The Foreigner: Actor's Play makes an Actors' Play

(reflections after seeing a production of Larry Shue's comedy THE FOREIGNER at Pope High School in Marietta, GA)

To the ranks of great actors-turned-playwrights David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and William Shakespeare, add Larry Shue.

I met the actor Shue during his stint as a leading member of the Harlequin Dinner Theatre, a company that produced musicals in Atlanta and DC, running them a month and then trading them. He was particularly memorable in the title role of WHERE'S CHARLEY? I met him after a performance of I DO, I DO, in which he starred with Dorothy Collins. Gaga over her status as alumna of Sondheim's original cast of FOLLIES, I got her autograph, but just shook his hand.

During that period of his life, Shue was drafting the play that gives him his claim to immortality, THE FOREIGNER. Set in a small bed-and-breakfast near Atlanta in the late 70s, it tells the story of Charlie, a shy Englishman seeking a quiet retreat. His friend Froggy Le Seur concocts a fool-proof plan to allow Charlie to keep to himself: let it be known that Charlie is really Cha-oo-lee, a foreigner who speaks no English. But the plan backfires, as all the inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast find it therapeutic or fun to speak their deepest secrets to him.

PHOTO COLLAGE: Our production of THE FOREIGNER by the Walker School's Middle School, 2002.

The show had a couple years' run off-Broadway in the early 80s. Shue starred first as "Froggy," then as "Charlie." Then a plane crash killed Shue en route to Hollywood with the screenplay for the movie version around 1984. The play has been in constant production ever since, and I've directed it with middle schoolers twice, most recently four years ago with a cast of devoted and gifted eighth graders.

Now, Chase McCallum, who played Froggy in eighth grade, grown up and graduating from high school, has on his own produced and directed a superb staging of the show, playing Charlie. He drafted Carrie Stallings, another veteran of that fabled staging of four years ago, to reprise her role as the older woman "Betty." Reed McCallum, who followed Chase in my drama program, portrayed the duplicitous Reverend David Lee with subtlety and relish.

Chase chose to seat the audience on stage, closing the curtains behind us, to create an intimate "black box" feel in the large auditorium. His actors inhabited that little bed-and-breakfast for real, ignoring the chatty couple and the rude high schoolers and the video cameras.

As I say whenever some snob claims that Shakespeare was a front man for some aristocrat, only an experienced actor could write this way. Shue generously gives every actor great chances to show off with set pieces and moments of transformation that delight the audience. While words are the source of great fun throughout the play, it's a play about characters, not their lines. Charlie gets huge laughs simply by reacting silently, and he gets to perform a virtuosic story in mime and double-talk (an actor's exercise used in drama class -- to create stories from nonsense lines) . One stretch of the script that makes an audience breathless features the young woman in the play reading aloud from a newspaper to mute Charlie, gradually breaking down from sarcastic debutante to a child bride, vulnerable and scared. The emblematic moment of the play, often photographed, is the mute breakfast scene in which Charlie draws out a sullen boy who is supposed to be mentally deficient. He does it by simply imitating the boy's movements -- another actor's game that any drama student would know. The boy, finding himself in the role of teacher, grows in self-confidence.

In a way, the whole play is about what acting teaches. Charlie tells Froggy (I paraphrase), "I'm acquiring a personality. People hand me pieces of it." The actor always works to assemble the personality of his role, and the good actor finds pieces in his own real life and experience to make the role real. A good actor reaches a better understanding of himself and others in the process.

The play makes reference to THE WIZARD OF OZ in several subtle ways, and spectacularly so in the finale. It's no casual connection. The inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast are as different and lost as the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy. Through the agency of the imaginary foreigner, each discovers inner resources in time to defeat the forces of evil, and we feel great affection for the characters by the end.

A couple of personal notes, here. First, having seen the play in a professional production, and having spent literally hundreds of hours of my life in rehearsals for equally professional student productions, I had the odd and pleasurable sensation of coming home when I saw the set for Chase's production. The same thing happens when I see a production of SWEENEY TODD or any other familiar musical or opera. Seeing such a play, so familiar, and so rich in feeling, is a bit like participating in a religious ritual -- engendering the same feelings, no matter the size of the church or the characteristics of the priest. No wonder the ancient Greeks worshipped through theatre: these characters are spirits that possesses the actors who play them, and I know them and love them, no matter who embodies them.

Second, we who saw the play Friday night shared the unique and bittersweet experience of being forced to leave at the end of act one. A passing storm blew out the electricity early in the act, and emergency generators provided some fluorescent light for the remainder. Fire regulations required us to leave as soon as possible. Chase, having planned this production for years, remained in character as all of us, audience, actors, crew, filed out in darkness into the parking lot, all disappointed. Impromptu, Chase presented Charlie's "story" for us, with the dumpster as his backdrop - a strange and memorable moment of theatre.

From Zero to Murder Mystery in 21 hours

(reflections following four successful performances of UNDER THE SURFACE, a one-act murder mystery written by the actors and yours truly, their director.)

I've wanted to write a murder mystery since I was a fifth grader discovering "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" thirty-seven years ago. Thanks to my eighth grade drama class, I've now had that experience, and it was at least as much fun to create one as it is to read one.

It's my custom to start each eighth grade class by commissioning the students to write their own play, to be around forty-five minutes long, to involve everyone as a character, not to be mere take-offs of movies or other "given" characters, and not to contain elements that would get me fired.

This group quickly gravitated to the idea of writing a murder mystery, the first of my classes to do so. We started with little more than the name of a victim, "Lily," and the notion that she was last seen at a lake, and her body was never found. Soon, we had her social milieu -- twelve friends her age, who have converged on a mountain lake resort town every summer since early childhood. She disappeared at the end of their end-of-the-summer party last summer.

A subset of characters emerged, the "townies" who used to be part of the group, but have been marginalized since the teens grew more aware of social stratification.

Very early on, we discussed the notion of a prank gone wrong. We didn't know what to do with that idea, but we tucked it away. It emerged at just the right moment.

That's all we knew when the class improvised the scene in the anteroom at the funeral home, following the memorial service for Lily. Self-conscious, all the students kept quiet, afraid to say much more than "isn't it sad?" Then one girl startled everyone by saying to one boy, "What are you sad about? You're the reason she's gone!" The play developed from seeds in that one improv.

We filled out depositions on official-looking stationery of the Mountain Lake Resort, NY sherriff's office. Writing as characters, each actor wrote what he or she did on that fateful day in August, in the morning, afternoon, early evening, and at the party. Later, I played "lawyer" for the defense of the prime suspect, and asked for any memories that might exonerate -- or cause problems for -- my client.

I gave my actor / writers some rules of detective fiction:

• We're looking for someone who has motive, opportunity, and character to commit the crime
• Everyone is hiding something
• The prime suspect has to die half way through the story
  

Actors were asked what they thought about Lily's disappearance, and we made a list of those theories. Students were given the assignment to break into pairs and trios, to select activities at different town locations (tennis courts, barber shop, cafe, cabin, beach) where they would argue their different theories. Every reason had with it some memory of an event, and we added flashbacks for those. I asked actors to come up with solid mementos for each memory, and got a letter from Lily, her cell phone, and a ring.

One pair of actors introduced a plot twist: Lily didn't die, but she faked her death to be able to start a new life far away. But she hasn't called her sister recently.

Still, we seemed not to be moving forward in our process of writing the play. All the scenes seemed to be saying the same things over and over again.

With the whole cast assembled, I blacked out the lights in the theatre, except for one circle of light in the center of the floor. I said, "That's the annual bonfire. Okay, go!" Girls chatted about marshmallows, and it was pretty tedious. But each succeeding "take" suggested a new idea, and soon we had a strong scene that included a ghost story, a prank gone wrong, and the topper: discovery of the prime suspect's dead body.

I won't say that the play wrote itself after that. But things clicked into place. We tweaked earlier scenes to lead up to that bonfire.

As director, I had responsibility to come up with the solution to our crime. We had only one more week to rehearse before our first performance, and we still didn't have a final scene.

I felt like we'd written ourselves into a corner. It helped to ask three simple questions: Where did Lily get the money to run away? Why hasn't she called? And who killed her ex-boyfriend at this year's bonfire?

I'll cherish the memory of our class meeting the next week, when I got to do what countless fictional detectives do. "I know who did it -- and he's here among you." Kids saw the logic in the solution, and we went to work making a final scene that would uncover all the secrets.

The hard part was keeping that scene interesting, since it's conducted entirely in past tense, its characters discussing past events. But there's the excitement of discovery to propel them, and we used the technique of flashback to turn narration into action.

Then I did write myself into a corner. We all agreed that the bad guy should set fire to the house bringing his nemesis down with him. How could I possibly have the stage burst into flames, except through some unconvincing light trick?

The solution was already contained in the dialogue: memory of a bonfire prank years ago, when the college-aged characters were mere eighth graders. When the villain ignites the flame, there's a quick blackout and, simultaneously, an off-stage voice yells, "Fire!" Red light floods the stage, and boys rush on, and we gradually realize we're at that bonfire in an earlier, happier time. The last second of the play was the flash photograph of the whole cast smiling for the camera -- eighth graders giving their impressions of college students' impressions of eighth graders!

Watching all the pieces click into place over the last eight weeks (only 21 hours of class time) was immensely satisfying for me, like doing a crossword puzzle, or like seeing my rhymes fit with music.

Nancy Calhoun, Middle School Principal

(remarks for a reception honoring Nancy Calhoun, retiring from the Walker School after thirty-three years' teaching, twenty-three as founding principal of Walker's middle school.)

Today a student pays tribute to Mrs. Calhoun as a teacher, and our headmaster will give his thoughts about Nancy as a colleague and friend. It falls to me, as a member of the faculty in the middle school, to give you the inside scoop on Nancy Calhoun as a boss.

First, you should know that, as a boss, she is strict. That's not to say that she rides us during faculty meetings. She smiles indulgently while we act up like our kids. The girls in the front row pass notes and share candy, the boys in the back throw paper and make wisecracks, and there's always someone to say, "Wait! What are we talking about?" But we can all name the items on a list called Nancy's Non-Negotiables, and we fall in line behind those without question: things like respecting students, keeping parents informed, keeping Nancy informed, and being professional with each other. I've noticed that the list has grown a little since she hired me back in '98.

She's the kind of boss who gets things done. I was told when I started here that Nancy Calhoun always gets what she wants. It's more accurate to say that Nancy always wants what's best for the school, and she has the will and the creativity to get it. We needed room for a music program -- she found space in the gym. She concluded that middle schoolers need single-gender math classes, and she juggled schedules to make it happen. She found the ideal band director who happened to be married to our music teacher, and she convinced the Board of Trustees to change policy. She found the ideal science instructor in England, and she fought the U.S. Immigration Service to keep him.

And, while her faculty is in the classroom helping children to grow, she has made a priority of our professional and personal growth. A few years ago, Nancy instituted book discussions for us -- books about school, but also books about family and personal life. She encourages us to try new methods, or even new fields -- so a former literature teacher now incorporates writing with mathematics; and an art instructor has developed a curriculum for Art History. And just as she shows up to watch our children in countless sports events and plays and concerts to build them up, she writes us very personal notes that show how much she has noticed and appreciated what we do. I was startled in a private meeting with the Headmaster, when he mentioned some things that I'd volunteered to do -- and I realized that Nancy must have been keeping track and telling him. Our dean of students Blair Fisher, at the announcement that he would succeed Nancy, thanked her for seeing leadership potential in him long before he did. And Nancy hasn't stopped educating herself, either -- I know that she began a few years ago to study People magazine cover to cover, when she realized that everyone else already knew who Britney Spears was.

Most of us first met Nancy at our interviews, when it became clear that this boss looks beyond your résumé for one essential quality: to work in Nancy's organization, you have to actually enjoy Middle Schoolers -- in all their potential, and all their intense needs. Then she looks for wide-ranging experience beyond teaching, and interest beyond a subject area. That's why our faculty is so weird, including a math teacher who chases tornados, a science teacher who quotes Chaucer, a Civics teacher who designs websites, a History teacher who writes musicals, and people with backgrounds in business, geology, world travel, parenting, armed services, administration, and showbiz. And when she offered us a position, we all jumped. In fact, Kitty Drew says that she interviewed at another school, where the principal said, "Oh, if you have the chance to work for Nancy Calhoun, take it."

Since this is an insider's view, I bet you all want to know -- out of the public eye, behind closed doors -- is she really so considerate, positive, and well-spoken? Sorry to disappoint any news reporters here, but the answer is, yes, yes, and yes. We can trust that what she says to us face to face is what she believes in her heart, and it's no less than what she says to anyone else. And I bet all of us have had to go behind closed doors with her to confess our own mistakes, and, I, for one, always leave as if I've received absolution from Mother Superior.

These past eight years, I've spent a lot of time working with teachers from Cobb and surrounding counties. I find that, whenever they relax, they talk exclusively about their problems with overbearing and incompetent administrators. Whenever teachers of the Walker middle school relax, we talk about something interesting we've discovered, or ways to reach certain students, or we talk about the arts, or world affairs. I think that says a lot about Nancy Calhoun, the choices she made, the priorities she has set, and the way she leads. And when I tell those public school teachers how we think of Nancy as a colleague, they can't imagine it.

The truth is, we in the Middle School faculty have never referred to Nancy as the Boss. She has been our teacher, and she has been our friend -- and that's the real inside scoop.

Blink: How Words Distort Vision

(Reflection after completing the book BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING by NY Times writer Malcolm Gladwell, and a NEWSWEEK review of a book that runs counter to BLINK called HOW DOCTORS THINK, by Dr. Jerome Groopman.)

During our trip to New York, my high school friend Craig Housman bought a pamphlet on throwing playing cards, hoping to be able to slice bread or halt assailants at forty paces with the Queen of Hearts. He was disappointed.

In a way, I kind of hoped that I would finish reading BLINK able to make complex decisions in a single intuitive bound.

With interesting anecdotes propelling the book, each becoming a sort of model, author Malcolm Gladwell seems to move us forward to such a conclusion. Yes, we learn, initial impressions can be right when months of study can go wrong (as in the example of the Getty museum's purchase of an ersatz antiquity on expert advice after initial "repulsion" by "something wrong" with it). But we also see how New York Police, reacting within a matter of seconds to impressions of "something wrong" chased Amadou Diallo, an unarmed and frightened man, to a corner where they shot him to death.

What good is it to know that first impressions are right, except when they're wrong? A new book, HOW DOCTORS THINK, argues in favor of methodical, deliberate decision-making.

To say that Gladwell opposes this would be to caricature his book. Gladwell's stories do share at least one common element. In story after story, experience has taught people things that they cannot put into words. Worse, when they do try to verbalize their insights, the words cause "second thoughts" that actually obfuscate the reality.

There are sports figures who can't explain their own success, or who explain it wrongly (as demonstrated by slow-motion x-ray video of what their bodies are actually doing). . . There's the experienced firefighter who had the sudden intuition "something's wrong here" and ordered men out just before the floor collapsed, but it wasn't until much later, with help, that he realized what had been wrong: experience had taught him to expect more noise and less heat than he was getting from an apparently isolated kitchen fire. . . There are the lab tests that show how something as simple as exposure to a favorable image of black men in authority can undo deep-seated racial stereotyping in black and whites both, and another that measured anxiety in sweat glands and heart rate as subjects chose red cards, long before their conscious minds figured out to flip only blue cards because the red ones were stacked against them.

Gladwell looks at his subject from many angles. He includes a section on a comedy improv team, showing how they rehearse seriously in order to be able to make up thirty minute plays on the spot. One of their rules is to accept what happens in any situation, rather than fighting against it. (114-116). Experience makes the split-second cooperation possible.

Perhaps most interesting is the story of Pentagon maverick Paul Riper's "Red Team" outsmarting a war room full of top brass, confident in their superior numbers, firepower, communications, and strategy. By not using electronic communications, and concentrating force in one direction, Riper "sinks" a dozen ships and "kills" 20,000 Americans before they have the chance to use their big guns. Riper scorns the long decision-making processes instituted at the Pentagon. Too much information, too much intellection, were no match for quick-striking and sly force. Of course, Shakespeare knew this -- see Hamlet.

So, people with experience can trust their unconscious decision-making, unless their vision is blurred by unconscious bias and / or physical panic. A little experience to break stereotypes helps. So does a little bit of time: Gladwell tells how several police forces are now ordering cops to go on patrols solo, because waiting for back up gives them time to get a little more experience with a subject before making a split-second decision that they'll regret. (I won't forget the cop who, finding a black wallet clutched in Diallo's hand, yelled, "Where's the gun?!" and collapsed, sobbing. )

But words create a "verbal shadow" that can alter one's memories and perceptions, while introspection leads to paralysis, death in a fluid military situation.

I've known this a long time. In fact, it's the crux of my senior honor's thesis at Duke University, about Henry James's antepenultimate novel THE AMBASSADOR -- in which the main character Lambert Strether arrives in Paris knowing the truth, then talks himself out of it.

Time Out

(including reflections on the Metropolitan Opera's High-definition broadcast of Il Trittico, and an all-British concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra including works by Elgar, Turnage, MacMillan, Maxwell-Davies, and Britten)

Religion and great art have at least this in common: they lift us out of ordinary time.

This was brought home to me Saturday April 27. The day was overcrowded with events, and concerns for pending time-consuming projects weighed on my mind enough that I couldn't get back to sleep when my little dog Luis woke me up at 2:30 that morning.

First on the agenda was breakfast with John R., in town for our 30th high school reunion. He'd bought me dinner on my last night on the Duke U. campus back in 1981. (That next morning, I began a two-day journey to Jackson, Mississippi, where I would stay for 17 years). Now, 27 years later, would we recognize each other? No problem. Would there be talk of old times? Truly, none of that came up. Instead, we each made short work of the previous 27 years, compressing all into just two or three decisive high points and some current themes. (Briefly: his college students' lack of interest is as galling to him as 7th graders' is to me, and we both see this lack of curiosity as something different from what our crowd showed back in the 70s; big decisions seemed to just fall in place for us both; for both of us, the realization has come as a surprise that music is what's more important to us than anything; both bike.) I left feeling very happy, as if all those years are now validated and wrapped up for storage and I'm free to move on to the next chapter.


Then I met Frank Boggs, mentor and early cultivator of my interest in music, at a multiplex to see the last broadcast of the Met's first year of opera-at-the-movies. This one, Il Trittico, had interested me least, on the basis of some commentary in Puccini's biography and the synopses of the three independent one-act operas. Act Three, Gianni Schicchi, is a masterpiece of farce, and I'd seen it already. Acts One and Two are, respectively, a sordid melodrama about a jealous husband's revenge (Pagliacci without the interest of the play-within-a-play), and a tear-jerker set among pious nuns. How wrong I was. Music gave substance to the flimsy stories and sympathy to the stock characters, while Puccini and his librettist took pains to plant themes and plot elements early so that the twists seemed natural instead of manipulative. The acting of the singers was also natural. Director Jack O'Brien and his design staff created the Met's largest sets for elaborately realistic environments, down to the worn cobblestones in the convent.

But the moment that took me out of time, and out of my seat, occurred at the end of Act Three. Schicchi is a great farce, and like all farces, all the characters are caricatures, and even the show's big hit tune is sung by an airheaded young soprano. I thought all the big emotional moments of the triptych were finished, and this was a frothy dessert. But, as Schicchi, victorious, drives all the relatives out of the mansion that now belongs to him, the entire set -- enormously wide, deep, tall, and sober, befitting a wealthy man's deathbed -- sank into the floor. The audience gasped once as they saw the roof of the mansion lowering into view, the two young lovers seated there to sing their little coda to the comedy. As the balcony neared ground level, the audience gasped again, for there, behind it all, in realistic color and detail, was the gorgeous and familiar panoramic view of Florence at sunset. Did millions of dollars go into this effect, which lasted only for two or three minutes to the end of the opera? It was worth it. I've never cried for a scene change before - but this was magic.

The Symphony program included Maxwell-Davies' musical impression of a wedding on the Orkney Islands in Scotland, with amusing (and difficult) musical imitations of a wedding band drunk with alcohol and fatigue, topped with "sunrise" in the sound of the bagpipes. Turnage's piece was a collage of gestures, and constantly delightful and interesting, though I was glad it didn't last a single minute longer. My reason for buying this ticket was to hear my hero Britten's Sinfonia de Requiem, but it was beautiful and dramatic in all the ways that I've learned to expect from Britten - so, not so remarkable.

The program ended with Elgar's most famous Pomp and Circumstance march, played with much greater zest and color than I'm used to hearing for it -- taking us instantly back in rose-colored memory to Queen Victoria's last years.

By the end of the day, I wanted to do anything I could to prolong the time -- shop for groceries, get a Subway sandwich, listen to jazz on the radio, read a book.

Art and religion both tell us that there is time outside of time, and the quotidian concerns that worry us aren't all that important.

Shooter's Fantasies

(Response to commentary by essayist Diane Roberts, who teaches English at Florida State University on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and on the shooting of dozens of students and teachers at Virginia Tech this past week.)

Beginning her commentary with a list of the disturbing graphic violence found in writings of respected authors, among them Williams Faulkner and Shakespeare, Diane Roberts comments on the fatuity of media "rent-a-shrinks" who believe that the Virginia Tech shooter's intentions were evident in his writing.

Her student writers often fill their stories with fantasies of revenge and fantasies of horrible deaths for characters who are their stand-ins. Feeling powerless and feeling oppressed is part of being young; so is feeling sorry for yourself. Dreaming of power, then, is a corrective, along with dreaming of revenge, and dreaming of the gratifying grief and regret at their own funerals.

There's another simple observation by the wise and witty Frederick Buechner in his masterpiece quartet of novels collected as THE BOOK OF BEBB. The narrator, a high school English teacher, comments on grading his juniors' stories with their "usual quota" of fatal car crashes and violence, as the students inject death in their stories to make up for the lack of anything resembling real life in them.

Cho's fantasies weren't different, and it's clear that he felt a lack of "real life" in his own life -- just like many others his age. But a healthy mind draws a line between fantasy and reality.

Speaking Well of the Dead: Kathay, R.I.P.

(reflections on the life of Kathay Walters, friend and neighbor, and on the sermon given at her memorial service in little Alamo, Georgia.)

A preacher at the Methodist church of Alamo, Georgia began his memorial sermon this way (as I rermember it):

I have to admit that I didn't know Kathay Walters. I only met her once, two months ago, at the funeral of her mother. All I know is what I've heard from you [her family]. And I don't know who started it . . .

He was referring to a family feud with allegations of malfeasance, allegations of mistreatment of aged parents, all tangled with property, wills, and harsh words. The minister guessed that he was the first ever to choose Philippians 4 at a funeral oration. It's the passage that I set to music for my brother's marriage, "One thing I know, forgetting what lies behind. . . straining for the prize of the upward call of Jesus." The preacher went on:

. . . I don't know who was right or wrong. But I know this: No one here is going to speak ill of the dead. . . . You, her family, her daughter, her sisters. . . you all remember times when she loved you and you loved her, and you all remember good times. Remember those, and remember that Jesus said no one is fit to be a judge but Jesus alone.

It was a remarkably candid and forceful statement in a situation where preachers usually resort to bromides about death and vague "memories" about a person they knew only in their Sunday best -- or in a hospital gown. The little brick church, whitewashed inside, was big enough to hold about one hundred - fifty people if they squeezed. There was a group at the back of one side, separated by a gulf of ten pews from a family group at the front. Pall bearers across the aisle were separated by another ten pews from where I sat with Nikhil (who moved three years ago into the home where I used to live across the street from her) with his wife Mallika and cousin Amar. At the point when he said to remember the times when she'd loved them, the separated groups began to cry.

With us was Kathay's dearest neighbor friend Dottie, who'd laughed with me on the phone just a week before as she was helping Kathay to plan out a lifetime of reforming her eating habits to accommodate diabetes. Dottie had taken Kathay to the hospital with acute symptoms on the Tuesday, and stayed with her through overnight surgery and violent, excruciating aftermath.

Since the preacher didn't know Kathay, I offer my perspective. There's a lot that I didn't want to know, and there's a lot that was so different from my experience that I just laughed.

I know that her candor was shocking. She was fearless. She wouldn't sit still when she perceived that she or someone else wasn't being treated fairly. When teens down our street attracted a clientele of thugs in loud cars, she called the police to report drug dealing and over-loud car radios. She sat on her front porch with a cell phone to call 911 and a gun in her lap. When the cleaners lost her clothes smoke-smudged in a house fire (that I slept through - notwithstanding the firetrucks and sirens across the street), she sent to insurance companies and small-claims court her long inventories of every gown, blouse, and article of underwear with estimated costs -- dictated to me at my computer. On other issues, she dictated letters to me addressed to the Governor, our Senators, our Insurance Commissioner, the owner of Home Depot (to expedite the opening of his aquarium), and her divorce lawyer, and Oprah.

When I moved into the Owens Meadow subdivision of Kennesaw, GA back in 1998, she introduced herself, demanded that we trade house keys "because neighbors should be able to take care of each other," and she put me to work clearing weeds out of the vacant zone between my house and the next, so that she wouldn't have to look at them. (She also didn't want any haven for snakes.) But she also mowed lawns up and down the street as a service to the neighborhood -- riding her tractor in her short shorts (Kathay was not a petite woman), red hair, hat, sunglasses, cigarette dangling from her mouth.

When I called her from the hospital the morning after a car crash, she took care of my house and my dogs Cleo and Bo, who adored her always. During my long convalescence, she provided me with meals, too.

Some years later, after I'd moved, and Cleo died suddenly, I drove to tell her. I couldn't even get the words out, "Cleo died." She comforted me, and led me straight across the street to demand that the next door neighbor give me his little dog -- who'd played often with Bo and Cleo, and who otherwise never got off the rope tied to the side of the garage -- saying, "You don't care for the dog, and he'll give him a good home." That's how I got Luis. By the way, I'd done the driving for her when her beloved old cat suddenly fell ill (poisoned, perhaps). She buried him in the backyard and swore she'd never leave that house, because he was back there.

She taught me how to make martinis, having been the cute blond waitress in a miniskirt at the Holiday Inn on Windy Hill Road. Back in 1970, she told me, that was about the only place in Cobb County where a man could get a good drink. Late nights in winter, she also liked it when I brought eggnog, which she'd make "dirty" by adding Grand Marnier or Bourbon -- in a proportion about 50-50. She also worked as the head of dining services in a large retirement center, and after planning meals for hundreds a day, she never did learn to cook for one guest. I always left her dinner table stuffed, and carrying tubs of leftovers besides.


When I'd come home frustrated by students, feeling beaten down, she'd sit me on the porch, put a huge snifter of plum wine in my hands, and share her opinions.

Her house was always dark, except for the big-screen TV. She kept it super - cool in the summer, insulated with screens and blankets and curtains on the windows.

I never did write down the words that she would say without having seen them -- "honeysuckers" were weeds on my fence, and the neighbors had a hot tub "ka-huzzi." But I felt it would be a kind of betrayal to write down the words for someone else's amusement, and they're all gone, now. Still, there's one story along those lines that I love: She had little ceramic birdhouses, and little carved ones, too, arrayed on the tops of the kitchen cabinets. She proudly pointed to new wallpaper trim she'd pasted along the ceiling -- "birdhouses," she said. But I looked more closely and saw that those "birdhouses" had moons carved on them, and human ankles visible within -- she'd plastered the kitchen with outhouses. She was embarrassed, but she left them up.

Our friend Nikhil did a bold and fitting thing, writing an appreciation of her in rhyme that took up a full page of the funeral home's sign-in book, an improvised verse that mentioned her big heart and sharp tongue, how she was never shy about speaking what was on her mind.

I'd long been in the habit of taking her out to some of our favorite places, and taking her to some events, besides. We saw The Color Purple and The Lion King, and the new aquarium. We ate often at Buffalo's and Copeland's, and recently, the OK Cafe. She'd dress to the nines in glittery tops and tight black pants, with jewelry and eye shadow. But I waited 'til March 23, a beautiful afternoon, to suggest that we go down to Buckhead to the pricey and trendy Atlanta Seafood Company, with its three-storey copper fish in front. She loved it - had lobster, "white ziffandel," and some of my dessert. It was the last time I saw her.

Heavy Issues, Light Textures

(Response to ALL THE KING'S MEN, a play by Robert Penn Warren, directed by August Staub at Theatre in the Square, Marietta, GA; and EDALAT SQUARE, an opera in one act by R. Timothy Brady, directed by the composer/librettist at Emory University.)

Friday night, and then again on Sunday afternoon, I've enjoyed two works of theatre that turn on the same question: What's right when what's good diverges from what's legal? Rather than being weighed down by the question, both works use techniques to keep the storytelling light and supple.

When I read ALL THE KING'S MEN as a teenager, I never pictured Stark as actor David Milford portrays him - crinkly faced cherub, ingratiating and boyish, suddenly bullying and sarcastic. Fighting for his own political primacy so that he can continue to "do good," Stark casts about for any way he can use to undermine his opponents, settling on the method of exposing the bad choices they made.

Penn Warren's script works best as central "reporter" and amateur historian "Jack Burden" tries to explain Stark to us. The play moves fluidly back through time, juxtaposing opposites (Stark the master politician, Stark the sap in his first campaign, Lucy Stark the religious crusader, Sadie Burk her husband's cynical mistress). It bogs down between suites of scenes, when Burden debates a "Professor" who pedantically iterates that a hospital is a good thing, no matter why or how it was built. The play made me want to read more Penn Warren, and to re-read the novel. At forty-seven, I'm better able to appreciate the ambiguities and ambivalence in the world that he depicts.

Now, young though he is, composer/librettist R. Timothy Brady has created a short opera that admirably avoids the easy answer. EDALAT SQUARE was the site in Iran where two teenaged boys were executed for sodomy in 2005. The libretto is a sequence of poetic monologues, stylized and abstracted from the literal situation. Only once, near the end, the two young men sing to each other, in lines that seem to refer to seeing God. But the focus is not really on them. The older brother "Hassan" is our lens for the story. His first line, spoken on tape while we see him kneel on his prayer rug, is, "I have dreamed of a revolution, a changing of the world in the world that God had originally intended." For the sake of that dream, and strict law, and the honor of his family, Hassan reports his brother and friend to the authorities. It's clear that for him, for his mother, as for the young men, no good comes from his legal and moral decision.

Brady's dramatic structure is light, and his musical texture is remarkably airy. We hear a tape of the traditional call to prayer, while we see an abstract Persian design and watch Hassan's preparations for prayer. That sung prayer accustoms us to long, unaccompanied vocal lines that do their arabesques before returning to the original tone. A string quartet plays in similar lines. Often, the accompaniment plays between vocal lines, not under them. Once in awhile, the quartet makes percussive sounds with plucking and knocking. Hassan never sings, and rarely makes a live vocal sound, while we hear the pre-recorded voice over of his internal monologues. He does, however, perform a ritual hand-washing, and a microphone at the water bowl amplifies that sound to become part of the texture of the music. The mother sings with an "R+B soul" vocal quality; the two lovers sing with legitimate operatic voices. The final lines, sung by some kind of judge, were the most striking of all in vocal quality -- performed, I think, by a singer trained in Persian classical music -- and in their pronouncement from Sufi poetry, aimed at Hassan, in agony after the hanging: "Is there any Remover of difficulties save God? Say: Praised be God! He is God! All are his servants, and all abide by his bidding!"

I admire the composer's restraint, and the variety of ways that he colors those long lines.

Life After Deaths, continued

This week, I received an invitation to a reception honoring recipients of the Christian A. Allenburger, IV Faculty Award. It's in the library of St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson, Mississippi, where I taught from 1981-1998. Chris, an 8th grader who fell ill in December 1985 and died September 14, 1986, had an impact on my life that extends far beyond the fact that my first experience of a funeral was being pall bearer at his.

So, during this Easter season when four of my friends have passed away, it's fitting that I should be reminded of Chris. I'm sending this message with my regrets to the host of this week's reception:

I always feel grateful remembering Chris, Alex, and Susan. I was supposed to be Chris's teacher, but he taught me, as the threat to his life made him grow up in a hurry. He deflected attention from his own discomfort to put visitors at ease, and he listened intently to learn about life outside his hospital room. The last time I saw him, he encouraged me to follow my love of music whatever the cost -- and I started that year to study composition.

One day stands out for me when I remember that time. We had the day off from St. Andrew's, so I could visit Chris in the morning. He told me proudly that he no longer had any cancer cells in him. He was feeling so well that he invited me to stay for lunch, then to stay for a visit with his friend Payton, then to explore the hospital with both of them - wheeling Chris through a maze of hallways, and out to the helicopter pad. Alex and Susan invited me to stay for dinner, and it was special by any measure. They served all the staff on the floor with take-out from Ruth's Chris Steak House, somehow all the more delicious for being served in styrofoam boxes. During that dinner, Alex took me aside and gently explained the truth to me, that the poison killing the cancer cells was also killing Chris, and withdrawing the poison would permit the cancer to grow again. Chris's best hope for survival was his hope itself.

That dinner on the ward was a spontaneous sacrament. It was the outward sign of parents' love that nourished Chris's spiritual growth even while his body fought the disease, and a celebration of the community on that ward, and a sign of hope that a boy's life can continue to touch us beyond his death.

Because I cannot attend the reception, please relay my continued thanks and affection to the Allenburger family and the St. Andrew's community.

Life After Deaths

(reflections occasioned by the April 9, 2007 issue of Newsweek, which contains several articles about cancer, and several more about belief and disbelief in God. Also, reflections on recent deaths among my friends, and readings in the daily devotional Forward Day by Day) Years ago, the morning after the suicide of a teenaged girl in our church choir, our rector Karen Evans put aside her Sunday morning sermon to discuss the event. I barely knew the girl apart from her crystal-clear and pitch-perfect voice (and her name was Crystal), but my eyes sting whenever I recall that moment. Karen said, "I'm feeling many things, and first, I'm feeling anger...at Crystal, for taking away herself, and the years we would have had with her. " In an interview, Elizabeth Edwards has another way to say the same thing about the cancer that has re-emerged after she thought she'd beaten it: "The cancer will eventually . . . win this fight. I come from a family of women who live into their 90s, so it's taken something real from me." This morning after the Church's somber remembrance of Christ's crucifixion and burial, I'm getting ready for the funeral of my ex-neighbor and friend Kathay Walters. Just a week ago, she and her neighbor Dottie laughed with me about Kathay's brand new diagnosis of diabetes, and how she "wasn't gonna take no shots!" I hate to think of what Dottie told me about Kathay's final hours -- an emergency surgery followed by violent reaction and rapid shutting down of organs. The tears that follow death are for ourselves. We cry because we've lost a loved one. We've lost the future that we had expected to share with them. We may cry for regrets about something we should have said or done. We also cry literally for ourselves -- the selves that were reflected in the eyes of an intimate, their memories of us. I learned this in a single moment, when I was leaving the home of my grandmother Thelma Maier for the last time, where she had made me feel like a little prince: that part of me was gone. These last four weeks, I've thought a lot about death and the life that may follow it. This is Lent: 'tis the season to be pensive. Besides, Kathay's will be the fourth funeral I've attended in this time, nearly doubling the number I've attended in my whole life. Sharing tea with my friend Nikki and his wife Mallika in the home where I used to live, across the street from Kathay, we all expressed shock. How rapidly it happened . . . how the wheelbarrow loaded with weeds sits in the unfinished flower bed . . . how just two weeks ago, she dressed up and went with me to the fish restaurant where I'd been planning to take her for years . . . how Nikki and Mallika had taken food over to the house when she was feeling ill (as she had taken care of me when I was in a wheelchair recuperating from a car crash in 2000), but she had not answered the door -- and they'd never seen her again. Nikki, who has welcomed me to Hindu poojahs in his home, surprised me by imagining Kathay in heaven looking down on us, now free of the disabilities and financial worries and family battles that frustrated her, and laughing ( or maybe furiously complaining to the Authorities ) about the irony of how her house (her pride and joy) was immediately occupied by family members who had recently fought her in court over the care and death of her mother Montez Box. I'm the Episcopalian. Do I believe in life after death? Elizabeth Edwards, in that Newsweek interview, talks of how she had to re-adjust her fundamentalist beliefs long before her cancer, back when her 16-year-old son Wade was killed when wind swept his car off the highway: "The hand of God blew him from the road." She now believes that God promises enlightenment and salvation, not protection. I suppose she means "enlightenment" as something that guides our thoughts and deeds in life, and "salvation" as a reward after. I believe in God who is that force inside us, urging us in certain directions; a force inside the universe urging it creatively into its shape. I would not call a freak gust "the hand of God" and, when I have a narrow escape, I thank God for life itself -- and to give me guidance and energy for what I have left to do -- but I don't thank Him for the escape. Imagine: "Dear Lord, thank you for crashing that car into my side at just the right angle to crack my bones just enough to lame me for six weeks, but not to damage any internal organs or crush my spinal cord.") . Besides, if I thank God for my narrow escape from death in that car crash, it follows that I must I blame God for killing Kathay, or for killing my friend Leslie Walker from cancer three weeks ago, or for not saving the young man Michael Harper when his parents and friends and our whole faculty were praying for healing. I believe in the way people live on in the lives of the people they've touched. I believe in touching those lives. I believe that's what Christ was about. I believe that the parts of scripture that tell of eternal paradise or eternal damnation are brought down to earth by other parts that make clear that death is final. I'm about to leave for Kathay's funeral; tomorrow, I'm going to celebrate Christ's resurrection. Do I believe in Christ's resurrection? What about Paul's letters, as when he says, if there is no resurrection after death, then we Christians are the most abject of all mankind? Here's my bottom line: We celebrate something that can happen in our lives today. I pray to and for people who have died, as if they can hear me, or, alternatively, as if I'm dealing with parts of me that they represent. So, I'm just doing the best I can; I leave life after death to God.

Sampling Poetry, March 2007: Bards and Shards

(About the March 2007 issue of the journal POETRY, "founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe")

I started writing this blog partly to keep samples of writing and ideas that I like. I've found a few in last month's issue of POETRY. These are samples, and, maybe by coincidence, they all seem to make samplings or fragments either their subject or their technique.

First, there are selections of some nine hundred fragments of verse by Sophocles. Found in quotations in other sources, these bits and pieces are grouped for us in fortune-cookie styled strips under categories that the translator-arranger Reginald Gibbons claims are "among the dominant themes of a poetic mind." For example, under the heading, "The Fullness of the World," Gibbons makes sub-groups under Roman numerals. Under "I" are several images that suggest creatures' guarding or hording: "A scorpion stands / Watch among the rocks" and "Everything is covered by spider webs." Other sub-groupings suggest varieties in wildlife, sensual pleasures in peoples' perfumes and garments, and tastes of foods.

There's more in common among the subgroups gathered under the heading, "The Sea." all supporting the thesis sentence: "Seafarers I assign / To the ranks of those most / Beaten down." There's a section about a certain fisherman who "invented" some "clever" pastimes as "board games and dice" to provide "Sweet relief from idleness." Sophocles imagines the great happiness of being a sailor on land, "Under the eaves to sleep / And hear the steady small /Rain in your thoughts." I especially like a thought that Gibbons encloses parenthetically among these "sea" related ones: "Yet, to a mother, children / Are the anchors of her life."

Another poet, Richard Kenney, reminds me of Lawrence Raab in building poems on notions taken from fantasies and science fiction that have been ubiquitous in American pop culture since the Fifties. The persona in "Science and Technology" seems to discount, and then, to confirm, the possibility that "unknown bodiless entities" use our brains for entertainments that we experience as dreams. Even more fun is a poem that takes off from the fact reported in the mid-90s that most household dust has settled to earth from outer space. He gives voice to the tiny space aliens who view us (from behind our furniture, and from our fingertips) as "long water bags minerally stiffened" who sometimes try to merge, failing because of "surface tension."

The sounds and the sense, and even the look of Kay Ryan's "Train-Track Figure" are all one. It's a fun little riff on the way we glimpse something on the other side of a passing train, "sliver over sliver of between-car vision." The lines are brief themselves, making a sliver of text on the page. There are some end rhymes, but even more consistent repetitions of vowel sounds in groups of four: "between - car / vision, each / slice too brief / to add detail / or deepen...." The repeated sound goes by in the same rhythm as the repeated sliver of image goes by. Does it mean anything? It's just a "slice of life," and it suggests only everything that we perceive in bits.

Finally, I'll mention another poem that did nothing for me, an example of a kind of poem that I read too often in POETRY. It's got the same internal rhyming, and even end rhymes, and the same short lines as Ryan's poem. But the fragmentary images seem to me to be merely random ones, associated in some way that remains private to the poet, and I lose patience with it. "The seeker leaves / for Bangladesh, / the prophets check / for signs of theft, / the singers sing / for what is left." Okay, Marxists would say that all profit is theft. Is there a pun in there? Maybe, but there's nothing real here to make me care to make sense of it. (I'll omit the poet's name. If you don't have something nice to say. . . .)

T. S. Eliot, whom POETRY helped to promote, also worked with fragments, and made fragmentariness his subject. But, as a lecturer at Oxford pointed out when I was there to study Eliot, he had a great sense of the dramatic, his fragments often conjuring characters whole by means of a bit of stage business, costuming, or dialogue, as he conjures those pretentious ladies who "come and go / Speaking of Michaelangelo."

George Smoot's Wrinkles in Time: Thrill of the Hunt

(Reflections on WRINKLES IN TIME by George Smoot with Keay Davidson, published by Morrow Press.)

I never look at the stars without remembering that I'm looking back into time. The light of one star left its source a century ago, and the light of another left at the time of Jesus, and so forth. I also understand the Doppler effect, how we can know that an object is approaching or receding by the wavelength of its light. I "get" the idea that gravity is the curvature of space rather than some kind of magnetic tugging. But when I try to grasp George Smoot's lifetime work of mapping the universe's grand structure, well, it's like I've got too many variables to juggle in my mind at once, and I drop all of them.

Mapping the universe, looking at light from its first seconds, and measuring distances between clusters of galaxies: Wouldn't that be like trying to drive through town with blacked-out windows, using photos of the streets made during the previous decade?

So this book contains large swaths of text that I just had to take for granted, couched in a narrative of decades spent on one hunt, pursuing leads and double-checking results over a period of five decades. Smoot begins the story with a primer in ancient physics, mixed in with the story of his own childhood fascinations with stars.

Throughout the story, he communicates gratitude for others whose work flowed into his, and for many others who worked with him. The work takes him to mountaintop observatories, to launches of balloons three stories tall, to Antarctica (where he vividly describes his panic when his overexertion caused him to inhale too quickly, freezing the liquid in his runny nose, stopping his ability to breathe, doubling the gasping...) and to launchpads for satellites. Much of the work seems to be mundane problem-solving, such as how to screen out light and radio waves from earth when trying to detect those from outer space. He's always working in teams, and it always feels like guys in a college dorm room somewhere, puzzling over a problem together. Sometimes he fretted that another team would get the data first, but he seems to have been genuinely disinterested in the outcome, actively trying to prove himself wrong in order to be sure that he was right.

For me, the new concept that I can grasp is the idea that, in the first seconds of bang, there were "seeds" or wrinkles that, eons later, are the sources of inconceivably vast curtains of "dark matter" that dwarf galaxies by comparison, drawing those galaxies with gravitational force at outrageous speeds.

His conclusion mentions those who scorn the Big Bang theory because it seems to lend support to Christian fundamentalists. Smoot diplomatically slides to an assertion that he disagrees with his old teacher: the universe isn't pointless, isn't random. The discoveries of which he is a part point to an increasing sense of unity - as all organs and limbs of a human body stem from the same DNA, he says (p. 296). And, he concludes, "We are awed by the ultimate simplicity and power of the creativity of physical nature -- and by its beauty on all scales."

Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia: You Had to Be There

(reflections on THE COAST OF UTOPIA, comprising three full-length plays VOYAGE, SHIPWRECK, and SALVAGE, by Tom Stoppard)

Maybe if I had seen all three of these plays last month when they could be viewed over a single weekend in New York, I'd associate the names of all these characters with faces of the actors who played them, and some characters and some episodes would stand out. But I've only read them, and I'm unable to recall any action or words by any character in any situation (not counting one that was described in a review that I read).

In fact, after reading them, I can't say more than what I knew from reading reviews. The play more or less follows Russian radical Alexander Herzen and his friends and family over several decades during which his efforts to hasten the liberalization of Russia (mostly articles in journals) become relics and they themselves are derided: "We have left you far behind, and you refuse to notice. ...You're a poet, a storyteller, an orator, anything you please, but you're not a political leader or thinker" (Salvage 110). This image echoes earlier verbal images, and it relates to off-scene events in the trilogy, most memorably the shipwreck in which Herzen's estranged wife and beloved deaf son perished. I appreciate that, but it's not enough to pull these hundreds of pages together for me.

Maybe that's Stoppard's intended effect. Minutes from the end of the whole trilogy, Herzen says, "But history has no culmination! There is no libretto." So, Stoppard has fashioned a very long drama that constantly looks forward to an event that never happens. Herzen in old age, has learned, "A distant end is not an end but a trap." There is no coast. There is no Utopia. Anyone who believes in a Utopia must impose it on the rest of us with tyranny as oppressive and dumb as the czars'.

All the talk of Russian politics and Western culture is played against a background of family life. There are sibling affections and disappointments in marriages in VOYAGE; the loving tutor Matwilda and the sorrow and guilt over the wife and deaf son in SHIPWRECK; reunions of old friends in SALVAGE. Stoppard layers these in every scene, and that's another point: the family, the loves, the kindnesses and taking care of each other are in the end more important than all the writing and debating.

Grasping for a way to comprehend it all, I find an analogy to CANDIDE. Herzen and friends view the world, and find that it never conforms to their worldview. In the end, they realize that they should stay home and make their gardens grow. It's a good thought. But Voltaire expressed it in ninety pages.

I enjoyed many incongruities in the dialogue (when the personal and the political are juxtaposed humorously). I'd like to see it and compare the experience of reading it. But I'm relieved that I didn't slam down $1500 for that weekend in New York.

Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: Fighting Words

"My daughter --" begins the has-been salesman as he pleads for a chance to swim again with the real estate sharks of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Three times during the play, he begins to use her to gain sympathy, and he never completes the thought. That's as close as we get to the lives of these characters outside of the arena where we see them.

That arena is everything. The men are all searching for points of advantage, points of the opponent's vulnerability. Like boxers, they spend a lot of time circling and stalling, and even when they lash out, they often hit empty air. They also connect, and it's painful and funny, too.

As in A LIFE IN THE THEATRE (see earlier review at this blog), Mamet trusts the actors to find nuance in apparently idiotic lines. So this play begins with a silent well-groomed young man listening less-than-patiently while the harried looking older man "Levene" searches for the right tone to begin his pitch. He's going to beg, but he doesn't want to sound like he's begging. So he tries five times: "John. John. John. John. (pause) John -- " When it doesn't work, and the other man interrupts, "Levene" says, "Hear me out," and tries a whole other approach. This happens a half-dozen different ways.

Later, there's a hilarious dialogue that includes variations on this line: "Are we talking about this, or just talking about it?"

What are the character in this play talking about when they're talking? There's something about a sales contest; there's a bit about some real estate. There's one extended speech about a particular sale. Once in awhile they mention money, and even pile cash on the table. But those all seem to be small objects in passing. It's all abstract. It's words and phrases used for positioning, daring, drawing lines, crossing them. A disgruntled member of the audience said, "Every two seconds!" and I knew that she was referring to the "f" and "s" words that are used for emphasis, for stalling, for attacks. (A sign at the door warns, "Parental Guidance Advised: There is strong language in this play, a !#$**?!! ton of it!")


In the production at the Alliance Theatre's Hertz Stage in Atlanta, the three scenes of act one take place in Chinese restaurants, and act two takes place in the real estate office. The verbal sparring is relentless. At the end, when all seven actors line up for their bows, it feels like we're applauding athletes at the end of an exhausting, exhilarating exhibition.

Pair of Parodies

I've always enjoyed the challenge of writing parodies, especially when they rhyme. For St. James Marietta's fund raiser "Bad Music for Good Causes," I wrote this couple of parodies:

If I Won the Lottery, with apologies to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe

All I want is a double - wide*
Kitchen freezer with one outside
Hot tub to rest my bod
Oh, if I won the lottery!

High-def flat screen with DVD,
Ford like Dale's, and a red Humvee
With tires as big as me
Oh, if I won the lottery!

I'd be
Hot if I got some implants
And my tummy tucked.
Nose job,
Hair transplants, and then --
Get all of my lypo sucked!

Someone's head resting on my knee
Warm and tender as he can be...
To hunt and fetch for me --
A coondog would be loverly!

*"bod" is intended to rhyme with "outside" and "wide"

My Favorite Episcopal Things with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein

Beautiful flowers and vestments and votives,
Sounds of the bells and of train locomotives.
Incense so sweet that we asphyxiate -
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

"Wonderful Days," Christian Ed., Polk Street Players,
Words that aren't mushy in lyrics and prayers,
Prayer books called "new" since nineteen seventy-eight:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

Sermons succinct with occasional lapses
Vergers who know their rear naves from their apses,
Ushers who don't pass the guilt with the plate:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

When the Vestry
Says our giving
Isn't all we planned,
Our Warden reminds us of all these great things,
And -- POOF! -- there's a hundred grand!

v. 2

Vestments by Ruta, our fashion designer,
Hymns that are happy in keys that are minor,
Keeping our Christmas trees weeks out of date:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

One priest's a jazzman, and one priest's a broker;
One priest does chili, her husband does yoga.
One's shippin' youth all the way to Taize -
Ces quelques choses nous feront admirees!

Bagels and coffee with someone remarking
How they beat Baptists to premium parking.
People who differ and yet tolerate:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

When our Outreach
Needs some uplift
To work as it should,
St. James comes together for music that's bad,
To give to a cause that's good.

Lunch with W: Report from London Columnist

Columnist for the Sunday Times of London Irwin M. Stelzer contributed an item to The Weekly Standard (March 12, 2007) that he calls "Reader of the Free World: A Literary Luncheon with the President." I summarize his article for my own reference. I cringe often when I hear the President stumble through unprepared remarks, yet I've found much to admire in the President when he has been filtered through other sources (Bob Woodward's Bush at War, for example). This article is one of those. I have to suppose that this "filter" is a corrective lens, not rose-colored.

The occasion for the article was a lunch-hour seminar at which the President wanted opinions from experts on some books he has read recently. Stelzer had attended other such gatherings. This time, the guest of honor was Andrew Roberts, author of a sequel to Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples from which I taught history for years in the 80s.

Part of the discussion concerned the use of the terms "good" and "evil" in formulating public policy. Bush argued back when guests suggested that public officials usually must choose among "lesser evils." He said that the choice can be made between evil and good principles.

Some of the discussion concerned Britain's anti-American polls. "Is it due simply to my personality?" he asked. Answer: Yes, plus envy of US power and a preference for Palestinians.

On lessons of history from Mr. Roberts:

• No deadlines for withdrawal. England did it in India, and bloodbath started one minute after the deadline. Bush has been seeking other guides, including a study of France in Algeria, where more Algerians were killed after French withdrawal than before.
  
• Rich powers fall to poorer ones when they can't take the heat. The author states that World War II was "nearly over" before the public was permitted to see a photo of a dead soldier, and he muses that today's coverage is "sapping the West's will."
  
• Intern enemies until the war is over. Example found in Ireland during WWII.

About the pressure in his office: "I just don't feel any." He is confident, says the author, that he is promoting good by his policies, in the long run.

In summary, the author writes:

Here is a man who is comofrtable in his own skin; whose religious faith guides him in his search for the good, without leading him to think he has a private line to God...; who worries less about his "legacy" than about his standing with the Almighty; who is quite well read; and who believes that the President of the United States must be, to use his much-derided coinage, "the decider."

Tchaikovsky as Dramatist

(response to the Metropolitan Opera's production of EUGENE ONEGIN, opera by Tchaikovsky from the verse novel by Pushkin.)

I've seen EUGENE ONEGIN only twice, enough to know its dramatic shape well and its music only vaguely. I know it mostly by its a remarkable dramatic effect. Like tremors, the drama may leave structures standing, but it is felt deeply.

Its plot is minimal, something like this: girl tells boy she loves him; boy cares for nothing and no one; girl rebuffs boy when he realizes too late what he has missed.

The mood is autumnal, highlighted in the Met's abstract design by falling leaves that carpet the stage during act one. Acts two and three take place at two different soirees, represented in each act by a rectangle of straight-backed chairs within which the party-goers dance... though the rectangle is larger and the chairs are more plush in act three. During the preludes to the each scene, the director shows us the boy Onegin, now middle-aged, looking back on the events of his life with regret.

Tchaikovksy expertly focuses us on these people, and makes us care. He leads us into the opera with wistful and slow - moving music. During intermission, the audience who saw the show live via satellite at movie theatres got a glimpse of a rehearsal, when the conductor calls the music "dangerous" because it's so simply constructed -- a single phrase repeated in a sequence of pitches -- that the orchestra must use shadings of tone, dynamics, and emphasis to bring it alive.

Tchaikovsky sets each act with a social group, elevated at each act: peasants working at harvest, then provincial gentry, and finally, high society at a palace.

The action, such as it is, happens quickly. Music and words tell us immediately that the stranger Eugene Onegin "is the one" when Tatiana and we first see him; Onegin's speech destroying her hopes is direct and curt (and, in this production, we see Tatiana slowly crumpling her love letter to him behind her back). In act two, his flirtations drive his best friend to a rash challenge in just a couple of dances, and we believe it. The duel in which Onegin kills his best friend takes one minute or less to accomplish.

Yet Tchaikovsky takes time to make these points of action meaningful. After a fond nurse puts Tatiana to bed, we see Tatiana's long night awake to write a love letter to the man she's just met, and we see the sun rise. We appreciate her courage and her certainty in her feelings. In act two, there's an odd intrusion as a lightweight French singer interrupts the party to sing a banal and fruity lyric to Tatiana. It seems like a mere comic relief, but Tchaikovsky is achieving something dramatic, here: everyone's watching Tatiana, including the man who rejected her, and the words are all about her blessings and beauty, and she's bravely enduring not just one verse, but an encore. It's an effect that takes time, and nothing obviously dramatic is happening, but we feel it. Before the duel, Tchaikovsky takes time for Lensky to remember his happy childhood and happy love while he waits for Onegin to show up. The duel over, Onegin turns away in regret.

At that point, this director skips to Act Three without intermission. Dressers change Onegin's costume in full view during the glorious and grand prelude to the party at the palace. Now it's years later, and Onegin tells the audience that his life has been a bore, traveling and caring for nothing, but always haunted by the fact that he killed his best (only?) friend over a meaningless flirtation. Immediately, Tatiana enters the party. We and Onegin learn how Tatiana has matured into a gracious and wise lady, not by hearing her, but by hearing the adoring guests as she silently greets them in the background. Tchaikovsky gives her husband Prince Gremin a long aria of affectionate appreciation for her.

In all these instances, Tchaikovsky achieves drama by evoking context swiftly, and probing inner action patiently.

I understand that Pushkin's original novel is satirical, and we do see signs of that in the libretto. But instead of laughing at the girl Tatiana for the romance novels that she takes so seriously, or laughing at her brother in law Lensky for his jealousy, we sympathize.

Finally, we all feel Onegin's regret, what might have been if he had been less wrapped up in his own ego.

A Precious Detective: Agatha Christie's Opposite

(Response to novels by Alexander McCall Smith, featuring Precious Ramotswe.)

"Even Agatha Christie, two-dimensional as her writing is, has a worldview," a director of one of her plays told his cast, "and hers is, 'everyone's hiding something bad.'" The mystery novels of Alexander McCall Smith aren't really mysteries, and they're not really novels, and Smith's world view reverses the usual detective novel's: there's always more good to discover in a person.

Smith has now fashioned six books around his character named Precious Ramotswe, founder of Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. About forty years old, "traditionally built," and old-fashioned, "Mma" Ramotswe is the root of the series while characters branch off and grow from book to book. Crime is little more than a pretext for our time spent with the characters. In Smith's latest, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, there's a mysterious intruder who steals trousers from Mma's clothes line, an embezzler from Johannesburg that she's been hired to find -- but these are forgotten for chapters at a time as we get involved in Mma Ramotswe's looming encounter with her Ex, and her secretary's enrollment in dance class, her husband's new apprentice, and the dangerous liaison of the young apprentice who quits.

The central characters are motivated often by a sense of duty and heartfelt gratitude, as they discover "precious" qualities in people whom they've judged by appearances. Smith's loosely tied plots give him room to have his characters ruminate on good old days, on modern manners, on dancing, on the almost-human character of automobile engines, on women's figures, and on tea. I heard the author in an interview say that he thinks of his fiction as "tea-drinking books," to be enjoyed and savored in a relaxed way.

Through these books, I have absorbed a mental impression of Botswana at odds with all the other images I have. Smith, a Scot, lived in Botswana for many years. Is he showing us the Africa he saw, or is it a highly selective vision? Checking the internet, I found Smith's own comment about that:

One or two people at signings usually ask me … am I ignoring the harsh realities of life … We have all become familiar with the images of boy soldiers and hungry children and cattle dying in dried-up river beds. We need to see all this … but we should also bear in mind the magnificent humanity and sheer decency [to be found in Africa]. There are legions of people trying to lead good lives - and doing so - in the face of difficulties which would floor most of us in no time at all ... The world which I try to portray in these books … seems to have resonated with a vast number of people who, I suppose, want to believe that the human spirit can transcend the horrors which confront us.

Smith, quoted in Frank Devine, "The World of Precious Ramotswe" in Quadrant Magazine, October 2003

Devine adds: "[From Botswana's] apparent hopelessness, McCall Smith has conjured a universe of light and cheer, of tranquillity, good manners and comic warmth."

The six Mma Ramotswe novels are:
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Calm Advice for Episcopalians in Opposition

(response to an essay in WEAVINGS: A JOURNAL OF THE CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL LIFE, March/April 2007. The theme of the issue is "Abide in Me.")

Elected to my first year on the Vestry of my Episcopal church, I suddenly find on my plate the ugly conflict(s) over "the gay Bishop." He's not the real problem, of course; he's just the reduction of a long-simmering brew of differences about scriptural interpretation and ecclesial authority.

So I'm getting it from both sides. A friend from another branch of the Church was unable to hide his schaudenfreude when he related a news item that Bishop Alexander seems to be losing a struggle with dissidents over use of church property. Parishioners have taken me aside for whispered pep talks about fighting the "liberalism" in our diocese and in our national church, and others who know me better look to me to voice their understanding that the Church is a body that continues to mature, any changes of outlook being a sign of collective experience and wisdom. I said to one parishioner, "Being Episcopalian means that we believe the Spirit has guided the processes of selecting our leaders through the centuries; and if the Church is leaning away from what we believe, then it's probably time that we should re-examine what we believe (with reference to earlier teachings about race and divorce)."

For self-defense as I wade into this war, and for soldiers on both sides, I recommend an essay, "The Christians are Fighting -- Again" by Robert Corin Morris. He takes the long view -- very long -- starting from the partisanship among Jesus' twelve apostles, and the decision of the early church to accept different practices of Jew and Gentile in the same church.

Far from being a new problem, war within our church is something we've always had, and, Morris writes, "something in us likes it a lot." (He cites a book by Chris Hedges, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING (read reviews), and asserts that war is "our default position.") He tells anecdotes of how Christians have denied each others' faith since the days when Athanasius called a childhood friend "The First-born of Satan" for a nuanced difference in their ways of describing the divinity of Christ.

Morris agrees with all sides that "doctrine matters" as the "common ground of belief and practice" for any group to "hang together." But the agreement doesn't have to be absolute, any more than it was at the Council of Jerusalem, where the early Church drew a line at "the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood" (Acts 15:20).

But Morris presents Jesus himself as the unifying factor beyond doctrine. While some parishioners in my church have derided "warm and fuzzy theology," they'd have to admit that a lot of what Jesus said was to blur the sharp and hard lines of the theology of his day. He reduced the ten commandments to two, he cheerfully broke sabbath laws in the name of kindness, and he makes "love" the defining characteristic of his true disciples. His opponents use doctrine against him, and he always subverts it towards something warm and fuzzy, like humanity, and caring for the poor and the prisoners.

In our present conflict, Morris suggests that we adopt "the Gamaliel Principle." A Jewish leader named Gamaliel spoke in defense of Peter and John, saying that if their new Christian movement is of God, it will last (Acts 5:26-40). Morris concludes the main part of his argument by facing the present controversy directly:

Is it so impossible to imagine part of the church calling gay and lesbian Christians to live according to the same principles of sexual fidelity in consecrated relationships that bind heterosexuals, while other parts of the church demand that homosexuals consecrate themselves to celibacy as the only discipleship option? We don't know the long-term consequences of the "innovative teaching," spiritually or socially, though both sides claim they already know the answer. What if both proponents and opponents prayed the same Gamaliel prayer: "O God, if this is from you, let it flourish; if not, reveal its flaws"?

Finally, Morris suggests that, in the worst case scenario, we could make the best of it by aiming for an "amicable divorce." Some divorced couples, workingout shared responsibilities, find "new, if more distant, relationships." He imagines ways "to recognize that we're still estranged parts of the same family...not able to see eye to eye."

Morris is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Newark, and the founding director of Interweave, "an interfaith adult education center for spirituality, wellness, and the common good in Summit, New Jersey." His books include the Isaiah section of the SPIRITUAL FORMATION BIBLE and the recently published, PROVOCATIVE GRACE: THE CHALLENGE IN JESUS' WORDS. (Link to his page at Amazon.com)

Sondheim's FOLLIES "Encore"

In the early 70s, influential critics at the New York Times panned Stephen Sondheim's first two collaborations with director Harold Prince, COMPANY (1970) and FOLLIES (1971). In spite of those reviews, the musicals garnered much favorable critical attention and Tony Awards. Still, those reviews contributed to a popular conception of Sondheim as "cold," "cerebral," unhummable, and "too clever by half."

This weekend, the paper's head critic Ben Brantley sets the record straight, reviewing a concert staging of FOLLIES in Broadway's "Encore!" series:

The brittle shield of ice that was once widely believed to encase anything Stephen Sondheim wrote continues to melt apace. On the heels of John Doyle’s intense back-to-back revivals of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, this “Follies” definitively tears off the stigma of cerebral chilliness that was attached to it when it opened 35 years ago.
Directed and choreographed with winning sensitivity by Casey Nicholaw, and acted with a blend of complexity and clarity that rarely happens in musicals, the Encores! “Follies” opens a floodgate to a dizzying rush of feeling from the first strains of its overture. That opening music, conducted by Eric Stern, glitters with grandeur, lyricism and an uneasy undercurrent of fragility. It is the sound of beauty with fracture lines, just about to crack.

Another recent article by Gina Bellafonte contains comments about the current revival of COMPANY directed by John Doyle. She, too, corrects earlier failure of perception:

“Company” seems so sophisticated now partly because of its prescience. It opened a few months before the publication of “Play It as It Lays,” Joan Didion’s deadening novel of ... the psychological consequences of a ruptured national morality. “Company” is unquestionably a cheerier affair, however much it resists its own optimism, but no less ambivalent an indictment of the sexual libertinism to which the 1960s gave sanction.

...It has been fashionable to think of “Company” as an endorsement of marriage steeped in resignation and reserve. But the show lacks the dismissiveness that that interpretation implies. This production suggests that a marriage, or a lasting one, anyway, is not about a union of two impassioned souls forged against the world. It is a communal enterprise, its success sustained by the order of social life.

None of this is news to me. FOLLIES has sent shivers up and down my spine since the first time I heard a scratchy LP of it, and finally seeing it on Broadway in 2002 (?)
showed me even more than I'd expected. I've seen several productions of COMPANY, and I played "David" in a production at Duke University in 1979, but it wasn't until I saw a couple of productions in one year that it deeply moved me: one production on a small "mod" set of trapdoors and platforms reminiscent of "Laugh-In" at Actors Express, Atlanta, and the wonderful big production (directed by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick) at the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration in the summer of 2002.

Following that celebration, Ben Brantley wrote similar thoughts: "After seeing the six musicals in this series, I began to think that Mr. Sondheim may be the most emotional composer in the history of musicals." He points out that earlier productions hadn't the "clarity" of the later ones.

Directors and actors may be better at realizing what Sondheim and his collaborators were doing. Possibly, without the pressure of creating a new thing, later directors have been able to focus their productions more acutely.