(Thanks to Dan Stern and SLATE for this photograph of Kurt Vonnegut: AP/WIDE-WORLD)
Ah, age.
Relentless, unpitying, constant-- even when you sleep. The hours tick by, the seconds and decades fleeting, and what do you have at the end of the line?
Well, that was cheerful.
As we rehearse "The Taming of the Shrew," for the Park District, I have had a few revelations regarding age. The most recent event in this process-within-a-process was Monday night, which gave me the impetus to finally write about it; an inkling I had long had but declined to indulge.
One of the oddities about writing is that in the crafts of both news and fiction you learn that the best writers (Joyce, I suppose, or Tolstoy, or E. B. White or the Associated Press) write from the lofty abstraction of the Third Person. Like Eleanor Roosevelt's axiom, too, you are encouraged to write, as much as possible, about ideas. Ideas, I suppose, as rendered into character or action.
As I recall she actually was referring to conversation ("Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people"), but for the purposes of writing, other people are characters; hence, as above, ideas. I do not know if, for instance, E.M. Forster might be taken to task by Eleanor Roosevelt for his gossipy internal dialogue writing about Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore; I doubt it. Writing about other people renders them an abstract, does it not? Arguably Thackeray writing "Vanity Fair," a monument of scuttlebutt, was "discussing people;" but of course that's literature. A corollary to the Rooseveltian maxim might be that if the people you are discussing are produced by your own imagination then I suppose you can do what you like with them, and it may not be considered mere gossip. Then these characters may indeed stand in for and do the duty of "ideas;" a notion as old as "Pilgrim's Progress."
To further complicate this notion of who is where saying what about whom is the nostrum considered by most everybody to be the final word, "write what you know."
Emily Dickinson, for instance, was able, without attacking Lepanto by sea, accompanying a failed Himalayan expedition, recalling a thousand pages' worth of an entire past world after nibbling a cookie, or running the bulls at Pamplona, to write some of the most deathless poetry extant. All done without stirring far from the here-and-now of her ancestral Amherst; the human condition, and that of her own heart, being the essential palette and canvas.
But now I find I have wandered off into the tall weeds.
In our little Shakespeare production, with the exception of my acting friend Peter (we have done four Shakespeare plays together), and Karen, the director (we have been acquainted for over twenty years, from back in the day when she was my Meisner method instructor), I am the oldest participant.
Interestingly (for me, at my age, married as I am to a young and beautiful wife twelve years younger), I play "Gremio," a part known in the pantheon of the commedia as "Pantaloon," according to my old employer The Encyclopedia Britannicca, a "stock character of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte-- a cunning and rapacious yet often deceived Venetian merchant.
"Pantaloon dressed in a tight-fitting red vest, red breeches and stockings, a pleated black cassock, slippers, and a soft brimless hat. Later versions of the character sometimes wore long trousers (pantaloons)."
In this production I'm wearing a black brocade tunic, laced with black cord, and black brocade knickers, with no cassock (Karen explained to me that despite the definition above, for our theatrical purposes a cape in sunny Italy would be inappropriate). The cap and slippers remain uncorrupted, with the addition of a big black cane. I have also asked for tooth-blackening and an eyepatch, but the luxury of these appliances will probably remain upalong, and I will be bastilled with only my scanty bag of actor's tricks, for getting the desired effect of decrepitude.
This brocade tunic and I have a history. In "As You Like It," I wore it to play the evil Duke Frederick:
She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience,
Speak to the people, and they pity her.
Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone. Then open not thy lips.
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass'd upon her; she is banish'd.
Later, I saw my colleague Christopher Prentice dogged out in this rig in "MacBeth." In its past, this raiment adorned Keith, Karen's rock-musician-turned-technical producer husband, who was probably coerced into donating it to the theater's wardrobe. I think Keith may have also outgrown the Mittelalter-Rock (think the "Dropkick Murphys," or "Cornix Maledictum") for which he zazzled. Life, as it were, marches apace.
Oddly enough for such a life-affirming comedy as "The Taming of the Shrew," we have had a rather dark time of it, since the unexpected death of Assistant Director Duane Davy. Duane was an ex-Air Force flier, an architect for the City of Chicago, and bachelor. He was a quiet and retiring man, but told some of the most interesting stories about flying.
"You should get a private license," I urged him.
Duane had a distinguished, long head, a long face, and a narrow aquiline nose. He scrunched up his bearded chin and said, "Civilian equipment-- after you've flown military equipment-- is …disappointing."
Karen said she saw pictures of Duane when he was younger. "He was cooler than cool," she said. "Never married, but he had his girlfriends. He had a bicycling girlfriend; he had a camping girlfriend; he had a girlfriend for going out to nice places for dinner."
The Saturday before he died I bummed a cigarette from Duane and asked him how his Lincoln Square rehab was coming along (he bought a century-old house with a wraparound porch and was retrofitting it a room at a time. We had the "King Lear," cast party, there. It had a huge front room and a fireplace, and Duane was installing massive woodwork on the porch, extending it into the backyard with a gazebo and trellis).
"It's going OK," Duane said, blinking his gentle eyes and turning his cigarette in his big fingers. "I finished my bedroom and it's pretty nice. I take it a room at a time, if I don't feel like working on it, I don't. I'm in no hurry." I bought him a pack of Marlboro Lights but there wasn't enough time to give it to him, and two days later I had smoked the last one, for him.
While staying Assistant Director, Duane also was slated to step in to replace the part of the "Pedant," which would have been his first time onstage at the Chase Park theater.
His service was in Plainfield, Illinois, last Saturday. I did not go, but some of the folks in the cast did. His people were dairy farmers, west of here, somewhere. Karen said his sister arrived during Duane's last illness (he suffered an embolism biking on the lakefront and lingered for two days), concerned about the milking.
He there does now enioy eternall rest
And happie ease, which thou doest want and craue,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some litle paine the passage haue,
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book I.
The cast, out having a drink, has raised a glass to Duane a couple of times, already.
Onstage Monday night we were trying to execute a bit of business; popping our heads out from behind a set-piece. I found myself trying to work out, with my fellow players Adam and Jon, the order of the business. I suggested maybe I should scrunch down, first, so they might pop out above me, rather than trying to stretch over them. My reasons were that they were more flexible, smaller… I searched for the word…
"Young," Adam said.
"Well, it's not that, exactly," I said, trailing off. Fortunately for my own kismet, as well as the psychic health of our little play, not to mention my own honor, tattered a robe though that may be, I was too taken aback, initially, to make some kind of protest. Adam could well have been referring to my characterization of "Gremio."
"'Petite,' actually, was the word I had in mind," was the unuttered wisecrack ranking among the standard set of clever put-downs, being a tall, broad man, I could have whipped out. My reluctance to resort to violent expostulation was also actuated by the acute consciousness that however big and strong you are at fifty, a youngster half your age who knows how will eventually beat the hell out of you, if only by virtue of staying power. And besides, truly, how weak and foolish can one allow one's pathetic old Ego to make one, even unto personal violence? Finally, I did not turn away with a hollow, old, feeling in my chest, and weep a little, later on.
No. Dragging old Self into every conversation, taking everything personally, suffering delicate injury at every turn; it is too pathetic. "Fear boys with bugs," as Petruchio has it.
In a flash, something reminded me of my old friend Kurt Vonnegut. Well, he was not my, "friend," actually. My sister was an English professor, and I met him in my early twenties at a cocktail party at Iowa State University, down the road a piece from The University of Iowa, where he lectured for the UI Writers' Workshop. I was sunburned and lanky, smart-alecky and confident, young and boisterous, full of half-baked ideas, testosterone, and unguided enthusiasm. I probably raved about Melville, or Sterne, or Kesey, or made lame-brained and pointless conversational excursions into an exegesis of "Player Piano," or "Breakfast of Champions," or "Sirens of Titan" (which I still have never read).
Vonnegut was rather reticent, and with a half-smile and an interested gaze seemed to regard me as a large, strong, playful, and somewhat out-of-control puppy; with a mix of interest and trepidation, bordering on fear.
Whatever I said, I recall he responded, "I understand," with a kind smile and encouraging nod.
He wrote, in "Slaughterhouse Five:"
Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. 'So what do the Three Musketeers do now?' he said.
Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn't time-travel. It had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow.
One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times-living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.
Now they twisted out from under Weary's loving arms. They told Weary that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren't going to wait for them any more.
And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.
Onstage, there, with these lithe young men, was I Billy Pilgrim, timid, frail, and old before his time? Or Roland Weary, overbearing, clumsy, clueless and bovine? "Young," I for sure was not, anymore.
Fifty may be the "new thirty," but a pratfall takes a lot more out of me than it did, before. I can still work like a mule and lift at least my weight, stage-fight with a broadsword (although not for as long a time), and speak thirty lines without breathing hard, but entropy, as it were (and that's a pun), will have it's guerdon of us all.
Well, that was cheerful.
As we rehearse "The Taming of the Shrew," for the Park District, I have had a few revelations regarding age. The most recent event in this process-within-a-process was Monday night, which gave me the impetus to finally write about it; an inkling I had long had but declined to indulge.
One of the oddities about writing is that in the crafts of both news and fiction you learn that the best writers (Joyce, I suppose, or Tolstoy, or E. B. White or the Associated Press) write from the lofty abstraction of the Third Person. Like Eleanor Roosevelt's axiom, too, you are encouraged to write, as much as possible, about ideas. Ideas, I suppose, as rendered into character or action.
As I recall she actually was referring to conversation ("Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people"), but for the purposes of writing, other people are characters; hence, as above, ideas. I do not know if, for instance, E.M. Forster might be taken to task by Eleanor Roosevelt for his gossipy internal dialogue writing about Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore; I doubt it. Writing about other people renders them an abstract, does it not? Arguably Thackeray writing "Vanity Fair," a monument of scuttlebutt, was "discussing people;" but of course that's literature. A corollary to the Rooseveltian maxim might be that if the people you are discussing are produced by your own imagination then I suppose you can do what you like with them, and it may not be considered mere gossip. Then these characters may indeed stand in for and do the duty of "ideas;" a notion as old as "Pilgrim's Progress."
To further complicate this notion of who is where saying what about whom is the nostrum considered by most everybody to be the final word, "write what you know."
Emily Dickinson, for instance, was able, without attacking Lepanto by sea, accompanying a failed Himalayan expedition, recalling a thousand pages' worth of an entire past world after nibbling a cookie, or running the bulls at Pamplona, to write some of the most deathless poetry extant. All done without stirring far from the here-and-now of her ancestral Amherst; the human condition, and that of her own heart, being the essential palette and canvas.
But now I find I have wandered off into the tall weeds.
In our little Shakespeare production, with the exception of my acting friend Peter (we have done four Shakespeare plays together), and Karen, the director (we have been acquainted for over twenty years, from back in the day when she was my Meisner method instructor), I am the oldest participant.
Interestingly (for me, at my age, married as I am to a young and beautiful wife twelve years younger), I play "Gremio," a part known in the pantheon of the commedia as "Pantaloon," according to my old employer The Encyclopedia Britannicca, a "stock character of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte-- a cunning and rapacious yet often deceived Venetian merchant.
"Pantaloon dressed in a tight-fitting red vest, red breeches and stockings, a pleated black cassock, slippers, and a soft brimless hat. Later versions of the character sometimes wore long trousers (pantaloons)."
In this production I'm wearing a black brocade tunic, laced with black cord, and black brocade knickers, with no cassock (Karen explained to me that despite the definition above, for our theatrical purposes a cape in sunny Italy would be inappropriate). The cap and slippers remain uncorrupted, with the addition of a big black cane. I have also asked for tooth-blackening and an eyepatch, but the luxury of these appliances will probably remain upalong, and I will be bastilled with only my scanty bag of actor's tricks, for getting the desired effect of decrepitude.
This brocade tunic and I have a history. In "As You Like It," I wore it to play the evil Duke Frederick:
She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience,
Speak to the people, and they pity her.
Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone. Then open not thy lips.
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass'd upon her; she is banish'd.
Later, I saw my colleague Christopher Prentice dogged out in this rig in "MacBeth." In its past, this raiment adorned Keith, Karen's rock-musician-turned-technical producer husband, who was probably coerced into donating it to the theater's wardrobe. I think Keith may have also outgrown the Mittelalter-Rock (think the "Dropkick Murphys," or "Cornix Maledictum") for which he zazzled. Life, as it were, marches apace.
Oddly enough for such a life-affirming comedy as "The Taming of the Shrew," we have had a rather dark time of it, since the unexpected death of Assistant Director Duane Davy. Duane was an ex-Air Force flier, an architect for the City of Chicago, and bachelor. He was a quiet and retiring man, but told some of the most interesting stories about flying.
"You should get a private license," I urged him.
Duane had a distinguished, long head, a long face, and a narrow aquiline nose. He scrunched up his bearded chin and said, "Civilian equipment-- after you've flown military equipment-- is …disappointing."
Karen said she saw pictures of Duane when he was younger. "He was cooler than cool," she said. "Never married, but he had his girlfriends. He had a bicycling girlfriend; he had a camping girlfriend; he had a girlfriend for going out to nice places for dinner."
The Saturday before he died I bummed a cigarette from Duane and asked him how his Lincoln Square rehab was coming along (he bought a century-old house with a wraparound porch and was retrofitting it a room at a time. We had the "King Lear," cast party, there. It had a huge front room and a fireplace, and Duane was installing massive woodwork on the porch, extending it into the backyard with a gazebo and trellis).
"It's going OK," Duane said, blinking his gentle eyes and turning his cigarette in his big fingers. "I finished my bedroom and it's pretty nice. I take it a room at a time, if I don't feel like working on it, I don't. I'm in no hurry." I bought him a pack of Marlboro Lights but there wasn't enough time to give it to him, and two days later I had smoked the last one, for him.
While staying Assistant Director, Duane also was slated to step in to replace the part of the "Pedant," which would have been his first time onstage at the Chase Park theater.
His service was in Plainfield, Illinois, last Saturday. I did not go, but some of the folks in the cast did. His people were dairy farmers, west of here, somewhere. Karen said his sister arrived during Duane's last illness (he suffered an embolism biking on the lakefront and lingered for two days), concerned about the milking.
He there does now enioy eternall rest
And happie ease, which thou doest want and craue,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some litle paine the passage haue,
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book I.
The cast, out having a drink, has raised a glass to Duane a couple of times, already.
Onstage Monday night we were trying to execute a bit of business; popping our heads out from behind a set-piece. I found myself trying to work out, with my fellow players Adam and Jon, the order of the business. I suggested maybe I should scrunch down, first, so they might pop out above me, rather than trying to stretch over them. My reasons were that they were more flexible, smaller… I searched for the word…
"Young," Adam said.
"Well, it's not that, exactly," I said, trailing off. Fortunately for my own kismet, as well as the psychic health of our little play, not to mention my own honor, tattered a robe though that may be, I was too taken aback, initially, to make some kind of protest. Adam could well have been referring to my characterization of "Gremio."
"'Petite,' actually, was the word I had in mind," was the unuttered wisecrack ranking among the standard set of clever put-downs, being a tall, broad man, I could have whipped out. My reluctance to resort to violent expostulation was also actuated by the acute consciousness that however big and strong you are at fifty, a youngster half your age who knows how will eventually beat the hell out of you, if only by virtue of staying power. And besides, truly, how weak and foolish can one allow one's pathetic old Ego to make one, even unto personal violence? Finally, I did not turn away with a hollow, old, feeling in my chest, and weep a little, later on.
No. Dragging old Self into every conversation, taking everything personally, suffering delicate injury at every turn; it is too pathetic. "Fear boys with bugs," as Petruchio has it.
In a flash, something reminded me of my old friend Kurt Vonnegut. Well, he was not my, "friend," actually. My sister was an English professor, and I met him in my early twenties at a cocktail party at Iowa State University, down the road a piece from The University of Iowa, where he lectured for the UI Writers' Workshop. I was sunburned and lanky, smart-alecky and confident, young and boisterous, full of half-baked ideas, testosterone, and unguided enthusiasm. I probably raved about Melville, or Sterne, or Kesey, or made lame-brained and pointless conversational excursions into an exegesis of "Player Piano," or "Breakfast of Champions," or "Sirens of Titan" (which I still have never read).
Vonnegut was rather reticent, and with a half-smile and an interested gaze seemed to regard me as a large, strong, playful, and somewhat out-of-control puppy; with a mix of interest and trepidation, bordering on fear.
Whatever I said, I recall he responded, "I understand," with a kind smile and encouraging nod.
He wrote, in "Slaughterhouse Five:"
Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. 'So what do the Three Musketeers do now?' he said.
Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn't time-travel. It had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow.
One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times-living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.
Now they twisted out from under Weary's loving arms. They told Weary that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren't going to wait for them any more.
And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.
Onstage, there, with these lithe young men, was I Billy Pilgrim, timid, frail, and old before his time? Or Roland Weary, overbearing, clumsy, clueless and bovine? "Young," I for sure was not, anymore.
Fifty may be the "new thirty," but a pratfall takes a lot more out of me than it did, before. I can still work like a mule and lift at least my weight, stage-fight with a broadsword (although not for as long a time), and speak thirty lines without breathing hard, but entropy, as it were (and that's a pun), will have it's guerdon of us all.
səˈlæn
