An Especially Good Friday

Not even sky-high pollen counts could keep this Episcopalian away from Good Friday services.  St. James', Marietta, GA did it right:  nave stripped of candles, vestments, and cushions; silent prayers and somber readings from Isaiah and John; slow procession with a human-sized cross during recitation of the reproaches; chanting of tunes, from ancient tones to the rich spiritual that asks "Were you there?" with the answer implied: "It causes me to tremble."  We left in darkness, our tower bell tolling thirty three times for Jesus.


Yet every Good Friday for me is a return to what I experienced at St. James' in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1982.   [Photo; Good Friday, St. James' Jackson] To borrow an image from an Anglican novel I read at the time, Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels, the Episcopal church "is not a river to be fished, it's an ocean in which to bathe, and give [ourselves] up to the tides and currents" (Davies 62).

Davies' character was talking about a university education, but I can identify with the idea of full immersion Episcopalianism.  That's what I experienced for the first time that Good Friday.

Since Palm Sunday, I'd been at church nearly every day for a week by the time Good Friday came around. Singing in the choir, I was stunned to silence by our rector Charles Kiblinger's tight-lipped efficiency stripping the altar at the end of the Maundy Thursday service.  For the next day's noon service, two upper-middle-aged tenors McCarrell Ayers and Joe Powell, Sr. took turns singing the words of the Lord in Vittoria's setting of the Reproaches:

I did open the sea before thee: and thou has opened my side with a spear.... I did give thee to drink the water of life from the rock: and thou has given me to drink but gall and vinegar....  I did raise thee on high with great power: and thou has hanged me upon the gibbet of the Cross.

We sang the refrain, "O My people, what have I done unto thee?  Or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me," and, in Greek, "have mercy on us." I remember the soloists' distinctive voices to this day, with the emotion of that Renaissance piece.

Joe and his wife Linda invited me after the service to a restaurant at "The Quarter," several cuts above the usual fast food I could afford in those days early in my teaching career.  While we laughed and had serious conversation with our wine, outside were torrential rain, black sky, and thunder that shook the skylight.  I'd taught the Powells' daughter Emily, and I sang with Joe in choir; but my parents were hundreds of miles away, and the Powells took care of me for years.  Joe got me involved in Education for Ministry, a four-year theology extension program of The University of the South; Linda broadened my idea of "religious" literature to include Davies, Updike, and agnostic Iris Murdoch.  Linda covered her refrigerator with cartoons and quips, including one to the effect that true evangelism is to live one's life in such a way that anyone seeing you must believe in miracles.  Linda's own family wrote about her better than I could do in their tribute after her death in 2013:

She will be remembered for her formidable intellect, wit, and devotion. She lived her faith by being part of the daily life of so many people over the course of her 80 years, making each of those lives richer and better. Friends will miss a seat at her table with a full pot of tea, a view of the tranquil setting of her home she tended so lovingly, and her, perched eagerly waiting to listen with care and good counsel. (See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/clarionledger)

Neither Joe nor Linda, nor the rector, nor anyone else I knew well at St. James' had been "cradle Episcopalians."  This was a peculiarity of the church in Jackson, where Bishop Duncan Grey Sr. had made a stand against racial segregation long before the rest of the state was forced to fall in line.  Joe and Linda, along with my principal Dorothy Kitchings, had lent their names to a public letter against segregation; for their stand, Joe and Linda had literally been kicked down the stairs of their Methodist church. 

The Powells, always challenging but never judgmental, showed me first, and best, that being religious didn't have to do with correct belief.

Now, thirty-four years later, the Episcopal church is for me a presence the way ocean is for a coastal town.  No, I don't go "fishing" for particular doctrines or beliefs.  Rather, the church envelops my life with music grown familiar over decades, stories continued day by day across the years, beliefs enacted in rituals week-by-week, liturgical seasons, fiction and essays growing out of the tradition, and, always present in memory as an ocean's waves are present in sound, the Powells' hospitality.  

Sources

Davies, Robertson.  The Rebel Angels.  New York: Viking Press, 1981.  See my other blogposts about Robertson Davies' works.

St. James' Episcopal Church. Facebook page. 

Robertson Davies' "What's Bred in the Bone" Still Works Alchemy

Robertson Davies said that he wrote his novel What's Bred in the Bone to explore questions raised by a true crime, when some Vermeer masterpieces turned out to be the work of a clever faker.

Completing an apprenticeship to a restorer of ancient paintings, Davies' fictional forger Arthur Cornish paints an original triptych in 16th-century manner, marrying all the opposing forces of his life story with his depiction of "The Marriage at Cana." Art experts, stumped by this apparently ancient painting in original style, call its anonymous artist "the Alchemical Master." How close they are to the truth, for Cornish has melded much that was sad and painful into something beautiful, lead into gold.

Davies poses an interesting question through a different art forger. When critics who had loved the forgery turn on him and declare the work worthless, the forger asks, "What delighted you? The magic of a great name? The magic of the past?  Or was it the picture before your eyes?" (353)   Beyond the aesthetic question, there's an interesting religious and psychological angle on the story, that Cornish has drawn on mythologies of the past (alchemy, Christian images) to construct a "personal myth" from the elements of his own life.

Decades after reading the book, I remember the motto inscribed on a banner across the top of this painting: Thou hast saved the good wine for now. Davies himself had his sweetest successes at the end of his career. Looking at retirement, now, I'm clinging to that idea. See also a reflection I wrote on the same theme, You have kept the good wine till now (02/2015).

Thirty years after I first read Cornish's story, the wonder of the novel What's Bred in the Bone still is this imaginary painting, focus of all Robertson Davies' far-flung, even outrageous, plot lines.  Now, as then, I'm fascinated by the way that Davies collected notes about anything that struck his fancy, composing novels in triptychs when the note cards reached a critical mass. As it happens, on this day when I'm thinking how such a confluence of ideas is itself such a great pleasure and uplifter of spirits, I've experienced a confluence of stories through the modern medium of network radio.                           

First, I heard striking stories on the podcast Snap Judgement, episode 706 "Man in the Mirror."  A soprano begins an audio diary at the start of hormone treatments for gender-reassignment, and the voice we first hear singing "Can you hear me?"  deepens through a rough patch of huskiness and voice breaks, until we have a satisfying, lovely duet of the woman's voice and the man's, an octave apart.   

Then, a Brooklyn storyteller sets a different scene:  one "Joe" in his flannel and workboots drinking Bud at 10 a.m., one self-satisfied college-educated storyteller working the bar in her family's establishment, and a hapless Chinese food delivery man who overcharges her; she cringes when "Joe" gets involved, only to hear him speak calmly, slowly, in Chinese.  The story flips her expectations (and ours).  

The program ended with a fiction about a virtual orphan caring for her younger sisters at the time of the London Blitz, the stained glass window placed in their care by the local church, and the apparition of a figure from that window, a guardian Man of Glass. 

The next program brought us actor/sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay telling about the subject of his new historical book, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living.  A little over twenty-four inches tall, born without hands or feet, this late 17th century polymath performed skillful tricks on stage and produced a self portrait comprised of Psalms and the Lord's Prayer in tiny calligraphy, etched backwards for a printing press.  

Both a 16th century dwarf and a picture made from tiny calligraphic lines figure in Davies' story of Francis Cornish.  As a young friend of the small town's mortician, Cornish had sketched the body of a suicide, the town's much-humiliated dwarf.  In a kind of artistic alchemy, he elevates that pathetic man to status of an icon as model for a faux-Renaissance portrait of a court jester.  Cornish also composes a line drawing of the Crucifixion from calligraphic lines from a Gospel passion narrative.

Can I, like Robertson Davies, pull all these strands into a single statement?  Something about the wonder of life might do, or what lies under the surface of our perceptions.  Davies' own idea about alchemy seems to fit all the stories, but, then again, also describes what I believe God to be doing in our world since the earliest days of Scripture.

I'm satisfied, for now, to record the stories for possible use, later. 

Davies, Robertson.  What's Bred in the Bone.  New York:  Elizabeth Sifton Books, Viking, 1985.

Stefon Harris and Sonic Creed: Jazz Metaphor

From the stage of Atlanta's Spivey Hall last night, Stefon Harris told us "I have to believe in what I'm doing to let it take me away from my wife and son," and that's why he calls his band Sonic Creed.   He'd flown wife and son from Newark for the weekend, to be with Daddy and to celebrate the boy's seventh birthday.  That was by no means the only moment of "awww" in the concert.

Number by number, with a few words between pieces, Harris developed a metaphorical view of what we were seeing. Generous introductions of each musician were part of his message:  Musicians of different generations and backgrounds "problem-solved" every second to redeem "failures" on the fly.  The band included Mike Moreno on guitar, James Francies on piano, Joshua Crumbly on bass, and Jonathan Pinson on drums.

We watched the process of problem-solving as he picked up his mallets at the vibraphone to develop a long improvisation from three notes that we shouted out to him (F, C, Bb).  From those three notes, he launched music pieces in waves, sometimes with a "ha!" or a "huh?!"  Eventually, his band mates got in on the act, and the song morphed into a raucous arrangement of the 1920s standard "Bye Bye Blackbird."

Aside from the beauty of tone that Harris draws from tapping, slamming, and massaging the keys of the vibraphone, Harris's red-topped mallets gave us a way to see how he developed patterns up and down the keyboard.

For an encore, he brought sensitivity and joy to a standard that he says he just learned last year, "I Fall in Love Too Easily," ending on a soft slide of the mallet from one tone to the next, a vibraphone sigh.  Ah!

Road Trip to Road Show

Road Show

When the cast recording of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's musical Road Show became available, I wrote extensively about its improvement on Bounce, an earlier version of the show that I'd seen in Chicago.  See my reflection here.

Having now seen a production directed by Gary Griffin set in a smokey saloon at Washington / Arlington's Signature Theatre, I can say that the show is a delight from beginning almost to the end.

One pleasure is just what we expect from the Sondheim brand, the polished rhymes, always pointing up something funny, something heartbreaking, something true.  But Sondheim and his collaborators "rhyme" in ways beyond words. At any given moment, a line of dialogue or song resonates with something that we perceive later, and Gary Griffin's staging emphasizes parallels between one decisive moment and another.  There's pleasure simply in perceiving the ingenuity behind the seamless integration of elements.  That was true of Bounce, as well.  

But Road Show gets at the heart, too. The very first song builds to a strong emotional confrontation.  as the ensemble pronounces snide judgement on Addison Mizner's life at the moment of his death: "Waste" of Addison's talent, waste of "the one that [he] loved."  As the Mizner brothers, Josh Lamon (Addison) and Noah Racey (Wilson Mizner), set up the theme of "Brotherly Love" in a charming, believable sung dialogue about a moment when Willy took care of Addie.  Racey made "Wilson" so charming that he seduces us with his personal credo in a song called "The Game," never to settle for what one has but to stake everything on the turn of the next card.  

Much of the joy in this show comes from sharing in Addison's discoveries, first of art, then of love.  These are expressed through music, dialogue, and staging.  The ensemble wordlessly encourages him to envision the kind of wildly eclectic architecture that could encompass a stage full of souvenirs from his failed ventures abroad.  He finds a kindred spirit in young Hollis Bessemer (Matthew Schleigh), and there's joy in the song "You" as admiration and love for each other builds with their business of building mansions for millionaires at Palm Beach.  (Weidman's invention stands out, here, in Addie's exuberantly wacky history behind his eclectic creation, along these lines: "Then the Moors invaded and added a breakfast nook by the pool....")  The song "Best Thing that Ever Happened" is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is Sondheim's brazen use of just one tone, one rhythmic pattern, and lyrical variations on the title to take the characters through a range of thoughts and feelings.  It builds to a tender moment, very satisfying.  When Hollis joins with Wilson to tempt Addison to give up all they've achieved for an outrageous new venture, "Addison City," we're caught up in the excitement.  

What follows is inevitable, given the true life story of the Mizner brothers, and the pattern set up from the start. It's also a downer.   Sondheim and Weidman couldn't avoid the business fiasco at Boca Raton, but I did feel bafflement at the sudden turn in Addison's relationship with Hollis. I could write an essay to justify it, but nothing about it felt right. 

Road Trip
I'm not big on traveling anymore, but I'm glad I made this exception.  I've been to Washington many times, usually with a busload of middle schoolers, ever since I myself was in 7th grade.  This time, friend Susan and I Ubered past the monuments and toured instead a place that felt like home to us, the NPR national headquarters.  We even exchanged words with critic Bob Mondello about Road Show.  We saw reporter Melissa Block in her office, the "tiny desk" of the eponymous concerts, and the cubicles where reporters prepare those news updates every hour.  

We had a simple lunch at a vast French bistro, empty but for a hundred white-clothed tables, an attentive staff, and us.  We decided it must be a front for the CIA.  At the National Portrait Gallery, we paid homage to old friends whom we know through their words more than through images.

We also ate a lot of fast food.   I was glad to get back to the routine.

[First Photo: Stefan Alexander Kempski (Ensemble), Angela Miller (Ensemble), Noah Racey (Wilson Mizner), Jacob Kidder (Pianist), Bobby Smith (Ensemble), Matthew Schleigh (Ensemble) and Erin Driscoll (Ensemble) in Road Show at Signature Theatre. Photo by Margot Schulman.]

 
[Second Photo: Matthew Schleigh (Hollis Bessemer) and Josh Lamon (Addison Mizner) in ROAD SHOW at Signature Theatre. Photo by Margot Schulman.] 

[Third photo: Yours truly with Henry James, National Portrait Gallery.]

[Fourth photo:  Friend Susan and yours truly in North Carolina, birthplace of Hardee's.]

Deep Parody: Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar

Here's a cheesy metaphor for the wonderful film  Hail Caesar:  It's like lasagna, layer on layer of parodies, personalities, and cultural history, all warmed with faith, hope, and charity melted on top.

Part of the pleasure lies in seeing the layers.  We can imagine Joel and Ethan Coen with buds brainstorming around a table.  So, it's Hollywood, 1951:  What was in the zeitgeist, then?  Gene Kelly musicals, H-Bomb, Esther Williams water ballets, pastel-colored kitchen dramas, Gene Autrey's singing cowboy films, films noir, Red Scare, Biblical epics in Technicolor, actors with fruity accents in highbrow scripts, theologians who were household names, and the H-Bomb.  What if, they must have laughed their heads off, asking,  What if Communists kidnapped the Charlton Heston conservative and brainwashed him?  What if a Priest, a Preacher, an Orthodox Patriarch, and a Rabbi walk into a movie studio?  What if the studio head decides to fill the role of blase blueblood in a highbrow drama with a drawling musical cowboy?  

Holding all these elements together is studio executive "Eddie Mannix," played by Josh Brolin.  He's like the hard-boiled detective with the pure heart.  His unstinting efforts to contain crises bubbling up among the stars of a half-dozen films constitute the action of the movie.  But the story is just one simple choice he has to make, put to him at a lovingly recreated tiki bar by a rep from Lockheed:  Will Mannix take a job that will allow him time to see his wife and children, doing something "serious" for mankind?  "Seriousness" is signified by a photo of an H-Bomb blasting the Bikini Islands to smithereens.  Or will he continue to give heart, soul, and all his days and nights to the frivolous Hollywood film industry, already in decline as TV rises?

For every temptation to join the military-industrial complex,  there's a scene in a confessional booth with an exhausted Priest.  My friend Susan and I have puzzled over the way religious faith and socio-polical idealism emerge as themes in the movie.  The true believers are all comical, and the Biblical epic is ridiculous. Yet Brolin's character takes his faith seriously, the communist stooges make sacrifice for their cause, and we're led to see a speech about "faith" as a sincere moment in the epic (even while we snicker at the "tasteful" presentation of Jesus on the cross).  We don't conclude with some writers that this is some kind of statement about religion, except in the broadest sense of What Really Matters in Life, and that turns out not to be building H-Bombs.


The long-standing rap on the Coens is that they know everything about movies, and nothing about real life.   I feared this movie would leave a sour taste like the last of theirs I saw, another Hollywood parody called Barton Fink.  Instead, Hail, Caesar is relentlessly joyous, exuberant, and sweet.

Carol's Unpredictable Moments

For all the sumptuous beauty of the settings and costumes of expensive 1951 hotels and bars, my favorite scene in Carol is set among dour suits at a table in a law office.  

Directed by Todd Haynes, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt, much of the story follows a familiar pattern. 
We've seen Cate Blanchett's "Carol" of the upper-echelon seduce Rooney Mara's young "Therese" from her Bohemian life, and conflict when the husband stumbles on his wife with the younger woman. Once the story gets going, it all seems pretty inevitable.  We guess that some kind of drastic, punishing repercussion will follow the consummation of their relationship.

But as my friend Susan said, "When they sat down with the lawyers to argue over custody of the daughter, I had no idea what was going to happen." The eloquence and simplicity of "Carol's" plea is unexpected and memorable.  "It's going to get ugly," Carol warns, "and we're not ugly people."

I was intrigued by another scene that seemed to serve no purpose in the film. Briefly, we see Therese with pals in a theatre's projection room, all watching Sunset Boulevard.  The scene has no bearing on plot or character development, leaving me to wonder if we're seeing a clue to the director's thinking: does he see his film as analogous to the earlier one?  Is "Carol" a predatory older woman, like "Norma Desmond?"  Commenting on the film, Therese's friend is keeping score of times when the dialogue covers up what the characters really think. Is this a sort of directorial watermark, highlighting for us the Pinter-esque brevity and obliqueness of the dialogue?

A Look Back through Forward Day by Day May-July 2015

[Picture: Philip and the Ethiopian. see July2]

The periodical pamphlet Forward Day by Day (www.forwardmovement.org) has been a part of my morning routine for decades, more than ever these past few years, giving us a short reflection on Scripture from the daily readings assigned in the Book of Common Prayer. A different author handles each month.  From all the good reminders, a few readings strike me for aptness or unusual insight, and those I'll summarize below.

May 1, 2015, John 14:13 I will do whatever you ask in my name. The commentator for May, Richard H. Schmidt, points out that what's done "in a person's name" is done as that person's agent; so, this isn't a promise that we can use God's name as a magical incantation. Rather, we're promised whatever we ask when doing God's work.  Forget about praying for touchdowns.

May 12, Deut. 8:17 Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth."  "The self-made man is a spiritually dangerous myth, as is the myth of the self-made country... We are blessed ... to serve as divine agents of the world" who are called to do three things: give, give, give.

May 13. Luke 12:22ff Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? What we worry about is not so important; helping someone else takes our minds off worry; we can trust a God who "has a long history of bringing good out of evil, victory out of defeat...."

May 18-19. Luke 9:62 No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.  Churches that look backward to see if they have more people, more money, are looking at the wrong things, instead of asking, "How are you expressing your faith in your community?  Are you focused on others or on yourselves?... Do people experience joy when they worship with you?"  In personal life, the author gives me advice I need badly: "It does little good to go back and relive the times we've been attacked."  I like to do that, to imagine telling off so-and-so.  My heart rate goes up, and I get vindictive.  Bad idea!

May 21. Luke 10:29 And who is my neighbor? In the Good Samaritan story, both of the main characters are Jesus.

July 2. Acts 8:27 So he got up and went.  At the urging of an angel, Philip leaves town, evangelizes an Ethiopian eunuch -- high in worldly status, anathema to Jews -- and gets teleported.  The commentator for July, Penny Nash, concludes, "Obedience, it seems, leads to bravery...."  

July 3. Acts 9:5  I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.  Having built his reputation on opposition to Jesus, Paul falls flat on his face before Him.  Nash writes, "Paul and I have had some serious fights...[but] Paul and I find solidarity in our most humiliating moments."  She writes, "I know what it's like to feel like everything I'd... been righteously indignant and zealous over is ultimately harmful...."  I can second that emotion.

July 10. Acts 10:48. He ordered them to be baptized.  Peter's baptism of gentiles "would have the liturgical wonks, formation directors, the altar guild, and the rector squirming...." Rules, writes Nash, "protect us, make us feel good, and keep our dividing lines nice and tidy."  But Peter "refuses to leave [the crowd] hungry and thirsty and broken.  And thanks be to God for that."

July 13. For Nash, reading Mark's gospel is like listening to seventh graders. "The stories are short on detail, but tall on drama.  Everyone, everywhere, all of the people -- Mark speaks to us with such ardent and terse language.  I can almost hear my students telling me about something amazing that can't wait one more minute."  So we should be telling our good news "to everyone everywhere ... like right now." 

July 20. 1 Samuel 24:13 My hand shall not be against you.  "Saul mistakes David's meekness, his mercy and kindness, for weakness.... A thousand years later, Jesus, understanding the profound and life-changing energy of the meek, proclaims they will inherit the earth."  But "meekness, like grace, is hard to define."  Nash says it's not running up the score, "and it's not sitting in the dirt crying when you've lost by over a hundred points."  It's doing your best and "not slinking off to pack up your entire desk every time someone gives you a bit of constructive criticism."  Good message for me and for my students.

Luis, Rest in Peace

A year ago, I wrote "Trying to Catch My Old Dog Luis," guessing that the day was coming soon when he would stop being the happy, grateful little dog he's always been since at least 2002, and I would have the vet put him to sleep.   I included many photos from our life together.

More recently, I wrote about the soul or anima of an animal, with descriptions of how desires and pleasures animate my younger dog Mia.   But I was thinking how tired Luis's anima had grown.  (See "Mia's Anima, A Dog's Soul.")


This holiday, even as I write this, Luis has often wandered listlessly, moaning, pausing at the waterdish and not drinking, turning away from food, pausing at the door, but not staying to go out.  Even when I pet him, though he will reach up and lick me once, or lean his face into my palm, he seems distracted and a little anxious -- I suppose because of aches that the pain medicine hasn't helped.
  
It's time.  Here are some recent pictures that show what a happy, contented, affectionate dog he can still be, at moments ever fewer and farther between.

PS - Thank you to friends Susan and Suzanne who went with me to the vet.  They have each cared for Luis over the years.  While we waited, he cycled among the three of us for affection everywhere he turned. 

Stoppard's The Hard Problem: Dramatizing Thought

[Photo: Original production at London's National Theatre, with Damien Molony and Olivi Vinall, from theGuardian.com]

Tom Stoppard early in his career claimed to write plays because they provide a respectable forum to argue with himself.  He argues in his latest script The Hard Problem that both altruism and consciousness itself can be explained by evolutionary biology. Or not.  Though Stoppard argues the heck out of both sides, I'm not sure who wins.

But, reading the script, I noted with pleasure how Stoppard found dramatic situations to fit the thoughts. In drama class, I urge my kids to find ways to do what Stoppard does so well, to make thoughts visible. Like rhyme in essays by Pope and Auden, patterns of images can substitute for developments of substance, and, besides, they are a pleasure in themselves.

For example, there's a visual motif of kneeling in prayer.  We see the protagonist Hilary kneeling at her bed (8).  It's a sign of her belief, her hope, and also her guilt for something revealed shortly after.  The image of kneeling at prayer is repeated (46), then echoed in a scene at a Venice hotel room, where the concluding stage direction reads, "He [Spike, her materialist friend] pauses to listen, kneeling in the light from the minibar" (53). Her final prayer is just "Thank you," spoken aloud, to no one (72).  


The image of mother-and-child works into the fabric of the play's rhetoric and plotline.  Hilary alludes to the bereaved mother who breast-feeds a starving man in The Grapes of Wrath (6), and Hilary's debate partner Spike renames Raphael's Madonna and Child  as "Woman Maximizing Gene Survival" (13).  Spike says the universe is "no baby, just bathwater" (10), not bothering to reiterate for Hilary, or for Stoppard's audience, the whole argument behind the allusion. (Later, Hilary says there is nothing under science to explain the lowly gene's conviction that "life has a value" so "it's tortoises all the way down," oblique allusion to more than one myth.)   In all this banter about motherhood, Hilary inexplicably begins to cry (15).  We soon learn that she gave up her baby Catherine to adoption.  By coincidence, her wealthy employer has an adopted daughter of the same age and name, who first appears on stage asking her father, "What's 'coincidence?'" (26).

Another kind of repeated "image" is that of the psychological simulations or "problems" that deal with altruism.  First, there's discussion of a classic psychology simulation, "the Prisoner's Dilemma." Stoppard assumes we know it.  Later, as I guessed he would do, Stoppard makes the hypothetical dilemma into action on stage, when the protagonist Hilary is offered the chance to evade consequences of her collaborator's malfeasance (70).  Hilary also alludes to a psychological study called "the custody problem," for which subjects decide who should get custody of a child if one parent is average but dependable while the other is wealthy but erratic (37), the very situation we see.

Alongside the argument about the brain as a mechanism that either does or does not "cause" consciousness, we have analogs represented by characters in the play.  Market analyst Amal sees traders operating as one self-interested "mind," predictable by computer models, except when the market acts "stupid" (33, 68).  Hilary's nemesis Spike writes a paper about hormones affecting risk-taking behavior among gamblers and stock traders (56).

I enjoyed the play from start to finish, feeling sympathy for Hilary, and amusement at dialogue.  Variety's critic Matt Trueman was less amused seeing the original production at the National Theatre of London, but his analysis can't be faulted:

There’s no denying the richness of these ideas, jostling up to one another in myriad ways, but that’s the measure of good thinking, not good theater.   In a play that invokes emotion throughout, emotion is still hard to come by. Stoppard’s characters aren’t people, so much as opposing viewpoints with jobs and characteristics attached. (1/29/2015)

Trueman points to another theme in the play that I missed, how all of these experimenter / theorists  to some extent allow bias to determine their results, especially by discounting the "outliers" in the data.  In his view, Stoppard's shaping the story to fit the thought is tantamount to twisting the data to suit one's predisposition.

Still, Stoppard provides his actors with great text to say and lots of subtext to play. An old friend catches up with Hilary, and hears about the adoption. "So everything turned out all right. I'm sorry" (20).  A lot of perception and feeling happen between "all right" and "sorry."   I love the observation (concerning mice brains) "It's only amazing, not counter-intuitive": score for the materialists (36).

The end of the play is silent business of packing up personal items.  Is this emotionally satisfying?  Is it somehow a solution to the problem?  I'm puzzled. I may have to see it to understand Stoppard's thought.

(Read a more general reflection on Stoppard's work, "The Invention of Stoppard.")

The Big Short: How to Turn Misery to Comedy

By slicing different kinds of leftover fish, a chef can make a seafood stew more appealing to diners than three-day old halibut.

By slicing and bundling toxic subprime mortgages with more dependable kinds, mortgage lenders before 2007 turned junk loans into gold-plated junk that bedazzled big-name investors world wide.  The guys who first recognized the fraud behind that alchemy are the subject of The Big Short, a film directed by Adam McKay, based on Michael Lewis's book.

By slicing up the arcane technical details, human malfeasance and misery of the housing collapse and mixing in elements of buddy movies, mockumentary, and social satires like Network, McKay and his creative team have turned a grim and potentially dry subject into a sharp-edged comedy that keeps us alert and involved, laughing and sometimes crying.

So The Big Short's form follows its content.   Like playwright Tom Stoppard, McKay flies off on tangents to make sure we get the subject from different angles.  We get dictionary definitions, witty epigrams, a straightforward lecture from a super-model in bubble bath, and a demo of sub-prime "CDO's" with that celebrity chef's fish stew.  Characters make snarky asides to the audience during dramatic scenes.  A stripper writhing and caressing herself comes to the realization that her loan-fueled investments in five houses might be risky.

In an interview on Atlanta's local NPR station WABE, author Michael Lewis spoke with awe and appreciation of the lead actors Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, and Ryan Gosling.  He said that they were professional, devoted craftsmen, meeting him and the characters they portray, putting their time and whole minds into mastering the financial background to their characters' stories.

With all the laughter, the moments that stick out most were moments that brought characters to the point of dismay and pain:

• Ryan Gosling's character stuns Steve Carrell and his cohort with the observation, "You guys think of yourselves as cynical, but you still trust that the system is basically fair."
• The door opens to a McMansion in a deserted suburban development to reveal a big bruiser with tattoos, who seems threatening at first, but vulnerable and broken when he learns on-camera that his rent checks have gone to a landlord delinquent on mortgage payments: hugging his little boy, he wonders what he'll do if his family is evicted.  This makes an impression, and sets up a heart-stopping moment later when we see the father and mother trying to hold their family together living in their car.
• A rep at Standard and Poor's apologizes for having to wear those flimsy sunglasses that optometrists provide, an odd and distracting detail, until the characters' questions make her reveal the truth: that her company doesn't dare give an honest rating to these junk products.  When she takes that clumsy visor off, her eyes express more than her words.
• Christian Bale is totally convincing as the obsessive fund manager with a glass eye and the insight to see the coming financial meltdown before anyone else.  He's "pent up" in every sense of the phrase, guarded in emotions, holed up in his glassed office, often playing heavy metal music on speakers or earbuds to shut out the world.  As his character gambles with millions to make billions, all of his associates abandon him.  It's harrowing to watch him play drums in a sealed-off room at his home, releasing his pent-up feeling, but bringing no comfort.  
• Steve Carrell's character "Mark Baum" comes across at first as the world's most egocentric jerk, but we come to appreciate what drives him.  It's not ego, but guilt.  His catharsis -- seated with his long-suffering wife -- brings sympathy from us.
• "Mark Baum" has a couple more epiphanies that hit the audience hard.  One occurs at interview with a smug billionaire financier at dinner in Las Vegas, watched at the next table by Ryan Gosling and friends.  We get a play-by-play on what Baum is feeling, and a freezed frame at the precise moment that Baum realizes that the world's economy could collapse, and one-second flashes of scenes from the actual financial Armageddon.
• Another epiphany happens when, suspicious, Baum asks his partners why two cocky young mortgage brokers freely confess their unethical loans to "Ninjas" ("No Income, No Job") and poor immigrants.  The answer is a kick in the gut:  "They're not confessing; they're bragging."
• Two other characters on the periphery of the main story are their own buddy-picture, which might be called their "excellent financial adventure."  With their mentor, a disenchanted Wall Street Banker played by Brad Pitt, they pull off the deal that will make them rich, and they do their end-zone celebratory dance.  Pitt's character stops them, conjuring up the misery that this financial meltdown will cause.  It hits them, and us, hard.

On a totally personal note, I recognized some of these events from my own experience with the housing bubble.  A house that my mom bought for an investment of $87K in 1990 sold to me for $103K in 1999.  There were scads of forms to fill out, guarantees of income, inspections, repairs required, a coupon book for making monthly payments, etc., etc., etc.

But around 2002, acting on a whim, I stepped into the show room of a mortgage lender to look into refinance.  It was wall-to-wall atmospherics, airy, cobalt blue, animated video presentation at the entrance, and, behind glass partitions, sleek uncluttered tables with padded chairs.  Attractive young women and men roaming the room nabbed me.  I signed a few papers and walked out an hour later with over $103,000 and no obligation to pay back anything at all before a huge balloon payment due some years later.

It felt too good to be true, and I sensed that I had fallen into a trap.  I resolved to get out of this agreement a.s.a.p.  I paid off my old mortgage, fixed up the house with money saved by skipping monthly payments, sold the house for $136K, got rid of that other loan, and bought my present home with a conventional fixed-rate mortgage for $165.  Just before the bubble burst three years later, it was appraised near $200K; its value fell to $145K before the rebound.

In an epilogue, the movie warns us that it's all happening again. with CDO's (old halibut) under a new name, and skyrocketing values.  (My own house is up to $190K again).  Oh, yes:  the seer played by Christian Bale, the one who foresaw the coming collapse in supposedly secure market, is now invested solely in water.

Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy

[Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Vincent Harding, foreword.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.  First published, 1949.]

Howard Thurman preached, taught, wrote poetry, and spoke as elder statesman of the Black Civil Rights movement from the middle of the last century.  But how does he earn the title of "prophet" bestowed in passing by the author of the foreword to Jesus and the Disinherited (viii)?

To appreciate Howard Thurman's prophetic vision, substitute "White America" for "Rome" and "the Black American" for "Jew" in the first chapter of his book, first published in 1949.  In his stark outline of the Jews' situation in first-century Palestine, Thurman implies a vision of his own time and of what was soon to come.

For a first-century Jew, Thurman writes, "Rome was the enemy, Rome symbolized total frustration; Rome was the great barrier to peace of mind.  And Rome was everywhere" (12).  A Jew could respond only two ways:

1. Nonresistance, effected in two ways: 
   (a) more or less grudging compliance (e.g., Herod and Sadducees) along with hypocrisy and "strategic loss of self-respect" (13), or it meant 
   (b) strict self-isolation (e.g., Pharisees) along with bitter hatred and fear of any disturbance to the status quo that might bring down the wrath of Rome (14).   
2. Resistance, effected in two ways:
   (a) guerrilla tactics, futility, fanaticism (as the Zealots of Jesus' own band) and danger to the community (16). 
   (b) The option proclaimed and exemplified by Jesus.

In the book's next three chapters "Fear," "Deception," and "Hate," Thurman considers three "hounds of hell" that do internal, spiritual damage to those who choose compliance, isolation, and violent resistance over the way of Jesus. Thurman writes as if with foreknowledge of those Black clergymen and white politicians who attacked King for moving "too fast" to bring change, of those isolationist Black muslims and Back-to-Africa movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the armed Black Panther party. This isn't supernatural prophecy, but just what the Episcopal Church teaches as "theological reflection," drawing on illustrations from scripture, cultural artifacts of history and literature, and from personal experience.


In a final chapter called "Love," Thurman expounds upon the preferred option, what Gandhi called satyagraha, and King would translate as "love force."  We are told to love our enemies, Thurman writes, but we apply this only to personal enemies, the easiest kind of enemy to forgive (82).  The command doesn't seem to apply to two other categories of enemy, because they are thought to be beyond our capacity to forgive.  One is the Enemy (the "Romans"), and the other is the Collaborator with the Enemy, such as the tax collectors in the days of Jesus, so contemptible that one was insulated from having to "love" them (83).

But as Thurman points out, Jesus heals the slave of the Roman centurion, and takes a tax collector to be among his chosen twelve.  For African Americans to forgive and love their white oppressors, Thurman admitted, would take some "unscrambling," such as occurs when blacks and whites work together during a flood and status is momentarily set aside, for example; or, it could happen during worship (88).  One thinks of years later when the experience of worship with white men changed even the firebrand Malcolm X. ("Will you [now] shake hands with a white man?" asked a motorist who recognized X at a stop light, soon after the publicized return from Mecca.  "I'll shake hands with a man," X replied, smiling.)

Within his elegant outline, Thurman expresses incidental insights that caught me and my friends in the Education for Ministry program by surprise.  For Thurman, whose grandmother rejected Paul's letters as her plantation owner's scriptures of choice to justify slavery, Paul's deference to Roman authority was the understandable blind spot of a man born into privilege (22), though his remarks "bore bitter fruit" throughout the remainder of history.  About fear, Thurman reminds us violence is implied even within the confines of a pleasant-seeming segregated neighborhood, where people live inhibited by fear without ever having to come into personal contact with an individual of the dominant class (31). Jesus not only preaches against fear, but lives as though there are worse things than death for a child of God:

One of the practical results following this new orientation is the ability to make an objective, detached appraisal of other people, particularly one's antagonists.  Such an appraisal protects one from inaccurate and exaggerated estimations of another person's significance. (41)

About deception, Thurman tells how we may accept some kinds of dishonesty to survive subjugation, but he cautions against the corrosive effects of dishonesty, describing the downhill slide of Macbeth from one lie to the next into madness and misery (55).  Citing Gandhi, Thurman asserts that we must have "confidence that the effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as the oppressed"(60).  He concludes:

If the position of ascendancy is not acknowledged tacitly and actively by those over whom the ascendancy is exercised, then it falls flat.  [If deferential hypocrisy] is supplanted by a simple sincerity and genuineness, then it follows that advantage due to the accident of birth or position is reduced to zero.  Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings. (63)

 (I wonder, however, how to apply this analysis to the current eyewitness video of Sandra Bland, a black woman, whose assumption of equality seems to enrage the white male officer who pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change in Texas this past year.  He arrested her; two days later, she was found hanging in her cell, cause given as suicide.)

About hatred, Thurman readily acknowledges that hatred releases energy, and feels positive.  Recalling then-recent wartime experiences, he tells how hatred can "masquerade" as patriotism (64), or "the illusion of righteousness" (72).  He observes that hatred, once "released," "cannot be confined to the offenders alone" (76).

Early in the book, Thurman remembers representing Christianity to a Hindu man who shook Thurman's faith with probing questions about the crimes done to "brown people" in the name of Jesus (4-5).  Thurman came to downplay the other-worldly aspect of Christianity to focus on Jesus as one responding to oppression (18).  Thurman explains how the refrain "Take all the world, but give me Jesus," though "germane" to the religion of Jesus, "has to be put into a context that will show its strength and vitality rather than its weakness and failure" (19).

My friends and I were "surprised" for a few reasons.  As friend Susan observed, just a few years ago we considered that we lived in a "post-racial America' where Thurman's concerns were "so last century." The surprise was how relevant Thurman's analysis seems now, with a movement called "Black Lives Matter" responding to the justifiable conclusion that black lives have not mattered enough to local governments, with professional chatterers decrying the presence of Latinos and Muslims in America, and with backlash against LGBT citizens among evangelical Christians who say that they themselves are the ones under attack.

Then, there's the surprise how directly Thurman revises our mostly personal view of our own religion in a way that suddenly seems like common sense, so obvious.

Finally, there's surprise in seeing how much of this work applies to my own experience as a teacher of Middle School.  I guess it could be argued that teachers are the oppressors and students, the oppressed; some days, it feels the other way around.  Thurman observes how those resisting authority "measure their own significance [by] the amount of power and energy [authorities] must use in order to ... hold them back" (16).  In the chapter on "Deception," he tells of the unprepared student who throws the teacher off-task by asking a question about the teacher's pet interest (49).  Thurman holds Jesus up as a model to all teachers for the kind of love shown to the woman caught in adultery:  Jesus "met the woman where she was, and he treated her as if she were already where she now willed to be [and] 'believed' her into the fulfilling of her possibilities" (96).

Aside from all this wisdom, Thurman is direct in overall outline, economical in sentences, never chatty, polemical, or "academic."  He has gravitas.  He's just a great writer!

Miss Marple's Debut in Murder at the Vicarage

Agatha Christie was only 40 years into life and 10 years into writing when she created the elderly Miss Jane Marple for Murder in the Vicarage (1930).  We can cut her some slack for some careless writing.
 
Miss Marple herself scorns coincidence, allowing herself just one in her solution to the crime (250).   Yet much of the novel turns on coincidences, such as a crucial misdialed phone call that just happens to go to Miss Marple.  Her nephew Raymond is introduced late in the book just to bump into the one person that he would recognize at the small train station.

Christie gives us more details than I cared to enumerate fudging the time of the crime, which includes a forged note, a fast clock, and the coincidence of a late train.

Her prose is often first-draft quality.  She relies on silly adverbs:  Detective Slack tries "determinedly" to contradict his name, and our first-person narrator the Vicar tells us he looked "curiously."   When he asks a question, isn't curiosity implied? Can he see his own facial expression? Here's a paragraph I'd have my seventh graders re-write:

I was just standing in the hall, wondering whether I would not even now go over and join them, when the doorbell rang.  I crossed over to it.  I saw there was a letter in the box, and presuming that this was the cause of the ring, I took it out. (252)

Five clauses in a row begin "I" -- need I say, repetitiously? -- and, simply to pick up a letter, we slosh through colorless function words was,whether,when,there was,that this was the, and then wait for the vicar to hear, cross, see, presume, and take it out. This is padding.

At her best, Christie can write a witty bit of dialogue.  Told that an annoying witness fears she's next on the murderer's hit list, the detective remarks, "No such luck" (117).  Miss Marple explains that "Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out" (92), a skill that comes with experience.   Marple calls another character "morally colorblind" (281).   

For a novel narrated by the town vicar, matters of faith are pretty superficial, along the lines of tut-tutting infidelity and telling how a woman gives him every opportunity to notice her pink-striped silk knickers (81).  There's a remark about how the "high church" curate clashed with the church warden, "opposer of ritual in any form" (3).  The town doctor tells the vicar how psychology blurs any line between right and wrong. "I believe the day will come when we shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals," the doctor says (121).  It's out of character when the vicar finds himself extemporizing an emotional sermon on sin in his community that has consequences (240).  (Read my blog post about "Christ in Christie")

So the author develops her plot without showing much concern for its characters or their world: both would come in some of her later works. This earlier work was at least a diversion, a welcome return at the end of a long day.

• Read more articles about Christie and others at my Crime Fiction page
• Personal thanks to Agatha Christie for an idea I've borrowed from Murder at the Vicarage for this year's murder mystery dinner theatre play at St. James' Episcopal, Marietta: What happens when three different suspects confess to the same murder?

Rediscovering Charles Addams' Family in a Musical

Before the musical, before the movies, before the first TV series, there were those exquisitely detailed one-panel drawings by Charles "Chas" Addams.  At five, I asked my baby sitter Mrs. Wilson to sit me on her lap and explain Addams' humor to me, my initiation to irony. 

But what I really loved were the drawings themselves.  I could spend quiet hours peering into his cobwebbed corners, imagining what lurked down dark halls, finding little faces in the black space behind shards of cracked windows.  Bliss was to watch the show before bedtime on Friday nights, to lay my Addams cartoon collection Homebodies on the bedside table, and to wake before anyone else in the house Saturday morning to leaf through those drawings week after week, admiring their skill, making up my own stories about them.

All of this is to say that I brought a lot of Addams baggage with me to see the musical.  To see those silhouettes emerge from memory onto the live stage was a visceral thrill, met with wild applause. [See photo:  This and photos following come from the collection of designer Bill Schreiner, the Walker School.]

The Addams Family was performed at the Walker School, Marietta, GA, by grown-up former students of mine, directed by choreographer Katie Arjona, designed by Bill Schreiner, with vocal director Samantha Walker.   I saw the show twice, on Thursday November 12 and Friday the 13th.  Aside from being delighted by the actors, chorus, and band, I came away admiring what the creators had done.

Working with the same plot as, gosh, every half-hour episode of the TV show -- normal people meet the Addamses -- the writers (Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, book; Andrew Lippa, music and lyrics) gave themselves room to explore Addams' world.  "What's 'normal' for you may be asinine for others," Morticia says.  "Normal" means being from "the real America" outside of New York, where people adhere to life plans, and stay cheerful by keeping anything "dark" to themselves.  The Addamses are cosmopolitan -- we see ghostly ancestors from Spain, France, and even Viking territory -- and spontaneous enough to fire an arrow blindfolded at a lover or to rocket Uncle Fester to the moon when he gets a notion to go.  In an anthem intoned by taciturn Lurch, they "Move Toward the Darkness."  That thought is developed in a great parody of songs that tell us, when things are down, to look for "that silver lining," "flowers that bloom in May," or "pennies from heaven": Morticia thinks happily how Death is "Just Around the Corner."

So much of the show is silly, but its creators take family seriously.  No one laughed when Morticia repeated the vows from her wedding to Gomez: "Dance every day, for passion; share everything, for honesty."  The opening number brings back generations of Addamses to witness and facilitate the action:  Here's a family for whom family is everything.

With strong voice and withering sneer, Briana Keegan played a thoroughly millennial "Wednesday," loathing herself for being "pulled in a new direction" by romance.  Every time she sang "pulled," she stretched her brother Pugsley with chains on a rack.  Dylan Alfi played a punk "Pugsley," getting laughs and sympathy at the same time when he sings of losing his sister and chief torturer.  Affable, energetic, and gloriously voiced, David Simpson played the love interest, who hands Wednesday a blindfold in my favorite moment of the whole show.  His tight-buttoned parents were played by Connor Barre and Meghan Dresdner, who both get to let loose, showing off their vocal and comic chops.  Sean Nesmith was "Uncle Fester," sweet and funny as our host for the evening.  His moon dance was an audience favorite.  Jesse Baynes made a gloriously earthy "Grandma."  On platform shoes as the giant "Lurch," silent Harrison Pritchett got some of the biggest laughs of the evening just plodding to a door and heaving his shoulders with one sigh of resignation. Deb Kemp, charismatic as "Morticia," was often the still center to a manic stage picture who could reduce the audience to helpless laughter with just the rise of an eyebrow.  But she could break into song and dance, too, with her perfectly matched "Gomez," Kenneth Laster, who performed with strong voice, sure step, and irrepressible enthusiasm.

Like Addams's original cartoons, Bill Shreiner's set gave us something interesting to look at wherever our eyes wandered in the vast space of the auditorium (formerly a basketball court).  Todd Motter kept up a spirited pace with the costumed orchestra from Vic Mizzy's inevitable theme (four note arpeggio, snap, snap) to the finale nearly three hours later.  Voices were clear, strong, in tune, and self-assured, thanks to Samantha Walker's vocal direction.  The whole package was the work of director Katie Arjona, who insisted on, and got, professionalism and warmth. 

Touching Music: Guitar in Recital with the Assad Brothers

[Photo: by KQED, recital by brothers Odair and Sergio Assad in 2012, similar to what we saw November 21 at Spivey Hall, Clayton State U., Morrow, Georgia]

The Assad brothers strum and pluck the strings, also press, tickle, and slide fingers along them.  They hold their faces sometimes right up against their instruments, cradling them.  I have never been so conscious of touch in music making. 

Guitar has always been a pleasant sound on recording, but three rows back, in such a "live" room as Spivey Hall at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, I was drawn into the world of guitar sound.  The music for two varied in texture, sometimes being dialogue passed in flashes and gestures between the brothers' instruments, sometimes combined in dramatic statements or ambient scene painting, sometimes like song with accompaniment.  The first half of the concert featured composers  Granados, Albeniz, Rodrigo, familiar from symphonic works.  The second half featured shorter pieces from mostly Brazilian composers, Piazzolla the exception:  Pernambuco, Jacomino, Baden Powell, Gismonti, and Bellinati.  Introducing us to works by their countrymen, some of them friends, the Assads spoke more and laughed a lot.

For once, I left thinking more of the instruments' sonority than of any particular piece.  The mood could change, but the voice of the guitar always felt affable, hopeful, and considerate.

I may be conflating the sound with the brothers' own characteristics.  Sergio (photo: R), the older one, did most of the speaking.  Both men have soft voices and unassuming stage presence.

The audience  asked for two encores before we let the brothers go.

Tributes to My Teachers: Eleanor Spiers, 7th Grade English

Eleanor Spiers at Spalding Drive Elementary school in Fulton County, north of Atlanta, seems more remarkable to me every year that I teach seventh grade myself. 

We had no books, not even workbooks, only a classroom set of very dull grammar exercises. We sat in neat rows. We met her class just before lunch, just after a class called "Spelling" where my classmates mercilessly reduced the soft-spoken spelling teacher to tears by interrupting and ridiculing her. (I didn't -- that class was agony for me.) But then we'd file across the hall to Mrs. Spiers, who never raised her voice, never punished anyone, and never had to. We never interrupted. We never misbehaved. 

How did she do it? That's a mystery to me even today. A student once paid me the compliment, "You're strict, but it doesn't feel like it." That's how it felt with Mrs. Spears, and she was much more successful at that than I've ever been.

[Photo:  While we had no class text to read, Mrs. Spiers did show us Encyclopedia Brittanica's short film of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The discussion that followed taught me how to test theories with citations of evidence from the story itself.  I now show the same film to my classes.]


What she taught was, I'm afraid, superfluous. My verbs had agreed since third grade, and I'd used commas and quotes correctly since fourth grade at least. From her I learned easily to diagram sentences, and never have found any use for doing so. 

What she did for her students, however, was to encourage what was good in our writing. It's the same technique that Dr. Sclater would use to teach me music composition (read more). From time to time, we would take a break from grammar exercises, and she would have us write stories that we could read aloud to the class. 

My first story was, I'm afraid, more sermon than story. It told of a boy who wanders off alone in a public place and gets in trouble with delinquents. He escapes, barely, and concludes that he has learned his lesson. She praised it to the class as a prime example of "dry humor."   I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained, "The story seems to be serious, but that's what's funny. It makes fun of that kind of preachy story that tries to teach children a lesson." 

She was wrong (or, as I think now, she was pretending to be wrong). I truly had taken my preachy story seriously. But I tried from then on to live up to her opinion of my work. 

Tributes to My Teachers: Dr. John Clum, Writer, Dramatist, Scholar

Dr. John M. Clum at Duke University showed me a deeper way to enjoy literature when he became the first English teacher to ask me a question I couldn't answer. 

"Don't you see the structure?" 

I was puzzled. "You mean, how many chapters the book has?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. "You mean, whether it's in first person?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. I ran out of ideas then, but I spent the rest of my semesters at Duke trying to find out what he meant. 

For the first time, after years of getting an A for essays that simply stated what was obvious to me, I started to use every essay assignment as a challenge to work out ideas that were new to me. I took risks, and, all of a sudden, the student who knew everything about art realized that he had barely begun to appreciate it (for the same lesson applies to music and visual arts). 

Dr. Clum led me to the right destination following the pivotal wrong turn in my life, the very same day it happened. Nothing in my freshman year had excited me or challenged me so much as "Music 101-102" taught by the university chapel's gentle and jovial organist Fenner Douglass. On the first day of classes in my sophomore year at Duke, I took my seat in "Music 103," anticipating that I would declare a music major and pursue a career in music composition. Then the head of the Music department entered and announced, "If you're interested in composing music, get out now: this department is for scholars and performers only." I stood, walked out, and phoned Dr. Clum to enroll in his class as a drama major. Years later, I had to recognize that music was my true love, and I still regret not withdrawing from Duke right then and transferring to some school where I could have pursued music composition. 

I may have made a wrong turn, but Dr. Clum led me to the same destination anyway. (As Sondheim wrote it in a song: "I chose and my world was shaken / So what? / The choice may have been mistaken, / The choosing was not. . .") Besides the insight about "structure" in art, Dr. Clum taught me these lessons:

• Following a monologue that I performed for his class, using all the actors' tricks I knew, he gently pointed out that I was "acting" instead of trying to communicate what was specific to the text. That was the first of many times that he confronted me with how much more I had to learn about things I'd thought I knew.
• When he cast me as the husband of the heroine in the nineteenth-century classic Hedda Gabler, he created a seminar for the cast so that we could study the social and artistic context of that play. Rehearsing and studying for four months, I experienced depth in a role for the first time.
  Another experience I had for the first time in that course: He gave me the first grade lower than "A" that I ever received on a paper about literature. I was indignant. In a conference, he said, "Lord knows, it's a good paper. I just expected more from you."
• That "B" actually precipitated a crisis for me, and Dr. Clum was again there to help me towards the right goal. After I'd calmed down, I recognized how right he was. After eight years of secondary education, I'd never had to think in a literature course. All of my work had been reporting or describing what was obvious to me. I went back to Dr. Clum, who was also my academic advisor, and asked him about that. His answer was simple: Enroll in a certain unusual course taught by General Irving B. Holley, and that course redeemed all the others, and became the basis of everything I've taught my students in history and literature courses ever since (read more about General Holley).
• He did me a favor by casting me (for a class performance) in a play by Pinter. I hated the play, I hated the role, I didn't understand it, it seemed stupid, it seemed sordid -- and then he helped me to understand how the words could say one thing but mean another, how characters can use words for weapons (or defenses). Then his question, "What animal is your character like?" got me to think about a cat, with its caution, its alertness, its laziness, its hedonism. Portraying that part in that play taught me the main lessons that I've been imparting to my drama students ever since.
• In a playwriting seminar, I treasure above all the conference I had in his office on the top floor of the old Carr building. My play about a busybody secretary named "Lotty" was going nowhere. It was a true-to-life depiction of real experiences I'd had in a summer job at a department store -- but, just like real life, it had no direction. "What can I do?" I asked him. Without speaking, he rose from his desk and closed the door to the hallway. Then, smiling, leaning up against the door, he said in a low voice, "Kill Lotty."  I laughed. First, it was such a shock, and it felt like a real conspiracy. Then, I saw pretty quickly that he was right. Murder would be an exaggeration of what we all felt, and that would make our feelings more clear than my accurate report of actual events. I'd learned how something can be more true than actual.

The academic program in Drama that he created now thrives. The story of his struggle to raise drama from a club activity to an academic discipline was the subject of my researched paper for Dr. Holley, which can be found in Duke's archives -- listed on the archives web page. I hear from Dr. Clum that my history "Dramatic Changes" stands today as a reference for researchers.

Tributes to My Teachers: Frank Boggs, Choir Director

Frank Boggs taught me in "chorale" at Westminster Schools from 1973 to 1977, but he has remained my mentor and friend to the present day. 

If my deepest ambition is to write sacred music that communicates mystery and grandeur of God, that's my response to glorious music that I learned to love through Mr. Boggs. Throughout my adult life, I've spent almost every Wednesday night in church choir rehearsals, always seeking the joy of hearing my voice blend with others, creating a piece of music that glorifies God in its expression and craftsmanship -- regardless who else may hear it. Truly, my religious faith comes from music more than from scripture or doctrine.

If I love musical theatre (not just Broadway, but opera), that comes from Mr. Boggs, too. He directed me in OKLAHOMA and LITTLE MARY SUNSHINE, and he stoked my interest in Stephen Sondheim with clipped articles and saved programs, giving me the opportunity to direct a suite of Sondheim songs for our small ensemble (see photo below), and, later, to direct the full Chorale's Broadway revue.  My first song was a lyric that he set to music for me. 

Singing is not all that happened in choir rehearsals. Mr. Boggs exposed us to music, cartoons, reviews of theatrical productions, memories of performers, and discussions of religious meanings behind music. He once asked us, "Why did Vivaldi set the happy words 'peace on earth, goodwill to men' to slow, somber minor key music?" (I'd never thought to ask why any artist does anything -- and now it's what I always do.) 

At fifteen, I liked performances that were loud, fast, flashy, with some growls and maybe some screaming thrown in. Then I saw Frank in concert. I and my fellow members of the Westminster Ensemble had performed some numbers at a church in Tennessee, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. He'd told us that he'd be "singing a few numbers," but we realized later that he had been too kind: we were only his warm up act. I remember that he sat at the piano, sang a song or two. Then, while he played some chords, he described for the audience how his grandfather used to sing a certain hymn while tending his garden. Then he lifted his hands from the keys, turned on the bench towards the audience, and sang softly, unaccompanied, a hymn of anguish:

Oh, Lord, if indeed I am thine,
If Thou art my sun and my song,
Say why do I languish and pine?
And why are my winters so long?
Drive these dark clouds from my sky,
Thy soul-soothing presence, restore --
Or take me unto Thee on high,
Where winter and clouds are no more. 

That night I saw the difference between showiness and authenticity, the same difference between entertainment and art.

Frank also gathered the young people in his care to discuss what he called "Quaker Questions," allowing us to share our memories, concerns, and questions -- bonding us and helping us to grow up. I remember asking him about the intense friendships I was enjoying at the age of sixteen: "Do adults have the same kind of friendship?" He answered honestly that the intensity probably would dissipate with time, but that friendship could deepen. Of course, now we're living that truth.

Two Mentors, 
One Photograph

[See photo]  Famed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sits on stage while my teacher Frank Boggs (the other bearded man) looks on. I am the worshipful seventeen-year-old second from the right. The photograph was taken in Broadway's Music Box theatre, June 1977. 

Knowing how I idolized Sondheim, Mr. Boggs had told me to write him to ask for an interview, and Sondheim instantly replied. This taught me a life lesson: If you don't at least try, you'll regret it the rest of your life. 

Twenty years later, Mr. Boggs again met Sondheim during a "meet the audience" talk at London's National Theatre. Sondheim asked, "Are you a teacher?" Mr. Boggs nodded. Sondheim said that he'd always wanted to teach, and he said how grateful he was to his teachers. Speaking of the importance of his teachers to him during a national broadcast on his 70th birthday, Sondheim actually had to stop talking, overcome with emotion.

Seated with us in the photograph are my peers in the Westminster Ensemble, who, under Mr. Boggs, sang a program of songs by Sondheim. On the way to a tour of Poland and Russia, we stopped in New York to see the Broadway revue SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, when this picture was made. This photograph is a detail from a photo collage I made for Frank Boggs's retirement celebration. 

Other Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• Echoes of My Teacher's Voice(01/2019)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews of Frank's performances that I've written over the years.

[See my Stephen Sondheim page.]