Book Log: January 2010

[Dear Mister Miller, You were my inspiration to launch this section of my blog. My 7 1/2 readers can thank you if they feel so inclined.]

Danger in the Shadows Dee Henderson    
My first endeavor into the Christian fiction genre was this thriller about a gal who had a traumatic childhood experience and is trying to live her writer life with danger still looming over her. The backstory was unveiled with wonderful pacing, and I was drawn in by the details of the FBI-based plot. I thought I’d just abhor the love story I saw budding between the protagonist and a famous athlete who met in a chance elevator crisis, but I quite enjoyed his diligent and honorable pursuit of her. The details were engaging, the emotions of the characters were transferred to me, the reader, and though the end was happy (as expected) there are more books in the series!

The Red Tent Anita Diamant    
Recommended by a friend who was curious about the true Bible facts in this Biblical fiction work, I picked up The Red Tent, excited to discuss the story from the book of Genesis. Early on in my reading, I adopted a cold attitude towards the narrative. I found many details that were quite liberal in the “spaces” they filled between the Biblical truths of Jacob, his wives, and their children. As I continued, my composure softened; I realized that the novel wasn’t trying to rewrite the Genesis narrative but rather tell a fictional story rooted in that historical time period from the female point of view. I came to appreciate the rich cultural details and even some of the suggestions that pose legitimate Bible questions (were Dinah and Joseph childhood friends, since they were close in age?). It’s encouraged me to engage more with the historical fiction genre.

The Four Loves C.S. Lewis    
I began this book over the summer, trying to learn how to best love various friends who were geographically far from me. C.S. Lewis always proves to be a difficult and head-y read. It’s a book I learned intense information from, but I need to read it slowly and methodically to understand the rich concepts that Lewis is suggesting. He presents a great distinction between the loves: affection, friendship, eros, and charity, and makes the connections to practical living obvious.

Service Included Phoebe Damrosch    
All the waiter books I’ve read are all basically the same – it’s the story of someone else living the life I also and already live (yet she’s making a yearly salary from her words, and I still scoop dollar bills off the tables). It’s tough. There are an endless amount of stories from waiting tables, but eventually it all tends to sound the same. This read was engaging, interesting to me because it was set in a dining room much finer than the one in which I work. I liked reading about 10,000 dollar bottles of wine and the sommelier who sold them. A good read, but nothing marking it as a standout from the rest.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself Bill Bryson    
A collection of very brief articles by an American who’s lived the better part of his adult life in England and has returned with his British wife and family to the United States. His fresh eye to all things American and his light, satirical voice had me laughing aloud throughout. This is a wonderful piecemeal read; great for traveling and situations where interruptions are frequent.

Hack Melissa Plaut    
A memoir of sorts about a degree-holding young gal who hates the office life and in her quest to be a real adult, decides to get her “hack license” and start driving taxicabs in New York City. The front end of the book is more impressive than the back half. Maybe it’s like waiting tables – the stories are endless, but after a while they’re all just stories and they lose their luster. She tells about passenger after passenger – some stiff her, most ask her about being a chick cab driver, some are angry, she gets tickets, crashes into other cars, sees a woman stuck under a truck, waits in traffic, and gets the finger all the time. But she’s a cab driver, not a writer, and it shows. Maybe I should drive a cab, for a change of pace? This book wasn’t convincing enough.

Out of the Shadows Sigmund Brouwer    
Another Christian fiction attempt, this one not as thrilling as the last. Brouwer does well as creating anticipation, but saves all that matters for the last few pages. The ending suffers. The suspense is dragged out too long. In Henderson’s book, I wanted to read the pages in between the “now” and the “big surprise”. But in Brouwer’s novel, I often wanted to skip pages ahead to see what he was making me wait two more chapters for. This author also writes young adult sports novels and an adult western series – maybe those are worth a peek.

REVIEW: New York Eats

I ate at a number of wonderful places (most of which were recommended to me by my various hosts) during my time in New York City, the best of which I will elaborate upon here.

Ukranian Cafe: Veselka [East Village]
My situation with this café was unique in a thousand ways. Let’s just say that to start things off I walked in around lunchtime (to eat breakfast), soaked from head to toe, sans umbrella in the sporadic downpour, wearing my Pittsburgh Penguins jersey on the day the Pens would play the New York Rangers inside historic Madison Square Garden. I was wearing my scarf as a babushka to cover my hair and most of my face, trying to stay halfway put-together since I wouldn’t be going anywhere resembling “home” until the middle of the night. Table for one, please.

I ordered breakfast and coffee with soy milk. I love it when restaurants have soy milk.

The French toast was made from challah bread, which I knew as the traditional Jewish braided bread that was to represent the manna that fell from heaven in the Old Testament. I had no idea that this type of baking also had Ukrainian roots, but I later found that the Jewish influence in the Ukraine, dating back to the 18th century, had made it a part of cultural wedding ceremonies and holidays. Hm. Anyway, it had a light, fluffy texture and a subtle, sweet taste. Served with a link of kielbasa, it made a delightful and filling breakfast.

I stayed through the better part of lunchtime, reading books and magazines I had brought and eventually became hungry again. I had read online about this restaurant’s specialty in pierogies and thought I’d try them before I left to visit a number of bookstores (including the largest in the nation). Two meat, one spinach and cheese, and one potato pierogies left me very full and satisfied. The pierogies were soft and stuffed with tasty filling. Wonderful food and service at this quaint little café in East Village.

American Bar/Café: Fanelli Café [Soho]
I recognized the Soho neighborhood, only by name, because I had a friend who’d moved to New York and said he loved this area. It was where all the famous people milled about, and he was after a bit of fame himself, so his affinity didn’t surprise me. But it didn’t take me but a few blocks of wandering about in Soho to find that our tastes didn’t agree.

True, I enjoyed my ninety-second misfit tour in the Prada store and my ensuing interaction with the pair of employees who were liberally twirling, spinning, dancing across the wooden floors in their tailored suits and high heels, getting paid by the hour. And I enjoyed the Evolution store for its museum-like quality of displayed animal carcasses. But other than that, Soho doesn’t have anything I need.  Generally, it’s entitled and I am not.

There was, however, a bustling little pub that called itself a café where we stopped for lunch. It was reasonably priced for the likes of this neighborhood and I was whisked away by the feeling that everything inside the doors was in fast-forward. I very much relished this feeling for the short time we were inside.  I never felt rushed, only comfortable, but nothing ever stopped moving or slowed down.  My chili over rice was warm, filling, not-too-spicy. And ordering chili was a risk for me, unnatural, but I was living on the edge, New York City-style, so why not, right?

Fanelli Café is a bit of gem in this Soho high society. I support this corner bar.  In Soho, we call them cafe’s.

Greek Dinner: Uncle Nick’s [Hell’s Kitchen]
Times Square, where we were seeing Memphis on Broadway, was spilling over with gawking visitors, so we chose dinner a few blocks west in Hell’s Kitchen. The Greek restaurant had exposed brick walls and an open kitchen, a style that I love, especially for ethnically authentic eateries.

Eating anything non-American is always a bit of a challenge, because after ordering an entire meal, there’s the chance you won’t like it. But without taking the risk, you’ll eat hot dogs and hamburgers for the rest of time. I took some tips from my friends who had been here before and started narrowing down the menu to a few items I’d never heard of and one lamb dish that was my safety choice.

I ordered a dish with Greek sausage (so far, I’ve loved all types of sausage I’ve come across), some other meat with a very long name and something called “sweetbreads”, which I naturally thought was a sort of sweet bread. The dish was served with a white wine-based sauce and bit of cabbage. The sausage and the other meat were delicious beyond description. I mean, really. The tastes were explosive and rich, the meats were tender and juicy. It was a truly wonderful experience for the tastebuds.

The sweetbreads, however, surprised us all! They were not, in fact, bread at all. They were a meat that had the texture and consistency of chicken with a thin breading. The taste seemed very mild, adopting the sauce that it was cooked in, something like pieces of cooked tofu. The sweetbreads were not impressive alongside the other meats, but to say the least, they were a very interesting addition to the dish.

Overall, the experience was delightful.  We were seated in a timely manner on a busy weekend evening.  The Greek staff was friendly and accommodating, answering my foolish American questions with kindness and patience.  And the food was well-prepared and authentic, as far as I knew.  Tasty, for sure!

Brunch: Good Enough to Eat [Upper West Side]
Confession: Breakfast is my most favorite meal of them all. I would eat it constantly if it was easily available and I didn’t anticipate having to regularly define my eating habits. I enjoy the food selection at breakfast and the quantity and creativity of the food offered. So when we walked into the brunch establishment with the white picket fence outside, exposed brick walls (can you tell I adore this quality?) and country bookshelves with antique china on the shelves, I was already impressed and hadn’t even decided on my food yet.

At this restaurant, they make a homemade strawberry butter. At all costs, this is worth it. They serve it with warm biscuits instead of toast and this is a fantastic idea. Approved.

If the strawberry butter wasn’t the main course, I also had a sort of skillet that was called a turkey hash on the menu. Diced potatoes, vegetables, and meat browned in a bit of oil and served on a plate, the flavors having blended together with some salt, pepper, and maybe an allspice. Party in my mouth. The strawberry butter gave a sweet intermission between bites of the turkey hash, but the saltiness and portion size of the skillet dish reached near-perfection on my breakfast score card. Cheers – this place really was good enough to eat.

Dear NYC

Dear New Yorker,

Staten Island Ferry, South Manhattan

Your city is much like mine on two bottles of five hour energy drink or an overdose of a GNC protein shake. Just a little too much of a relatively good thing.

Your grocery stores sport shockingly outrageous prices. Try the fruit stand on the corner.

Be warned: the world is probably not going to end tomorrow. Even if it does, walking in fast forward like you do will not solve anything. The place you are going will still be there when you get there. Slow down.

Remember: New York City will either take your money or your time. Maybe both. And sometimes, your freedom. This isn’t always bad, you just need to be prepared to give something up.

Cathedral, East Village

Attending a professional sporting event in on of the nation’s largest urban centers and cheering for the visiting team is a touch intimidating but quite rewarding.  GO PENS!

A creative establishment or an innovative apartment-owner uses the long, skinny renting space in a unique way and is fine. A regular restaurant or renter feels cramped.

Sure, the cellar doors on the sidewalks are intriguing, but the garbage bags piled high on the streets everyday long for a hideaway. Get alleys.

Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Pastor Tim Keller

No city is too big for a God this big.

Times Square, Daytime

Times Square is a circus. On Saturday night it’s a full-blown freak show and I love nothing about it. If that’s what we value in American entertainment, then send me off on a ship to somewhere.

The food is mostly good.  Culture is appreciated and enhanced here.

I’m no longer amazed by the rich and famous, not like I once was.  I’m quite satisfied and often astounded enough at the successes and talents of the ordinary and the under-appreciated.

Memphis, Schubert Alley

Broadway is not over-rated. It is wisely rated; ratings well-deserved. It is a unique niche of the arts community with so much to be said for it. My appreciation for all things art was deepened and intensified in my first Broadway experience: Memphis.

Try Chicago: it’s like a case-study of your city, with less of the things you hate and not without the urban detail you love. You will wait longer for the train, you can wear sweatpants in public, and famous folks are only every third block.

Trustfall

You learn a lot of really strange and unexpected lessons about life and godliness by working with kids. The least of which are not a series of games, skits, and riddles to pass the time in between. There’s a lot of “in between” with children and youth that needs to be filled with something semi-purposeful, at the very least, intentional, or else they fill it with something else.  I remember how, years ago, when I was a kid, and then again when I was around and among them, I learned to trustfall. 

Trustfall

 

I don’t know what it’s really called, but it’s a partner activity in trust. You’ve seen it done a thousand different ways, and so have I. When I was a kid, I refused to trustfall. I never went to church youth group or anything, like the kids I work with at summer camp, but a few summers I raced a wooden car that my dad helped me make in a Baptist church derby and they taught us this trustfall game.  The teacher expected me to turn away from her so that I couldn’t see her and let my weight fall fearlessly off of my own feet into her arms.  Her arms would be there, even though I couldn’t see and wasn’t sure.  I never played.  I just watched the teacher catch the other kids.  The kids laughed when she caught them, relieved to feel the gentle resistance and be put back on two feet again. 

It wasn’t until I was grown that I remembered trustfall again.  The counselor in my cabin played with our girls on the first day.  It served as something of an icebreaker, a get-to-know-you game.  I didn’t find it to be a game at all.  It was terrifying and made me anxious.  I avoided the activity at all costs and succeeded save for one camper who clung to me during most events.  She constantly asked me to catch her and I feared her trust.  Feared I may crush it if I slipped or she caught me off guard or I wasn’t standing close enough.  My heart raced when Sierra spun around to fall into the open space before me; that carefree fall would never be me. 

There was the question of willingness, sure.  Maybe the friend that had promised to catch you thought it the perfect time for a practical joke, a prank that would let you fall backwards for what felt like minutes until your bottom hit the sand unpleasantly while everyone laughed.  I wasn’t prepared to risk that kind of embarrassment or discomfort.  Once you throw your shoulders back, it’s too late to reestablish your feet beneath you.  If the catch isn’t there, the ground is the next stop on this flight.  Then there was the question of ability.  I’m not a kid anymore, I’m a bit bigger than a kid, in fact.  Even a friend with the best of intentions might love to catch me but be caught off guard at the velocity of my falling weight, and we’d both come tumbling to the ground in an awful heap.  I’d rather not take part in that situation, either.  I’m quite comfortable with both feet on the ground, falling nowhere. 

As safe as falling nowhere may be, it isn’t very adventurous.  As an easy and obvious metaphor to life, it doesn’t show much trust in my Savior and, frankly, it’s too safe to have any fun!  So, it’s a good thing that I had a persistent friend who showed me, once, what working with youth is all about.  She wouldn’t let me off the hook with my trustfall fear. 

Whitney all but marched around the campgrounds behind me with her arms out in front of her, repeating the word “Ready?” until I was.  I tried to get her off my case by breaking the rules: asking if I could look over my shoulder while I fell, step back with one foot instead of falling, fall sideways, have her step so close I could see her hands reaching forward.  But she wouldn’t budge.  I was going to trust her.  I was going to fall. 

And the feeling of finally falling back was, for a very short time, as terrifying as I had ever imagined it.  I think I held my breath.  To launch my body off the surety of the heels of my feet was almost a paralyzing feeling.  The moments after that, I felt in limbo.  I hadn’t been caught yet, so there was no relief, but I hadn’t hit the ground, so things weren’t a disaster yet, either.  I was curious and still scared.  But the moment I felt the springy feeling of Whitney’s arms like a hug, I knew why those children in my class laughed when the teacher caught them.  The relief that calms that momentary confusion and eases the tremble in my floating, falling body was overwhelming.  It kind of felt like a surge through my limbs.  I was tickled all over and thrilled that I had accomplished what I had so long thought foolish and silly. 

This is what it can feel like to trust.  We ultimately fear the crash.  We also fear the confusion that clouds our vision right before it’s clear what the result will be.  But we forget the promises we have in Christ.  Even for those of us who don’t care a lick about Him; His promise to us is love, unconditionally.  We can only ever know by letting the weight of ourselves fall back, and drink in those moments of suspended weightlessness when our feet have nothing to hold.  And prove to ourselves, or someone else, that there’s a sure thing back there in that unknown.  There’s someOne to trust.

What Would You Take Your Pants Off For?

I know what you’re thinking: She’s out of line. There should be no stripping here. But, here’s the sitch. I just learned about a crew, Improv Everywhere, from the podcast that I listen to, This American Life. They’re a crew of actors/comedians based in New York City (where I’ll soon visit for the first time) who create unique forms of public entertainment from time to time.

Their event scheduled for tomorrow afternoon is an annual pantsless subway ride. This is what Ira Glass told me about on the podcast yesterday. During the first year of this prank, people would continuously board the subway in New York without any pants on. After a while, a pants vendor came through the train car, selling all sizes and styles of pants – these folks’ actual pants! Ha! I laughed out loud. I was sold. It was brilliant.

As I sifted through comments on the troupe’s website earlier today, I came across many naysayers. Haters thought it was a waste of time, a disconnect from reality, a denial of the truly meaningful things that this world should be paying attention to. Really? Yet we record The Office on our Tivo, play video games until the sun comes up, and sit on our leather sectionals for hours on Sunday watching football game after football game and all of that is okay and “American”. How is walking around on the train wearing only your underwear in January for a couple hours so much worse?

Don’t be fooled.  It’s far better.

All to say, I’m so “on board” with the troupe, that I’d take my pants off for the prank. It’s a little more liberal than is typical for my kind, but I like what they do. I support their vision for art and its accessibility. Their spirit for freedom and fun is endearing; maybe the rest of us should adopt a little bit of this looseness when it comes to certain things.

So take your pants off. And laugh when you see people on the train in their underwear, twenty-seven degrees in the heart of New York City tomorrow. Let’s do this, Chicago.

Update: Apparently, Chicago IS doing this, but only at one location and waaaay up north of any part of the city where I might consider hanging.  Buggers.

Flick Picks: FAMILY STONE

Just a reminder how I’ve single-handedly (for the seven readers for my blog) revamped the rating system: Here.

My mom used to tell me that we leave our Christmas lights up until January 6th. She also told me why we do, but I’ve forgotten that part. The important thing is, I spent so many evenings watching the new Christmas “classic”, Elf that it wasn’t until January 5th that I got around to watching The Family Stone on recommendation from a movie-expert of a friend. But, it’s alright because our Christmas lights were still up.

They sell The Family Stone as a comedy, admirably so. It was recommended to me as more of a drama, depicting the reality of a dysfunctional yet shockingly real family with surprising accuracy for a Hollywood effort. Both the marketing and the recommendation were right, to varying degrees.  And though the validity in my friend’s recommendation was redeeming, The Family Stone didn’t excel too far above a typical pop culture dramedy.

I’m always a little hesitant to press play on the movies that are jam-packed with celebrities. It makes me nervous, like it’s a ploy to cover up a loose plot structure or poor character development. Some kind of bait and switch that’s going to keep me starstruck long enough that I don’t notice the crucial details that the movie lacks. No lies, I feared just that when I sat down to watch The Family Stone. And I don’t  like Sarah Jessica Parker all that much, so with her playing a major role and me already hesitant, I was glad I had cider and popcorn in case things didn’t work out.

The strange thing about my initial feelings was that they fit pretty well with the opening of the film…in such a strange way. I didn’t like Parker’s character, Meredith, one bit but neither did one single member of her boyfriend, Everett’s family. I liked each one of the Stone’s well enough, so we all got along great. But only for a while.

The Stone’s were malicious and closed-minded and I grew tired of their jokes on visiting Meredith. I started to feel sympathy for her, even though I thought she was utterly ridiculous. It wasn’t until late in the movie that I became wise to how the movie had pulled at the strings of my heart. It was working its magic. I was feeling the characters as if they were real. I laughed at their jokes, gasped at the unbelievable, scowled at that which was too harsh. I was an unwilling lover of the genre that I hate: “dramedy”.

By way of revealing family dynamics, The Family Stone is more than the chaos that family comedies often end up portraying. The characters are individuals. The problems are  real; they step out of the box of stereotypes for a minute and try swimming in the deep end. There were a few points where I sat wide-eyed, thinking: this isn’t funny at all. And it wasn’t, it was a moment of reality. Life isn’t always something you can laugh at, even for the most casual, laid-back, close-knit family. I found the portrayal refreshing, free from the chains of Hollywood façade. 

Sure, the director takes an overwhelmingly liberal approach to casual sex, drinking, and homosexuality.  I didn’t say the movie couldn’t be beat – I just said it portrayed the family well.  The approach to sex is very “Hollywood”, but less revealing than most – at least I felt comfortable watching it.  The use of drunkenness is disappointing, it’s presented as the only way that Meredith’s uptight character can loosen up.  The implications of that are horrible, the plot direction is an “easy way out”.  But the stance on homosexuality created fantastic moments of tension in the film – one particularly notable dinner conversation where Meredith, in her poor, stuttering communication insulted nearly every member of the family as she tried to engage a difficult topic.  I actually think that Patrick and Thad (the gay couple) were intentionally portrayed as the most modest, healthiest couple in the film – how interesting.

A good one for discussion, even though we Americans like our movie-watching to be as passive as possible Rental.

Flick Picks: THE PRESTIGE

Here is my little diatribe on ratings

I recently learned (decided?) that Christopher Nolan is my favorite movie director of the current generation. Kudos to the help in this area and friendship in all areas of my dear Charissa, the knower of all things film.

In The Prestige two magicians (Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman) battle their entire lives/professional careers (these two terms become interchangeable concepts for both individuals, a powerful motif) for status and success in their craft.  We learn the inner workings of magic – how the “prestige” is the part of a  trick where the impossible draws gasps from the crowd.  For example, when the disappeared returns to an empty stage, or soaking wet from inside a locked water tank.  The audience doesn’t clap after the “turn”, because anyone can disappear.  But coming back is the impressive part, the secret that the audience struggles to figure out, the secret that the magician takes to his grave.  Every monologue about magic is also, cleverly, about this dark personal battle between these two magicians.

The movie is crafted in such a way that the viewer is immediately let in near the end of the story for just a split-second and then taken back to the beginning to learn of how these magicians began their lifelong tango with one another. The entire journey is of the putting-the-pieces-together variety: my all-time favorite.  We follow the story through narratives from each man’s journal, pursuits of more impressive tricks, and the final pursuit of the “Transported Man”, the last trick that ends this epic struggle.

Nolan crafts his characters with the depth of their personal struggle; he sews them so tightly into this period piece that we don’t think for a second that this magician could be the Batman from Gotham City or Wolverine from the X-Men.  They have always, and ever will be from start to finish of this film, dueling magicians.  We believe the words they say, we’re shocked at the lies that are uncovered, we gasp audibly when we realize the implications of the truths revealed. 

My bias is obvious, but the film won’t lie.  Nolan has done it again.  He’s created an artistically beautiful, intellectually challenging, and creatively ground-breaking work.  Top 5.  Inception hits theatres this summer.

Business Etiquette

My friend Jim is a better writer than I am, but lately I have to twist his arm for him to even dig out an old journal entry of his overseas, mountain-climbing escapades and post it as a blog.  He has a real job now, so I guess I can understand cutting him a little slack.  He doesn’t wear sweatpants five days out of seven and hardly ever sleeps til noon anymore…that’s more my style, and maybe always will be.  But, it’s not like he has nothing to write about.

If I picked up the phone umpteen times a day and there was inevitably going to be an angry, embittered person on the other end of the line who’s been waiting minutes, even hours, to talk to me, I’d certainly have a thing or ten to say about the hilarious and sometimes scathing interactions that follow.  The fact that precious minutes of dedicated housewives across America are ticking away on Jim’s waitlist is another post in and of itself, because if I had to wait three minutes to talk to him, I’d surely hang up!  This is his life.  And the issue is: it’s going unblogged.

The problem, says Jim, is that you just can’t up and write about work like that.  They tell you so.  Or so he says.  Even when he delivered pizzas, it was the same.  Now, don’t get me wrong – Jim’s an honest, straightforward kind of guy, if a smidge passive at times, and he wouldn’t say so if it weren’t so, but I’ve never heard any such thing.  I’ve worked at a restaurant and catering establishment in downtown Chicago for upwards of 5 years.  It’s not a small fry kind of place, either.  As I’ve learned in my time there, it has quite the following: mostly folks that are older than dirt, but follow they do.  Reputation and tradition are big time baggage that come with the simple duty of waiting tables and running off-premise catering events.   I consider myself a veteran at the Berghoff and certainly in the restaurant industry at 9 years in practice.  Never once has anyone given me the spiel about writing up the Berghoff or any other place on my blog.  They never said do it; they never said don’t.  No one’s ever said anything about it at all. 

In fact…not only have they never told me not to write about it, but when our menus come out “quarterly” and they’re  littered with poor English grammar and typos in the succulent descriptions; when three dishes in a row are described as “excellent” (a poor menu adjective, in case you hadn’t figured), they don’t even think to ask for help.  I wait tables not to exercise my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing.  Or to capitalize on my 9 years of restaurant industry experience.  Or to enhance those 3 years in hospitality and tourism management where I managed students in two supervising positions.  And waiting tables certainly doesn’t have a thing to do with my Master’s degree aside from how the tips paid the bills for the classes.  Even so, it’s hard to watch three and four drafts of the dinner menu fly off the copy machine on non-recyclable paper reprints.

So, Jim says it’s not right to write about work.  It’s his excuse for not writing at all.  I don’t think I can accept his reasoning – not because I’ll go on writing about the Berghoff in my ignorance of business etiquette, not because of my absence of a real job, now and maybe forever, and not because I don’t think Jim is right on the money…I’m sure he is – but because everything is a catalyst for crafting words in those who can craft them.  Sometimes I have dry spells and it feels like I can’t even play hangman on a piece of receipt paper without tremendous difficulty.  But even when those days hit, I should be filling the back of a napkin with phrases, with word pairs or prompt ideas, with the shaky beginnings of exercises or alliterations.  Anything to light the fire, keep it burning.

So….Dear Jim, write a blog.

Chicago Spots: The Gift Theatre

I want to spend the rest of my life meddling around in the buzzing community of struggling artists. The young adults who juggle fast-paced, low-paying side jobs to buy brushes and canvas, to fund head shots for auditions, to stamp stacks of submissions. No one will pay me for this – at least no one I’ve met – but these are the people that set me on fire.

Still, I will argue against my formation of a crituqing bias. Frankly, my friends are just good at what they do. Not because I love them and not because they are my friends. I just got lucky and found the good ones.

My friend, Rob, is in a play that closes this weekend, Summer People.  He plays the role of a troubled marine, just returned from war, who escapes to a remote campsite to deal with post-war trauma and avoid returning to his family.  The marine doesn’t go by name.  He lives on campsite 54.  Signs in under an alias with the campsite director.  He’s characterized by escape, both in his interactions with the families on the grounds, and in intense war-torn flashbacks.  His turmoil is internal, but he sweats suffering and the burden of the actor who plays him is to show this.  54 clenches his fist, squeezing his thumb down to the bone almost always, especially when he becomes uncomfortable.  It’s obvious that he desires connection, but every time it inches towards him, even a little bit, he runs scared back to his hideaway on the shore. 

Even though the play, in its screenwriting, lacks a bit of fullness and some originality in a few of the plotlines, there are moments when this character – above the rest – embodies a considerable amount of depth.  Yes, he’s a consistently suffering character in a setting that resists the added burden of him.  But suffering isn’t green like the color.  Doesn’t have four corners like a shape.  It sure can look like something…but, what?

It is the pressure pushing color away to white bloodless skin, clenching the handel of a shovel?  What of these stuttered responses, silence, stillness where successful sentences should be?  Suffering can be deep, like the hole 54 dug in the sand to try and bury every memory he had from the war.  Is it any secret that he couldn’t escape them, or the pain that they caused?  Suffering is persistent, like kids coming around, asking questions, causing trouble, being kids.  Like people in your way when all you want is to be alone. Only questions when you need an answer.  Sickness.  Sadness.  Fear.  Rage.  Regret.

An actress read a non-fiction piece at a reading I went to last month.  She said that she becomes the characters she plays, to a degree.  And that when she’s between characters, she’s not as sure of her.  I’m not sure how true this is of my friend, Rob, but he’s been playing 54 for months now and it’s coming to an end.  I saw the real Rob in the character of 54, and I can speculate at ways that I see 54 in Rob, but the jury’s still out on that.  What the jury has decided is that 54 is a chance character.  He could’ve been played sterotypically, and suffering would have remained an ethereal, unreachable term that we use without understanding.  But in this production of Summer People, 54 was played by a heart artist, a true performer.  A potentially flat character was given shape, he developed fullness, and was thus, crafted into a visual representation of the internal struggle that a post-war marine might have - a battle that someone like me would never have access to were it not for mediums such as these and acting such as this.

Art is the future.

Winter

It hasn’t snowed here yet and Thanksgiving has already passed.

I’m worried about you this winter.   I know the way you fear the way winter captures you.  The way it comes and never leaves.  The way it cages you with it’s cold, a prison even theatres and snow sports can’t breach.  I spent the season filling your time so you’d never feel the weight of those chains.  The weight is still on me.

I’m worried about your new New York life and the winter there. Will you make it through the heavy snowfall falling asleep to dvds of old sitcoms and the hum of the fish tank?  Can you cheat the early sunsets and too much dark in one day with bread pudding in the oven and shark on the grill?  Will you barbeque it in your socks from the kitchen floor while it starts to snow?

Be okay this winter.  Christmas is coming, bringing months of East Coast snow.