Deeds & Words

From wonkette.com:

“Critics, you won,” said John Aglialoro, the businessman who spent 18 years and more than $20 million of his own money to make, distribute and market “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” which covers the first third of Rand’s dystopian novel. “I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2.”

No, I think it’s “Audience, you won.” 

I read Atlas Shrugged when I was in my 20s.  It was slow going but I persevered.   I didn’t think the writing was great; I got tired of the speechifying, and I knew pretty early that there was something really wrong there,  but I loved Rheardon Metal, and I thought I was Dagny Taggert; a calm clear-eyed heroine surrounded by incompetents who couldn’t see my gently shining genius.  It wasn’t until Taggert’s sister-in-law killed herself that I began to get a handle on things. Then I had the same problem most people have with Rand; if you follow her philosophy to its reasonable conclusion, it is adolescent selfishness and nothing more.  No, wait.  That isn’t fair.  That’s rude to adolescents.

Rand’s brilliant strong beautiful independent clear-eyed powerful interesting  characters take credit for everything.  They are above the rest of us, we sheep, even though they do apparently make mistakes, like marry the wrong people.  When they have affairs, then, it’s with others like them.  That’s not their fault.  It’s the sheep’s fault for being sheep.

I still wanted to be those people. I wanted to take credit, to be extolled for my brilliance, my wit, by terrifying strength and competence.  I didn’t really understand, until Dagny’ sister-in-law ran off the edge of the building, that Galt and his band of ubermenchen were mannequins; that Dagny was as much a wish-fulfillment character as any breathless maiden in a bodice-ripper romance novel; that, in fact, it was a romance novel, if a toxic one. 

This is exactly how the GOP sells its brand to the very people who should join a union and demonstrate against Wall Street banks; by serving up a  broth of wealth fantasy/vengeance fantasy/romantic fantasy.  Some day I’ll be the rich one.  Some day I’ll show them.  Some day that will be me, my “elegant legs” slanting away under my perfectly fitted gray suit, with that rich, powerful handsome man staring at me, panting with desire.  Yes, that’s how my life will be someday, not like it is today.

I didn’t know there was a movie until I saw that quote on Wonkette.  Then I read some of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  $20 million is a high price-tag for a vanity project.  It seems as if Mr Algialoro should have invested in some actual writers, and maybe a director and some actors.

And really, with a built in Tea Party audience you couldn’t sell this, Mr. A?  Your problem was not the critics.

Plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival run the range from conventional to exuberantly experimental.  This summer, for instance, the festival will be producing WillFul, an experimental and experiential piece that reads a bit like a scavenger hunt.  The event goes beyond the walls of the theater and the audience is directed to wear walking shoes.  This year’s Julius Caesar addresses the play from the point of view of power and revolutions, and part of the set is in the plaza outside the New Theater; twelve banners of political leaders who were assassinated. 

To Kill a Mockingbird, in contrast, is staged in a conventional manner.  The festival has a team of brilliantly skilled carpenters, scene and set designers, lighting and sound specialists and it’s fair to say that technologically, the only limit is the set designer’s imagination, which puts a lot of pressure on those designers.  Mockingbird embraces minimalist sets, formal sets and shadow-screens to tell its story. 

The stage is semi-circular with three levels; three steps down to an apron and then three more steps down to the theater floor.  The first and third acts (this is a conventional American three-act play) use limited props, and shadows on the screen backdrop, to evoke the town, the street and Atticus Finch’s house.  When the house is needed, stagehands carry out a door frame hung with a screen door, that has two long pegs at the bottom.  The pegs fit into slots cut in the floor.  There are two sets of slots, to help the audience orient ourselves and understand if we are seeing the front of the house or the side of the house.  When it is needed, a porch swing lowers from the ceiling; when it is not, it rises slowly back skyward. 

The tree with the hollow where Jean Louise Finch, called “Scout” and her older brother Jem, find hidden treasures is silhouetted against the backdrop, as is the increasingly spooky Radley house where the reclusive and maybe crazy “Boo” Radley lives. 

All the other houses on the street are invisible, suggested merely by the behavior of the actors.  Mean old Mrs. Debose just wheels her chair out onto the stage when she is yelling at them from her front porch. 

The front door of the Finch house gets a lot of use, but many of the conversations happen on the front porch, most often between the children and Calpurnia (Isabell Monk O’Connor) the Finch family’s protective housekeeper.  Conversations between Atticus and the men of the town, usually about the trial, take place in the yard, because, as Scout tells us, “Conversations about politics and death” happen there. 

Christopher Sergel, who adapted the play, chose to give us Jean Louise as an adult narrator, a slender, gray-haired woman, simply dressed, who is looking back over her memories of this year in her life.  Jean Louise is no passive narrator; she interacts with her memories, moving among the actors, often speaking the same line as her nine-year-old self. 

In contrast to this nearly bare stage, the second act, which is the courtroom scene, is formal.  There is a full balcony where the children watch the proceedings, an imposing judge’s bench, chairs for the jury (Jean Louise perches on an empty chair, watching the trial with us).  On the lower level, the prosecutor’s and defender’s tables sit side-by-side, facing the judge, even though the actors declaim to the audience.  We watch Mayella Ewell (Susannah Flood) cling to the rotted scraps of her dignity as she faces down Atticus, who she accuses of “sassing” her because he calls her “Ma’am.”  We see the fear and shame in her face as she gives her testimony which we already know is a lie. We watch the shackled and crippled Tom Robinson (Peter Macon), accused of raping her, struggle to swear on the Bible, because he has only one good hand. In the balcony, we are as rapt as the children, and as hopeless as the black Reverend Sykes (Tyrone Wilson), because, like him, we know what the outcome will be, no matter how brilliant Atticus is. 

The action of the jury gives the lie to the solemnity of this set, this virtual temple, and to Atticus’s desperate plea for justice, where he says that everyone knows that not “all men are created equal.”  Some men are stronger, some smarter, some have more advantages, “some ladies make better cakes.”  But there is one place in American, says Atticus, where men are equal; in a court of law. 

If only that were true. 

On the other side of the compelling second act we are back to the imaginary Macon summer landscape, where Scout, Jem and their summer friend Dill find out more about Boo Radley, and Jem and Scout face a vicious attack. Near the end of the play, the shadow-screen fades and a real house, the Radley house, not a shadowy haunted house but a three-dimensional structure, takes its place.  Scout has made a connection, learned something about the real world, in both of these material scenes. 

Dee Maaske, who plays the adult Jean Louise, provides a sweet and wry performance.  Mark Murphey, in the role of Atticus, mostly manages to not look like Gregory Peck, no small achievement, but there is a single moment in the play that caught my breath.  After Atticus has faced down the lynch mob, and sent the children home, he stands for a moment beside his chair.  He looks to one side, and the expression on his face encompasses grief and shame; grief for his client, and also grief for the people of his home town, which he loves, for not being better, for not rising to what he knows they could be. 

The play works because of the authenticity of Scout, Jem and their summer friend Dill; played by Kaya Van Dyke, Braden Day and Leo Pierotti.  These are three fresh and disciplined young talents.  Van Dyke is wonderful but Day captures the bossiness, ignorance and awareness of a boy on the verge of adolescence perfectly.  His theories about life and about Boo Radley, his disappointment with his father, who, as Jean Louise puts in, “didn’t hunt, didn’t fish and didn’t play poker; and wouldn’t let us have any fun either,” which we watch transmute into pride as he sees his father in the courtroom, are vivid and real. 

This is an old play, a powerful play, staged and cast to bring out all its power.  I left sniffling, and thinking, as did the people on either side of me.

I walked up to the bank to put our marriage certificate (Marriage Certificate!! OMG!) in the safe deposit box.  I couldn’t remember my box number but  I had the key.  Actually, I had two sets of keys, and Greg, the teller, asked me which box I wanted.  There’s the one Spouse and I have together, and one I had gotten several years before that, and had forgotten about.

I said I wanted the joint box and wanted to close out the other one.  Our joint box has two documents in it.  Four now because I aded the certificate and one other paper that needed safe-keeping.  I asked Greg to take out the other box for me.  When he lifted it out he said, “It’s light.”  I heard something sliding, making a plastic clatter as it hit the side of the box, and started to laugh. 

“Floppy disks!”  I said.  I have always been pretty faithful about backing up my computer, and sure enough, here were a handful of disks from 1997. I tossed them in my bag and closed out the box.

*

In the refurbished building that used to house T&K Vacuums a few years ago, a new gallery is opening.  The location is good and bad; good because it’s easily seen from one of the town’s two main streets; bad because there is very little parking.  We shall see.

The Pine Cone Cafe closed.  It lasted about three years. That’s about two years longer than I expected it to.

Two blocks south, a quirky little shop called Shiki Monkey is closed.  Sad but not surprising.

A new coffee place is opening in town, called Holy Cow.

Live theater, like a good novel or a movie, gives the viewer a chance to imagine, or understand, another person’s life. As Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird might say, it’s a chance to walk in another person’s shoes. 

For half an hour during the Ashland Shakespeare Festival’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird, I could imagine what it might have been like to be a black man in the 1930s south, or the 1960s south, or the 1980s south, or maybe the south today.  It was unsettling. 

The courtroom scene is the second act of the play, and it is surprising that is it suspenseful, since the verdict is a foregone conclusion.  Of course I have read Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel.  In the book, I identified with Scout, our first person narrator, an adult telling us a story about the summer she was nearly ten, and the events that year that changed her life and opened her eyes to the world.  I thought the book was about injustice, which of course it is, and fear of the other, which it is.  I thought it was about family and different types of courage, and it is about all that too.  Marion McClinton, the African-American director of this year’s production, also sees that it is about inequality, something so rooted in the story that I almost overlooked it because I took it for granted.  In that courtroom scene in the Bowmer Theater, I was not allowed to overlook it.  For a few minutes, I could imagine what it would be like to be someone whose entire existence is so precarious that merely coming to the attention of the wrong white person could cost you your life.  Maybe you didn’t lower your eyes quickly enough or step off the sideway fast enough—or maybe you didn’t do anything except walk by a certain house on your way to work in the fields every day. 

Mayella Ewell (portrayed with heart-breaking conviction by Susannah Flood) has accused Tom Robinson, a black man, of raping her.  While Mayella can be seen as a fellow victim, in a way, her father Bob Ewell is a bully, a liar, a man who brutalizes his children and has probably sexually abused his eldest daughter.  The Ewells are white trash; on the stand, Bob boasts about being able to write his name “so he can sign his relief checks.”  When I read the novel, I thought then that Lee was, if not exactly cheating, making it easy on herself, and on the reader, by making the Ewells so easy to dislike.  They are not “like us.”  They aren’t good whitefolk, they are those “others.”  McClinton seized on a point I had never absorbed; the toxic, brutal system of social order inherent in oppression.  Bob Ewell, who beat his nineteen-year-old daughter and will later try to kill Atticus Finch’s children, has to have someone to look down on.  In Macon, Georgia, in 1935, Ewell is entitled to that. That person is Tom Robinson.  The outcome of the trial is foregone, but if there had been a glimmer of hope for Tom, he extinguishes it himself when he admits, on the witness stand, that he went into Mayelle’s house because “he felt sorry for her.” 

He, a black man, dared to admit in a room full of white people that he felt sorry for a white-skinned girl.  

It is for this reason that Bob Ewell wants, not only Tom dead, but Atticus as well.  He sees Atticus as the architect of this upheaval of social order, this attack on his privilege.  It makes no difference that Tom is innocent, or that Tom is a simply a better man than Ewell.  Tom Robinson, and later Atticus Finch, challenged Ewell’s privilege, and unlike middle-class, educated and white Atticus, Robinson has absolutely no protection against Ewell’s rage.  

Earlier in the play, of course, Atticus and Tom are menaced by a drunken lynch-mob.  Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, burst onto the scene, and Scout, who recognizes one of the men, begins talking to him about his son, who is in her grade.  The men, confronted by a tiny spark of humanity within themselves, steal away, ashamed.  Robinson will not be so lucky with a jury, in the temple of American justice and equality.  Struck by logic, the complete lack of any evidence incriminating Robinson, and Atticus’s passionate and eloquent summation, the jury will struggle for three hours to beat down that spark of humanity and conscience within themselves, and make the decision they know is wrong, to protect a social order that keeps them on top. 

Tom Robinson (Peter Macom, striking every note in his small role perfectly) knows that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, and that he is a dead man, but even then, even on the witness stand, he does not have the luxury of defiance, of telling these people what he really thinks of them, because he has a wife and children who must go on living in this town. 

This is oppression.  This is not a level playing field. 

I’m not doing the entire play, the players or the excellent sets, justice here, but I’m writing about the moment in the play that changed my thinking, at least for a moment. McClinton took an old story, one with an iconic movie attached to it, and moved it out of the shadow of Gregory Peck.  He made me think about the world differently.  He made me think, for a few minutes in that mostly-white audience in Ashland, Oregon, about systems of inequality not from the outside, but from within.

I was torn.  I had a ticket for the Saturday matinee of To Kill a Mockingbird, but after a long walk Saturday morning I decided I had to do the cultural thing and see what was available for Saturday night, instead of staying in my hotel room and watching the season premiere of Doctor Who on BBC America.  Yes, I really am that shallow.

So, after walking in Lithia Park, I went to the Box Office, but Julius Caesar was sold out, and I wasn’t drawn to August; Osage County. So, I get the best of both; I saw Mockingbird, and got to feel virtuous about watching the Doctor try to help President Nixon with an infestation of scary aliens.

* 

On the trip up, I left my Shakespeare umbrella in my room in Eugene.  I didn’t get the umbrella here, but at a bookstore back home.  I used a gift certificate that a group at work had given me for a birthday.  It was squarish in shape, not circular, and had Shakespeare on it in green and melon-orange.  I really liked that umbrella.  I called the hotel and we agreed that I would pick it up on Friday when I came back down, but I took the wrong freeway exit.  It had the same number as the northbound exit to get to the hotel, but. . . it’s the getting lost thing. After driving around in a housing tract for twenty minutes, I mentally shrugged and got back on the road. 

Bloomsbury Books had the same umbrella, so I got another one.  It doesn’t have the sentimental value, but it’s part of the vacation now. Perhaps it will develop a store of memories, and the old umbrella will move on and have new adventures, not unlike Doctor Who and his rotating human companions.

Shakespeare Books and Antiques used to be up the hill, about a block off Main Street, in a long narrow space. I don’t remember it having a lot of windows.  Now she is in a shop on Main Street, a big, square well-lit place filled with books, old toys, paintings, prints and photos, serving dishes, trays, cases of jewelry, statuettes and magazines.

I found a slim book of poems by TS Eliot, including The Wasteland and bought it.  Why?  Well, it was only four dollars, for one thing.  And The Wasteland is one of the most powerful and intriguing poems written in the last hundred years.  So that’s why.

The proprietor has a century-old cash register.  She grabbed another customer and let/made her ring me up on this beautiful, intricate machine.  If you wonder why some people like steam punk, drive or fly to Ashland and look at this non-electrical machine.  As a bonus, she flipped up the richly decorated cover to show a little window where the totals are kept.  Below this little gauge, the surface was blackened with carbon.  “This was before electricity,” she said.  “And at the end of the day, the shopkeeper had to write down the total from here.”  She tapped the carbon stains. “So they’d strike a match.”  She pointed to the other side, where there were a few streaks of black.  “And these marks over here must have been from—“ 

“Left-handed clerks,” the other customer and I said in unison.  Because, it turned out, we were both left handed.

. . . this one, on the back of the door in the single-stall bathroom (think “closet”)  at the Greenleaf Restaurant in Ashland wins a gold medal for several reasons:

• bossy
• insightful
• funny

And don’t forget to pray for world peace.

April 22, 2011 (Earth Day!)

The Washington State stretch of I-5 has the bossiest highway signs ever. 

There are the usual; CLICK IT OR TICKET, and LITTER AND IT WILL HURT. (Yeah, it will—they fine up to $6,250 for littering.)  Then there are variations on the themes; like the baffling, “Seat belts must be worn day and night.”  Even when I’m sleeping? Oh, you mean in the car.  Well, I didn’t think the laws of physics only worked the day shift. 

Then there was, DON’T PICK UP HITCH-HIKERS. 

I was waiting for, EAT YOUR VEGETABLES OR THERE’S NO DESSERT FOR YOU.

*

Speaking of fines and signs; failure to use a safety device that will, in an accident, prevent you and/or your passenger from hurtling through the windshield and dying; that’s a $97 fine.  Tossing your crumpled Kwik-Gulp coffee cup out the window could be a $6,250 fine.  Um, priorities, people?

*

29 days until Judgment Day!  I know this because the Family Radio people bought space on one of those new-fangled electronic billboards outside Salem, Oregon—and they splurged and added a countdown clock.  They say the Rapture starts May 21, 2011.

If the world were really going to end in 29 days, really end, and you couldn’t stop it or survive it (insert personal catastrophe of your choice here) what would you do?  Would you quit your job?  Find the biggest, wildest 29-day-party and join in?  Book trips to all the places in the world you had always wanted to see?  Re-connect with family and old friends?  

May 21 isn’t the end of the world, though, it’s the Rapture.  After that, seven really bad years, Antichrist and everything.  Then the world ends.

*

Farther south in Oregon I saw another billboard, the old fashioned paper kind, that read, “Saturday is the true Sabbath.”  It cited the book of Daniel.  “It Was Changed by the AntiChrist!”  Wait–the Antichrist has already been here?  But Judgment Day isn’t until May 21!  I’m very confused.

 *

WAKE UP, AMERICA!  This is a private A-frame sign in a pasture south of the town of Riddle.  I think it was a political message, but I had been driving for five hours and was a little drowsy.  I appreciated the blue-and-red lettered wake-up call.

*

The Oregon Lottery is up to $17 million, and Powerball is up to $42.  On the same billboard, underneath the glowing electronic numbers; “Playing Lottery is Not an Advisable Investment Strategy.”  Really, Oregon?  Are you going to tell me to eat my vegetables too?

St Emmanuel’s Episcopal Church in Eastsound has a labyrinth.  They didn’t the last time I was there.  While I was wandering around town, waiting for the verdict on High Tea, I saw it.  The gate was open and the deliberate swirls were too tempting not to walk. 

Labyrinths are not mazes.  Mazes are puzzles.  They contain tricks; dead ends and what John Crowley brilliantly names “snakes’ hands;” passages that loop around and end up back where you started, like a snake eating its tail.  A labyrinth is a passage.  Follow it, and it will take you to the center.  Turn and follow it back, and it will lead you out to the beginning. 

This labyrinth looks familiar.  I don’t think it’s the famous one from Chartres Cathedral, but it is certainly one I’ve seen before, associated with churches. 

One story about labyrinths is that they were created for people who didn’t have the money to go on a pilgrimage.  At one time, pilgrimages were the In Thing for Christians.  It was like early tourism.  Some people would do Pilgrimage on $5 a Day; sleeping rough, carrying no money, relying on the kindness of strangers, but as it became more popular, wealthy people decided they didn’t want to do it that way.  It became quite a business.  If you couldn’t leave your fields or your job for a year to go to the Holy Land or someplace, maybe you could go to your church and walk the serpentine whorls and loops laid out on the floor, while you meditated on your life and God’s purpose for you. 

I walked this one. I didn’t think about any of that stuff, though.  I was still dealing with some leftover adrenaline and worry from Joan’s first phone call.  I made myself look at my feet and pay attention to each step.  I was mindful of my breathing as I did this.  This is one way to walk a labyrinth.  There are many ways.  You can walk one backward.  You can dance one.  You can skip the passage and leap across the lines, if that’s what you want.  I wanted to just walk the passage as it was laid out. 

A woman came out of the church and watched while I was doing it.  I apologized and said I hoped I wasn’t trespassing.  She said no, they loved to see people walk it.  She said it was very new to them, only completed last month.  They are having a dedication the first weekend in May.

Because I built in so much drama in the last post, here, to reassure everyone, is a picture of Faith and Joanie (Joan E) at the Senior Center High Tea.