Frank Boggs Celebrates "71 Years of Song"

[Photo: Very early Frank, first artist with Word Records]

A once-in-a-lifetime event is more relaxed the second time around.  Seventy years after he first sang professionally, Frank Boggs brought in soloists and speakers from all over the country to help him remember his career.  A year later, a group of close friends and loyal locals came together more to appreciate and support what Frank calls "this kind of music" sadly missing from public and church life these days.

Songs were arranged in sets according to theme, such as "Heaven," "Jesus," and Spirituals.  Frank contributed anecdotes about when he met (reluctantly!) pop-Gospel star Andrae Crouch and prominent Anglican evangelical John Stott.

But mostly we had music.  Frank started us off with his rendition of Crouch's "Through it All," acting the words as if it were a dramatic soliloquy.  "I've been lots of places / I've seen lots of faces / There've been times I didn't know right from wrong...."

Now, I may have an insight into Frank's secret of success, as we share an appreciation of live musical theatre.  When I was a student of Frank's at Westminster in the 1970s, he encouraged me to explore musicals of Stephen Sondheim and the dramatic nuances of singers whose repertoire includes show music, Cleo Laine, Bobby Short, and Mabel Mercer.

When Frank conducts the Georgia Festival Chorus, a group he founded a couple decades ago, his gestures draw drama out of the group, 120+ singers rising and falling, giving dramatic emphasis. He punched the air on certain syllables of "The Majesty and Glory of Your Name" to turn the chorus into a single personality, responding to the emotional highs and lows of the lyrics.  The number got a rare mid-concert standing ovation.

While pieces were conducted by his deputies David Scott, Michael Cromwell, and Ken Terrell, Frank was often singing the bass part from his seat on the side.

Though pianists Cathy Adams and David Carnes and organist Phillip Allen bring fine technique and a variety of colors to the music, the chorus is at its best when singing a cappella, as in the penultimate verse of "Jesus Paid it All."  The voices blend to produce a powerful sound, rich and warm.

Happy anniversary, Frank!  The Lord bless you and keep you adding to your legacy as you teach new generations to be sensitive to the words as well as the musical markings.

Philip Glass: An Affinity with Bach?

"Do you think you have a special affinity with Bach?"

Terry Gross asked this of composer Philip Glass on NPR's program Fresh Air.  They were discussing Glass's new memoir Words Without Music, recently published.  

Glass deflected the question with humor, laughing that his teacher Nadia Boulanger had "pounded" Bach into him.  Indeed, Boulanger would extract an alto part from a Bach piece and Glass could derive Bach's bass line and melody from it.     

A longtime fan of Glass, I'm on the same page with Terry Gross: I've always thought of Glass as a Bach for our day.   As Gross mentioned, arpeggiated chords and rapid scales are characteristics of both composers.   They re-arrange old music for different instruments to present under new titles. Both directed small ensembles to perform their own works.

Having read the memoir, and having recently seen Scott Hicks' documentary Glass: A Life in Twelve Parts, I have fresh insights into Glass's affinity for Bach.

The composers seem to stand in roughly analogous positions to the concert music of their times. Bach was a bit isolated from the musical mainstream in his day, stuck in a backwater parish and unappreciated, but his work came to define what we hear in tuning, harmony, and key relationships;  Glass, though a gregarious artistic collaborator, remains isolated in the niche he carved for himself during the 1970s and 80s, and yet his work "permeates" our culture. So said the judges of Canada's biennial Glenn Gould Prize who honored Glass this year.

Their music shares a quality of feeling that transcends the personal.  I hear the orchestral preludes to both Bach's St. John's Passion and Glass's opera Aknaten as giving us the same sense of roiling notes, implacable forward movement, and tightly sprung energy, detached from the personal inner-drama we're accustomed to hearing in Romantic music. Glass aimed for a quality he found in cutting-edge theatre of the 1960s, especially by Beckett and Richard Foreman, a "detachment" from the world of the rational storytelling to reach "transcendent" emotions (Glass, Kindle edition location 3233).  Glass prized "joy" in Beckett's work, a "clearing of the decks" (i.e., of dense personal expressions such as plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller), and humor (1699).   He credits John Cage for the insight that the joy and feeling come from the cognitive work performed by the listeners (1552).

A "quality of feeling that transcends the personal" would be a pretty good definition of "spirituality," something quite apart from Bach's devout Lutheran faith or Glass's many years of yoga, travels to eastern shrines, his photo with the Dalai Lama, or his sessions with a Native American shaman.  Glass's choice of texts and subject matter often take us to a place where the world as the character knows it is challenged at its root.   (See links below for my articles about Glass's works on Gandhi, Kepler, Aknaten, and "barbarians at the gate";  I'm thinking also of The Making of the Representative from Planet 8, his opera with librettist Doris Lessing about a planet that learns to accept its rapid extinction.  I saw that in Houston, 1988 -- not a success, though Glass suggests that strife between director and designer was to blame (4969).) 

Compare their catalogs to find books of etudes, suites for solo cello, and encyclopedic works that methodically demonstrate all the composer's techniques, such as Bach's Art of the Fugue and Glass's Music in Twelve Parts.   This is music as music, written for study, for exercise; but anyone who attends closely to the form will find "feeling has become unrelated to the actual material you're attending to" (3238). 

Both men worked tirelessly to support themselves and their families.  Bach cranked out a cantata per week for years, and whipped up specialty works on commission (Goldberg variations, Brandenburg concerti).  Glass's pride in work well done shows in the detail he gives about the many jobs he kept to support his family while he worked on music after hours:  nail factory worker, wood stacker, truck loader, plumber, taxi driver.  (He also devotes a lot of ink to detailing costs and savings.)  When Glass gets into the avant garde art scene, he describes his fellow artists in exactly the same terms as he described co-workers in the other jobs: physically strong, with "very regular lives, rising early and working all day" (3755). 

About working, Glass explains how he "tamed his muse," forcing himself to sit at the piano three hours straight every morning, whether ideas came to him or not (1349).  Eventually, musical ideas did flow during that time, and did not bother him later in the day, though he does tell Scott Hicks that music is always running "like an underground stream" through his day.  In the documentary, we see Glass at the piano, staring at manuscript paper while Glass says, in voiceover, how he often has no idea what he's supposed to do.  Then, he jabs the pencil at the paper and fills in a measure.  Other times, his work involves rehearsing with a group on tour, preparing for a solo concert, meeting with Woody Allen about scoring for a movie, reviewing a score with conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and listening to his music programmed into a synthesizer by young Nico Muhly (who tells Scott Hicks, "I talked him out of using just a string sextet, and that's my victory for today").

Optimism, sometimes blithe self-confidence, is another quality that emerges from Glass's memoir.  He never doubted that he'd get into a program for young teens at the University of Chicago, or Juilliard, or Boulanger's group.  When it took seven years to sell the LPs by Schoenberg that young Philip had unwisely purchased for his dad's store, the lesson Philip derived was, "Give me enough time, and I can sell anything!"  As a student scribbling music late in a cheap diner, he saw in a similarly-occupied middle-aged man not a caution that composers can't rise, but an affirmation that he had chosen a good life.  He hired his ensemble before he could make a living as a composer, accepting that he'd have to support them with his day jobs for awhile.  He borrowed $30,000 to rent out Town Hall, hoping to sell out the crowd for Music for Twelve Parts. 

The shadow side of that quality is a certain obliviousness to others.  In the memoir, when Glass falls for a young woman and wants to set up a new home for the two of them away from his wife, he evidently thought it was a great idea to borrow thousands from his children's savings accounts.   His sister remarks in the documentary about how his "wife du jour" has to be "half his age plus seven years."  In an unguarded moment, Holly Glass (wife number 3? 4?) tells us how this marriage was not quite what she signed up for, as he is so unavailable while he's so wrapped up in his music. 

After all this, my favorite Glass quote is still the one from his interview with cousin Ira Glass on This American Life back in the early 2000s.  When Ira wondered if the composer ever tried to write something that wouldn't sound like Philip Glass, the composer replied, "All the time!"  and laughed.  He added, "It never works." 


Elsewhere on this blog, I've written appreciations of Philip Glass, his music, and certain operas:

• "Glass Full: Gandhi Opera at the Met"
• Reflection on the zeitgeist revealed in both Glass's opera Waiting for the Barbarians and the contemporaneous Batman movie
• "Oh, Mr. Glass?" What I wanted to say to the composer during a half-second of personal contact during intermission at a performance of his opera AKNATEN
• Reflection on Glass's opera KEPLER, with a response from the production's director.

Bishops in 1968: "Apprehension of Truth is a Growing Thing"

Here's a splendid expression of the Episcopalian approach to -- well, everything -- that came out of the decennial Lambeth Conference of 1968:

Comprehensiveness demands agreement of fundamentals, while tolerating disagreement on matters in which Christians may differ without feeling the necessity of breaking communion.  In the mind of an Anglican, comprehensiveness is not compromise.  Nor is it to bargain one truth for another.  It is not a sophisticated word for syncretism.  Rather it implies that the apprehension of truth is a growing thing: we only gradually succeed in "knowing the truth." It has been the tradition of Anglicanism to contain within one body both Protestant and Catholic elements.

Source:  Kwok Pui-Lan. "The Anglican Church as a Cultural Hybrid." Education for Ministry: Reading and Reflection Guide, volume B: Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2014.

Standards v. Specifications

[Picture: Every standard has its shadow. (Smoot)]

A standard, originally meaning the flag that soldiers followed into battle, connotes a moral cause worth dying for. 

I used to count myself as one of those teachers upholding "standards," but now I draw a distinction between "standards" and mere "specifications,"

"Specs" are fine.  I want a car with hatchback.  I want a paper that cites its sources, or I want a personal essay that integrates a real-life experience with reflection on its meaning. In church, I prefer a service that connects present to past through music, ritual, and contextualizing of scripture.

But whenever we make a specification into a moral "standard," we should be aware that every front has its back, every standard casts its shadow -- in Karl Jung's sense of the word "shadow," meaning the mix of qualities we suppress when we choose to present ourselves a certain way.  These may be very good qualities that we suppress for some social purpose -- the way girls [used to?] learn to suppress their intelligence around boys, or a person in authority suppresses his impulse to use clever sarcasm with a subordinate.   

The danger of focusing on the teacher's standards lies in losing sight of a student's other strengths. I learned this the hard way when I overlooked weeks of progress by a girl whose final draft still didn't have the requisite topic sentences; and forcing a talented boy's writing into a formula (read my blog article Assessing Students' Writing with Rubrics: First Do No Harm).

I got a sense of what this must feel like for the student when I once brought a student's essay to a fellow teacher who had disparaged the boy's writing. I wanted her to see how the boy had conceived a distinctive metaphor to shape his essay and had displayed deep understanding of a complicated subject.   She read the introduction and handed the paper back to me, commenting only that there were two misspelled words and a wrong comma. She saw herself as the last bastion of enforcing standards.

What's important?  Is it creative thinking, engagement with the subject, a stretch in the right direction?  Or is it upholding certain specifications as moral "standards?"  Let's not confuse the two.

By the way, my first sentence ends with a preposition, a violation of grammatical standards that derive from a misapplication of Latin grammar rules to English.  As Winston Churchill wisely said, "That is something up with which we cannot put!"  

Forward Day by Day: Invite the Dragon to Tea

[icon written by Rev. Paige Blair]

I mark pages of the quarterly Forward Day by Day booklets whenever a daily meditation strikes me.  I'd have those little booklets crammed into every cranny of my roll-top desk by now if I didn't use this blog for storage of thoughts.

In the issue ending January 2015, the most striking pages were co-written by Barbara Baumgarten and David Catron, who work together in a mission among the poor in Rio de Janeiro and Santa Rosa.  They self-published a book, Don't Touch Me! Daily Stories of Gospel Relevance.

Here are some of their responses to daily readings in scripture:

• John 15.5 I am the vine, you are the branches. When we read this, we don't often picture the man-made trellis used to support the growing vines.  We miss the implication of community of believers when we think only in terms of one grape, one vine.
• Psalm 4:4 Speak to your heart in silence upon your bed.  Catron writes simply, "Today I missed an opportunity to do good."  His ex-wife of forty years dropped off a present for their daughter; he failed to invite her in.  Immediately after she left, "It was too late.  A moment for grace had presented itself, and I failed to honor it."  He knew that night, on his bed, he would "ponder the encounter...and be silent."  
• Isaiah 41.6 Each one helps the other, saying to one another, "Take courage!" A Brazilian's promise, "I am going to buy you!" though puzzling, conveyed confidence.  "If we did not possess the qualities he professed to admire, we worked to develop them so as not to disappoint him."  This strikes me as a great approach to leadership and teaching.  
• Isaiah 43.5 Do not fear.  Or, as a Buddhist expression has it, "Invite the dragon to tea." Or, as a Quaker Gene Knudsen Hoffman has said, "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." The authors tell of introducing themselves to the threatening shady characters encountered at the train station each day.
• Matthew 16.15 Who do you say I am?  Who is Jesus for you? "How a person answered that question" during the process of ordination became a guide to more general behavior to others. "Was Jesus a buddy?  A severe judge?  A mediator? ...alive... or always the same, as if still dead?" One called him a "troublemaker," upsetting a life already settled and doing fine.
• Psalm 39:4 My heart was hot within me; while I pondered, the fire burst into flame; I spoke out with my tongue.  Catron recalls feeling this way and how he shouted out "the truth" at a clergy conference.    But "the truth did not set me free; it cut off all meaningful communication with my colleagues in Christ."  I often fantasize -- usually in traffic -- about speaking that kind of truth, and tremendous energy builds up inside my body, heart rate shooting up, arms and back tensing.  Good thing to remember: that's a dream that must never come true!
• Mark 4:11 ...for those outside, everything comes in parables.  When a group examined pictures of Christ from around the world, the authors observed, "Like a parable, no artwork communicated the absolute truth about Jesus, but each caused us to struggle with who Christ is."  They conclude, "Truth is a creative act. We enter not through dogma or law but through personal engagement."  
• Isaiah 51.7 Do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.  The authors' anecdote concerns a bad doctor, good doctor experience.  What struck me was the coincidence of coming across this reading a day after I was indeed dismayed by Mom's accusations.  I'm learning that "dementia" can be like the weather, clouds coming in out of the blue, and vanishing as quickly.  I must not take it personally;  I must not be dismayed.

The Forward booklets are available in "tract racks" at many churches for one dollar; the organization sells subscriptions and many other valuable, thoughtful guides to spiritual life via www.forwardmovement.org .

Legally Blonde, Jr: The Musical: Five Minutes to Magic

[This is the text of an article I wrote in October 2014 for The Walker School's blog.]

Scott Smoot 
I’m director of the Middle School’s W.arts (“Walker Arts”) Drama Team, here at a virtual round table with my colleagues responsible for music, dance, and art work for W.arts’ production of Legally Blonde the Musical, Jr. At two performances October 2 and 3, audiences packed our auditorium and cheered the show, giving our kids immense satisfaction and happy memories for a lifetime.   

But we say at Walker that we “value the experience above the applause,” and we’d like to share something of fifty hours’ experience that went into a performance of just over one hour. Let’s take a slice, less than five minutes, to show you how a musical works.
 
The portion I have in mind begins at an emotional low point of the story involving the young heroine “Elle” (sixth grader Hannah Bachman) and “Warner” (seventh grader Robbie Hedden), the young man she expects to marry. At a fancy restaurant, flanked by a chorus of waiters, he has just told her in song that she isn’t “Serious” enough for him, a future senator on his way to Harvard Law School. She storms out, and Warner ruefully says, “Check, please.” Blackout on the restaurant, house right; lights up stage center on a banner that sets the scene as “Elle’s” bedroom in the Delta Nu sorority house.
 
Two hours’ work went just into that transition. That’s how long eighth grader Michael Johnson and seventh grader Jeff Murchison aimed lights and programmed the dimmer board to create four distinct areas on the auditorium’s floor and stage. Thanks to their work, the story moved along without a pause, fading on a scene in one area and and lighting up the next.

Wendy, you were our stage manager. What was happening behind the scenes at that moment?
 

Wendy Hawk 

Those “waiters” dropped their linens on the props table and changed costumes right there in the stairway to become frat boys and a Harvard dean. They had only four lines of dialogue and three verses of a song to change. Meanwhile, on her way to center stage, Hannah grabbed a pink bathrobe planted before the show by sixth grader Brooke Baughan, who managed Hannah’s transitions from scene to scene.
 

Scott 

The robe’s pockets were stuffed with candy wrappers to show that “Elle” has binged on candy for days. When I told my 7th grade English classes that we had to consume dozens of Milky Ways, they were willing to help for the sake of the show. Regena, we haven’t even mentioned the other costumes.
 

Art Director Regena Simpson 

The Delta Nu girls, all sixth graders, wore matching tee shirts. We’d tried brushing on sparkly “Delta Nu” symbols with fabric paint, but the insignia didn’t stand out enough. So we cut the Greek letters from sheets of felt and glued them to each shirt. That took hours, but the effect was worth it. We had the process down in time to do different shirts for the frat boys.
 

Scott 

So, in our five minute slice of the show, we’ve advanced about fifteen seconds. Talking to her sorority sisters, “Elle” gets the idea that she can show “Warner” how “serious” she is if she just gets into Harvard Law School.

Choral Director Samantha Walker 

That’s my cue. It was a tricky moment. Jeff in the tech booth started the recorded track. Hannah timed her spoken lines around three chords and then launched into a song, “What You Want,” stepping into new light, house center.

The next three minutes of music took us a couple of hours to learn back in August. The Delta Nu chorus joins in, and then there’s sung dialogue between “Elle” and the character “Kate” (sixth grader Tonya Dadlani), who helps her to study for the LSAT. But “Elle” is tempted by a chorus of men to put down her books and join in spring parties. The boys are singing a fast reggae tune about how she’s missing out on fun while the girls sing a counter-melody about how “she’s doing this for love.”

Wendy 

We choreographed that dance with the girls in a line confronting the boys, pushing them away from “Elle”. Only we were short on boys. Then Sam had a great idea to invite her Upper School men’s a cappella group to join in.

Samantha 

They were excited to do this. Most of them had been in W.arts musicals during Middle School. We learned the song in about half an hour, and they showed up for rehearsals in the last week of the show.

Regena 

The boys’ lead singer (seventh grader Spencer Duncan) was great with six guys backing him up, some of them twice his size. The cool thing about that was how wonderful it was to have the Upper School boys step in to help the Middle School’s musical.

Scott

Staging the next transition was a tough one for me to figure out, until I was inspired by a Middle School pep rally. I thought, “That’s what we need!” when the team burst through the “Wolverine” banner. “Elle” and her friends make references to cheerleading in the script, so it’s natural that pep rallies would inform our thinking about design and movement.

Regena 

So Wendy and I painted this giant “Delta Nu” sign on a giant roll of banner paper, then on a separate matching size paper, we painted the Harvard seal in gold . We taped the two banners back-to-back.
 

Wendy 

When “Elle” completes the LSAT, the chorus turns the giant Delta Nu banner like a revolving door and they all disappear behind a huge Harvard seal…

Samantha 

,,, as the loud party music turns into a little gavotte, subito piano. So it seems like, out of nowhere, we’re at a meeting of Harvard’s admission committee (seventh graders Zach Martin and Blair Elliott), speaking their lines in time to recorded accompaniment. When they get to “Elle’s” application…

Scott 

… all “Elle” breaks loose! She, her sorority sisters, and six big guys ripped through the Harvard banner —

 

Wendy 

— thanks to Bill Schreiner, the Upper School stage craft teacher, who advised me to perforate the paper with an Exacto knife so ripping it to shreds would be easy. We needed a fresh sign for each performance —
 

Regena 

–which is why we had to paint everything twice. That took about eight hours for an effect that lasted one second.

Scott

Ah, the magic of musical theatre!
 

Wendy 

The chorus overwhelms Harvard with the message that “Elle” is “What You Want.”
 

Samantha 

Although we learned the song in August, it was hard for the kids to remember their parts with all this activity, so we were re-learning right up to the last week.
 

Scott

Song over, wild applause received, Jeff cued traveling music, Michael shifted the lights, and actors dressed as Harvard students revolved a wagon that was painted to look like bookshelves and a chalkboard by Wendy, Regena, and volunteers from our parent booster club POTA (Patrons of the Arts).
 
Every individual involved put about five hours into these five minutes that cover half a year of “Elle’s” story. We worked hard together to create something original: that’s my definition of “fun.” Thank you, ladies, students, and parents!
 
Legally Blonde the musical, Jr. has music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin with book by Heather Hach, based on the novel by Amanda Brown and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture. Produced at The Walker School by special arrangement with Music Theatre International, Inc. (MTI).

Melissa Manchester, Singer and Songwriter: Home to Herself

 "I don't have the soul of Joni," Melissa Manchester sang in 1973, but none of the anger or angst, either.  For spirited, intelligent, fun music with a healthy outlook, Manchester still stands out from other singer-songwriters.  Although she had her greatest commercial successes in the late-70s and 80s, and though I've checked in on her career every few years since then, right up to her new release You've Gotta Love the Life, it's the earlier stuff that sticks with me.  Hardly a week goes by when this introverted middle-aged man doesn't sing lines she wrote:  "It's not so bad all alone, coming home to myself" (words by Carole Bayer Sager) or "I've got a place in me / And I have to be there / Alone" (words by Adrienne Anderson).

In 1973, I was fourteen, crazy for Carly Simon and Bette Midler, ready to risk my Record-of-the-Month-Club bonus points for a cassette called "Home to Myself" knowing only that Melissa Manchester had been one of "the Harlettes," The Divine Miss M's back-up singers.  For a good high school freshman like me, she seemed exotic and dangerous. In the cover photograph, she reclined in a low-cut gypsy blouse on a bed of Persian carpets, one shoulder and one eyebrow raised, giving me the kind of disdainful once-over I'd received from some older girls.  Then, she growled the first words of the album, "I don't know why you're here, / You like the way I move," but, "If it feels good, let it ride... I don't want to spend all day on what may come tomorrow."  In the next song,  Manchester coos, "If you want me, you can have me. / ...That's why they call me 'easy.'"  This was a girl with an attitude that my mom would not approve.

In her music, too, Melissa Manchester stepped out of bounds.  The songs of her first album, mostly written with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, seemed to blend into a suite of dramatic arias for a young woman who invites a handsome stranger up to "stay at my place, / I have music that's mingled with lace," ready to skip introductions to just "start off with hello."  What starts a cappella moves into hard-driving rock with gospel organ in the background, then comes to a sudden halt for steady piano chords played pensively under an inchoate little lyric, "Pick up the good stuff, if you left it outside...."  Bits of songs and accompaniment return to other tracks, one phrase transformed into jagged counterpoint played by a string quartet.

[Photo at piano: M.M. as I remember seeing her.]

In the opening song to her second album Bright Eyes, we hear four distinctive riffs on the piano, when most pop songs are lucky to have just one.  The rest of that album could be a set for a jazz vocalist, including a couple of slow-swinging one-o'clock ballads, an uptempo Latin number, and a bad girl's gospel song, along with a standard by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin, "I Can't Get Started."  At age fifteen, I was carded and almost denied access to see her perform this set live at a dive called "The Great Southeast Music Hall" in Atlanta, until the management decided I wasn't much of a risk for consuming illegal substances when I wailed, "I've been planning to see her for six months!"    

From a later album called Tribute, we know what singers influenced her before she joined the cohort of soft-rock singer-songwriters.  In those first two albums, she belts sustained high notes like Streisand, she's by turns brassy and coy as Judy Garland, and, like her models Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald (with whom she once shared a commercial -- "Is it Ella, or is it Memorex?"), she rarely takes the straight path between one note and the next..

After she found commercial success with a gentle ballad, "Midnight Blue," from her third album, her voice hewed closely to the melody as written, over homogenized arrangements, with steady rhythm tracks, overlaid with strings.  Hearing her later albums, I have a feeling that she's like a sports car stuck in traffic: there's a lot more under the hood than she's getting to show. 

I confirmed this once about fifteen years ago, when I met her backstage after a varied and delightful show in a casino in Tunica, Mississippi.   A friend of the editor of Tunica's entertainment magazine, I tagged along as "photographer" for an interview with the star.  I had the opportunity to express gratitude for her anthems of introversion "Home to Myself" and "Alone," and to remind her of an incredible bit of virtuosity she had displayed on a Boston Pops broadcast, when she sang Gershwin's tricky "Fascinating Rhythm" while simultaneously playing "Rhapsody in Blue" on the grand piano.

What I recall most about her, though, was her attitude towards "the life."  She was proud to have been happily married to one man all her career. She told how her teenaged son had suddenly understood how big a star his mom had been in the 80s -- hit records, appearance on "The Muppet Show," attention from the Grammies and the Oscars -- and had hinted that he wouldn't mind if she wanted to become famous again. But she preferred to be able to wear the glittery gowns for a concert in the heartland one day, and shop in jeans at the local grocery store the next.  She had friends stuck in mansions behind gates, and that, she said, was no way to live.

At that time, she was branching out as a songwriter, doing scores for Disney made-for-video animations (Lady and the Tramp II, Finding Nemo II, etc.) and for an off-Broadway musical.  On her website, she's in a photo standing next to master Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

She had one other salutary effect on my life, early on.   Once I'd seen her live, I was sorely disappointed to see her on The Mike Douglas Show, lip-synching to the commercial recording of her hit "Midnight Blue."  I felt embarrassed on her behalf.  Formerly addicted to TV, I was cured.

Dead Water by Ann Cleeves

[Link to photos of the Shetlands.]

Detective novelists are in the same boat as sports announcers:  everyone knows the broad outline and moment-to moment rhythm of every basketball game, and the only question is, will the favored team win?  So NPR's sports announcer this morning had to fill that outline with background and themes, Coach K's playoff history with Duke,  Wisconsin's penchant for surprise last-second three-pointers, and the many upsets of this particular round of "March Madness."

With Dead Water, Ann Cleeves extends her Shetland Islands series of detective novels with fresh characters, new angles on the natural and social environment of the craggy archipelago,  and some pleasingly bizarre discoveries of corpses -- equivalent to slam-dunks and three-pointers.

Cleeves alternates points of view, chapter by chapter, giving us each character's take on the events and on the other characters.  It's a useful technique, though some characters are more fun to be with than others. 

Our chief detective Jimmy Perez is in mourning, so there's welcome focus on his diffident sidekick Sandy, whose well-earned modesty makes his foibles endearing, his successes satisfying.

Cleeves fleshes out the character of Perez's boss, an official known as "The Fiscal," taking her out of her office and impeccable wardrobe, and putting her in a boat with a body, in a place where she feels vulnerable.

We also meet Willow, a young woman attractive to both Sandy and Perez, immediately inimical to the Fiscal.  She's tall, frizzy-haired, daughter of hippies, product of commune life, with a "hard edge" from the way the trusting community was betrayed (128).  Willow gives Sandy some insight into why her parents persist on that old commune, or why anyone persists a lifetime in something unrewarding: "How can they admit to themselves that they made a mistake?  It would be as if they've wasted the last thirty years" (129).

When Willow realizes that she's out of her depth, her faltering self-confidence stimulates Perez, who wants "to look after her, to give her small treats" as he does for the child of his late fiancee (284). Learning that the victim, a journalist bent on tell-all exposes, turns out to have been a recent convert to Christianity, Willow's rad-lib atheist background makes her incredulous,.  She wonders with alarm if Perez "might be a god-botherer too," being native to islands where "superstition would be rife" (231).  Perez offers the insight that the victim, meeting a Christian girl with a fortune, may have wanted to believe, to please the girl, and "to become the center of attention again"  (243).

Cleeves engaged me in the texture of her story and its characters, while the line of the plot ramified; chapters 46 and 47, telling us who did it, how, and why -- comprise the least interesting, least believable part of the book. In fact, glancing over the last pages just now, I realize that I'd forgotten the culprit.  Well, no matter:  Final score is 45 to 2.

[See my Detective Fiction page for more about works by Ann Cleeves and others, with capsule book reviews and links to reflective essays.] 

April Fools: 8th Graders' Original Play from Scratch

When my 8th grade Drama class first aimed to create an original play, we knew nothing about it except that it had to involve three girls and four boys, and that it had to be ready by April 1st.  Its running time would have to be around 45 minutes.  Right up to dress rehearsal, I had doubts that we'd make it.  Having seen it played to an audience of family and friends in a preview on March 27, I now wonder at how it all fits, as if the whole thing were inspired. 

No one sat down to write April Fools; the play emerged from interactions during class.  Alison and Andrew K. improvised dialogue for a CEO’s interrogation of her daughter’s boyfriend in a coffee shop.  Davi and Stewart improvised the daughter’s attempts to get her dad’s help at a golf range.  Andrew W. “drove” the CEO’s limousine, improvising banter with Solomon at a drive-through.  As the daughter’s friend, Lily Grace found her motivation in three “takes” of a scene at a baseball game. 

After we’d laid the groundwork, the actors took a couple weeks to act their answers to the questions, “What goes wrong when all the other characters see the mother with the boyfriend at the coffee shop?” and “What do they do the next morning to try to make up for their mistakes?” 

The final piece of our story came from the first days of its creation. In January, Solomon had created “Rico,” a shady visitor to the campus who charmed the girl characters.  We abandoned that subplot, but it inspired the chauffeur’s undercover role, and “Rico” was reincarnated when Alison suggested how a shady character could help everyone to find success in the final scene.

I guided the process, but all of us created April Fools.  

cast (in order of appearance)

James, the chauffeur …………..……….ANDREW WAIBEL
Gwen Woodsen, CEO ………………..… ALISON HEBERT
Alex, Gwen’s daughter …………..………….... DAVI NEILD
Maddi, Alex’s friend …………....… LILY GRACE SHERAM
Dylan, Alex’s boyfriend….………………...  ANDREW KOO
Holt, Gwen’s Ex..…………………….  STEWART McCUNE
Everyone else ……………………...… SOLOMON LOMAX

Technical director, guest student Michael Johnson
Director, Mr. Smoot

Scenes i - iv take place on March 31; v & vi April 1. L.A. streets and a private high school, morning
ii. the country club driving range, later in the morning
iii. press box at the high school baseball game, afternoon
iv. a crowded coffee shop, after 9 p.m.
v. various locations in LA, 10:30 a.m.
vi. luxury hotel event room, LA  11:10 a.m. 

Mr. Turner: Impressions of the Artist

The film Mr. Turner gives us the crabby little rotund man behind those expansive luminous seascapes of early Victorian England.  Embodied by actor Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner is a bull in the Victorian china shop, grunting and waddling through drawing rooms, sullen or abrasive in conversation.  Yet his eyes well with tears at amateur performances of music, and we see him animated with affection for his father and with passion for art.

Director/writer Mike Leigh skirts the well-worn arc of biopics -- from obscurity to fame -- by starting mid-life, when the artist and his eccentricities are already well-known.  It would seem that the only way to go is down through diminished reputation and declining health.  We do see Turner mocked in a music hall sketch, his work displaced in the gallery by Pre-Raphaelite kitsch; we visit the studio of a photographer whose technology both threatens Turner and fascinates him; we see the stiffening of the proud man's gait, hear the racking cough.

But Leigh leavens the story of decline, told in short episodes, with scenes that show other themes in the artist's life.    

Of course, art itself is a major motif in the movie.  Turner will travel to Holland or to a Scottish sea port, strap himself to a ship's mast during a storm, pay a prostitute to pose, or consult a scientist about magnetic qualities of the spectrum, all to capture the images he wants. He maintains fierce independence among other artists at the gallery, and defends a past master from the snide attacks of a callow John Ruskin: "That man," he says, "was a genius, an artist of his time."  When Turner's own time seems to have passed, his neglected works crammed in his shabby gallery, a discerning American offers a fortune for the lot, and we know that his reputation will outlast the fashions of his day.

Another sequence of episodes trace Turner's gradual discovery of love late in his life, set in counterpoint to scenes that show his callousness.

For callousness, Leigh shows Turner resist calls from a former mistress to support their desperate family. Turner loans fifty pounds to an impecunious artist who stubbornly antagonizes all who would help him, just to be rid of the man. Learning that the man's children have starved to death while their father indulged his pride, Turner's sympathy is aroused, extending so far as to forgive the debt and to denounce the man.  The longest single thread in the story, and a painful one to watch, is how Turner takes advantage of a housemaid, never acknowledging her devotion to him, not even noticing her dire physical decline.

But when he takes a room at the seaside home of a former slave ship's captain, Turner and the captain's cheerful wife begin a polite friendship that, in her widowhood, develops into a mutually nurturing relationship.

I wonder if Leigh intends for the movie to imitate Turner's own approach to art?  He does fill the screen with Turneresque skies that reflect on water.  Yet it's not the delicate colors that he emphasizes when he shows us Turner at work, but sudden jabs with the brush, impatient smearing with his fingers, even spitting at the canvas.  The film's spare musical score by Gary Yershon, played all by strings, seems an analog to Turner's work, sounding to me (on first hearing) like a wash of harmonic colors punctuated by sudden jabs with the bows.  The movie likewise is a portrait told in daubs that resolve into a design only as we get some distance.   

Someone's Still in There: Krista Tippett Discusses Alzheimer's

Often, Krista Tippett's radio program On Being offers thoughtful, generous guests whose ideas bloom in answer to her curiosity.  Today, the show featured clinical psychologist Alan Dienstag, who works with Alzheimer's;  As that disease has touched my family, I listened on headphones at the grocery store, pausing in the cereal aisle to cry a little.

Tippett's show used to be known as Speaking of Faith, and she asked this guest to opine on what his Jewish tradition has to say about Alzheimer's.   "God forgets, too," he said.  God isn't just the creator of awesome things, but must be in the pain, too.  In other answers, the doctor suggests that Alzheimer's gives us a concentrated vision of what we are all experiencing, i.e., being like a picture that's fading.  He's moved by the sight of his patients in writing groups, trying to set down who they are while they still can do so.

He offered some comforts.

Even in a late stage, a caregiver will recognize humor or sadness, "dispatches" from the person inside.  Sometimes, there's wisdom: the woman who struggled to answer why she loved the beach, before saying, "There's a kind of music always there." A wife was distraught that her husband couldn't say who she was, until one day he said, "I don't know who you are; but I love you," just what she needed to hear.

Memory, we now know, isn't brought up from a well, but pieced together from many different parts of the brain, a creative process.

When Krista Tippett asked the doctor how he'd feel getting a diagnosis of Alzheimer's now, he said he'd feel grief and loss, but not fear. For one thing, he explained, the Alzheimer patient isn't aware of the condition, and he told of a husband who told a support group,"I forget things sometimes, but I get by just fine," while his wife cried silently behind him. 

Tippett ended the program with a reading from a collection of poems that arose from the poet's workshop experiences with Alzheimer's patients.  The collection is Oblivio Gate by Sean Nevin.

The Last Five Years on Screen: Feeling is Enough, with Music

It's not the tale but the telling that makes the film adaptation of The Last Five Years wonderful.

Supple, expressive songs by Jason Roberts Brown articulate and enlarge the characters' thoughts and feelings in a variety of styles. The camera, directed by Richard LaGravenese,  also enlarges the characters' faces, expressive and appealing. "Jamie"(Jeremy Jordan) and "Cathy" (Anna Kendrick) fall in love, marry, then grow apart as his career becomes "the other woman" (actual other women being his accessories).

It's a familiar story made fresh by the author's manipulation of time.  At the start, "Jamie" has left to pursue his career, and "Cathy" is "still hurting."  We see her, tears in her eyes, take off the wedding ring, the watch, the bracelet. But then we see Jamie burst into an apartment with Cathy wrapped around his thighs, singing to his "Shiksa Goddess" about how crazy he is about her.   He's at the start of the relationship, moving forward, giving her along the way that bracelet, the watch, and the wedding ring; she's at the end, looking backward; we see their opposing trajectories in alternating scenes, meeting midway at the wedding. 

The most magical song of the movie is the story of "Shmuel," a song in Brown's best Fiddler-on-the-Roof  style, in which energetic "Jamie" tries to lift dispirited "Cathy" to see herself in a fable about a tailor who has a chance to use time in a new way.  Performing as husband, tailor, spirit, and old Yiddish narrator, Jordan performs the number with verve and precision, tugging "Cathy" out of her funk.  It's staged for "Jamie" to dramatize his whimsical story from cloth, lamps, and holiday decor found in the apartment

All the other songs are so honest that they make us smile and hurt.  The hurt is always there, because we know how it turns out, though we hope against hope that these sweet, well-intentioned, beautiful people with their soaring voices are going to somehow get back together.

I had mixed feelings about the stage show.  (Read reflection here.) The movie is able to round out the story in a new way, and I love it.

My only qualm is this:  Betrayal, by Harold Pinter, also told its story backwards, peeling layer after layer off the original impression we get of the affair.  Betrayal thus builds to a revelation that the situation was never so clear-cut as we thought.  In the end of this one, have we learned anything new?  I can't think of anything revealed by the criss-crossing of time, only an uptick in sympathy for the boy.  Feeling is the point:  At any given moment, we're feeling the exhilaration of young love and ambition, while we're also feeling sympathy with the loss of the same.

Well, with all the music, the lyrics, the acting, the scenery, the dancing and glorious voices to appreciate -- feeling is enough. 

[See my Sondheim page for many other reflections on matters relating to the composer that Jason Roberts Brown "worships" (his own word) Sondheim, his shows, and musical theatre more generally.]

Wisdom about Life from Songwriter Joe Henry

Not only have I never heard Joe Henry before, but I didn't even recognize any of his collaborators besides Madonna.  But in just a few minutes' talk with Krista Tippett on her radio program On Being, this guy tossed off some wisdom both profound and obvious. 

• Those "bumps" in the road of life are the road of life; ants at the picnic are part of what it means to have a picnic. I added to myself, "Difficult classes are what teachers are for!"
• He thinks of marriage as a verb, and, once you're married, you can never not have been married, any more than he could not be a brother, even if, "God forbid," he and his brother were to suffer estrangement.  Today's sermon by Fr. Daron Vroon at St. James' Episcopal Church concerned this same idea:  "covenant," unlike "contract," is a binding relationship, not just a transaction.  
• Songwriting is a process of discovery.  The song has a wisdom of its own; the creator has to learn what the song already knows.   Later, in another context, he said the same thing about relationships, esp. marriage.
• His beloved parents were devout Christians; he never identified with the religion, but felt his salvation in music.  His earliest memory was sitting under the ironing board, looking up at the foam under the cover, while his mother watched JFK's funeral.  He knew she was upset. He asked, "Does this mean you're going to die?"  "Yes, dear."  "Will I die, too?"  "Yes, dear." 
• A lyric of a song on his latest album tells us that "a blind man looks out of your eyes." 

The clips of his music did not appeal to me; but he sounds like a good, wise, healthy man.  

Leonard Nimoy, Gratefulness

Leonard Nimoy was remembered today on NPR for bringing gravitas to his role as Mr.Spock.  I treasure 48 years of memories of him in that role, embodying so many qualities I've admired.  I think he may have been a role model for this geeky little boy back in 1967.

But my favorite memory is most recent, when he joined the NPR comedy game show "Wait,Wait,Don't Tell Me." After lots of jokes, many at expense of uber-geek host Peter Seigel, Nimoy gave a heartfelt response to a question about the actor's famous frustration with his being so identified with one character.  (His first book was titled I Am Not Spock.)  "Not a day goes by that someone doesn't come up to me to tell me what a difference the character of Spock has made in their lives.  I can feel nothing but gratitude for playing that role."  (Paraphrased from memory.)

I tear up every time I repeat this anecdote, even now.  I'm not sure why.

Thrilling Conclusion to Kavalier & Clay

(I just finished reading Michael Chabon's wonderful novel, and know that I've got to catch up with everything else he's done since 2000.  I reflected on the first half a few days ago in Midway Through Kavalier and Clay. I've also rhapsodized about The Final Solution in an essay called Michael Chabon's Sherlock Holmes Novel: Short and Sweet.)

In our last episode, our reflective blogger had just written about how he loved the interpenetration of comic book fantasy and the "real" lives of the comic book creators.  Little did the Blogger know what lay in store:

Reality and meta-reality merge when we read how the arch-villain The Saboteur booby traps a gala where The Escapist performs on stage.  We can read between the lines to see that it's a sad sack would-be Nazi getting even with Joe Kavalier at a bar mitzvah.  The fun works both ways, in super-sizing the action, and in appreciating how plausible it all is.

Over-the-top events are made easy to believe when Sammy Clay does his patriotic duty to scan the night sky for panzers from atop the Empire State Building.  A storm is brewing, and clouds "like zeppelins" send forth lightning and sparks, on the occasion of his first kiss (ca. 372). In a novel about comic book creators, it fits.

Radioman Defeats the Nazis!  Joe Kavalier, motivated throughout the first half of the novel by anger at his impotence to rescue little brother Thomas from the Nazis, does his part for the war effort at the South Pole, with a ham radio, a crusty mechanic, and a one-eyed dog named Oyster.  In a way, it turns out to be every bit as miraculous as one of his alter-ego's adventures.  

It all fits!  Chabon contrives a comic-book climax with costume, human flight, police, orphans, every important character present.  As we approach that climax, tropes from other parts of the story double back again, as when Joe becomes magic teacher to young Tommy Clay, echoing both Kavalier's boyhood, and the origin story of the Escapist. 

After the climactic scene, Chabon takes a few chapters more to answer all the questions that have kept the story going forward, in ways that leave us feeling good, and warm, and happy to have known these guys (and the gal, Rose).

Chabon mixes in these last chapters a great deal of commentary on the relationship of the comic book world to the world of his characters.  All are "escaping" from guilt, from being "a fairy," from a loveless marriage (into Rose's romance comics).  Chabon incorporates the history of comic books here, saving for next-to-last the real-life Senate hearing on the depravity of comic books inspired by the real-life book Seduction of the Innocent by Fred Wertham.  He relays the observation that Super-heroes are all golems, all Jewish (Superman himself, from the old country, takes on a gentile identity). Comics are certainly "escapist" entertainment, as charged.

So, what's wrong with escapist entertainment?  Chabon throughout the novel demonstrates the idea that even a "cheap" genre can transform reality into art, and can be done artfully.  An earlier chapter is an essay on the topic disguised as the protagonists' attendance at the premier of Citizen Kane.  But among the most arresting passages of the novel are those in which Chabon describes an artist's work for us: all the rage that goes into Kavalier's painting of The Escapist giving Hitler a jaw-breaking punch; Rosa's turning the frustrations of her life into a romance comic about a wife at Los Alamos who discovers that "the other woman" in her husband's life is the A - Bomb, its mushroom cloud salaciously curved; Kavalier's magnum opus, a 48 chapter graphic novel about the Golem.  Nothing beats the early description of Kavalier at work drawing the naked woman (Rosa) whom he surprises in a showy leap from the fire escape through a window into her room -- so much feeling goes into the strokes of the pencil!

I read the acknowledgements with avid interest, recognizing so many of the names from my own years of comic book fandom.  Named last, and "above all," is the great comic book artist who, like Sammy Clay, finished the last years of his career working from the West Coast, who shares his initials with Joe Kavalier, the great Jack Kirby.

I must read more by Chabon;  I also need to look into the recently published bio of Kirby. [Link to my reflection on the biography of Kirby.]

Believing, Beloving: Diana Butler Bass, "Christianity after Religion"

Look to the roots of words to see how far the popular understanding of religious "faith" and "belief" have strayed from their points of origin.  Our English word "to believe" comes from belieben, "beloving."  Our word "doctrine" comes from the same root as doctor, and should have something to do with healing, not with separating goats from the Good Shepherd's flock.  Credo was chosen for the start of our creeds over the alternative opinor, the difference between "I set my heart on" and "I have an opinion."  The ubiquitous verse John 3:16 would be better translated as a promise of eternal life to all who entrust their lives to Jesus, not those who agree with certain statements about Jesus.

[Image: Thanks to Robert Talbert and wordle.net for the Creed, most-repeated words largest]

This etymology for our language of "faith" (itself related to fidelity, personal loyalty) comes from an excerpt of Diana Butler Bass's book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and The Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (2012).  She subscribes to Harvey Cox's idea that Christianity has passed from an  age of "faith in Jesus," when faith was the way a community lived, through an age of "belief about Christ" when adherence to dogma determined who was in or out, to the present age characterized by "experience of Jesus."  (excerpt 126).  "Fundamentalisms," she quotes Cox as saying, "turn out to be rearguard attempts" to stem a tide that has already overrun the battlefield, the way the last Roman Emperor tried to reclaim authority (127).

Bass bolsters the claim that Christians are moving beyond belief with a brief reference to polls and a little history.  Americans self-identify as "spiritual" more than "religious."  She looks at Jonathan Edwards' call for return to "affections" in worship as a start for this latest age, back in 1740.  She skips ahead to Pentecostalism's origins around 1900, at the same time that William James was concluding that "religious experience" is helpful to an individual's life, regardless of dogmas.  She tells about how reason "hardened" into rationalism, and how fundamentalism arose in reaction.  That's when beloving became believing in the sense of agreeing to a set of statements.


Bass tells us that the Creeds are an obstacle to those who think of themselves as "spiritual," today, but she offers a compromise to those like me who want to hold on to the Creeds.  Bass tells us that we encounter God through words, by which she means prayer.  She suggests that the Creeds, far from being Cliff Notes for a quiz in the afterlife, are actually prayer, when read, "I trust in God the Father...." (140-1).  She presents a creed remade to speak to the Maasai people, which describes Jesus as "a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe" who invites us "on safari" to look for good to do. "All who believe in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love...." (143).

Bass anticipates my uneasiness replacing the creeds and rites of religion with "spirituality" and "experience" when she relays worries expressed by her audiences.  Didn't Hitler's followers claim "experience?"  Can we be just "cafeteria Christians" who pick only what we want to believe? [For more on faith v. belief, and how to "believe in" hell and heaven, see my post on Meditations by Fr. Frank Wade]

Bass's answer emerges from an observation that no young clergy-in-training cited authoritative figures when asked how they go about dealing with important issues of faith. Rather than authority, these young clergy sought authenticity, by which they meant the sense of a broader community -- community found via internet, perhaps, but widely dispersed, nonetheless.

Reflecting on all this, I find that theater helps me to find my own balance between adherence to a set of credal statements and more fuzzy "experiential" faith.  For example, when a young actor of evangelical background was my choice to play Hamlet, we studied both Shakespeare's text and our own experiences to arrive at a living interpretation of Hamlet as truth-teller who attempts to bring healing to rotten Elsinore, neither madman, nor avenger.  Our interpretation emerged from engagement with the text and life, both; it required no distortions or elisions; it was consistent within itself; yet it was different from what others have done with Shakespeare's text.

This reading by Bass comports with "theological reflection" promoted in the rest of the book containing it, the Reading and Reflection Guide published by the Education for Ministry (EfM) program out of the School of Theology at the University of the South at Sewanee.   We are exhorted to use reason to consider experience, shared thoughts and feelings, connections to our religious traditions and texts, and what may be part of our culture.

Bass writes that "what" we believe is less important than "how" we believe.  Whether one "agrees" with the Creeds that "He rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures" or one claims personal "experience" of resurrection, the essence of "faith" is in Bass's paraphrase of Jonathan Edwards' question: how does the resurrection make a difference in our lives?  

Bass, Diana Butler. Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.  Excerpted in Education for Ministry. Reading and Reflection Guide, Volume B: Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World.  Sewanee, TN:  The University of the South, 2014.

Find links to many more of my reflections on the Episcopal church, scripture, and on others' perspectives of the same topics at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians! 

Midway through Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Halfway through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I'm as swept up by Michael Chabon's style as I am caught up in his story.

Will young Josef Kavalier, graphic artist who creates the panels for comic book hero "The Escapist," truly be able to redeem his promise, made as he escaped Prague, to rescue his little brother Thomas from Hitler's Europe?  Will his cousin and friend, American-born Sam Clay, stave off the selfish businessmen and corporate lawyers who have sought to cheat him and his partner Joe from the profits of their creation?  Has he found some kind of love at last in the radio actor who embodies "The Escapist" in both voice and form, named Tracy Bacon - epitome of Gentile All-American manhood?   Will Joe marry the lovely, spunky Rosa Luxemburg Saks, inspiration for Joe's character "Luna Moth?"

While these questions draw me onward, the style stops me time and again, just to appreciate the novel's texture.

Part of the texture is its underpinning of fact, legend, and pop culture references.  The ancient wish-fulfilling fantasy of the Golem, a clay man animated to avenge pogroms, is the ur-text for this novel about Sam Clayman and his partner Joe Kavalier, who has escaped Prague in a crate with the actual clay golem.  Subtext for the story is the sad real-life exploitation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, Jewish teens who waited their whole lives to receive more than a sliver of what their creation Superman earned for their publishers.  There's another real-life comic book connection:  When our character Joe breaks into the office of the American Aryan League, he discovers a comic book fan, reminding us of the horrible truth that Hitler and his closest minions were failed artists who drew the world into their adolescent revenge fantasies.

Chabon plays with the interpenetration of his characters' stories and the comic book universe they create.  The "origin stories" of the super-heroes mirror the histories and fantasies of Chabon's protagonists.  Sam Clayman has gimpy legs; his hero is lame, but for a magic key.  Rosa in her office job wears modest clothing and glasses, a female Clark Kent or "caterpillar girl" who will inspire "Luna Moth" (258).  One page after we read that Joe depicted "The Escapist" chained in a tank of electrified sharks, "the shark of dread that never deserted its patrol of Joe's innards rose to the surface" (180).

Chabon's narration manages to have the slightly ironic detachment of commentary on pop culture, at the same time that it exults in the purple, punning, wise-guy prose of the comics, pulps, and movies.  Here's what Joe sees from across a crowded room:

And yet in [Rosa's] eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared. (237) 

The scene that follows is what Hollywood calls "meeting cute."  Rosa's entourage of young men parts stagily for Joe and Sam, and then groan at the cliched dialogue:  "Have we met?"  "I am certain I would have remembered someone like you."  It gets worse, or better:  She takes a drag on his proffered cigarette before he reminds her that it hasn't been lit, yet.  Later, describing Joe's fingers preparing a magic trick, Chabon indulges happily in a pun about "prestigious digits" (317).

I'd say that I can't wait to finish the book; but I keep taking time out to savor its pages.(Read my post about the Thrilling Conclusion.)

Michael Chabon.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Picador, 2001.

"You have kept the good wine till now."

John 2.10   You have kept the good wine till now.

The parable of strangers at a banquet was Fr. Daron’s text, and his sermon made an important distinction between meaningful celebration and mere “partying," but we were distracted by one of our most grandfatherly parishioners leading a tiny girl by the hand down the center aisle back to her seat.  Grey heads everywhere turned, cooing aww. 

We older parishioners love to see the little children at St. James’.  The parade from Children’s Church at the “peace” is a highlight of our 10:30 service.  We like to see the younger adults, too, and the downward trend in average age among ushers, choir, and Vestry.

But I wonder what we with bad eyes and aching joints have to offer the young?  There are serious answers to that question in recent books by theologians Richard Rohr and Ronald Rolheiser. (Link to my reflections on those books.) They write that the first half of life is about defining our identities through the homes we make, careers we build, and principles we defend.   Popular culture promotes the fight to build our lives, but tells little about what should follow.  Many of us just keep fighting, to our detriment. Carl Jung wrote, "What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age.”

We can learn how to make a gift of the second half of life by considering that grandfather in our congregation:  give support, listen, tell stories of the ways it used to be good, laugh about the times we got through worse, and leave all the correction and criticism to the parents!  Let the young see us at church often for meaningful celebration. Rolheiser writes, “Live in gratitude.”

You readers who may still be fighting your battles, take comfort from the sign Jesus performed at the wedding in Cana:  with God, the best may come last.

Laughing Stock the Perfect Middle School Play

[Photo:"Mime" after show; "Psychic" behind]

Bradley Hayward's one-act comedy Laughing Stock is listed in Brooklyn Publishers' catalogue as 45 minutes long with flexible cast "from 24 to 72," making it very appealing to a middle school teacher with a drama club of around 24 mostly younger members.  After our performance last week, a mother said it gave lots of kids lots of chances to get laughs, and "just enough" bathroom humor to keep the boys interested.  It has a moral, "Life is only as boring as you make it."  She called it "the perfect middle school play."

I'd had my doubts.  Was it funny, or just "middle school funny?"  Would parents be shocked to hear the word "sucks" five times on the first page, or to hear a stereotyped rapper  say "dayum?"  Two-thirds of the script pass before our protagonist's life story advances beyond "I was born...."  But now I'm a believer.

"Michael" enters a black stage empty except for a stool, a cube, and a pair of smiley-styled drama masks for a backdrop.  To graduate, he must perform a play made from his own life story, but nothing's prepared.  "I don't even know any jokes," he apologizes.  A Writer from the audience -- in our production, played by a pert young woman -- offers to "spice up" his "humdrum life" with stock characters:  pirate, gunslinger, femme fatale, elves, cheerleaders, a pop star, psychic, lawyer, hillbilly, mime, mad scientist.... For the next forty minutes, twenty-some actors make grand entrances in colorful costumes, do their bits, and run back to the dressing room to prepare for their next entrances.   

Rehearsals were frustrating for the leads until the day that I dismissed the rest of the cast early.  I had Michael and Writer rehearse just their dialogue without the madcap interruptions.  We found a kind of "boy meets girl" drama:   Boy welcomes Writer's help, Boy begins to doubt the Writer's shallow approach to drama, Boy opposes Writer with help from William Shakespeare -- a young woman in our production, sporting a Shakespeare tee-shirt.  Our leads found new energy in each segment:  Michael's hopefulness at the start, Michael's swelling self-confidence with Writer's encouragement, then growing mutual hostility.

Just when the arrival of new stock characters begins to look like a formula, Hayward introduces the "Greek Chorus."  Enthusiastic sixth and seventh graders played "follow-the-leader" with their lines, experimenting with inflection and movement.  Over a few weeks, we rehearsed the chorus alone for over two hours to perform a bit that, in the end, lasted around three minutes.  The boost in energy and laughs made the chorus worth the time.

I came away pleased with what had happened offstage, too.  With so many kids, costume changes, and props, the show was virtually guaranteed to have distracting hubbub backstage and flubbed entrances.  We did have both during the last two weeks of rehearsal. But, without adult direction, the kids pulled their acts together and missed not one cue in the final performance (not counting curtain call:  no one wanted to be first one out, and they all piled up at the door).  This show made pros of them!

The Imitation Game: Finding the Man in the Machine

To learn how a machine works, you treat it as a puzzle: take it apart and see how the pieces fit together.  For The Imitation Game, screenwriter Graham Moore and director Morten Tyldum fracture the life of Alan Turing so that we can see connections between its pieces.  With understanding comes affection, humor, and pathos.  

One piece is the "code."  By now we've all heard how mathematician Alan Turing led a team of puzzle-solvers under cover at England's "Bletchley Radio Factory" to design a rudimentary computer that broke the Nazis' machine-generated "Enigma" code.  But in Moore's screenplay, schoolboy Turing, obsessive, inexpressive, bullied, asks Christopher, his one friend, about a book on cryptography: "How is code-breaking different from normal speech?  People never seem to be saying what they mean."  By his mosaic treatment of Turing's life, Moore has flanked this piece from the 1920s with other conversations from 1941 and 1952, so that we have ample demonstration of this genius's difficulty picking up sarcasm and social cues coded in normal speech.

Another piece is the eponymous "Imitation Game" proposed by Turing in a theoretical paper, much in the news lately as "the Turing Test."  A machine that successfully fools an interrogator into thinking its answers are human has crossed the threshold of "thinking."  The story is framed as the interrogation of Turing by a detective investigating an apparent break-in at Turing's home in 1952.  Bits of that interrogation are woven in and out of scenes that show us Turing's obsessive behavior at school and among teammates at Bletchley.  Through fine writing and actors with conviction, we also see schoolboy Turing struggle to express love that he feels for Christopher at school, and adult Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) learn how to be human from Joan (Keara Knightley), sole woman on the team.  Much of the humor in the film arises from Turing's mechanical imitations of jokes, flirtation, and kindness.

The other piece has to do with secrecy.  Even in youth, Turing knew to hide his love for Christopher;  in 1952, exposed by a male prostitute, Turing was convicted and sentenced to chemical castration under the United Kingdom's "immorality laws." The entire Bletchley operation was secret during the war, expunged from the record for another fifty years afterward.  Turing also learns that one of his teammates is spying for Stalin.  But the core of the movie is the irony that, once Turing's team could decode every Nazi plan of attack, their knowledge still had to remain secret, even from officers who could prevent massacres, lest the Nazis get wise.  Moore dramatizes Turing's dilemma when a convoy ship is sacrificed to secrecy.  Director Tyldun makes sure we see the human cost in lives and loss.  Later, we see a close-up of Turing's pencil marking his statistical analysis of how many Allies to sacrifice on a given day to keep Nazis in the dark.

Every piece of Moore's screenplay falls in place at one simple line.  Turing asks his interrogator, "So, now that you've heard my answers, do you think I'm human?"

Thanks to fine writing and fine performances, we all have our answer.