After the "Hymn to the Sun" and Psalm 104, reactionary forces overwhelm Akhnaten.


In act three, the tiered walls close in again, and Glass reprises music from act one. Akhnaten appears worried while his insouciant daughters babble wordlessly; over roiling, urgent music, the narrator recites from "the Armana Letters" in which military governors begged the king to take action against encroachments on the empire. The end repeats the beginning, as the old priests and the military replace Akhnaten with the child king Tut-- in McDermott's production, a boy in sports sneakers. In an epilogue, Akhnaten, Nefertiti, and his mother Queen Tye are exhibits in a museum, of little interest to the tourists who pass by. It's funny, and sad.


Between acts, several of the performers and the conductor spoke backstage to Joyce DiDonato, Met star and host for the broadcast November 23. What came across was friendliness of the cast members to each other, and a surprising gee-whiz-I'm-in-this-amazing-thing kind of energy. J'nai Bridges, playing "Nefertiti," accepted the soubriquet "Opera's Beyonce," though I suspect Ms. Knowles wished her admirer had not added, "I've been a fan of hers since I was a little girl." Anthony Roth Costanzo, so regal and intense on stage, was warm, exuberant, even a bit silly backstage, remembering how DiDonato had held his hand years ago during his Met premier. He made a face that told us all we needed to know about the hot wax treatment prescribed by director McDermott to remove all hair from his head and body, to make "Akhnaten" someone other-worldly. Glass had the same intention when he wrote the role for a countertenor. Someone interviewed that day admitted that it's still a shock to hear the piercing high voice come from a grown man.


My one gripe about the show is that the props and many costumes looked like they'd been purchased at a garage sale. Perhaps the designers wanted some kind of timeless quality, so they grabbed objects and pieces of clothing from disparate decades of the 19th and 20th centuries. The egregious lapse of judgement was to make Akhnaten's daughters into half-wrapped mummies with punk haircuts and black lipstick. The effect they wanted was there in the Hymn to the sun.


Before the opera began, patrons at my neighborhood movie theatre north of Atlanta made the usual comments about Glass's music being "boring." They continued open conversation during the instrumental prologue and much of Act I. Did they quiet down finally because some of us shushed them? I like to think that the music and commitment of the artists drew them into Akhnaten's peculiarly beautiful world.

Photo collage: Akhnaten assaults the old temple -- with jugglers. Inset, left: Servants pour young Akhnaten into a king's clothing. Inset, right: Anthony Roth Costanza's profile.

Psalm 42: What a Teacher Longs For at Mid-Year

As the deer longs for the water brooks,
so longs my soul for you, O God. (Psalm 42, verse 1)

Appointed in the Episcopal prayer book for today, Psalm 42 speaks to the experience of a middle school teacher in the last week before the winter holidays.

This was my 39th such week, so I should have the courage borne of past successes. Yet each morning this week, I awoke before four o'clock with a sense of dread and inadequacy. Ahead of me each day was a variation on the same challenge: would my prepared questions / instructional game / rehearsal plan / performance for parents engage the students for the hour? Could I maintain a professional demeanor, be energetic facing lethargy, calm facing sarcasm, supportive facing students' anxieties, indulgent (to a point) of students' giddiness?

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,
and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God,
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
(v. 6,7)

Friday at dinner on the Marietta Square with friend Susan, I could look back on the week's successes and laugh about many times when I'd been surprised by joy, warmth, inspiration. Kids enjoyed competing to define vocabulary words suggested by their classmates' cartoons. Kids shared poems and short personal essays they were proud of writing, every one containing at least one genuine surprise for me. The cast of MADAGASCAR, Jr. turned my simple idea for penguins' martial arts into something hilarious; and it was a joy to watch an improvisational dance duet between the Lion and Zebra, a fearless sixth grade boy and gracious eighth grade girl. My 7th grade drama class ran through their comedy sketches each afternoon with much eye-rolling, surreptitious whispering, and helpless giggling, so we all were surprised when parents and the art class laughed at all the right places in the performance. After the relief of that, even Friday afternoon carpool in the rain was fun, jocular interactions with parents through the windows of their vehicles.

The Lord grants his loving-kindness in the daytime;
in the night season his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life. (v. 10)

What do we thirst for, accepting that God is with us always? What's left to long for?  The word "consummation" comes to mind, and "rest," an end to challenges. That's what I'm yearning for in pre-dawn traffic, worried that I won't get to the copy machine in time for the first class, when I recite to myself, "We praise you for your saints who have entered into joy; / May we also come to share in your heavenly kingdom" (Prayers of the People, Form III, Book of Common Prayer, p. 387). I just want to stop in a happy place, the Land of Rest in the hymn tune of the same name.


But eternal rest, an end to striving, is not what we really want.  A character in Tom Stoppard's wonderful play Arcadia (blog 08/2007) asks what the point is, if all the answers are in the back of the book? Afterlife can't be the stopping place where there are no more questions or challenges, and that's not something we would could tolerate long.  Stasis is not in the nature of God. Joy and love both spring from anticipation and desire (eros, in the non-erotic sense). Poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes that he

... doesn't go for the conventional idea of afterlife... for a beautifully simple reason: "Death is here to teach us something, or to make us fit for something" (105). It has to be final. He makes a strong case that life is change, and the popular idea of "life" eternal, self intact, but without choices, without suffering, without anything left to complete -- is a contradiction in terms. (Beyond Belief, blog 08/2013)

Rest is no good unless it follows yearning and challenge.  After some rest, there's got to be more yearning, more challenge.


The cycle of longing, suffering, release, and more longing is expressed in Herbert Howells's choral setting of the King James translation, "Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee" (listen here to St. John's College, Cambridge on YouTube). I've sung the anthem many times in church choir.  We basses and tenors all longeth for a breath by the end of that first line. We strain to make it sound easy to blend on those sustained unison phrases. Howells' blue note for the accented syllable of "desireth," surprising in this context, gives the word an edge, a feeling that we're reaching for something and not quite getting there.

All voices sing forte on the question, "When shall I come to appear before God?" A quiet lament follows, "My tears have been my food day and night." Over the surging organ, voices sing fortissimo the words of the enemies who mock the Psalmist, "Where is now thy God?"

After that thundering climax, Howells' piece returns to its beginning, only now freshened by treble obligato and variations of the harmony that lean major instead of minor.


The same cycle is built into the complete Psalm 42, as well. After v. 10, there's another lament, more graphic than the first:

While my bones are being broken,
my enemies mock me to my face...
and say to me, "Where now is your God?" (v. 12-13)

Like Howells' music, the Psalm returns to an earlier question with renewed reassurance:

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,
and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God,
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
(v. 14, 15)

Vacation comes up next week; then the challenges of a new semester that begins in the darkest days of the year. Then I'll come back to review what I just wrote; maybe it'll satisfy me. Probably not.

Photo: Brandy and Me on the Road

Photo by our dog walking companion Susan.