Facebook Project: Miss O's New York Updates

Amassing the Posts

Hello, Readers--

My friend Rebecca Cummins helps lead a group in Vermont called Celebration of Expressive Arts, and she has asked me to come up in May and read New York Stories.

Below I'm recording some I spent Saturday recovering from Facebook. If you have any stories I've posted that you'd like me to locate because you think someone might like hearing it, let me know. And thanks.

Forthwith: Past Updates, 2009-2011.

MISS O'...

...walks past Antoinette and Tony’s every morning en route to work. Married 68 years, they stay inside up at the windows in the cold months. Tony gums to me, “Go home!” and then, “You look gorgeous!” and I bow. Antoinette mouths, “How are you?” and I mouth, “Fine,” waving her off. I mime, “How are you?” and her right hand does the old “so-so,” and she admonishes, “Be CAREFUL!” Is there any other way to start a day?

...gives you, ladies and gents, the 3-ringed circus that is NY in the morning: In this ring, the wannabe gangstas talking “internships” and a “vampire” last night on a “pretty good episode” “who kinda died, but not his true nature”; in  ring two, the Macy’s worker climbing freehand on the awning frame to change the cover to red; and in the center ring, girls in bird costumes and roller skates outside MSG. Awake yet?

...overheard this exchange at the turnstiles: “...and they’d call clients and say, ‘This looks good, you should get in on this’ when they knew...”  “So what?” “But they knew it wasn’t...”  “That’s not criminal.”  “But...”  “Buyer beware.”  Have a nice day.

...’s perfect Saturday in New York, in autumn: Metropolitan Museum; walk through Central Park; exit at 65th Street for cranberry scone and tea; sip and munch at Lincoln Plaza staring at the newly unveiled fountain across from the Opera house; walk down to Columbus Circle, finished after 17 years; let an artist use her hand tracing as part of an art project; down to 20th to Le Zie for dinner with wine. And: Scene.

...has noticed this jack o’lantern happily sitting on the retaining wall by the basement-level trash alley door of this apartment building, amazed that it’s lasted all week. Today she saw why: In the back of the pumpkin are carved two holes, with a chain running through it, chaining that gourd to the iron fence behind it. In New York, we understand the importance of security. Boo!

...’s Uncle Chester (Chet) O’Hara of Council Bluffs, Iowa, is 90 years old today. Driver of the lead jeep at the liberation of Paris, POW in Germany, American Union rep. When I called him last year I told him I was really happy about the election. “That’s how you voted, huh?” he asked me. “Well, I did, too,” he said. “Now I loved Hillary, loved her...” Way to rock it, Uncle Chet. Happy Birthday.

...just had lunch with her friend Kathy B., a voiceover artist, and they took in this 7th Avenue view: A woman’s large, shapely bottom too-tightly encased in a gray miniskirt, split pleat in back. Too split. “Should we tell her?” KB asks. “No,” LO says. “Etiquette says only tell her if she can fix it. She can’t fix that.” Nor could she fix the perfect “O” split over brown panties where her anus is.

...walks toward Antoinette, out by her gate. “You hear those sirens? Saturday morning? Our neighbor, his wife died a few years back, he died, right there in front of the elevators.” She points to the building across the street. “THANK GOD he died by the elevators.” She looks at me. “So they FOUND him.”

...was squashed on the 7 Train by a stick-insect tourista Fashionista doubtless headed to Fashion Week. Sensing irritation at her mass, Lisa began embiggening herself, first the right arm, which forced the Fashionista’s left arm into her carefully rouged cheek, pushing off her hat, and ended by nearly vaporizing her before her timely exit at Bryant Park. Enjoy your skim latté.

...returning to NY from NJ, saw lots of Marathoners encaped in foil, medaled, triumphant, and looking at maps trying to figure out their stop to return to the cheaper hotels by the airport. Makes you remember that most of the runners are NOT NYers, but they see more of the five boroughs in a few hours than I have in 6 years.

...is standing by the door of a 7 Train car after it pulls in, when she is elbowed out of the way by a young Asian woman with her friend in tow. She is agitated, pushy, and is sort of shoving this book at her friend, arguing in words Lisa can’t quite hear. And the book is “Living in Compassion” by his Holiness the Dalai Lama. Namasté.

...saw a Mary Kay representative on the N Train yesterday, a red blazer with loads of lapel medals and her Mary Kay pin, chatting up a protégé in Spanish. Soft of form, voluptuous of chest, short of stature, blocks for ankles, she fairly burst with body confidence as she doubtless related cosmetics conquests past. I loved her.

...is waiting for her neighbor Gareth, a South African married to Norma, who is Irish, to come over and try to unclog this displaced American Southerner’s bathroom sink. Home for three days with flu, I’ve had to listen as a squirrel continued his demolition work inside my bedroom wall, work that’s been going on, on and off, for about four years. Snow relentless but no squirrel today! Um. Hope it’s...just resting.

...hears Dar Williams sing “February”: friend Terri died one year ago, and last week Terri’s mom died, too; I still have the flu; the UPS man said, “The delivery guy for the Chinese place, the guy with the glasses,” had been struck on his scooter and killed Friday. An old woman, out walking her dog, said, “And the driver was drunk and high when he hit him.” The whole neighborhood is bereft. We didn’t even know his name.

Whenever you feel like your life is just sucking ass, consider this rejoinder from my friend, George: "I'm better this morning. I went to Bangladesh, and a nice little girl with a distended stomach listened to all my problems from her filthy mat by the village latrine/morgue. Though the buzzing of numberless flies may have drowned out much of my sad tale, I think she appreciated all I had to say."

SUBWAY STORY January 24, 2010 

On the way home from dinner Saturday night at my friend Pat’s in Murray Hill at around 1:00 AM, I walk to 23rd Street over to Park Avenue to pick up the Uptown 6 Train to Grand Central/42nd. I used to be scared of this hour until the first time I left a party at 2:30 AM and walked nervously out onto 10th Avenue…into bumper to bumper traffic, crowds of people, and then got to Times Square to find the 7 Train so packed I had to stand all the way back to Queens. 
So I get to Grand Central around 1:30 AM and walk downstairs to the 7 platform, which is inside a big, grimy off-white tunnel with really loud acoustics. A very tall, lanky 50ish white hippy man with his iron gray hair in a bun is playing guitar and singing (in an okay voice), “Who’s gonna drive you home…tonight…who’s gonna drive you home…” (I’m answering in my mind, “Whoever’s driving the damned train.”) There is something about the singer’s eyes that seems sort of empty, hard to read, and it’s incongruous with that mellow melody. (It’s no random observation; you have to notice these things.) 
Just as I am aware of the musician, I meet face to face with a guy who has been telling a sing-song story really loudly. He’s black, about 25, wall-eyed, effeminate. He is wearing two backpacks, a red one under a blue one. “Colly, why did you put that on the top of the refrigerator?” he asks in an authoritative voice, and answers himself as a tiny child, “I’m sorry Mommy.” He walks over to some people and continues, “Now Colly, you mind Miss Rhonda” and “Yes, Mommy.” He walks to another group. 
“…I can’t go on…thinkin’…nothing’s wrong…who’s gonna drive you home…tonight…” 
“Now you listen to Miss Rhonda. We’re getting on the bus now.” “Yes, Mommy.” He walks. 
Suddenly an older black man, like a character out of the young man’s story, a story that has notes of Southern culture woven into it, appears on the platform. He’s wearing a kind of small-brimmed fedora—what are those hats called?—butterscotch colored, and a matching golf sweater, odd on this frosty night. He shouts, “Do you have your medicine?” And the young man answers, completely clearly, “It’s in my bookbag.” “Well, take it!” the old man commands. “I’m doing make believe,” the young man explains; he continues to himself, “Did you hear what I said?” “Yes, Mommy.” The old man lingers, and then moves along. I’d thought he was a caretaker, but he’s no one to him. Was he even there? 
“…who’s gonna drive you home…” 
By now the platform is getting full: young, stylish women, middle-aged men, young guys, many on iPods—Hispanics, Asians, whites, blacks—all headed back to Queens after a long work day, or a night out. The Make Believe Man is pacing and pacing, telling his story from one group to the next: “Yes, Mommy.” 
In this wild flash, the guitar-playing man quits his song and shrieks, “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU SICK FUCK! SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKIN’ NIGGER! OUT OF BELLVUE! GO BACK TO THE HOSPITAL YOU FUCK! WHY DID THEY LET YOU OUT, FUCK? TALK ABOUT A HATE CRIME, I’LL SHOW YOU A HATE CRIME…” 
Unfazed, the young man explains in the same voice he’s been using with the story, but in a more matter-of-fact tone, “I’m talking make believe.” Then he continues, “Are you ready to get on the bus with Miss Rhonda?” “Yes, Mommy.” “Stop sucking your thumb, Colly.” “Yes, Mommy.” 
“YOU SICK FUCK, YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKER…” and the guitar man is packing up his instrument, swearing threateningly all the while, and there is an expectation in his outraged voice that we on the platform will be on his side. No one really moves, no one stares. The energy, though, curiously embraces a whole new tolerance for the previously annoying Make Believe Man. I catch the eye of an older Hispanic man looking at me—I notice his pencil-thin mustache and soft yellow jacket—and there’s a silent agreement between us that Guitar Man is the real lunatic. Finally Guitar Man stalks past me, “STUPID SICK FUCK….” He knows he’s alone in his rage. No hate crime occurs. Jesus. 
The subway train pulls up and I get on. There is a seat, but only if I insinuate my wide ass into the space (however graciously the guy in the Pit Bull coat tries to slide aside), and I’d been sitting a long time at Pat’s so I decide to stand by a door (I smile, give a little wave down low, and say, “No, thanks,” to Pit Bull Coat, who flashes a little corner-mouthed smile before he looks distant and unaffected again). 
This gives me a good view of things. Knowing that one always meets her fate in the path she takes to try to avoid it, I am not at all surprised when Make Believe enters my car by walking through the sliding doors from the next car. He keeps walking, though, as he tells his story, briefly startling only the people who were already on the car when the train pulled in. 
Looking around, I realize that everyone in this car could be from the cast of Freak Show: So many facial scars, off-hue skin tones, oddly low hair lines, squashed cheeks, deep furrows, beady eyes, hair too shiny, heels too high. One woman is arrestingly tiny, maybe just over 4 feet (when I see her exit), stick-limbed, Lohan-chic, such a doll-like blonde head, talking to a large texting man who seems to be answering her English questions with another language. When I catch a reflection of myself in a window, I see my waxed-canvas stovepipe-y hat over grey corkscrew hair and know that I, too, belong in the Freak Car. It’s homey enough. What the hell. 
I hear the sliding doors open at the other end of the car. “Colly, no thumb-sucking now.” And the doors close. Make Believe has moved on. 
The frost feels especially tingly on the dark walk home from the station. 
All so quiet. 
For now. 
Freaky.

WORKSHOP: We Say We Want to Just Make Out, But We Don’t Know How Not to Get Off

On With the Show

It’s all about “performance” these days. Forget Broadway, forget the Golden Globes: We ALL feel this. We get performance reviews at work; performance reviews in the sack; expectations to perform even at a dinner, a meeting, a date. Everything is ON. Your job is to keep someone SO interested, SO engaged, that they fucking forget they have a fucking PHONE to check. It’s goddamned SHOW-fucking-time.

Do you feel the PRESSURE? And yet in all this pressure to perform, we (and when I presumptuously say “we,” I mean the collective of humanity, and you may feel you don’t think that means you, and I ask you to assume it does) may lose sight of what we were doing in the room in the first place.

My friend Polina is a brilliant theater actor and innovator, a great teacher of acting. I’ve taken her classes. One evening in a scene study course, two student actors, a man and woman, were sitting at a table, speaking lines from a play. His character did the talking early in the scene. Polina interrupted him in mid-speech, without ceremony, and said to the girl, in her gentlest Russian-infused voice, “Excuse me. Sara, why are you listening to him?”

            Sara turned, said, “Because he’s telling me…”

            Polina said, with concern and sincerity, “He is boring.” She looked at the young male actor. “You are boring.” She looked back at Sara. “I am bored.” She gestured to the class. “We are bored. I am asking you why do you sit there. Why don’t you leave? Would you really sit and listen? Get up.”

            The man, Kyle, said, “But it’s in the stage directions.”

            Polina looked at him, then back at Sara, shrugged. “I don’t get why do you stay there.”

            Kyle got angry. “But if she leaves, what do I…”

            Polina honed in, and hard, but not meanly: “Make her come back. Use the lines. But make her come back, or she LEAVES. Da? Now. Again.”

One for the Money, Two for the Show

            Once years ago at a Michael Chekhov workshop—a workshop in the acting technique of the great teacher and actor Michael Chekhov—Polina had been given a directive, along with half of the group, to “do whatever inspired them.” Polina had no idea what that meant. “What is that? What does that mean?” were the feelings she recounted to me. A Russian-Jewish Soviet dissident from the Moscow Art Theater with a Ph.D. from Yale School of Drama, and an eager proponent of this work, she could only stare at the leader. The other actors leapt up and began “being inspired,” yelling, singing, moving wildly. Polina had no idea where these impulses came from, “so,” she told me, “I cleaned the room. I straightened chairs, or moved backpacks, and set about making the space nicer.” When the leader called time, the actors stopped, and the leader made comments. She was especially impressed with Polina. “What were you doing? What was your impulse?” Polina looked at me as she recalled it, mystified. “I told her my impulse was to figure out how to kill the time until this fucking experiment was finished.” (Polina would never swear in Russian, but in English it’s meaningless and so no problem at all. There’s another essay there…) Polina was supposed to feel she’d gotten her money’s worth? Was that it?

            This story put me in mind of an acting exercise I did, the first day of my first acting class in college. The acting teacher (who must have attended a similar workshop to the Chekhov one at some time in his past) broke the class into two groups and told the first half of us to go to the front of the black box studio and “act.” Everyone jumped in and began playing, making up scenes, the whole ball of wax. I could only stare. What were they doing? Where did this impulse in all of them come from? I didn’t get it. So I sat down on the floor in front of the chalkboard and waited for the exercise to be over. That’s what I did for the full two minutes. I waited. When that portion finished, the teacher quizzed the class: “Who was the most interesting to watch?” To a student, they said, “That girl,” pointing at me (doing my best Marlo Thomas face!). The teacher looked annoyed. “But she wasn’t doing anything…” he began, only to be interrupted with cries of “But she was . . . ” and he quickly moved on. He gave us another assignment, this time to count floorboards.  What he was trying to show was that having a real task made you more interesting to watch, but what he hadn’t counted on was an actor who was honest in the first place, who’d said, “This is bullshit,” and waited it out, thereby missing an opportunity to teach that what is actually “interesting” is honesty. (My acting teacher was really good, as it turned out, so I don’t mean this meanly. And I'm not the "role model" for honesty. But I’m trying to get at something to do with engagement, expectations, performance, and YOU. Us.)

Like Polina in the workshop, I wasn’t “trying” to “be” anything. We did what was honest for us in the moment. In a workshop or class, one would think this kind of honesty would be probed, discussed, used. What most teachers expect, and what most people expect, is not discovery, but performance. This isn’t only to do with acting or theater, but since that’s where I engage myself most, it’s my example. Here’s another one, at the risk of going all My Dinner with André on your asses.

I took part in a day-long workshop in London under the direction of an Irish experimental theater director. In the morning session, we actors engaged in an improvisation about being prisoners of war. The point of this improvisation was empathy—working to put ourselves in a place where we could empathize with the politically oppressed. She established the spaces and taped out the “cells,” putting two of us to a cell. She gave us various prompts and activities. What was my honest impulse? To utterly withdraw into myself. I had no interest in getting to know my “cellmate,” to “play” anything. I paced. I seized. I hardened my soul into a tight iron fist. I went about as deeply inside myself as it was possible to get in such artificial circumstances. I wrote a treatise, I had a name, “Eleanora Mann,” and by morning’s end, I was beyond anyone’s reach, emotionally or practically.  It was thrilling.

There was no discussion at the lunch break, no break at all really. We ate, I guess—I don’t remember any of that, except for a kind of confused waiting—but the afternoon session took us to a new place, years after the imprisonment, after: The war has been fought and the Allies have won our freedom: We became either judges, prosecutors, defendants, or witnesses at a “tribunal,” coping with the end of the oppression, working now for some kind of restitution or reconciliation. I was assigned the role of a judge, as was another participant, Ben. We had no idea how to do this, and in the brief time we had to prepare, Ben said casually, “Law and Order,” and I said, shrugging, “Sure. Exactly,” and we played every TV judge we had ever seen, about as sincerely and firmly as you’ve ever seen. We were dusting off the Emmy.

            I’m being sarcastic, but here’s how the day played out: A morning of intense involvement had been somehow reduced to a scene that felt utterly false and stupid. I don't know exactly how that happened. I mean, we were all just finding our way through a situation without a script, like life, really, when you think about it. What happens when a new country is being born out of ashes and degradation? Each of us takes on a role and we try to play it as best as we can imagine. But when the exercise wound down, we as a class never talked about what the experience of the day meant for us (closure was needed, context, explanations. Dinner. We had to change to go to a theater across the city), or what discoveries we'd made, though ostensibly that was the point. 

What turned out to be the point (consciously or not), I was disappointed to learn, was performance. That evening, as our ensemble made our way on the Underground to a production of Sweeney Todd, I got on earful. My morning “show,” as people thought of it (and I couldn’t tell you what anyone else did, so personally did I take the exercise), was not only ineffective and frightening, it was “selfish”—that word came up a lot. My afternoon “show” as the judge, by contrast, was “amazing.” And as I had done in my first acting class all those years ago, I could only look at the fellow participants and the leader during each separate one of these unrequested critiques, utterly confused. What had been the purpose of the workshop if not to make discoveries inside ourselves, to imaginatively explore—using drama and role-playing—what an alien and terrifying situation could bring about inside us, and cause us to act out? Apparently, we were supposed to be “performing” for each other. This is exactly what Ben and I did at the end of the day, play fake judges, bullshit with pained expressions, turn to each other meaningfully and occasionally whisper “significantly” (mostly obscenities to which we could barely keep a straight face), and it wowed the crowd. How was “wowing” the point?

So what I’m really probing now is the mistaken idea that performance has any place in acting class, in daily life, at work, or in sex—so that I might come (so to speak) to the title’s point: Because of performance anxiety and all the wrong expectations, people really don’t know how to make out any more. Do they? A greet, a grin, a drink, a knee rub, and the pants come off. Orgasm is the goal. The mess is made and cleared. People go home.

As Bret sings in Flight of the Conchords hilarious quickie-love-making song, “It’s Business Time”:  Was that IT? 

Let’s take a step back now, and ask those unasked questions: What is it to linger, to dwell, to go deep, to emerge, to stare, gape, stutter, work up to having to talk? Why not ask the question, “How was it?” and mean it, want an answer, find a deeper meaning, a better way in? Take this artistically or sexually—both are apt—and I wonder: What is the big goddamned hurry to put on the SHOW? There’s no audience: It’s just you and me. Right here, right now. Let’s learn something. (That is not a proposition.) (NO, it's NOT.)

Now let’s talk about teaching. Again.

This was a story last week in The Washington Post: In Schools, Self-Esteem Boosting is Losing Favor to [More Finely-Tuned] Praise 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-schools-self-esteem-boosting-is-losing-favor-to-rigor-finer-tuned-praise/2012/01/11/gIQAXFnF1P_story.html

For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates — but few, if any, academic gains.

Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. I always was a hard-ass and trusted it.

What did I get out of being told, “Your judge was amazing?” Absolutely nothing. What did Polina get out of being told that she was “so interesting”? Unless work is probed, explored, and delved into, what does so much “empty praise” mean? Look at Polina’s work with the young actors in her class: She was bored. She told them so. She wanted them to think about what they were saying, what would make their characters listen, stay, work to get someone’s attention. Would “Wow, nice!” make them powerful actors? She told them frankly, “I am bored.” They had to work to figure out what would make them—the actors/characters—want to BE in the scene before they could expect an audience to want to watch them. Polina pushed them to that point.

THAT is teaching. That is LIFE.

What is “performance”? The performance is the point at which you have done all the work you possibly could, given your all, gotten feedback and help and worked some more, and then SOLD TICKETS. Not until or unless you sell tickets—to put on the show, do the surgery, deliver the eulogy, take the exam, present the work to a paying public—are you in performance. Too often we treat the day to day process of living, of meeting people, of getting our bearings, as a goddamned performance, a “make or break” opportunity, do or die. It’s stupid.

I am bored.

Sex is boring. Our jobs are boring. The media is boring. Our politics, our issues, our candidates are boring.

And yet love is not boring, the earth is never boring, literature, art, science, goodness, hope—all that is not boring. Not in the least. I’m tired of being made BORED by people’s push to a fake engagement known as “performance” when what really should be going on is a process, and it's that process that too many are too fucking terrified to actually acknowledge. It’s so much easier to pull back the lips and squirt out, “Wow, nice!”

Process makes us engage. Process IS engagement. Are you bored? Change it. Change the scene. Get her to come back in and listen to you. Remember why you were talking in the first place. Make him make you stay. Make everyone work a little bit harder to get your vote, to have your heart, to earn an A, to keep you in the room. And you do that, too. Not because you are an asshole, but because you are honest, and it matters, and you love them. 

A Word Addict Confesses

ON LANGUAGE AS ADDICTION

When the journalist Christopher Hitchens died a few weeks ago at the age of 62 of esophageal cancer, he departed at the height of his fame and influence, which is not a bad time to go, though a great loss, really, seeing how much knowledge the man had amassed.  Through a gift subscription to Vanity Fair, I’d been reading his articles and essays during the past year, and really was just getting to know him. He came to my attention first when he was voluntarily water-boarded during the Bush Administration’s barbaric return to torture as an interrogation technique. This man who had flown into the mouth of every war since the 1970s said being water-boarded was the most terrifying experience of his life. Hitchens was wildly controversial for supporting the Iraq war—a lefty gone right—and what pulled him back left was his awareness of the role that religious fanaticism was playing not only in the Islamic world but also in rightwing politics everywhere. His most famous book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, made the case for a return to secular humanism and Enlightenment values. He concluded that it was probably too late, since the religious right dreams of nothing greater than the total annihilation of the world, and now has the weapons capability to bring it about.

Yesterday I took a stroll on YouTube and found two interviews, one with Hitch, as he was known, on a Canadian show called The Hour, and another with Hitch’s friend, actor and writer Stephen Fry (half of Fry and Laurie, and Jeeves of Jeeves and Wooster). Fry said that while he, too, does not believe in God, or god, he disagrees with Hitchens in his assertion that religion is only a poison, in that Fry’s own great passions are ecclesiastical architecture and Bach. (Not only was I impressed with the subjects of the interviews and the intelligence with which they spoke, I was also impressed by how engaged the (not American) interviewers were.)

I started this Hitch-hunt as a result of reading the last of Christopher Hitchens’s pieces before his death, this for the February 2012 Vanity Fair, called “Charles Dickens’s Inner Child,” about the great writer’s use of novels to show respect for childhood and to offer personal atonement. The next article is an In Memoriam for Hitchens by Salman Rushdie, in which Rushdie, a longtime friend, reveals that the title of Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, came out of a game they and group of friends played, called Titles That Don’t Quite Make It. (Other such titles included A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, and Mr. Zhivago.) So for all the seriousness of purpose of Hitchens and Rushdie and their friends, laughter had pride of place at their social table.

Stephen Fry remarks in another TV spot (this on why his favorite book is James Joyce's Ulysses) that all good art is comic, and I agree with that. This is not to say that art must send you into paroxysms of laughter, but that it should include wit. What set Fry and Laurie apart in sketch comedy, for example, was their love of language and all it could do and suggest, especially by casual misuse: "I have to fornicate with you, there." Just as the titles game above shows, only through enjoying and understanding what language is capable of can you come to see how one word can destroy a good title.

          *****

Nearly eight years ago now, the year I turned 40, my friend Tom suggested that the five of us old high school pals—he, Scott, Steve, Greg, and I (though straight female by birth, I am in fact a gay man; clarification: they are straight, but since I'm not attracted to women and they are...wow, this just got even more awkward)—get together over Memorial Weekend in our old stomping grounds (only Scott didn’t have a parent residing in the area anymore) and just hang out to celebrate our 40^th year—no kids, no spouses, just us. Tom realized that it most likely would be the last time we did such a thing when we were all living. Tom was in Chicago, Scott in Denver, Steve in Florida, Greg in Tucson, and Lisa in New York —what were the odds of bringing all five of us together again? The last of the weddings had more than likely happened, so that only left a funeral, and that’s nothing to look forward to.  For my part in arranging an event over the long weekend, I asked my dad if one morning he would mind having the guys over for breakfast, which sounds odd outside my family, but my dad (a former short-order cook in his youth) made a great breakfast, and it would be a chance for all of us to hang out with my parents (who are famously NOT night people). Afterward, we sat outside in the May sunshine, and my dad asked the best question of the visit: “What brought the five of you together as friends?”

What a good question, we all agreed. Hmmm. Tom ventured first, “Well, in school, we were all smart, but none of us were geniuses,” to which Greg quickly countered, “Speak for yourself,” and we all roared. Three of them had known each other since elementary or middle school, then high school introduced us all to each other, and in college and beyond we kept in touch, got together at holidays. Now, why?

I’ve thought about it over the years since my dad asked us about it. What I always remember are moments of talk: Riding with Greg to UVa to pick up Tom for Christmas break, and Greg’s idea to read every sign we saw backwards: “Stop” became “Pots,” “Yield” became “Dleiy,” “Exit,” “Tixe,” “Slow,” “Wols,” and “Pedestrian,” “Nairtsedep,” and you had to say it before you passed it. Really, it’s like driving in another country, much more exciting than only doing Rt. 29 through Culpeper, or rather, “Repepluc.”

Words: the mountains of funny letters we used to exchange, often with bogus return addresses; the indecipherable postcards; and watching shitty movies while making derisive commentary (a practice later stolen from us, apparently, for profit by MST3K) that made bad movies into brilliant fun. Our group favorite was Megaforce, a sci-fi adventure in a futuristic desert land where super choppers are the transport of choice, starring Barry Bostwick, Andy Gibb, and Edward Mulhare (the ghost of Captain Craig on the TV series, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir). Oh, lawdy. (When Tom married in 1999, we all watched this celluloid masterpiece-of-shit again the night before the wedding, sharing it now with a few more of Tom’s friends—Miss O’ still the only girl—and the other guys just didn’t get it. They were computer engineers, and language wasn’t their thing. But at least they could enjoy the really cheap special "effects" that no computer could have created.)

Given our vastly different lives at that time, our politics that ranged from rightwing capitalist to moderate to liberal to liberal socialist to Communist; our various landscapes; our chosen fields of endeavor; our interests—I now think that the secret link to our group friendship must have been, and is, the overwhelming love of language.

All of us were and are enthusiastic and sometimes great writers and talkers and wits, and our humor always language-based rather than physical. We “hear” the world differently, and in the same way. “You love ’em in blue, you love ’em in red,” Barry Bostwick intones to Andy Gibb, “but mostly, you love ’em in red.” We’d all stared at the screen. Finally, one of us said:

“What the fuck does that even MEAN?”

“What’s wrong with the other colors?”

“So you can only love by color code?”

“Why are we watching this?”

“Wait.  Here’s Captain Craig. He’ll explain it.”

And this would go on for hours. It’s gone on, as it turns out, for three decades.

*****

One summer at the Bread Loaf School of English, my friends George and Hugh told me about a situation in a men’s room on campus. The partition between two of the urinals had fallen down, leaving a kind of trench in the wall. On one side of this gap someone had written, “The Naked,” and on the other side another hand had written, “The Dead.” Below that, still another hand wrote, “The Sound,” and across the gap a new hand scrawled, “The Fury”; then, “The Agony” [gap] “The Ecstasy.”  So now George and Hugh actually looked forward to having to pee there, just to see what the urinal-titles list around the understood "and" would contain, and to think what they might add. By summer’s end the list had devolved to “Beavis,” “Butthead,” and the literary allusions were gone. Hugh remarked that it made him sad to think about what this lack of literacy meant for our esteemed school of English; then again, the surprise of the aberrant or vulgar is also a joy of language. (After all, another title-that-missed created by the Hitchens-Rushdie crowd was: Toby-Dick; a.k.a., Moby-Cock.) (The next summer the partition was fixed and the wall painted, so no evidence of genius or of culture brought low remained. And so it goes.)

*****

One of my former students, Nichole, wrote me on Facebook recently to tell me how she remembered my lesson in puns, and that she had loved puns ever since. My brother Pat is great at puns, and he had taught me about them. I used to groan at puns—I thought that dismissing them made me seem more intelligent. (At Bread Loaf, the poet Robert Pack said to me, “Everybody thinks puns are low and awful, but only because they wish they could do it.”) Here's how he taught me: I got mad at Pat once and said, “Spare me.” And Pat got a little twinkle and said, “That doesn’t STRIKE me at funny. Get it? Spare? Strike?” and I had to think, and said, “You could have BOWLED me over with that,” and Pat said quickly, “Don’t PIN this on me,” and then, “I’m ROLLING in the GUTTER”—this last being less a pun than a metaphor, but you get the idea. Let us not SPLIT hairs….

In grad school at Bread Loaf, it was George who reminded me of the joy of punning. As we walked through the woods, he asked, “Should we STICK to this path, or should be BRANCH out?” and his now-wife Jean said, “I’m LEAVING.” I think that pun helped bring them together.

In all of this LANGUAGE is laughter. It is the use of language to not so much move us as to make us laugh, and laugh, that is the true reason for any addiction to words and all they can mean. This plays out equally in sophisticated comedies as seemingly unlike as The Simpsons and The Muppets—one a bit blue, the other gently green—but both based on the understanding and love of language.

Or as Barry Bostwick might say, “You love ’em in blue, you love ’em in green, but mostly, you love ’em in…”

Cue the Monty Python foot.

And Music…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49c-_YOkmMU

From Where I'm Sitting, New York City

It's an unseasonably warm winter's evening in January in New York, the newly minted year of 2012. This is where I'm sitting as I type this. This chair was given to me by my college friend Gail Evans, who had been my roommate Vicki's previous roommate and who had left some thrift store furniture in the apartment when she'd graduated, and on a visit back to Blacksburg, I'd asked her if she ever wanted it back. "Oh, that green chair. It's from the 1930s. I love that chair." She paused and reflected in that way she had, seeing a point beyond and yet also purely in the moment.  She said, "No. If you don't want it, you can take it back to my mom's thrift store." I wanted it. I've been sitting in it ever since. From that apartment in B'burg to the Place to Montgomery St. to Church St. above Edna's beauty shop to the Stokeses' farm to my parents' shed to Spriggs Road to storage and to Queens: this chair is my home.

Now then.

Prior to this sit, Miss O’ had been lying in bed today and would not have risen, except she was surprised by the appearance of the exterminator (forgetting that it was indeed the first Saturday of the month); made perplexed and a bit worried by an inexplicable bill from Columbia University Pathology (note: a lab service, all was explained); and irritated by her own lethargy to the point of trying to eat something. Finally, after reading a novel, scanning YouTube, drinking two glasses of red wine, napping, and eating the last of the holiday peanut M & M’s supplied by her mom in the bus travel lunch pack, this writer is forcing herself to type out a blogpost while sitting with her laptop in the green chair Gail Evans gave her in 1984, still in her flannel pajamas (Miss O’, not Gail, and not since 1984; blue plaid, unripped), and decides she must tackle the story of her depression.

Ah, yes: Miss O’ suffers from depression. That gadabout, lunatic, free-wheeling, academic hard-ass you either loved or hated goes in and out of depressions. Acting classes are handy for oh so many reasons, and one of the biggest is “faking it” day in and day out on the job and in the universe. That depressions just get in the goddamned way of everything cannot be overstated. That they are useful is, weirdly, a byproduct, for the creative payoff to an episode of Holly Golightly’s mean reds is very often a work of art. Or a credible attempt at same.

As a challenge to myself, I am typing directly into this blog thing, rather than crafting the piece, because it isn't going to be very long (rest assured), but also because if I don't just post something I feel I'll never write again. Depression does that. You get up and open the laptop and you face a blank page that suddenly feels like the big blank of your life and mind and there you are, not existing. So all you can do is start typing. The magic of it is that words begin appearing, and it's as if I'd been invisible and started fading back in to my own lifescape.

Here's what is troubling me this day in 2012: America has just gone loudly, horridly stupid. It's nothing new, it's just so LOUD. Right wing calls to go back to 1812, deny progress, bury the facts of life, stuff the media full of bullshit statistics--those siren calls to end engagement with real issues and let go let God--just make me, well, go blank. Blank out. I also had a Facebook meltdown a couple of months back. Facebook is like the big reunion party you go to, and it's fun, you know, for four or five hours and you're catching up and it's amazing, sort of, seeing all these acts of your life shaping up into one giant play, performed on a site, and the party's gone on a while, and you think, "Wow, that was cool," and you go to the door to leave, and the host says, "You can't leave." And I sort of fell apart.

It's not that Miss O' doesn't love reconnecting and seeing those faces everchanging in the big cyber book. It's not that. It's the profound responsibility of it all--the recognition that there's this place I'm supposed to reach out to, and I get to where I feel I'm drowning in it. My friend Jen has a wonderful blog, http://boymommynyc.blogspot.com/, and she wrote a post recently called, "Facebook, I Wish I Could Quit You." Her point of view is slightly different, and wonderful, and it got me thinking about my own way of using that space. I'm still not sure what it's for, for me.

Here's what Facebook did, in a proactive way: For years, partly because of my own unpredictable states of mind, partly from my upbringing, and also because of being a public school teacher, I have been terrified of going "public"--with writing, acting, or any sharing of a personal creative act that did not involve coaching kids to be artists. As an artist friend said to me last week, "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings." What does it mean to publish? to distribute a film or video? to perform live? Why is it okay when other people do it, but not when we do? That sort of thing. And Facebook let me dip a virtual toe into a public space. I've attempted this blog. I allowed myself to be filmed and put up on a YouTube site telling stories. I let myself be filmed again last week. 

I am in the process of writing the one person show I always said I'd do, "The Miss O' Show," about my life as a teacher. I'm also working on a piece about men and why I don't have one. I am seriously thinking about performing again.

So out of these depressions, as I say, something emerges in the creative way of things. To tie this into the educational themes of previous posts, to try to test any human being in a "standard" way is a crock, really, because not everyone is going to be exactly positioned to "pass" at the same time. One thing I absolutely love about the current field of lunatic Republican presidential candidates is that not one of them is "standard" issue. Changeable, stupefying, and fucking terrifying, yes, but in no way cookie-cutter. 

So their very loud, mystifying presence begs the question: Is individuality for its own sake useful? When we require leadership in any field, is the reckless individual the one we need to hold a society together? Looking at this field of candidates, I would say no. And then what of the artist as individual? The artist in me wonders sincerely if it is possible for a society to travel fully by the same moral compass and still see its artists keeping artistic integrity. I do not know. I doubt we'll ever have to find out. Hence the depressions.

And yet bear them we can, and if we can, we must, as A. E. Housman said. So I'll continue to use writing as my own compass, to navigate in and out of my story, try to land a piece of writing or two and see where it gets me. That's really all I wanted to say. Let me hear from you, too.

Crossing Guard: Getting There from Here

WALKING TO SCHOOL

For several of the years I walked to elementary school, a very thin, tall-seeming woman in starched black uniform and military-structured white hat, orange neon belt, and disconcerting sunglasses walked to the intersection by my house to hold out white-gloved hands and say to the kids coming over across the field and from the other side of my street, “Cruss.” It was really the “oo” as in “crook”: “Cruss,” she would say, and the few words she might add, “Get bahck” or “vait dere until I say” were inflected in what I later learned was German. I made fun of this, practiced making my voice like hers. She was terrifying. Gossip swirled, her origins becoming the stuff of myth. I think now that when she was a little girl in Germany, she never imagined herself at a suburban intersection in Virginia guiding kids across the street en route to school, and yet there she was.

This post is really about why so many people hate going to school. Shakespeare knew it, said it in his “Seven Ages of Man” (“All the world’s a stage”) speech growled by Jaques in As You Like It, as the second age, after infancy: And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail
/ Unwillingly to school.  

The trouble with school, of course, is that it’s an institution. After a while, Ideas often become Institutions, so whether it’s school or a corporation or a Republic or a Communist State, at some point we humans cease to remember the founding principles and begin instead to feed the Beast that is the Institution.

I was reading this morning a review of an American Masters documentary about Woody Allen, who when walking past P.S. 99 (in New York, public schools have numbers) said, “I still think of it as a curse.” I had a student in my first year who told me the story of his mom taking him to kindergarten that first day, and when she picked him up asked him, “Well, how was it?” and he said, “Okay,” and she asked if he had anything he needed to do for tomorrow. He paused, looked at her. “I have to go BACK?” He hated school for the rest of his life.

It seems to me that there are three groups of people who absolutely hate school, and two groups contain people who like to Do Stuff:

·      The first are the Arts and Sciences Geniuses, those kids who are ready to observe, make experiments, listen, play, discover, much of it involving initial daydreaming time, and none of it wasted.

·      The second are the Mechanical Geniuses, those kids who have a gift for building, making, fixing, planting stuff, and who want to get their hands dirty doing it.

·      A third group—who may well also belong in the first two (or a fourth one, below)—are the kids who are physically, mentally, or emotionally “outside” the “norm,” who, whatever their talents or energies, stand apart and are visibly “other.”

School, as it is currently institutionalized, sucks for them.

A fourth group, Everybody Else, contains the people like me, in the hump of the bell curve, who get fairly solid B’s and C’s and really are pretty happy to be institutionalized. We just go with it. We don’t stand out much. We are straight, or know how to fake it, even to ourselves. We like learning things, would never have the imagination to find this stuff out on our own, and for the most part enjoy our exposure to new people, literature, writing lessons, science, math, history, and even the standing broad jump challenge in P.E.

As the years go on, around 7^th grade say, we in this fourth group may start to realize how weird we actually are, how much we are not really “of” the institution at all, and we find this out because we meet someone who says what we’ve always been thinking but had not articulated, someone who trains an imaginative lens, or a cynical eye, or an amused twinkle onto a typical school situation, and we look in their mirror and find ourselves. Possibly our own inner soul inspired this new friend to brave the observation. Then the institution loses its grip, in a good way.

SCHOOLDAYS MEMORIES

What do you remember most about school? As an exercise before reading the rest of this post, write the first five memories—images, assignments, people—that come into your head. Don’t judge them or censor them (no one will see it), and set it aside.

Take your time. I’ll hum.

All done?

Okay. Here are my first five, written just this second:

1.     Mrs. Angle and her purple suit, powder skin, red lips, cat-eye glasses.

2.     Tile floors.

3.     Trees visible around the periphery of the school, always glimpsed over courtyard walls.

4.     Cindy Sears, tall and gangly and large-toothed, merry-eyed and energetic, walking up to Miss Covington’s desk to do a 4-count burpee as penance for saying “Okay” as a verbal filler, a tic repeated a half dozen times in any sentence, and agreeing to this exercise in self-improvement, and how I deeply admired her spirit for it.

5.     This very nice woman, a young, sun-weathered jock of a gal—it’s her face I see, very pleasant—who taught us square-dancing in the Multipurpose Room when I was in fifth grade, and the smell of old tater tots and sour milk enveloping me as the tinny fiddle sounds came from the record player, a man’s voice commanding us to allemande right and left—her encouraging face against the light of the high windows.

Analysis: What I See in My List: It’s what I don’t see in my list.  There’s nothing here about reading. I can say with complete honesty that I remember absolutely nothing I read in school until I read “The Lady, or the Tiger?” in Mr. Rampley’s 9^th grade English class. There’s nothing about math, science, history; no big concepts or giant breakthroughs; not even the playground.  And yet all the listed memories as well as the unlisted ones are part of life experiences that helped to make me a teacher, actor, director, writer, editor; to live in the country in Virginia and in the wilds of New York City; to study Virginia Woolf at Oxford and perform comedy at the People’s Improvisational Theater on E. 24^th Street. Plenty of people who were part of the same institutions as I was took entirely different paths, will remember totally different things, and yet we are all part of the same story.

Aside: None of my memories appeared in the form of a multiple-choice question.

All this said, Woody Allen the Artist turned out pretty well. It’s hard to imagine him becoming an even better filmmaker, whether or not his art is to your taste. Most of us turn out pretty well, my evidence for this being how well the vast, vast majority of 10 million people behaves in the New York subway system on a daily basis.

And yet.

There is unhappiness, disappointment, and a feeling of profound confusion and worthlessness among many of us, even as we get up, shave and shower, make coffee, and remember to mail the goddamned bills. Can better schools preempt this?

So perhaps another question to ask about your own school life is this: What lessons, teachers, encounters, experiments, or academic moments can you point to, directly, and say, “Because of that, I am X”? What would you have wanted more of? Why?

AN EXERCISE: To be completed whether or not you think Public Education as an institution matters, should you love me. (Yes, I am playing that card.)

Part 1 of this exercise: Before you or I spend one more ounce of brain energy and heart-squashing rage on the institution that is school, Miss O’ asks that you expound on your political views of education as an institution. What do you believe? Write a tract. Why do you believe as you do?

Part 2 of this exercise involves reflecting on your own education: From the playground to the music room, from subject to subject, classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, over all the years you attended, what do you remember? What stuck? Give yourself several days and pieces of paper to jot notes. It takes time. Write a while and then go back to whatever you were doing. It’s amazing what a short walk to a new task will do to jog a memory.

Part 3 involves doing a bit of geometry: First, reread Part 1. Then reread Part 2. Now: How do you see your experiences leading to or informing your beliefs? Then turn out a theorem on What Education Should Be. If school could be whatever you had wanted, how would it work? What would it be?

A Guideline: Miss O’ is asking you to use your own experiences, and she knows that for readers out there with children this may be impossible, since much of your view is now clouded by the experiences that your child(ren) appears to be having. I say “appears” because, well, look what I remember about school. You’d think with my B’s and occasional A’s that I was more academically minded than I really was.

To close, one more memory: I am in a skirt and knee socks, hair in pigtails, standing on the school loading dock (old bread smell, overcast skies, white light) during recess in 5^th grade and telling my best friend at the time, Lori German, “I hate your guts.”

Sweet times.

SEND ME YOUR VIEWS

If you care to, send me a 100-word or so “Statement of School Belief” in the Comments of this Blog Post. I would love to read them, and I am challenging you to summarize.

Until next time, when we hear Miss O’ say, “Don’t go the direction I say, go where my hand goes.”

BONUS TRACK: “The Seven Ages of Man” by William Shakespeare, As You Like It

All the world’s a stage,
       

And all the men and women merely players;
       

They have their exits and their entrances,
       

And one man in his time plays many parts,                       

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
       

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
       

And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
       

And shining morning face, creeping like snail
       

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,  


Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
       

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
       

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, 
       

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
       

Seeking the bubble reputation


Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
       

In fair round belly with good capon lined,
       

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, 
       

Full of wise saws and modern instances;
       

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts


Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
       

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
       

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
       

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
       

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes


And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
       

That ends this strange eventful history,
       

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
       

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Quote Collecting

On Quotations and Their Uses

Somehow I think my actual education, so-called, began when I started remembering things people said and wanting to write them down. The quotation thing started, as most things did, with my mom, Lynne.  Here are the three I began with, and they are written as I remember them:

John Milton, Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”

William Thackery, Vanity Fair: “The world is a looking glass and gives back to each man the reflection of his own face.”

Tagore: “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like the dew on the top of a leaf.”

I think it’s fair to say that I have lived by these lines since I first wrote them down during my freshman year of high school, on papers I taped into the front of the three-ringed binder I would use all four years, adding many lines from my first literary muse, Oscar Wilde, whom I learned about when I watched the 11-part Masterpiece Theater series, Lillie, about the life of Victorian actress and Wilde muse, Lillie Langtry. (Eat that, Run-On Sentence Police!)

Being drawn to quotations is by most accounts I’ve read a characteristic of eccentric people.  The people who hoard quotations the way others hoard seashells, or Singer sewing machines that don’t work, or carnival glass, are easy to spot by the way they reach for paper napkins in the restaurant to write down what someone next to them said. Not that I’d know from experience.

In my first years of teaching (at my first school), I challenged myself every day to come up with an apt quotation each morning and put it on the board—first on this square chalkboard on the left side of my (actual own) classroom by the bulletin board. (I later began collecting these quotes in The Good Book, added to lovingly by students, friends, colleagues, and my own discoveries all the years of my teaching life.) This room was “my” classroom only for that first year, when the principal recognized that as I 1) was a first-year teacher; 2) was a teacher with three preps; and 3) had two classes of students who had most all failed English 9 the previous years (that’s right, plural), maybe I could have a room of my own. The room of my own evaporated after that first year, and for the next two years (and for the first five at my next school), I changed rooms every single period, moving from downstairs, to upstairs, to across the courtyard, and back upstairs down the hall, giant canvas tote bag in tow (thanks, L.L. Bean!).

As I’d become “that crazy woman who writes quotes on her board,” I felt okay going around the school each morning (with the permission of the classroom owners) to put my thought for the day in a corner of each chalkboard, thereby increasing my audience substantially. The eccentrics, therefore, crept out in greater numbers, too: There were at least three types: 1) the kids who’d casually take out their notebooks, as if exhausted or annoyed, and copy the quote; 2) the ones who’d read it, comment out loud, and may or may not copy it, but wanted to talk about it; and 3) the quiet, confident little scribes, who’d happily admit to saving them up like green stamps they’d get to cash in for a big prize.

Quote Unquote

This morning I was awakened at 3:00 AM by the powerful ka-pow of a car backfiring five times in rhythm before starting, finally, and heading down this Queens block. I decided to follow the advice of my horoscope in the Village Voice (Rob Brezsny):

Taurus Horoscope for week of November 10, 2011 How's your relationship with your muse? Don't tell me that you're not an artist so you don't have a muse. Even garbage collectors need muses. Even farmers. Even politicians. All of us need to be in touch with a mysterious, tantalizing source of inspiration that teases our sense of wonder and goads us on to life's next adventures. So I ask you again: What have you and your muse been up to lately? I say it's high time for you to infuse your connection with a dose of raw mojo. And if for some sad reason you don't have a muse, I urge you to go out in quest of new candidates. (P.S. A muse isn't necessarily a person; he or she might also be an animal, an ancestor, a spirit, or a hero.) To that end I looked up, first, Oscar Wilde, and here is what I found. OSCAR WILDE, MUSE OF FIRE AT 16 "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." "Nothing succeeds like excess." "There is no sin except stupidity." "He hasn't a single redeeming vice." And then there is this. From The Soul of Man Under Socialism: ·      The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. ·      There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair. ·      In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. ·      On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public. —Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong. —OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. --OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. —OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist WHAT OSCAR MEANT TO ME He was a philosopher, dandy, wit, man of the theater, and also a socially conscious being with a huge heart for the ills of the world. People know Oscar Wilde’s funny lines—such as “I can resist everything except temptation,” mostly from his plays and his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray—but the essays quoted above show a sober, reasonable citizen who while an artist first, was going after social questions (with love and with the soul of an artist). Wilde made me expand my world view (art is a political act, and isn't that a burden), and also made me aware of how the burden of political knowledge prevented me from pursing my theater arts life in full—the desire to be of use in a social contract sense took over (the opposite of what he intended). I have had more than a few friends think less of me for being politically noisy. Claire Booth Luce said, “Politics is the refuge of second class minds,” and I often worry she was right.

 VIRGINIA WOOLF, DISCOVERY AT 26

“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

 “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

 “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

― Virginia Woolf

 “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

 “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

― Virginia Woolf

 “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

― Virginia Woolf

More:

·        When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

·         Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

WHAT VIRGINIA MEANT TO ME

Virginia Woolf wrote as I actually thought. Reading her novels Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando; her diaries; her criticism: Virginia Woolf’s words took paths that were a map of my own mind, if my mind had been capable of articulating and recording and depicting and expressing as brilliantly as her able, wild, imaginative mind had. Reading her was a relief, and a terror. The greatness of her empathy that was almost unbearable in my relative youth is a solace in my middle age.

WHAT OSCAR AND VIRGINIA HAVE IN COMMON

Both were bisexual, both in the acting out of physical love and in their ability to get inside the heads of male and female characters. This is no small thing, I see now. Both were not only creative novelists and playwrights (he wrote mostly plays and stories, and only one novel; she wrote mostly novels and stories, and only one play), they were literary and social critics of the first order. They took their roles as geniuses seriously. They did not take themselves seriously. (Until they did, at the end.) Oscar Wilde used the past (as a Pre-Raphaelite) to show an unflattering mirror to the present (Victorian) age. Virginia Woolf, born only 13 years before Oscar’s ruin, sloughed off the Victorians, ever looking ahead and helping to create modernism. Yet both were of their times, loved their countries, loved life. Both were social snobs, living the paradox of caring about the poor and uneducated, truly, while being unable to co-exist comfortably with them, indeed, while disdaining them. Both were the victims and agents of their own tragic ends—he for bringing about the lawsuit that exposed his illegal homosexuality, leading to his imprisonment and destroyed health, dying at 46; she—living through yet a second world war, losing her London home to a bomb, married to a Jew and therefore both on Hitler’s blacklist, and a return of the “voices” and depression that she felt sure would hold everyone back from escaping England should an invasion occur—took her own life by drowning at 59. And still, they created so much, shared so much, lived so fully, in spite of it all.

While having no claim to genius or to the drama of these life stories, I do own that Oscar and Virginia give solace even to the lesser being. As an actor and director, as well as a writer, I have had to transform into genders that are not always easy to define as male and female. Oscar’s characters are virtually interchangeable in the play The Importance of Being Earnest. Virginia’s novel Orlando daringly grabbed the notion of gender and upended it to spoof not only biographers  (it’s a fake biography), but also property laws that excluded women from inheriting (this done for her friend Vita Sackville-West, who lost Knole, bequest of Queen Elizabeth I to her ancestor, because while she cared for it, cherished it, honored it, she was a girl, so the property went to a lazy, disinterested cousin, Edward, and eventually to the National Trust.) Both writers were and remain dazzling wits, Virginia shining not with the epigramic brilliance of Oscar, but with a slyness that penetrates to the heart more deeply.

Both forms of wit are indispensable.

The artist must be of her time and aware of her time if she is to be an artist. And yet politics always threaten to drown the art.

Oscar Wilde is one of my closest friends. Biographies of him were cruel and nauseating (I’d read two in high school) until Richard Ellmann’s appeared in 1987, rescuing Wilde from the black muck of the haters and scorners, to have his genius restored and placed up front. It’s his own words—his art—that matter, after all.

Virginia, too, has had her share of life interpreters, but has fared better (mostly) in biographies. Her writing is not easy going, but she goes in my direction. I have come to know her and to think of her not only as a great writer and thinker, but also as a great friend.

I think this is natural to do, when one is naturally solitary. And yet one must not live in this solitude. Oscar and Virginia are friends with whom I commune, and are not to be made substitutes for actual living.

A LITTLE CODA

Recently I came across this quote. I’ve read nearly everything VW ever wrote, from essays to diaries to novels to criticism, and never in my life would I imagine her saying, let alone writing, this:

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

― Virginia Woolf (not)

As it turns out she didn’t.  Someone else queried the same thing, I learned, when I searched around and found a site called Quote Investigator—and while versions of it have been said by various artists for years, and even Woolf writes of losing her “virtue” by taking some writing jobs— that quote is so not my Virginia, and this attribution to her is a fairly recent mistake.

“A poet can suffer anything except a misprint.”  —Oscar Wilde

What is it about quotations that has fascinated and continues to send us off searching the Google and the Bartlett's? Quotations are companions, I think, for lonely people, or for moments when people feel alone. I was very much lonely in my youth, as are a lot of creative people, in that there are so few people we can actually share our thoughts with when we are young and our minds so wild and unwieldy and, well, terrifying. So until we meet our friends out in the world (our true friends), a kindred thinker’s words—and they were safe, Oscar and Virginia, because they were famous and revered, and, I later learned, controversial and complicated, and so much the better for me—can be a life-sustaining gift, wrapped up in tidy quotation marks, easily stored in the mind.

“Forget about quotations. Tell me what you know.” --Emerson