Thursday, September 08, 2005

 

BRIEFLY


One of my fellow performers at September's upcoming WYSIWYG show, Dashiell, "interviewed" me on his blog (which is definitely worth checking out). You can read my long, long answers to his questions here. I wrote so much that you might as well consider it another of my entries.


Just a reminder that the WYSIWYG show is Tuesday, September 27, at 7 PM. Here's the info. Don't forget to mark your calendar!

10:16 PM

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Sunday, September 04, 2005

 

ENTRY 190: SO SHINES A GOOD DEED IN A WEARY WORLD


Almost two weeks ago I boarded an early-morning subway train and headed downtown to sit outside the Public Theater for four hours. This is the annual ritual known as Shakespeare in the Park, staged at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park every summer. While you can wait in line for free same-day tickets at either the Public or the Delacorte, the former tends to have shorter lines. But if you want good seats, you have to arrive early. I took hourly ass breaks, rising from the pavement when I became too uncomfortable (not much padding back there).


At some point a young woman wandered along the line, offering to do Shakespeare scenes and sonnets: "Four years of dramatic literature, folks!"


No one took the bait.


"I've done the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet!" she went on. "I do Juliet, Romeo, and the nurse!"


A tumbleweed blew down the sidewalk.


Someone must have finally made a request, because she proceeded to do the worst Lady Macbeth I've ever seen (Act V, Scene I). But I smiled at it anyway.


I ended up sitting tenth row center, with a superb view, and the weather was the most perfect we've had here all summer; it was August, but I almost needed a light jacket. This year's offering is the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which won the Tony in its Broadway incarnation more than three decades ago. I will say only that it was a great deal of fun and worth seeing, before directing you to Ben Brantley's review in the Times. I agree with him on most points, and he says it with more authority than I could.


###


Recently I found myself struck by the conviction that I wanted to call Neil. I think it's the first time we've communicated at all in about two years.


It's strange to talk to him. The period during which he played a real role in my life has such a vivid place in my memory, but it also seems so distant. Yet there is always an immediacy and a deeply moving quality to our interactions, even now.


"I was just thinking of you the other day," he said, and it was nice to hear, whether or not I actually believed it. But I don't need to believe what he says anymore. I have no stake in that, or in him.


I had called, after all, for another purpose that technically had little to do with either of us. My mission was to tell Neil what I'd tried to tell him months ago: that my grandfather had really liked him.


"Well, thank you," said Neil quietly. "I'm glad he liked me. That means a lot."


"I just thought he would have wanted you to know," I said, my voice cracking a little.


Neil couldn't talk very long; he was on his way out of town for the weekend. That was fine, because I'd said what I needed to say.


"Let's talk again soon, all right?" he said. And I agreed, knowing we'd probably never talk again. But I was at peace with that knowledge.


After hanging up I sat there and cried, really cried, for the first time since my grandfather died. Somehow I hadn't been able to do it before, and I think it was because I hadn't yet conveyed that message. It was the last thing I would ever be able to do for him. Except, of course, for moving on.


They were tears of loss, and of resolution, and of finally letting go.


###


Big ideas are all you love. America is what Louis loves. Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

(from Angels in America by Tony Kushner, who is from Louisiana)


There were more tears today, ones that had until now been contained by levees of disbelief and horror and seething rage and shame. What finally breached those levees was the experience of listening to New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin's angry and despairing remarks in a now-infamous call to a local radio station.


After being fixated on news reports for the past few days, I walked around yesterday, feeling the same bleakness I had in September 2001 (and, for possibly obvious reasons, in November 2004). I tried to imagine New York underwater, and being trapped in Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium for four or five days without food and water, watching people being raped and murdered and committing suicide. Forced to perform bodily functions on the sloshing floor of an overflowing bathroom, or in the sink, or wherever they managed to go. Sitting on the ground somewhere among corpses. This is not my America. At least, I used to think so.


I am not some self-absorbed drama queen like Star Jones, who, months ago, talked about her "close call" (having honeymooned at some posh resort in Asia a full month before the big tsunami hit) rather than the horrific death toll and general devastation across that part of the world. Though I lived in Texas for 12 years, I never visited New Orleans, and now, with what has happened, I don't know if I regret never having been there. After all, it is less painful to mourn something you have never seen or someone you have never met. I am just trying to wrap my head around such horrific personal circumstances.


But, again, it isn't about me. It's about this country. It's about a president who continued with his vacation until it dawned on him that it wasn't a politically wise move, who finally made an appearance at the end of the week, making jokes about his fun drinking days. Hey, just a little Bourbon Street humor, right? Why is everyone so serious?


Could it have been any more obvious that Bush doesn't give a shit? On Friday, as he prepared to depart from the New Orleans airport--where he didn't even bother to visit the makeshift hospital in one of the terminals where people were dying one after another--he uttered the following appalling sentence: "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." This while tens of thousands were stranded in long lines at the airport, waiting desperately for volunteer planes to take them to some other city--nobody really cared which one. Not everyone can jet back to the stupid fucking ranch in stupid fucking Crawford, you stupid fuck. No one could have predicted the levees breaching, Bush said on TV, just like the administration had claimed that no one could have predicted planes flying into buildings or an ongoing Iraqi insurgency. Yet people predicted all of these things years before. Pathetic, simply pathetic.


I'm sure we all sleep better at night knowing that the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, worked for the International Arabian Horse Association before Bush appointed him to run a minor agency like FEMA. The former head of Miami-Dade's emergency management department said, "He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm. The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience." Maybe that explains why Brown told a CNN reporter on the air that he'd been unaware before Thursday of the thousands of people stranded for days without food and water in the New Orleans convention center. The incredulous reporter asked Brown whether any of his people actually watch the news, since they'd been reporting on that situation longer than a day.


I have to say, though, that the local police and the troops that were in the area, as well as the medical personnel and other volunteers who have worked to the point of exhaustion and personal peril, restore some of my faith in the humanity of this country. They have saved untold numbers of lives, despite the countless others needlessly lost.


I just don't know what else to say about any of it. Nothing I've said hasn't been expressed better and more thoughtfully elsewhere. But it infuriates me that this administration spends more time covering its ass about dropping the ball on this disaster than actually doing something about it. Bush will never be held accountable for any of it--diverting our invaluable National Guard troops and other resources to the disastrous Iraq conflict, handing the reins of FEMA to a certified idiot, making frat-boy jokes while people were dying a few hundred yards away. It's ironic that he is so irritatingly obsessed with the empty phrase "culture of life," which is coded language for "women shouldn't have the right to choose." I may be vehemently pro-choice, but I also believe that every life is precious. Call me crazy for valuing a grown military man or woman (or, for that matter, a civilian child) in Iraq, or thousands upon thousands of people in the American Southeast, even more than a microscopic cluster of cells. There must be some finer distinction beyond my mental capacities explaining why Bush could zip back to D.C. from Crawford on a moment's notice to sign the utterly intrusive Terri Schiavo bill, but didn't manage to operate quite so fast in response to the deaths of countless people across three states.


But perhaps there will be a certain accountability for our president at last, years from now, when he's shoved onto the express elevator to Hell. I'm sure it will be a lovely funeral, but I won't be there. I'll be partying in New Orleans, because, God willing, it will survive much longer than that son of a bitch.

8:21 PM

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