Then there is the added stress that this same preliminary day of my school gig is also the day of the Best-Picture Nominee Marathon at the AMC Theater. I have a ticket and I'll be damned if I'm going to let it go to waste. I walk into the darkened theater, heading up to the nosebleed seats, running over in my mind how I can possibly make this work—juggling movie watching and my principalnik duties. My phone is already lighting up.
It is a phenomenally dumb idea. Hhow did I think it would work?
Anyway, a movie comes on, one I've been looking forward to. It's a Coen Bros flick in which two men kidnap an old(ish) woman and hang her upside down "until she talks"; though what she's supposed to talk about I can't remember. Where she hid the gold, say, or who actually Killed the Great Chefs of Europe. The movie is rife with American roots music, as was O Brother Where Art Thou and, to a less exuberant extent, True Grit. The woman is the hero, of course: she is smarter, more honest, and more moral than her captors—but she is also a world-class dick and her verbal vitriol is breathtaking.
Much later, Paul & I are attending a play, which turns out to be Hello, Dolly! But since I have never actually seen Hello, Dolly! I don't even realize this until some old guy's recitative late in the show leading into the title song. The show runs longer than we expected and we have another obligation after. Paul needs to go, and for some reason he needs to talk about going, but he talks way too loud while the show is still onstage, which is egregious behavior and so I try to shush him and we end up arguing way, way the fuck too audibly. And he leaves alone in a huff.
I wait for the show to end and I try to leave—but I have to wait for the concessions counter to reconfigure or transform into egress stairs. I had just glimpsed an elderly woman with limited mobility being helped down one set of special "assistive" stairs, but then the whole thing gets set back to its concession-counter configuration and I have to wait until the next drawbridge. Meanwhile the cast are now milling about and hobnobbing with the audience; I worry that I will be pegged as "that asshole talking loudly during the show".
When I finally get out of the theater I go back to the cinema for another movie: this one is a grim drama about a middle-aged couple in trouble: Frances MacDormand and some guy she's been with forever. All through the movie we see little bits of evidence that the relationship is moribund; each sour retort and miscommunication stings a little bit more and lingers longer, like a birthday paddling. Late in the picture Frances's character sings (yes, it's a grim drama with music; surely you've heard of Sondheim) a solid, affecting aria on the couple's symptoms of malaise, including a pun on the French word 'tous' in which the order of vowels—tous, tuos; perhaps quibbling on 'duos'?—somehow, jibing with the aforegone plot, indicates guilt shared among both parties. Toward the end of the song she manifests anger and selfishness as literal monsters, drawing them on a store front window with greasepaint crayon while singing about their Godjiran destructiveness.
Later that afternoon, I am hanging around the shop (not the school, BTW) and in the back of my mind is the fact that I have to go home to fetch the library book that must be returned today. Fortunately John Furbush (who in real life I haven't seen in 30 years) arrives to deliver my new convertible. It is a tiny thing, probably lighter than a lot of motorcycles, the "interior" just big enough to fit a single person in, like a go-cart; only it is crazy-fast and just gorgeously maneuverable. I immediately take it out for a spin on the downtown city streets; and I am having such a great time driving around, weaving effortlessly among larger, stodgier traffic, that I forget the hour and my library obligation. When I remember, it is too late; the library will have already closed.
Back at the shop, a coworker clues me in—too late this time, I guess, but next time I'll know better—that the library actually has a mobile pick-up service. He uses it all the time, he tells me, while I peruse the collection of books he himself has out on loan from the library. He is a polymath the likes of which I've never known. He is the Professor on Gilligan's Island, except he knows more: he would never, even for an episode, get relegated to "and the rest".
My perusal of his current collection expands and diffuses until I am wandering around the shop, looking curiously at everything. The place is dimly lit and filled with wonderful treasures of, well, near antiquity. Mostly the stuff seems to be authentic versions of crap that would eventually inspire
The play is called This Day and Age (no relation to the Cecil B DeMille epic of 1933). The protagonist, a rural gentleman, is attempting to extract information regarding his wife—presumably an indiscretion thereof—from his manservant. The latter is a clown character whose attention wanders pathologically: he does not appear to be cravenly evading the question of his master's wife's fidelity; rather he seems earnestly incapable of keeping on topic when something else occurs to him. This makes for a very funny scene, toward the end of which the protagonist manages, with dire warnings, to keep his servant on topic for several Socratic questions running, and just as the latter is about to spill the real dirt on the lady of the house, with the master on the edge of his seat, the servant suddenly apologizes profusely for not considering how hungry his master must be and would he like some mutton? The master collapses into exasperation; and our stories collapse into an actual Sunday morning.
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