I made him go on rather a long, drawn-out hunt for his gift. There were clues to follow, puzzles to solve, and in the end it was buried in the frightening rubble in the basement. I got him a trip, to Kentucky-Tennessee, and tickets to see "Stomp" while we're down there. He has a cousin in Tennessee he hasn't seen in a long time, and would like to visit, so I hoped we'd visit while we were down there. We're going at the end of March. Hopefully the flowers will be starting to come up by then, and weather is usually rainy, but warm. He liked it, although I think I suprised him quite a bit.
He got me two massage sessions, and a dozen roses. I don't have any idea what to expect a professional masseuse to do, but I'm pretty excited about it. My only concern is that I'll end up a massage addict, forever going back. (Kind of like people who end up in therapy for life.)
Things between the two of us have been happily knitting themselves back together. The less I worry about it, the faster it seems to heal. The little seperation between us is fading away, and I'm glad to report that he has been more relaxed and happy, as have I.
Last Friday I ended up home sick during the day. Some disgusting thing invaded my stomach, and held me prisoner until about 4 in the afternoon, at which point it vanished without a trace, leaving me feeling perfectly fine and wondering what had happened. It was bizarre. I spent that evening at Riverwalk seeing Jeff in "Da", which was a really good show. I thought the cast was excellent, but must admit I was quite distracted by Jeff's performance. It was really very good, he outstripped what I thought his acting capabilities were, and went for a whole new level. I didn't think he would ever devote himself that much to a character, because it's just not where his interest lies. He's a director at heart, and considers acting to be a good way to gain experience and make connections toward that end. It's secondary to him. This performance, however, was controlled, careful, emotional, and very expressive. There were very good transtitions from mood to mood, scene to scene, and several tricky flashback type shifts that he handled very well. His focus was impeccable, and I thought his timing was excellent. His accent occasionally slipped, but I really don't think in the long run it mattered to anyone. Besides, his character was no longer living in Ireland, so his accent should be blurry. Overall, I'm sad the show is gone so that I can't highly recommend everyone go see it. I was impressed.
After that, Forest and I went out with Darcy to have some dinner, and generally hang out. I was starving, and appreciated Bilbo's slow service as we played several hands of hearts. Unfortunately, I found out from a friend that works there that Bilbo's has been sold to the Aboods, basically a group of slumlords who seem to aquire everything good in the area and turn it into another money-making machine. They own half of the half-rate overpriced buildings the MSU students live in, among other things, and in my experience they have been absolutely clear in their sole goal in life, which is to make money.
Bilbo's never makes money. People go there to hang out for hours on end, play games, listen to the great jukebox, and get crappy service. Their food is good, but it's not insanely overpriced, and I may order a single sandwich and stay there until 2 AM, just hanging out and talking to my friends. The Aboods aren't going to keep it that way and turn the kind of profit their greedy corporation is used to. At least, I don't forsee it. I guess time will tell. In the meantime I'll enjoy all the Hobbit Sticks I can.
Saturday morning I played handbells in a wedding. It was really a beautiful service. The bride and groom were both in their mid-forties, and this was their first wedding. They were positively beaming, as were all of the guests. It's great to see a wedding where every single person there is one hundred percent thrilled for the couple. The decorations were simple and elegant as were the dresses and suits. The couple had taken a lot of time to give the ceremony a lot of thought, and it showed. They had poetry for each other, and composed their own vows, which were absolutely stunning, heartfelt, and beautiful. They made me cry, and I don't even know them that well. (I never cry at weddings, except for my sister's.) They each walked down the aisle, one at a time, singing to the other. Our bell choir for the most part played beautifully, and the guests were all very complimentary.
After the wedding I jumped in my van and hit the road at literally 90 miles per hour. Forest's friend (and my new friend, too) Bridget and her high school drama team was performing in Ann Arbor around 1 PM, and I was leaving Lake Odessa at about 11:45. I hadn't thought I'd be able to be there, and was going to be very disappointed. I heard great things about the show, and it had won a local competition. The performance was to be their entry into the regional competition. Forest was already there. I really wanted to see it, too, because there weren't likely to be public performances.
So I plunged my van bravely forward, sometimes topping out at 95 miles per hour. The fuel warning light was on at the start of the trip, but I knew time was so close that I hoped to make it to Ann Arbor on vapors. In the end, I had to coast off a freeway ramp, recklessly paid for gas with a credit card just to save time, and still made it to the show. I am pretty relieved I didn't get a ticket, I was driving like such a demon.
The show was excellent. It was called Bang Bang You're Dead, and I think it's a shame more people won't get to see it. According to the author's notes, the play is intended to be performed by high school kids for their peers, and is not intended for public exhibition. It's royalty-free, and you can get the script from the web site linked above. Now let me just say that I usually don't like tear-jerker theatre. I don't like it when theatre is overwrought and painful to watch, because it looses its meaning in all that angst. The story gets glazed over by a sort of emotional haze, and people walk away not knowing exactly what they saw, only that it was disturbing, sad, or annoying.
This production, however, was so painful, jarring, searing, and filled with outright agony that it was a hundred percent spot-on correct. It was inspired by the killings in Jonesboro (sp?) and Columbine. The author intended the play to speak to the one potential killer in the high school where it is being performed, and to try to show the consequences of such actions. The kid in the play is a loner, who feels as though his peers are always laughing at him, and making fun of him. He's pained and resentful. He doesn't want his parents or his peers to be dead, but he does want to kill them. He doesn't make the connection between the two.
The play is an abstract. Things take place out of time, and there are litanies with certain themes reminiscent of a greek chorus. The kids who are the victims of ths main character have a chorus of "why me", in which they confront the main character, asking for reasons for their deaths, and not getting good explanations. At the end is a final chorus of "I miss", detailing all the things they never get to do again, now that they are dead. It is punctuated by slides of the grieving faces of the Columbine parents the day of the disaster.
By the end of this play everyone in the audience was in tears. The actors were crying. It is so ruthlessly, desperately sad that the audience was embracing each other for comfort when the lights came up.
I looked around and reminded myself that this is the power of theatre. This is what it can do. I didn't feel preached at, I didn't feel annoyed by its sadness or angst or that it toyed with my emotions. I felt that it showed me things about the world I didn't know before, and took me places I could never have gone. It wasn't a perfect performance, but it didn't have to be. Any group of teenage kids could do it, in a garage, a church, or out on the street and have the same effect.
I went with Bridget's family and Forest to hear the judges critique immediately afterward, and found that the judges were in tears, and had to delay the critique until they could speak. They had small suggestions for how to improve the play, but overall they were as astounded as I was. One judge hit the nail on the head by remarking at the Brechtian qualities of the show. I don't think the high schoolers knew what the hell he was saying, but I've read Brecht, and I completely agreed.
It's funny, though. Brecht didn't want his audience to feel emotions--he wanted them to think--so, he determined to destroy the theatrical illusion, and, thus, that dull trance-like state he despised.
Brecht's research led him to create a technique known as the "alienation effect". It was designed to encourage the audience to retain their critical detachment. He left the curtain in the way, to remind people it was theatre. There were narrators, there was almost no set, and he performed many of his shows in harshm, white lights like daylight. In college I read Mother Courage and Her Children which tells the story of a travelling merchant who earns her living by following the armies with her covered wagon and selling them supplies: clothing, food, brandy. As the war grows heated, Mother Courage finds that this profession has put her and her children in danger, but the old woman doggedly refuses to give up her wagon. The violence is implicit. Her children die horribly, and the blame for their deaths in the war is placed firmly on Mother Courage, who fed the war with her supply wagon and her sons. Kattrin, her mute daughter, ends the play by drumming a warning to a nearby town, and being killed by soldiers. It's a wonderful, sad play, and yet poor Brecht never managed to achieve the unemotional, analytical response he desired. Even though he tried to make the situation completely unreal, audiences never failed to cry at Mother Courage. It taught us a lot about theatre, and what it can do.
Oh, my. Sorry for the thesis. I digressed in a big way. What I was saying, anyway, is that the unreal, extreme, harshness of Mother Courage and the war, and the unreal plight of the kids in the play were poignant because in actuality they are TOO real. In our everyday lives we deny these things, but somewhere in the world these things are happening. That's the Brechtian part of it.
So the Everett High School drama group (Bridget's group) won first place at the regional competition, and were commended as an entire ensemble for their superior acting jobs. They will go the the State competition next week, and I bet they will win that, too. See, most of these other high school groups didn't pick plays that were really appropriate for them to do. One group did a cut-down version of Sweeny Todd, which you just can't really tackle with high school musicians. Another group did an abstract play that was basically a West Virginia fairy tale about erotic, evil fairies in the woods seducing a couple of girls, which made it blatantly clear that these were kids trying to portray adult material and not quite understanding what they were doing.
The Everett kids chose a play that was written for kids to perform. Every bit of it was something they understood, and they actually have probably experienced some of the feelings involved personally. They all know kids that have been shot at school.
Anyway, needless to say it was a little depressing. The good thing is, though, that after that home felt wonderful, and my tummy was upset again, so I stayed there. I ended up missing my audition for Michigan Shakespeare Festival, but at that point I was beyond caring. Forest spent most of the evening with me, and when he went out with Wayne I was perfectly content to shuffle off to bed early. It was a pleasant night.
Sunday morning I got up early to clean our house. It had been long-delayed, and was much needed. I scrubbed, picked up, dusted, the works. There were two loads of dishes to run, and I vacuumed enough to clog my vacuum cleaner, so I couldn't vacuum anymore. *sigh* By noon it looked positively respectable.
Elizabeth (my favorite Tae Kwon Do partner) came over at noon, and we did about 2 hours of Tae Kwon Do, and spent another 4 hours just sitting around and yammering at each other. We have a lot in common. She has two girls, and is homeschooling them, so we understand each other's dilemmas of trying to get our kids to do homework all too well. She also has an ancient house and has done a lot of the same projects to it that I have to mine. After she took off, I cooked a nice dinner, which Forest, Kirstin and I ate by candlelight. I didn't tell Forest what I was doing, but true to his psychic nature, he showed up with a dozen roses and a bottle of wine for the occasion. He also had roses for Kirstin, who was thrilled.
After a nice dinner together, we put Kirstin to bed, and curled up with our wine and a movie. I enjoyed the snuggling far more than the movie, I must say.
Forest is sad today because it's our first Valentine's Day, and he would like to do something incredibly romantic, but we can't, because we're both booked. He has class to teach tonight, and I have bell choir. We'll both get home around 9, and put the munchkin to bed. Perhaps I can soothe him with some nice at-home activity, though. Hmm.
