Dinner and a Show
Miss O' has a lot on her mind today, and it all got going as a result of a simple enough, leisurely activity. Last Thursday after work I walked
up to TKTS, the half-price ticket booth in Times Square, and got myself a
ticket to the revival of the musical The
Mystery of Edwin Drood. The show was, in a word, delightful. This musical, based on Charles Dickens's last novel, an unfinished mystery of the same title, hearkens
back to the theater of yesteryear, English music hall style—the breaking of the
“fourth wall,” total professionalism as the actors go in and out of “Drood-style”
character and offer an exhibition of cracker jack comic timing, outrageous characterizations,
and live sound effects: In other words, total, real theater. It’s not done much
anymore. When it is, critics can be quick to call it “old-fashioned,” as they
did with the marvelous American comedy, Is
He Dead?, a rediscovered work by Mark Twain adapted by David Ives, causing
that terrifically silly play to close far earlier than it should have. Other
shows, such as The 39 Steps, Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter by the
Kneehigh Theater Company, or this past season’s Peter and the Starcatcher can get both critical acclaim and an
audience for their theatrical daring, but I can’t help noticing that many of the
sources of these acclaimed shows are, like Drood,
British—is there a bias, I wonder? Two new American plays I saw on Broadway in
the last year, Clybourne Park and Chinglish, were blandly directed and,
however good the writing, really may as well have been made for television, as
far as I was concerned. (Clybourne Park’s cast, at least, doubled in
interesting ways—playing various characters in the past in Act 1, and new characters
in the present in Act 2, but the conceit was not enough to hold my interest,
its Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award notwithstanding. And I alone among my friends
and the critics was emotionally unsatisfied, so take my notes for what they’re
worth. I thought both plays...bland.)
The question you have to ask yourself
when it comes to any art is, Why do this
story in this medium? Why, for example, do this story as theater?
Why do that story as an image in oils? Why do this experience as a symphony or
as a three-minute radio pop song? In other words, what will this particular art
form illuminate about this subject that no other art form can? For example, if
a painting painted today is utterly photo-realistic, why not take a photo? If a
play would play just as well on television, why do it as theater? This is a
theme your Miss O’ has explored in blogs past, but today I want to talk about
something I’m calling the “blanding” of America, and while this idea is not
really new, philosophically speaking, it’s on my goddamned mind.
Now here’s a question: Why do
something as a restaurant? I ask this
because once I got my Drood ticket, I
found it it was a quarter to 6 PM, which gave me two hours for a pleasant
dinner. Since the show was at Studio 54 (on, you guessed it, 54th
Street, b/w Broadway and 8th Avenue), I realized I could have a
delightful split knish (with pastrami and swiss) and a beer at The Stage Deli,
home of the finest cheesecake I have ever eaten. It’s at 54th and 7th
Avenue. Or rather, it was. It’s CLOSED. For good. Dark, black, and gone. I
stood there stunned. I looked up the street. I looked down. I peered and found the faint
gold leaf lettering, and indeed, this had been the place. This NYC institution,
75 years old, has become the latest victim of spiraling rents—and these rents
are jacked up on OWNED buildings, because a corporate chain or FOB (Friend of
Bloomberg) in real estate development (a Mayor Bloomberg buddy got the site of
the city-closed St. Vincent’s Charity
Hospital for a SONG, so he can develop LUXURY CONDOS! We won’t talk about how
many of the new high-rises remain virtually UNINHABITED—but the developers
don’t worry because failure is a tax write-off—nor will we mention how there is
now no nearby hospital for anyone living
in the Village) can afford way-high rent (did you get that?). When this happens, what leaves the
neighborhood, what leaves New York, is more than a place of business: What goes
is authenticity. I wrote a blog about
my Italian restaurant, which met the same fate last year. The simple question, Now where to eat?, becomes fraught with
more than hunger pangs.
I’ve lost so many old standbys (or
the terrific staff in old standbys—oh, why can we not celebrate the career wait-person and nourish this?) in
my decade in this town. You’d think, “Hey, it’s New York, there are loads of
places to eat,” but you would be wrong, unless you literally don’t care 1) what
you eat or what it costs; 2) how clean it is; 3) how loud it is; 4) who frequents it; 5) what
the service is like; 6) how loud, loud, loud it is (do I repeat myself?).
First, I decided I’d walk, bitterly cold though it was, over to 9th
Avenue and try for a table at Kashkaval, a Greek place whose food I love. There
was only one place for a party of one (the pain of being one is that I am sometimes refused a table) at the bar. I began
taking off my coat, when I realized that these three bar seats were free
because you are sitting two feet away and directly across from the guy washing the dishes in an open sink.
Wet, old food smell steaming into one’s face rather ruins an appetite, so I put
my coat back on and begged off (the counter fellow nodded sagely). Back into
the cold, I decided I would go no further down than 49th, and seeing
nothing there that wasn’t too brightly lit, too crowded, not crowded enough
(something wrong there), too trendy-expensive, or too loud, I headed back to 8th
Avenue.
This does not exasperate me. On the
contrary, it’s kind of invigorating. If by 7 it’s a no-go, I can always pop in
somewhere for a pepperoni slice. So I walk. Suddenly on 51st, I
think it was, I saw it: McHale’s! All new and looking charming and clean! It’s
back! In former times, I grieved the closing of McHale’s—a dark, dingy wooden
booth of a burger place on 8th Avenue at 47th St. (I think) (comedians' hangout of the youthful Denis Leary and Jon Stewart and company), which was shut
down to make way for a concrete structure that now houses a Duane Reade or
something. The lack of cozy as a design factor in restaurants
any more is a shame, because now it’s all about LIGHT and NOISE, for that’s what
the “passing of the old” makes way for anymore, she said crankily, and it is
depressing. I miss booths (which have disappeared, you see, because a booth
feels homey and permanent), wood
(again, expensive and permanent-looking), low ceilings (which make a place
stuffy, but also cheaper to heat and cozier!), cool jazz or old rock quietly
insinuating itself into your drinks. That was McHale’s of old.
THIS McHale’s was brightly lit,
high-ceilinged, two-leveled, and DEAFENING. I had to YELL to ask for a table,
and when the hostess assured me it was quieter upstairs, she was kidding both
of us. I sat for all of 20 seconds and shook my head. Down the stairs I went,
explaining (mouthing) that it was TOO LOUD. “What?” The manager had a look on his face
that said, “Crazy old woman,” but the hostess nodded sagely.
Somehow I don’t think they’ll miss
me. Apparently MOST AMERICANS LIKE TO SHOUT WHILE THEY EAT AND ALSO WANT THE LIGHT
TO BE REALLY BRIGHT SO THEY CAN CHECK THEIR PHONES THROUGHOUT A FUCKING MEAL.
Miss O’ does not bend this way.
Then, back into the cold, almost
despairing, there it was: Like a little miracle amidst the scaffolding, I found
Cognac, a cozy, quiet French bistro not half a block from my theater destination.
I settled in for a fine repast of French onion soup, fresh, warm bread and
butter, and a glass of red wine. C’etait parfait.
So of course I worry: When will that nice place be got rid of? Maybe
an Applebee’s will come in!
Why I’m Sick of Chains, Where You Know Exactly What You Will Get
Here’s a wild question that will seem
like a digression, but it’s not: Why cast, of all people, Marlon Brando to play
Stanley Kowalski? Because if you’ve read A
Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (and there is nothing weirder,
perhaps, when traveling to New Orleans, than to pass an actual streetcar with
the name “Desire” painted on it, and another with, say, “Cemeteries”), you know
that Marlon Brando is the opposite of
the Stanley Kowalski that Williams wrote: Kowalski is a New Orleans “Polack,” a
large, loud, poker-playing working stiff who likes to drink and nail his wife—a
meaner Archie Bunker, but sweaty-sexy, if not hot. Brando, by contrast, was from
Omaha, a Native American, pretty, sensitive, effeminate, a quiet mumbler with
an ambiguous sexuality. So why did director Elia Kazan, against Williams’s
wishes and others’ judgments, insist on Brando? I think it was because an
audience would truly never know, with Brando, what Kowalski was going to say, or what
he was going to do. However faithfully Brando followed the script, every move,
every decision, every line, would feel like a surprise. Whatever was
predictable in the “type” that was Kowalski, Brando would make it fresh. And
the rest, as they say, is history.
It seems to Miss O’ that America
today not only fears the fresh and new, it is being made and taught to embrace
what is known, unexciting, bland. However much lip service is paid to
“diversity” and inclusion, or even to “controversy” (which on the news amounts
to the Monty Python Argument Sketch, or Cheese Shop Sketch, or Parrot Sketch, sometimes
all at once), one need only glance at the Barbie and Ken complex that is any
cable news network anchor desk to understand what I mean. That said, I don’t
despair, because for every ten or twenty Megyn Kellys there is, at least, one
Rachel Maddow; for every ten or fifty David Gregorys there is a, well, a
Stephen Colbert. But still, ten blands
to one fabulous is a real shame in a nation this size.
Where does the blandness come from?
It’s from business culture, I think.
Somewhere in 1960 too many people became enamored of 9 to 5, gray flannel-suited,
workaday worlds and homes in the ‘burbs. My dad was blue collar, but we did the
suburbs. My mom was a chain-smoking Cum Laude grad in English who recited Keats
as she vacuumed the rugs and wore toreador pants, but she dreamed of being June
Cleaver. (All Miss O’ can say is: Thank god for THAT failure.) Somehow, rugged,
actual exploring was set aside in
favor of watching TV, at least after my generation grew up running free in the
streets. And this “American dream” of a few, dull, workaholics became the
prototype for the American dream of the next five decades. Technological
advances in communication (so-called) made staying bubble-wrapped and sleekly
undefined easy for the average person; and consuming
over creative expression and
problem-solving seemed to be our corporate-assigned task on Earth. We gain
weight; we join Weight Watchers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Bricks in the Wall
So the cover of New York magazine this week (January 28,
2013) is a dark, mad, pencil-scribbled angry cyclone, black criss-crosses and
circles on white, a scared, befuddled little sketch of a guy with glasses
sitting on an unseen chair at the center of this maelstrom, with the headline:
“High School Is a Sadistic Institution”. Miss O’s first thought, “Spare me,”
led her to drop the magazine onto her kitchen sideboard and pull out the
Tullamore Dew.
You know what’s a “sadistic
institution”? The United Corporation of America. You know what the Corporation
wants schools in the 21st Century to resemble? Corporations. You
know what corporations are? Toxic. Fuck you, New York magazine, thought I, pouring a two-finger stiff one.
I read the article, called “Why You
Never Truly Leave High School” by the ironically named Jennifer Senior. Whatevs, as the kids would say. The
essayist says that “for years I never understood why high school values were so
different from adult ones.” She lost me here. Having been a high school
student, a high school teacher, and a corporate drone—existing in the suburbs,
the country, and the city—I have to say that my values as an adult are the same
as my values as a high school student: Love of family, a deep connection to
creative friends, a love of place, and above all, working at my very best at
all times. And as for the social stature things—who’s hot, who’s not, who’s in,
who’s a geek—the awareness of “us” and “them"—the people I know who are most
stuck in that cycle of thought as adults never left the eighth grade. I’d like
to say arts education would change that, but one of the all-time snottiest and
least mature co-workers I’ve ever had once danced with a ballet company. (Really,
she was out of a sitcom. She once said something conspiratorial and mean about a new hire, and I said that I'd left eighth grade thirty years ago. She then told co-workers that she and I were, and I quote, "mortal enemies." "How OLD are you?" I asked.)
So what makes high school
especially “toxic”? Even Kurt Vonnegut, whom the essayist quotes (and with
every line inflects even more UP, or seems to, but maybe that’s just me), said
that high school was the nearest thing to the core of American experience he
could think of. And Vonnegut hit it: High school directly reflects the world as
it is and is becoming. In 1987, for example, governors (influenced apparently
by corporate interests) declared, “Schools are a business.” The point of
American business, as it currently exists, is to make money and success for a
few and destroy the rest, and this should not be the goal of our educational
system (or any sentient creature, for that matter), in Miss O’s humble fucking
opinion. The corporate school goal is achieved in two ways: 1) bullying and
hatred of all unique persons in the name of Christ our Lord; and 2) the demand
that teachers teach to a pre-determined, corporate testing service-created test,
thus robbing teachers and their charges of the need for original thought. This
isn’t conspiracy theory, because it’s actually happening. (Just listen to Glenn
Beck to see the fruits of their labors.) When their rights to privacy are
taken, their natural food seeds genetically modified and corporate-owned and
held hostage, their fresh water compromised and thus in need of high-priced
purification treatments by corporate-owned works—the people who graduate these
corporate high school institutions will be too stupid to think creatively to
get out of the hostage situation. And the corporations can take all their
money, and end their lives.
These elaborate Dr. Evil schemes
fail, usually, because people like Miss O’ (yes, I am THAT POWERFUL) and her many, many friends and
colleagues and loads of artists and creative folks play the
game but move the fuck ON. We keep thinking. We challenge. We don’t mind
making dinner conversations uncomfortable events (for you should have been a fly
on the ol’ wall as Miss O’ regaled a tableful of Conservative Christians at a
holiday dinner in rural Virginia in 1997 with a story of the gay civil union of
her friends Hugh and Bud! What larks!). Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are all
that keep me going some days.
But back to high school. The gist
of the New York magazine essay is
that people spend a lot of time revisiting their high school years (reunions,
movies about reunions, renewing acquaintances on Facebook), and the writer
wonders why this is. Miss O’ wonders, Why only now are there research studies of high schools, in 2013, and why publish an essay
about them (for these studies frankly illuminated not a fuck of a lot as far as
Miss O’ is concerned)?
A little backstory: When Miss O’
was a young teacher-in-training, she was not so much astounded at as frustrated by the fact that all the
research she was made to read concerned children aged zero to three. There was,
also, a mandatory course in Early Childhood education, which is fine, but all the research of all children seemed to stop at age seven or so, the wisdom being
that no one changes, brain-wise, after that age. Everyone is, where his or her
ability to learn is concerned, so the wisdom went, fully formed. As I was to teach high school, I
couldn’t believe that there were no course offerings on how to teach
adolescents, and (as of this writing), I can find some books and educational
papers on the subject, but I can’t find one course offering listed anywhere
(according to today’s Google search) except at Fordham, “Adolescence Education,”
which is not to say there aren’t any others, but still. It’s odd.
And according to the New York article, which concerned high
school social "sadism" more than classroom experiences, I was not wrong to have
noticed the gap. In fact, researchers DID believe just that, says Pat Levitt of
the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. She says that “for
years, we had almost a religious belief that all systems developed in the same
way, which meant that what happened from zero to 3 really mattered, but
whatever happened thereafter was merely tweaking.” (NY Mag, 1/28/13, p. 20) So
I was glad to know there is new research.
Then I got to page 21 of the
article and read, “It turns out that just before adolescence, the prefrontal
cortex—the part of the brain that governs our ability to reason, grasp
abstractions, control impulses, and self-reflect—undergoes a huge flurry of
activity, giving young adults the intellectual capacity to form an identity, to
develop the notion of self.” Any middle or high school teacher reading that
will be nodding a brow-furrowed, “Duh.” Someone PAID for this research? (I'm only kidding a little. And there is more to the essay, so do read it.)
Big developmental research stopped
or slowed for way too long, apparently, after the last one I studied, a man
named Jean Piaget (1896-1980), who focused on the four stages of development,
as he defined them. (You can check this out on the Wiki.) My take-away when I
studied Piaget in college was that it was not until around the age of 15 that
children became, for the first time, truly able to see the world from someone
else’s point of view. This was invaluable information for me, because it served
to explain the extraordinary maturation that took place in my English 10
students from the beginning of sophomore year to the end. (At the beginning of
their junior years, these kids were often unrecognizable, behaviorally
speaking, and I mean that in a good way.) Beyond that priceless tidbit, there
was nothing much for the teacher of teens to hold onto.
I am glad that more research is
being done now, but it distresses me that the researchers have grabbed onto
the institution of high school as the
toxic factor in teen life. The take away from this article, in bold font, is
this: “‘These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way
of sorting out status,’ a situation likely to reward aggression.” (The
line outside of the quotes is in bold RED in the magazine.)
Now, please know again that Miss O’
is thrilled to see that there is research on adolescents going on (!) and that
real thinking is being done on this. And it’s also important to have historical
perspective. For example, Ms. Senior points out that up until the Great
Depression, kids were thrust into the world alongside adults—doing hard labor
or going to school, and that they “were not sequestered as they matured. Now
they live in a biosphere of their own.” Here is where I paused to reflect.
This idea of being “sequestered” is
really not peculiar to American adolescence, I think, but symptomatic of the
country as a whole. America sequesters nearly EVERYONE nowadays, by gender,
class, age, and profession: the rich in gated communities, the poor in project
housing; white collar CEOs rarely if ever darken the doors of the factories or
companies they own (many of us can testify to that); the aged live in retirement
communities or nursing homes, etc. People’s jobs in this country become so
all-consuming that the people they see most during the course of a day are
their co-workers. If you drive a car, the chances are that you mostly only see co-workers,
most of whom do the exact same job as you, along with your own family on any
given day. You may also see customers, and this is something, though the
interaction is likely only to be a business transaction and therefore a limited
exchange. If you ride public transportation, particularly in a city such as New
York, the opportunities for varied human contact are far greater, but with
iPods, so is the opportunity to tune out.
So I was thinking as I read this
essay that the box is often of our
own devising, in that kids who are “stuck” moving from classroom to classroom,
unengaged, bullied, simultaneously dreading and living for lunchtime, are just
like adult drones who hate their jobs. “What else is new?” one thinks. If it
isn’t state law that ties you to a place, it’s the need for health insurance. If it isn't money holding you back, it's an addiction to checking your phone. The bigger question is why we Americans allow corporations—who really do
whatever they do mostly for the benefit of a top few—to keep doing it. It’s not
unlike going to a church and one day you can’t remember the last time you thought
about god, or death, or your soul. Or like going to school and having no memory
of learning anything. Or going out to eat, quite often, in fact, and yet not
being able to recall a single meal that gave you an orgasm.
So while I wag my finger this week at our
complacence in corporate culture, really I’m getting at something
deeper: Buildings, businesses, courses, clothing, voting: We are blanding. It’s an insidious process. If
we don’t become aware of it, we fall into a zone of stupid. When President
Obama’s Second Inaugural Address expressed a hopeful message of inclusion to
benefit the many, I was astounded at how many on the Right took issue with it.
Huh? (Obama is as centered, intelligent, and even-tempered as any leader I've ever seen, and he's called out as a Lefty. It's hilarious.) They felt left out. Huh? What is it about “We, the People” or “All of us,
together” that does not speak to the Right? Because the Right is Corporate with a
capital C, it's the story of Us and Them. If you talk about “Us,” you really mean “Not You.” Okay
then. Way to project your own misanthropy onto the masses. And the complainers I watched were some of the blandest, white bread
humans I’ve ever seen, Michelle Malkin’s Asian past notwithstanding.
It’s time to break this stupid,
stupid corporate, lockstep, mindset. It’s time to break through the reliance on BLAND. We are becoming entranced and captured by blandness.
Can you imagine a world where you
skip to work, and a 15-year-old is elated to go to school? (Did you just roll your eyes? Why do we roll our
eyes?) Today my friend Hugh posted an article from a fact-checking website, and
I commented that if high school kids could do research projects that involved fact-checking network pundits and politicians, they’d have a blast. Not only would the research
be fun, the consequences would be REAL. What if you worked in a situation where
you felt really valued, where you had enough people to do the work, where the
workers had a sense of humor, a sense of fun in the everyday work, and where
every single second of every day wasn’t lived on a relentless, crushing commute
to a crushing deadline? What if teachers didn’t have too many kids to teach,
and rather than teach to a test, they could teach to the needs of their kids in
the world?
How will We, the People, break this
cycle of blanding? That blandness can
be crushing must sound odd, but if you’ve ever been depressed, you know exactly
what I’m talking about.
Kids, it’s time to throw over the
American Corporation party line—the dictates of Fox News and its affiliates,
the irony of which is that they tout “individual” achievement, of doing it alone, even as the Corporation of
America expects all “individuals” to behave in exactly the same ways. That
expectation is what makes a toxic high school, a toxic world. The most
successful societies prove that when we bring all of our INDIVIDUAL talents
TOGETHER to create something, magic happens: A symphony is only as marvelous as the individual
musicians, and the conductor bringing them together, playing it. A Broadway
show is only as good as the writers and the individual training of each and every
performer, technician, and designer, and how well the director brings all of it
together. If American Corporations could learn to value the ethos of “all of us
together,” and combined all their workers’ individual talents and energies with
their own business acumen—to tackle real problems using real science and actual
facts—there’s nothing this country couldn’t do, and beautifully.
I try to break the blanding every day in any number of
ways, and the glory of my hope that we can
do it is in seeing that I am not alone. Subversion is my strong suit (a
wonderful Bread Loaf professor of mine, Jackie Royster, said, “All good
teaching is subversive”), and it is apparently present in lots of us: For
example, each day I talk to strangers. Many talk back, and it's not always swearing. I make observations aloud. Ahem. I wear
fabulous hats. I post politically provocative shit on Facebook. I wear my
friend George’s Murray Beads. I enjoy the hell out of my brilliant co-workers,
and we send each other cartoons and riff on bad writing via e-mail. I go to
little bodegas, Mom and Pop hardware stores, unique diners, and local pubs. I
see a show, sometimes just on the subway. So that’s something. It’s my
individual contribution to all of us. What are you DOING to subvert your life’s
blandness? I think we have to surprise ourselves AT LEAST ONCE A DAY or why the
fuck live at all? That’s what Miss O’ thinks. High school classroom or office
cubicle, checkout line or machine shop, big CEO desk or taxi cab, you owe it to the future of the world to surprise the shit of people
in delightful ways—only guns seem to the be the mode de surprise, these days.
We all really have to do this—for
our kids, our environment, our quality of life, our creative capacities, our
sense of connection to place, for our
survival as a species. And this time, it’s gotta be kind, and loving, and
deeply personal, and relentless. Maybe we can get the people in charge of
corporations to see that when they harness our individual talents and
interests, when they really listen to what we think and see what we do,
companies—like ideal high schools—can flourish, all of us, together. And we could make it fun.
That’s all I got today. Now where's my whet stone?
Until next time,
Until next time,
Love from
Miss O’
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