Heavy

Running to the iTunes of a serendipitous string of shuffled songs one Saturday during my marathon training, I was struck by an insight that at the time I found quite Heavy: I had discovered yet another form of measurement of the passing of time.

It was in my 30s that light bulbs begin to click over my head about why my parents always whined about dated songs, missing friends, and forgotten celebrities. In my 40s, I realized one day that somehow all the war veterans had stumbled into the wrong generations—my comrades, who survived Vietnam, were the age my father’s WWII associates were supposed to be, and all his 40-something cronies had been mis-seated in the WWI vets’ place at the table. By the time I reached my 50s, it occurred to me that I might want to shut up about getting older because it was only going to get worse.

So these days I note the increasing bombardment of indicators mostly in silence. There are lapses. When the names of the four Beatles popped up as a trivia question on Jeopardy—one to which, furthermore, nobody knew the answer—I cried out in audible pain. A teenager who asked for my phone number and then looked at me quizzically, his finger poised over his open cell phone, when I handed him a slip of paper elicited a loud laugh. But mostly I suffer in silence.

Still, every now and then, a new variation slips in, and this is where it got Heavy for me during that Saturday run, the long one of the week. Dionne Warwick was crooning one of my all-time favorites, and it struck me suddenly that she sang of activities and truisms that no longer exist. “LA is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car…. weeks turn into years, and there you are, pumping gas… they’ve got lots of room in San Jose…” Pumping gas? Room in San Jose? 100 bucks to buy a car? She might as well have been singing about spooning under the harvest moon.

Topical tunes obviously fade, although it’s amazing how sometimes they don’t quite, or at least they go in and out of style, as with the Kinks’ tribute to that ancient energy crisis of the 70s: “I can score you some coke and some grade one grass, but I can’t get a gallon of gas.
… There’s no more left to buy or sell, there’s no more oil left in the well, a gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere, for any amount of cash.” The song will be apt again soon enough, I suspect.

Alas, some topics never seem to fade. Warren Zevon’s lyrics will always proclaim, accurately, that it is “time, time, time, for another peaceful war.” And “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” seems apt for all times, though the narrow population of one verse has become antiquated: “Where have all the husbands gone? Gone to soldiers, everyone.” Who picks the flowers, I wonder, now that the young girls fight alongside their husbands and sisters?

You can count on a certain dependable subset of war in select hot spots of the globe, so most of Zevon’s older lyrics still apply—but happily, sometimes even his lyrics become dated, at least regarding one lonely corner of our planet: “The Thompson gunner still wanders through the night… in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine …” It’s not much, but I grab hope where I find it these days—another symptom of aging, I suppose.

Another Zevon tune from the 70s continues to be, while a bit off on some of the details, still weirdly prescient, in a sick sort of way: “Nuclear arms in the Middle East; Israel is attacking the Iraqis; The Syrians are mad at the Lebanese; And Baghdad does whatever she please; Looks like another threat to world peace for the envoy.”

My run is nearly over and my 54-year-old bones are glad. Bach breaks through the shuffle like a beacon. My mind clears, except to ponder that, having occupied myself with utter nonsense for the past couple of hours, I perhaps have provided empirical data to support my long-held theory that runners are merely recycled Heads. Decades past our pot-imbibing days, when Heavy ideas dissipated along with the smoke, having lived through careers, children, divorce, and bodies that rebel at more and more of the substances we try to put into them, we’re forced to turn inward for our dope—from pot to endorphins.

So the Heavy ideas still come to me—and float away with the clouds over the final mile of the day’s run.

Pardon My Dust review (the uncut version)

(a slightly abbreviated version of this review appeared in the Wichita Eagle on Sunday, September 20; I prefer this one because it includes more info about the actual production, including the set and co-star Keith Boyer's work)

Pardon My Dust review (the uncut version)

By BOB CURTRIGHT Wichita Eagle correspondent
Playwright Annie Welsbacher’s “Pardon My Dust” is a two-person play but a decidedly one-woman show – rather, showcase – because it’s all based on the words and writings of noted tart-tongued author, wit and critic, Dorothy Parker.

Welsbacher cleverly weaves together excerpts from Parker’s poems, plays, essays, theater and book reviews as well as acerbic observations and delicious zingers shared by her famous friends and even more famous enemies to construct a view into Parker’s sophisticated but often dark world. Parker’s cynicism, colored by personal tragedies from suicide attempts to abortion, revolved around her never quite believing she was a good writer, despite her fame.

Parker was part of the famous Algonquin Round Table of writers who ruled New York in the early part of the 20th Century, but she felt overshadowed by such talents as George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley. The bitter irony is that, of her famous circle, she is the only one in continuous print nearly a century later. She is the survivor and the exemplar.

And playwright Welsbacher’s purpose is to force Parker to confront her own talents and realize her worth as a person, to give her the happy ending she may never have had in real life. Welsbacher does that by ushering Parker into a way station with all of her baggage – including more than a few stuffed dogs representing pets throughout her life – at the moment of her death in 1967 at age 73. “What fresh hell is this?,” Parker (Liz Willis) trumpets upon arrival in what looks like a posh gentleman’s club with dark wood bar and sleek leather chairs.

(The beautiful set design by Dan Williams is particularly brilliant because it is wallpapered with newsprint overlayed with giant Hershfeld caricatures of Parker and the Algonquin circle.)

It’s isn’t hell, she is told by a guide named Janus (Keith Boyer), but it might as well be because she is terrified of being alone. At Janus’ prodding, she roots through her considerable baggage – literally -- to recall and review the bits and pieces of her life. As she does, Janus transforms into half a dozen important figures in her past, from one of her husbands to snotty Woollcott (famous as the inspiration for “The Man Who Came to Dinner”) to her beloved Benchley, the love of her life but never (reportedly) her actual lover, to her dismay. Parker banters, argues, confronts, affronts and ultimately embraces Janus in his various guises so she can find peace with herself. The clever title refers to Parker’s ashes, which were relegated to a lawyer’s file cabinet for years before finally being laid to rest.

Veteran Wichita actress Willis, who approached Welsbacher to write this work for her, is a powerhouse as Parker, sometimes stalking the stage in triumph and sometimes shuffling around in doubt. Willis shows many emotional shades as she pushes beneath Parker’s strident, privileged, quippy surface to reveal the wounded romantic soul underneath.

Boyer, another prolific local actor, is a nimble, versatile presence as Janus who changes personalities (and voices) as easily as slipping on a pair of glasses, hat, smoking jacket or waiter’s apron. Boyer is a strong match for Willis and a generous co-star whose performance beautifully supports rather than competes with the heroine.

Directed by Wichita State’s longtime theater head Dick Welsbacher (the playwright’s father), the show – given its world premiere Wednesday – got off to a sluggish start but quickly picked up pace when Parker started throwing around her famous comments, some of them pretty salty. The play has R-rated language but is literate and sophisticated rather than smutty. While the play is designed as one 80-minute act, there is an unnecessary (to me) blackout pause to divide it into two scenes. Since nothing essentially changes and the setting is timeless, that moment creates a stumble in the mood.

Merle Streep

From the sublime to the ridiculous…. last night, in a motel room in Iowa, I turned on the TV and watched news of Walter Cronkite’s death. I felt moved to write about it, and did. Tonight, in another motel room in Wisconsin, I turned on HBO and witnessed not a death but a life. I watched a weirdly talented display by Merle Streep in possibly the worst production in which she has ever appeared.

It’s a cliché to say that Merle Streep is good; it’s a given, like the fact that trees grow toward the light. It’s a cliché to say she is the best, and it’s hard to keep saying that when she keeps proving it over and over and over again. Her avant garde work of decades past—in, say, a BAM staging of Alice in Wonderland , a performance any of us would be proud to claim—have been only exercises for her, a warm-up. Kramer vs. Kramer would have sealed her place in history, but that was before Sophie’s Choice. I was pretty sure she’d reached her apex in Angels in America—a male orthodox rabbi?! as only one of a fascinating chorus of characters?—but no, I’ve seen an even greater achievement tonight.

I didn’t expect Mama Mia to be particularly good; I watched it because it was free and it was on, and I love Streep and Christine Baranski and Julie Walters and Colin Firth. I thought it might be mediocre, neither good nor bad; the music certainly fits that rough definition. I didn’t expect it, despite the reviews, to be so truly, genuinely, awfully bad.

I most certainly didn’t expect Merle Streep to be so good. To fall on this work with the same frank appetite she might have unleashed on Gertrude or Medea or Hedda Gabler. Her energy made me ashamed of my own existential ennui, my difficulties in engaging in a world that seems so out of whack, at the same time violent and banal, and ultimately so pointless. Who am I to wail at the velocity of modern-day cruelties when Merle Streep is so willing to give her heart to disco-era pop music of no redeeming value whatsoever?

She put her soul into every single moment of that film. Into every line, every moment, every verse in those terrible songs and that dreadful staging and the awful choreography and tired story line and one-dimensional characters. The movie takes place on a Greek island, and somehow, she found ways to bring Greek drama—yes, pity and awe and terror and catharsis—to this meaningless little money machine of a movie.

I’ve seen good actors do bad work, from Hoffman to Olivier. I’ve never begrudged them for it. On the other hand, as a playwright, I’ve experienced the rescue by actors of prose that should have had a good editor—or dustbin. I’ve witnessed the enactment of that old saw about reading the phone book—as in, he’s such a good actor he can make the phone book entertaining. Literally: my father reads the TV listings every Tuesday for a radio station that ministers to the blind. He always frets about making them interesting. They don’t have to be interesting, I assure him, it’s just reference—the reading isn’t interesting either, we just want to know what’s on and when. But he works hard to make it interesting, and he damn well does.

Still, I have never ever seen the kind of energy and diligence that Merle Streep put into Mama Mia, a movie she made at a time in her career when she hardly could have needed the work or the money. I have never seen such humilty and such rigor and such elegant transplendence.

Because that’s the other thing: her hard work wasn’t evident, it wasn’t what you see so often in actors like DeNiro and Cage and Nicholson, where you are painfully aware of how strenuosly they are Acting, you are so bloody aware of it that you can’t watch the damn movie. No, no. Streep was doing her usual invisible thing, where she is simply and organically engaged in the character she is portraying. It was just simply all the more awe-inspiring to see such fine work in a vehicle that by any form of measurement didn’t deserve it.

In a strange way, I have witnessed the work of two masters of their mediums in as many nights. Both spoke the truth, whether through storytelling or journalism, and both were the best at what they did because of that—they sought the truth no matter how much work it took, and they hewed to it like a lifeline, and it repaid them well in good Work.

I am on my way to a workshop about church leadership. I’m leery of all the worship activities in our agenda, because I am not sure I believe in what these activities assume about me, about us as human beings. I became involved in this work as a payment to my mother, a payment I will consider completed at the end of my year as president of my church. I am glad to pay her this respect.

But part of me has been sated by what I have felt and seen in the past 48 hours, just getting to this place for the work to being. Part of me feels as though the workshop—my own personal journey—has already begun.

Walter Cronkite

He was 92, my God it shouldn’t have been a surprise, it happens to us all, even those who ought to have been beyond mortality, who created and maintained standards that defined Art or Social Contract or Mathematical Truth. Gauss, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Budda, Weill, Einstein, Beckett, they died.

But the death of Walter Cronkite, in our modern currency, is tantamount to the end of the universe, and I say that pretty close to literally.

The significance of his place in human history perhaps won’t be understood by the generation that sucks up its “news” via new media, in little MacBites, in-between homework and Twittering. Try to understand what it was like when Gallileo claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun rather than the other way around. That was Cronkite, in both substance and style. Early 20th century print journalism consisted of the same yellow nonsense that now passes for reporting (except that it actually sold papers); late 20th century and early 21st century broadcast performances aren’t even journalism—they are a peculiar form of entertainment that neither informs nor entertains.

Walter Cronkite, more than anyone other than perhaps Edward Murrow, defined television news at a standard it has not upheld before or since. Even the best of print journalism has never achieved the levels he reached in intensity or scope. He defined Vietnam, space, Watergate… but most important: he defined what journalists do. He determined that objectivity was tantamount, and what that meant was that when he did step in, that rare moment when he interjected his perspective—that beautiful acknowlegement of the legitimacy of informed human interpretation that further trajected American journalism forward in the 1960s and1970s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Normal Mailer, and others who noted that human beings bring, for better or worse, their interpretations to the pinnacles of Truth—he moved mountains by what he said. When Cronkite came forward with his beliefs about Vietnam, LBJ famously noted that he had just lost the American public.

Walter Cronkite changed American history. And he did so not through the strategies of American politics or corporate tactics, but by aligning himself with the truth at all times. His death is an enormous loss to us not just of a human being—which in the end is the worst loss that any of us suffer—but of a way of interpreting and reporting the truth that I believe we all will bear, not just now, but as citizens of America.

Nobody really believes what anybody says anymore. With Cronkite’s death, there is scant reason to do so. With Cronkite’s death, we lay to rest not one person, but an entire wayof examing American life—a viewpoint that makes assumptions of a certain sort of grandeur and honor that I am not sure we can claim anymore. I grieve not only the loss of the man, but also the loss of his blessing on us all as Americans in the great, but still perilously young, experiment in democracy that we all are trying to make happen.

Kalpen Suresh Modi, we will miss ye

Kal Penn is the stage name of Kalpen Suresh Modi, the amiable young actor famous for such silly roles as Kumar in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, who recently left a more serious though equally amiable role in the TV series House to join the public relations team in the Obama administration. Early in his career, he used the name ‘Kal Penn’ on his resume and photos to challenge assertions that an Anglo name offers a leg up. His audition callbacks rose by 50 percent.

Kalpen Modi says of his background (in an online interview, so who knows?), “I've been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while. I love what I do as an actor. But probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service. I went to a performing arts high school, but I still took a bunch of those dorky political science classes. It's probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me. They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, and that was always in the back of my head. In '06 I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. And I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else. The ultimate irony, of course, is that I love being on House. There's not a smarter group of people that I've been surrounded by in television.

Slouching toward New York

I'm here on the prairies of Kansas, yes, but at times, when the season is ripe, I miss New York's bountiful theatre. From Christopher Isherwood's review of Ruined and Scorched: These plays are vital signs that theater artists continue to engage deeply with the intractable problems of the world. And theater's responsibility to bear witness to the mass crimes of humanity may only increase in coming years. Journalism is a more immediate forum, and one in which the exigencies of aesthetics are not as urgent. But it is also imperiled. By comparison the fabulous invalid looks positively robust.

Ego Stroke, Mindless Chatter

Trolling the internet to see if anything by me was actually still posted anywhere (I freelanced for several years and had articles posted on the online versions of various magazines, but it's been a while), I was disappointed to find that, no, the things that came up when I googled my name were the long lists of books for young readers I wrote for several publishers during those freelance years. Some were awful, some were OK, a few I am quite proud of - but the pages of hits were nothing more than lists at bookseller sites. Still, I stumbled on an item by a librarian who specializes in "reluctant readers" - the audience I often wrote for - and was thrilled to find a few kind words for me among others. I take her praise much more seriously than that of book reviewers, because as a librarian who works with these kids, she knows what she's talking about - and because the kids themselves passed the final judgment. Excerpted from this little essay:

...The display of attractive books caught the attention of more than just the remedial students. I soon noticed other students whom I recognized as reluctant readers lingering at the display. Boys, in particular, enjoyed checking out the non-fiction titles, especially any about the U. S. armed forces or their vehicles, such as Attack Helicopters by Bill Sweetman, Attack Submarines by Michael and Gladys Green, or any dealing with animals; Bear Attacks by Patrick Fitzgerald and Vampire Bats by Anne Welsbacher were popular choices....

A small victory, true, but I take them where I find them.

What victories have YOU celebrated lately? I'm so pleased to have received items from friends to post here. Please don't be shy. Send along your essays, letters to editors, or ruminations on art, science, or the prairies. I confess to have drifted rather further into politics than I had intended to do with this blog, but given our past year, how on earth could I NOT have? Besides, depending on your leanings, the dances and leaps of fancy that occupied our airwaves last year could be observed as either science (using spin to shift thinking in frontal lobe brain waves) or art - that low-brow, performance art, strange business you generally see in tiny lofts on either of the northern coasts.