More Songs about Buildings and Terrifying Heights

Fomo and Andy Hoffman and I are hanging out on the balcony talking about a thing. What this thing is, I have no idea, except that it is smaller than a breadbox and motile. I am discussing the significant number of times I have lost track of this thing and had to retrieve it from the top of the building, because that is where the thing goes when it's not monitored. Brain runs through each of these experiences; in all cases they entail climbing out a window onto a ledge, manoeuvring onto the roof, climbing up to the cupola, climbing onto the cupola, and retrieving the thing from the very top of the spire at the center of the cupola. Despite the routineness of the routine, some of these episodes are hairier than others, but in all cases (I tell Fomo and Andy), "It's a pretty tricky thing to do."

Of course these climbs are exactly the sort of acrophobic dreams with which Brain loves to torment me. I almost always manage to avoid falling off the ledge, or the telephone pole, or the mountainside, or the wobbly 2-by-4 I have to cross to get from my home to anywhere else in the world—all such precipices impossibly high above the ground. Indeed, in many cases I am quite adept at traversing the nonsensical aerial obstacle courses Brain presents me with; but the acrophobia is always there regardless, a background of rank stomach-churning terror.

Anyway, we're on the balcony, which is more like the roof over the front of a bungalow—sloping very gentle down toward a steel railing. The slope is covered with Astroturf. Andy is skeptical that the climb of this building's roof and cupola, to retrieve the thing, is a bad as I have made it out to be. Fomo is looking over the railing at how high up we are; he drops a pillow over the railing to see how it falls.  and lands. I do not get near the edge or the railing, but I know the height is ambiguous: we are simultaneously on the second floor and thousands of feet off the ground.

It is time for me to go home. Home is currently a couple rooms on the third floor of a building that Barry Solan converted from a movie theater (not, curiously, the State; though we seem to be in Newark we are somewhere north of Main Street) into a boarding house. It seems I moved out of a second floor room some time ago and immediately regretted doing so; I have sorely wanted that room back. Barry's senior Video Américain employee Mike took over the second floor room I abandoned. Another video store employee whose name I forget is serving as the building manager; he told me—last week? two weeks ago?—that Mike has unofficially taken lodging elsewhere; and so he gave me a spare key to my old room, saying, "Effectively, this can be your room again..." but that's not what my lease says and it's unclear whether there may be unfavorable consequences to my staying in what it now Mike's room. Of course when I get to Mike's room, Mike is actually in there—or at least somebody is sleeping in the bed, so I head to my third floor room...

Which of course I cannot find. Apparently I've only slept there once or twice (maybe I've been couch surfing) and this place is huge and confusing. I head up a flights of stairs to the third floor. There is a woman sitting in the hallway ahead with whom I strongly wish not to interact—because I can't remember her name and I should? because it will be clear I have no idea how to get to my room?—so I turn in the other direction. I'm immediately doubtful this is the right way; indeed I pass a few other doors and then the only other egress is out French doors onto the roof. Well, maybe there's another way back into a different part of the third floor from here? Nope. It occurs to me that this house is deliberately set up as a labyrinth: unless you know exactly where you're going, you keep finding dead ends.

It is near month end and so I consider changing rooms again: I know one tiny room is currently vacant and would cost much less than my current rooms—and I ask myself, what do I need the room for besides a place to sleep? Except, oops, I own too much stuff to fit in a smaller room. Hey, no fair, this is just like real life!

The Stationery Store Considered as an Analog of Cocaine Addiction, and other stories

Today’s story is a theme and variations on “is this place real or invented?” The first such place is almost certainly an amalgam of both: a plaza in the middle of a semi-urban area, maybe compassing two city blocks, crammed with as many space-efficient amusement park rides as possible. Tucked under this but still at ground level, somehow, is a retail district with restaurants. My brother and I and some other folks—not sure who—are riding the rides and, later, eating in a swanky restaurant, the kind whose ugly lighting screams money, that caters to organized crime. Throughout our time together we are discussing the local area and how long it used to take us to walk hither or thither.

Enter Regina Spektor, or at least a little bag of cocaine. (Brain will keep singing "Hotel Song" these day.) This is in what I guess is my bedroom? but is really a public school classroom—I’m guessing the home ec room at Hammonton High (I never actually took a class there but geographically that is where it feels like). It seems I am a cocaine user, and I am almost out: I check my jar and it contains only a wee bit, all pressed together into a small disk, like the stub end of a piece of chalk that someone has used to scribble on a sidewalk, getting it down to the last bit they could safely scrape without burning their fingers. I shake this out of the (baby food) jar and into the mortar; I break it up with the end of an umbrella. But after that I apparently don’t do anything with it, except muse, as cluelessly as IRL, about the current cost of the stuff and how much it must cost those assholes you see in movies with enormous mounds of coke on their coffee tables. Necessarily given this mental image, someone sneezes. And we have a scene change.

I am carrying a stack of black plastic take-out containers to another, bigger, classroom space in which family and friends are gathering for a meal. It is an enormous square room, far bigger than any classroom should be, but it has a chalkboard along its, I dunno, 150-foot front wall. En route I realize the little cup-lets of sauce or dressing that I’m bringing are superfluous because so-and-so will have made her famous sauce that everyone must love and praise. Indeed, my bringing commercially bought sauce will be an insult. So, just as I’m getting to the classroom door, I compile the insulting sauce into another container (yay dream arms!); just inside the door there is a standard black classroom/office trashcan where I deposit my redundancies—then immediately worry that someone has seen me putting recyclables in the trash, but also worried if I make a big deal of the act of discarding it will come to light that I brought sauce. I grab them back out and take them to the recycle bin, which is all the way across the room by the fryer.

Speaking of which. I have also brought potatoes, a huge bag of them, and they are suspiciously uniform in shape, like cigars—or better still carrots with a few inches of point knocked off. Anyway, I set up to chop them and somebody volunteers to do it for me; so I take the few I have already chopped over to the fryer, where somebody else volunteers to fry them. “Unless you want to…” he says, and I admit that I really don’t fancy standing by the fryer in this heat. Because it’s hot.

Later, we’re on a bus ride home, and while I don’t remember exactly visiting a particular, beloved stationery store whence we have just departed, Bob and I are discussing its history. This is an amalgam of Dan’s Stationery on Bellevue Avenue, Hammonton, some stationery-specializing vendors at the Berlin Farmers’ Market (née Berlin Auction), and at least one dream store. I am running through the establishment’s names in reverse chronological order, and I’ve gotten through maybe four different names and owners when a guy across the bus aisle (I’m in the windows seat, Bob on the aisle) volunteers the next one: Tapper’s Stationery. Neither of us go any further, even though IRL the next older iteration (and, in my lifetime, the original, magnificent stationery store) was Dan’s Stationery. In this case, however, the establishment we’re talking about is a competitor that opened up across the street (and in some sense, across the mall) from Dan’s—a much more compact store, probably in what used to be Albright’s Shoes. (A few doors to the right of this:?)

The bus ride ends and we are, in whatever sense, “back home”. It now appears to have been a chartered bus and we are all one party; my mother (but not Mom) is at least in part Shirley Partridge. (Shirley Jones is still alive and working, BTW, 84 this year!) She is exhausted from the trip; we all know the script calls for me to be mightily pissed off about something and to take it out on her, briefly—a situation for end-of-reel resolution—but my dander and I are honestly not up to it. So, once off the bus and across the street, on the sidewalk in front of the park, I line up with the other children (Marcia Brady appears to be in the mix) to hug mom and thank her for a fabulous trip.

A Night at the Diner / A Day at the Cockfights

“Mark Tomasello, how come I ain’t never sucked your dick?” I ask Mark Tomasello just as he’s finishing up getting his dick sucked by some guy whom either one of us may or may not know. I’m hanging in a conference room with Mark and two other old friends. While Mark has been getting his dick sucked, the other two friends and I have been chatting about old times; but from across the conference table I cannot help noticing Mark’s dick sure looks like it would be nice to suck.

I honestly don’t know the answer to the question I asked, and I’m guessing Mark doesn’t either. We have always been friends. (IRL zero clue about Mark since shortly after high school.) I guess I am just now finding out he lets guys suck him off. Anyway, accommodatingly, he beckons me over, so I slide across the table on my belly. As a matter of teasing or reward system, Mark postpones the actual event by giving me other things to suck first: a squishy white latex buttplug-looking thingummy—it feels like a Stretch Armstrong in squishiness; it is obviously intended primarily for butt play because it sucks nothing like a dick—and then an actual dildo, which is much nicer to fake with. I guess Mark is playing with his own dick under the table while I’m demonstrating technique and getting myself hot with the toys, because when he finally says, “Ok, here ya go,” and stands up, his dick is huge and beautiful: not rock hard but exactly at the best stage of engorgement to suck on; the foreskin is pulled back and the top of the glans is dark purple and flat and sleek. The whole thing is a small Italian sub and I immediately put every centimeter of it in my mouth.

Timing is everything, and of course Mark is called away almost immediately with the others in the conference room (except me); but in a genuine act of kindness he leaves his dick with me so I can keep sucking it. And believe me, I do.

I spend an entire evening at an establishment that is part punk rock bar, part '50s style burger joint, and part Grandmom and Grandpop’s house on Edgewood Drive, Collings Lakes, N.J. At various points throughout the evening:

• I hang out at a big circular table in the starkly lit main diner space with Mark McKinney, Breck Young, Spike, surely a bunch of dead people like Ray and Chad. Possibly Dan BigBooté, though he is less welcome in my dreams and he knows it. It is an ordeal trying to decide which empty seat to sit in. Whom do I want to talk to most? Who actually likes me? (I am fairly certain Brain still has 40-year-old PTSD from a particularly cold and purposed experiment in ostracism Brain’s two best “friends”, not to be named here, ran in grade school.) Not that any of this matters much because the dialog from this scene, like the dialog from the cited experiment, is entirely lost.

• I go outside, where some of the seating is in little cars that move, slowly and continuously, along a track around the patio area, maybe 5 feet off the ground. I guess there are steps leading up to the track somewhere, but I don’t investigate. I just think it’s a neat idea for a diner/bar.

• I realize my party has run out of good steak, so I wind my way back into Grandmom’s kitchen, and further back down the hallway into a prep area that is where the little antechamber with the bookshelves should be. Here I find, on a white polypropylene cutting board, an already cooked prime-rib looking roast thing just begging me to carve it. This is perfect! Just what my friends and I were looking for. I take a knife that looks precisely like a scale model of a 2-person saw, and cut off a good, thick slice to try. Unfortunately, when I do so, some kind of sweet goo, like barbecue sauce but not quite, leaks out from the center, whereupon it becomes apparent that the slab as a whole was somebody else’s preparation that I have just violated. People have been wandering by me the entire time and nobody has hollered at me; I decide I have done minimal damage at this point, so I make myself scarce.

• I find myself at the bar across from Dave Silverman (the bar in this section appears to be in a long, narrow figure-8, with service areas in the loops on either side and between the loops, in the center of the 8, bar space where customers sit directly opposite each other). I have ended up with two beers; both of these are in what look like 24- or 32-ounce plastic iced tea jugs. In fact, the labels on the jug-handles have a sans-serif beige font against exactly the tannish-brown color you expect from iced tea labels. I have just got round to noticing that one of these beers in particular sucks; and when I consult the label I discover this is because it’s near-beer. “0% alcohol”, it tells me. Yuck. Dave is warning me about my social interaction with the guy on my left. Maybe he’s here fresh from Mos Eisley or something, but apparently I’ve already done something to piss him off, so I take my >0% alcoholic beer and go away.

Abruptly—no footage of the setup remains—I dash through the exterior door of the school or whatever public or institutional building where I earlier sucked Mark Tomasello’s dick. I instantly notice shadows and voices of colleagues in the hallway around the corner from this hallway; so I duck through an open doorway on my right into the same conference room from earlier. It occurs to me in rapid succession: They must have heard the exterior door open and close, mustn’t they? If they do not discover me here I will have the unique opportunity to be in this building after closing, which, well, who knows what I might find? But I believe they have already come around the corner of the hallway, so I cannot shut the conference room door behind me; and I expect one of them will almost certainly check this room, or at least lean in to grab the door and shut it, and there is no place for me to hide so quickly, and enough light is coming in that I will certainly be discovered if anyone leans in.

So I decide the thing to do is jump out and yell “BOO!” and scare them. So I jump out and try to yell “BOO!”; but because Brain is in dream mode trying to work actual vocal chords, it comes as out a vague moan with no chance of scaring the empty living room.

I'm afraid of Americans

I have been driving for a while in upstate New York and it occurs to me with increasing urgency that my car feels "funny" driving. I have just left a retail establishment of some sort whose public spaces are semi-open to the outside: actual structures, sturdier than tents, but still exposed, sort of an indoor-outdoor hybrid space where people can come, hang out, and not feel like they've cooped themselves up. 

The place hosts public events of whatever kind: they definitely have at least one bar—but not even one usable bathroom (the one I did find was marked "Staff only" and was locked). After hunting around the whole joint for a bathroom, I finally asked, was denied, and threatened to and then actually did piss on the barroom floor, which was suddenly, unexpectedly dirt. I soaked as much of the sod as I could—it was a good, long, horsey piss—but the bartender, the same slack-jawed yokel who had denied me bathroom use in the first place, was not impressed. But he was fairly nonchalant about it, so I didn't even get the satisfaction of pissing anybody off.

Anyway, now, something is weird about the car. Specifically about the front left (driver's) quarter, the very place I just had extensive work done (no really, 36 days in the shop, IRL, pursuant to a black ice slide into a yield sign). I pull into a petrol station and turn the car off. Well, there's your problem, says Brain, as soon as I get out of the car and look: The entire front wheel on this side is beat to hell and the tire is completely flat. No, wait, that's not a tire at all; it's a badger.

Sure, the nice man at the petrol station (of course they do repairs as well; this is upstate) can fix it, but it'll take a couple days. Meanwhile, I need to figure out how to get home and then get back up here when it's ready to be picked up. This is more worrisome than it needs to be; for some reason it takes me a long while to realize I have plenty of available credit and that Americans with plenty of available credit are fucking gods in the marketplace. Until that realization, I am stressed out, boggling at the logistics of the ordeal ahead of me.

Part of this stress is that I am starting a new job—in preparation for which I am looking through an old spiral notebook, octavo sized like I used to use in high school. This notebook might actually be that old but it appears to have mostly occupational rather than educational notes. I come across an incongruous zip-lock plastic compartment with a few pens and pencil stubs. This is clearly from the early part of my life where I thought free ball-point pens were a Good Thing.

I am sitting at the breakfast counter in the house where I grew up in Folsom, N.J., setting up my new work station. As always, there is detritus in the drawers from the last employee. But the plastic organizer tray fit into the top of the drawer does not have a compartment long enough for a full-size pen or pencil. Apparently it's a secondary tray, for paper clips and erasers and staples and things...? Roze is here with me; she has her own drawer, which I note has an appropriate organizer for writing implements. While we're setting up our work stations I am running over in my mind all that I need to do in order to accommodate the inconvenience of having my car broken down in upstate New York. This involves a good deal of shopping—or so Brain assures me, though I can't imagine now what contingency supplies I could possible need in this circumstance. I think Brain just wants retail therapy.

Somebody gives me chicken dinner; but it's clearly not a winner. (Wait, strike that. Use instead: Someone gives me chicken luncheon but it hits me like a truncheon.) It actually looks like it's some other kind of fowl, probably something just made up, because I can see in its cooked skin remnants of a row of feathers that looks like a Native American headdress rather than something that occurs naturally on an actual bird. I am more and more grossed out with the offered luncheon and my stomach has begun to complain. Little stabs of pain here and there. 

Maybe there is a temporal gap at this point in which someone offered me some stomach medicine, because the next thing is that I look at the cylindrical jar of medicine I have taken and I notice it has a label stuck on it with some kind of arcane warning about its use. Perhaps this printed material is just the typical side-effect notices, but someone has also scribbled on the label a notation, in effect saying "discard ALL this stuff". 

I walk through the workplace until I find one of the staff nurses that I like (this place appears to be Division of Federal Occupation Health or some such, where nurses teem abundant) and I show her the jar and the label. She looks at the product and the label and fairly quickly declares that it's fine; that we'll be fine. Petra has also had some of the stuff and speaks up as well, with concern about her own well-being. I have to point out "no really, don't use this shit" notation scribbled on the label, at which point the nurse changes her mind and confiscates the product; but she says we will still probably be ok.

Without segue I am working next to R. Michael Hodges, which entails lying in a bed next to R. Michael Hodges. (Brain never did care for subtlety.) We are still in the workplace and we are fully clothed; but I clearly have not gone through sexual harassment training.

I am deeply in love with R. Michael Hodges, as I have unalterably been since the day I met him; and, as has been the occasional case IRL, he tolerates physical affection and attention up to a point but does not pretend to be anything other than straight. Anyway, I kiss him twice behind his right ear, and that is clearly enough for the time being. We chat about work and I tell him about my broken car, my plan to retrieve it in several days, and the shopping I need to do in the meanwhile.

Later and without seeming relation to anything previous: I am at a house on a large, flat property, with a long dirt driveway coming up from a road that seems a mile away. This could be a prairie—it looks vaguely like a Western—but it could also be the tidal plain of South Jersey in a particular dry summer season. I am halfway up a ladder in front of the house (why? dunno) when someone comes up the driveway and give me the mail. It is a fistful of letters, almost all of them hand-addressed, some of them in sweetly decorated envelopes—sunsets and kittens and things. 

I flip through them and quickly find one that has been misdelivered: the street name and the town are the same, but this is addressed to Whatever Terrace West, not plain old Whatever Street. Then I find one that should have been delivered to Arizona; and another bound for the U.S. state of Occiput. I toss these misdelivered envelopes into a pile on the ground. Most of the rest of the stack are similarly, wildly misdelivered: several should have gone to India, Austria, and New Zealand.

I am still on the ladder when one of the residents comes out of her house (or her part of the house; it appears to be subdivided extensively) complaining that her mail didn't come. Someone has delivered mail to her door but it did not include what she was expecting. She asks me about the stack of mail I have been sorting and I explain it's almost all misdelivered and none of it was for her; I invite her to look at the stack to be sure.

I come down off the ladder and go into the house. Residual from my sorting of the mail, I now have three gummed form pads to dispose of, in landscape format with the gum on the left side, like an old-fashioned book of checks. I believe I need to return them whence they came, but they seem not to have come in an envelope or with any information attached. Meanwhile a woman and a man are talking quietly in the front room by the window. She becomes I as we both tell the man: "I totally understand your concerns about how bad things are in America."

Late nite shenanigans

It's getting pretty late. Paul and I have been hanging out in the Park Ranger—Brain's "pun" on the Deer Park, I guess—and I'm getting antsy. For what feels like the last 4 hours and 18 minutes Paul has been at an adjacent table gabbling with a twink he's clearly smitten with, and I'm moping at the table he abandoned. Luckily, this is a dream, so I have only to think about the practice of upscale eateries distributing free happy hour munchies, so as to encourage folks to stay and drink more, et voilà, here's some now. Even though it's long past happy hour. 

The onion rings are recently out of the oil, perfectly done, cooled just enough. But the first one I chomp down on makes it clear the onions themselves are not to be trifled with. The skin on the ring is unbreakable, so after a struggle, I end up with all the onion in my mouth and all the breading on the table.

I fucking hate that. Not just the ipso facto food fight but because I am convinced everyone in the joint was watching me lose to an onion. And I'm certain my face is absolutely covered in frying oil and crumbs.

Fuck this, I'm out of here. I perfunctorily napkin myself, stand, and walk the few steps over to the table where Paul and the twink are talking. I tell Paul I'm heading out. He barely acknowledges me, but as I'm turning to go, the twink says, "Seeya, loser." I wheel around and fix him with a look I hope is withering. He shrugs and says, "Why not?" He's playing it like "We're all friends now, why not joke around?" but he really means, "You're a loser, so why not say so?" I respond with, "I can think of one or two reasons." I give Paul exactly 1.5 seconds of the same ocular death ray, then turn again and stalk out of the joint. It is a good flounce.

The environs are American Capitalist Festivity: part Disney park, part Mardi gras, everybody drinking and hollering and drinking. I decide not to go back to the hotel right away; I want to be up on a balcony watching the celebration. I head around the side of the building, up an exterior flight of stairs, and I come to a closed gate, behind which is the second storey balcony, completely empty. I am momentarily confused, trying to remember whether I have heard or read something about the balconies being closed. I try the gate (it is unlocked) just as a voice from behind me says, "Oh, are we going upstairs?"

It is a stranger, but she is apparently being played by Betsy Arledge. She wants to accompany me in my dangerous mission to scout out the balconies. We head up another flight to the third storey balcony, and it quickly becomes apparent why the balconies are closed: they are basically made of hammock material, securely suspended—this isn't a frightening experience, just surprising—but extremely... stretchy. We walk close to the outer railing and the balcony sags down so far we are only a yard or so above the heads of folks walking on the sidewalk. (Where the second storey balcony went in this moment is not clear.) 

"This is fun," says Stranger Betsy, and indeed it is. But of course we are discovered traipsing around off limits and shooed off the balcony by Park Ranger staff.

Here Comes the Thud

Thanks to the hubby I've been watching a bodacious amount of The Good Wife lately. I missed most or all of Season 1 but got drawn in early in Season 2. I really enjoyed the second and third seasons, despite the tendency of the show to hang far too much emotional and dramatic weight on the ridiculous, universal sin of infidelity. "Fer chrissake shut up and litigate," I found myself saying.

But then... last night... Season 4 Episode 8, "Here Comes the Judge". Or maybe "Here Comes the Judd".

By far the worst episode I've seen so far. In terms of plotting and dialog, it's hard to fathom a more likely explanation than that the writers all decided to try bath salts on the same day.

First we have a judge who is advertised as "playing it by the book"—this is coming from Kalinda, an investigator whose time in court is limited, so this judge must have a seriously loud reputation for being straitlaced—but who nonetheless engages in a drunken tirade in a public bar, hollering before witnesses that Will Gardner is going to lose the case he, Judge Straitlace, is currently adjudicating. Also that Mr. Gardner is a liar and a thief who doesn't deserve to practice law ever again. Ok, we learn later that Judge Straitlace just got divorced and fell off the wagon, so now it's a free-for-all.

We have Mr. Gardner and co-counsel planning and calling for an independent judicial review of that judge's obvious bias—without once considering that it might aid their case to call the main witness to the judge's tirade, a woman, incidentally, with whom Mr. Gardner was once involved. (Are there any women in the legal profession in Chicago with whom Mr. Gardner was not once involved?) We have Mr. Gardner finally—after a courtroom reversal makes everybody go "duh!"—approaching that witness... and having sex with her before mentioning he and Justice both need her help.

We have the universally idiotic walking contrivance of "tow-truck magnate Nick Savarese" a.k.a. "Mr, Kalinda" a.k.a. "Hey let's remake Clockwork Orange!", obsessing on Cary Agos, absolutely dead certain Mr. Agos is sleeping with his wife.

And we have insipid side-plots involving each of the Florrick teens:

(1) Zach successfully lies about his identity to take a volunteer IT job at his dad's campaign headquarters—and nobody recognizes him as the candidate's son. The newly hired IT boss pleads with Eli Gold because she really, really needs this one specific high-school kid IT volunteer to, I dunno, hack the Pentagon or some shit—but he won't stay. Of course, once Mr. Gold finds out it is Zach, now Zach really, really wants to stay, but he's afraid to even ask his mom about helping out at Dad's HQ. Because for some reason both parents treat the campaign trail with the same child-protective horror as an opium den, alligator pit, or witness box at an organized crime trial.

(2) For no reason and with no convincing in-show rationale, Grace obsesses on a boy at school whose girlfriend, also called Grace, just killed herself. "It's sad but I'm good," she tells her mom on the phone—a typical utterance, as if this wildly privileged, coddled, and engaged private school teen has never learned any polysyllabic adjectives. Even if we concede the moronic premise that this human child of normal(ish) intelligence is worrying, "Hey, my name is Grace too! That could have been me!", the sequitur is ridiculous: in the space of a few days she stalks the boy, accosts him, befriends him, BFFs him, SWFs him, invites him to her house, asks him about the sex he used to have with Dead Grace in the bushes and whether that's what he intends with her (Live Grace). And possibly takes up smoking cigarettes.

And through all this insulting rubbish there is not a bit of acting required of the luminous Ms. Julianna Margulies to relieve the painful stupidity of the episode.

The Way of the World (not Congreve) at Folger

Let's get this out of the way up front: At no point in its first act does The Way of the World—"A new comedy adapted from the play by William Congreve" playing at Folger Theatre through February 11—threaten to turn into a good play. Its satire is broad and obvious—if it even is satire; the word "whinging" seems more apt. Its characters (seven filthy rich persons summering in the Hamptons) seem types—or perhaps price tags—rather than persons. Its observations on class seem tired and rote, as if the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, admitted defeat at the outset on that particular windmill duel. Its appeals to social media for zeitgeist hipness have pretty much the same effect on the comedy as Botox has on the face. Its attempts at pathos—largely in the eighth character, an unnamed "Waitress" who serially addresses the audience as a sort of tour guide to income inequality—might as well have the character reciting the words "I really want your empathy, please." A little later, there's a deus ex machina involving that same waitress, a casual hook-up with Henry, and stolen baubles that is just insultingly, inexcusably sophomoric.

(Oh, and its costuming is ostentatiously weird. Not the play's fault.)

At more than one moment in act one the flagstone cast member, Kristine Nielsen as "Aunt Renée", appears to be "doing" Charlotte Rae as Edna Garrett in The Facts of Life. This is certainly not to cast shade at Ms. Rae (who still treads the Earth with us, BTW) or the much-beloved television program she helmed, which managed to transcend pablum on numerous occasions. But to be blunt, there is nothing in Aunt Renée's attempts to avoid certain abhorred words for her increasing age and weight that hasn't run rampant through popular entertainments since at least 1979 when The Facts of Life first aired—and more likely 1879. Sure, there are some genuine laughs peppered throughout; it's just that, at opening night Tuesday, it felt oddly like all the laughs had been laughed before.

The play concerns Mae, an incongruously principled heiress who wants to donate her $600 million trust toward the salvation of Haiti; her bonne vivante but pathologically insecure aunt; and Henry, the amoral young Lothario who has recently boinked them both. Throughout most of the play, as they used to say, "She'll none of him" for both values of "she"; and the central conflict is clearly about getting Mae to have at least some of him. This entails Henry deputizing the handsome and dashing (and gay) Lyle to "distract" Aunt Renée, leaving Mae ripe for recapture.

The problem with this central conflict is that who gives a fuck. It is unclear whether Rebeck intends to endow Henry with any more redeeming quality than the capacity to have a crush on somebody. If she does, it doesn't quite work: he's pretty unambiguously a shitheel. If she does not, I have to wonder why we're watching a play about his woes. Honestly, does a redemption story even count if the redeeming quality is "not being the biggest shitheel on stage"?

Anyway. Meanwhile, a gaggle of technically adult humans—Charles, Reg, Katrina, and the aforementioned Lyle—spend their idle hours (that is, their only hours) in gossip and backbiting, little of which is particularly clever. 

Of these, Charles in particular borders on stereotype: he is forthrightly a fashion queen—which is fine. There lies within all things a grain of truth. Who doesn't know a fashion queen or two? But he is also "gay man hopelessly in love with his straight friend". We know he is the latter because people in his circle will keep telling him this is the case—not, alas, because we are ever presented with textual or emotional evidence of his tortured, unrequited mooning. "I got drunk and let you suck me off once," Henry chides him, at which point any self-respecting gay man ought to have replied, "...That you remember" or "Oh, that was you?" or "You and 418 other straightbois" or "Yeah, and you're the one who insists on talking about it. What, are you waiting for a Yelp review?"

This tired predicament might broach iconoclasm if the character of Charles went anywhere, learned anything, or even—call me crazy—took a militantly "Yes I fucking am in love with Henry. My emotional train wreck is performance art. Fucking deal with it" position. Nope. Poor widdle sad faggot Charles just stands there as friend after friend explains how pathetic he is. Well, so he is. So, in fact, are all these people.

Even worse, given a and b above, is c = Rebeck allowing her Henry to upbraid Charles for his invisible torch without mocking or even noting the fact that he, Henry, spends most of the play energetically pursuing someone who similarly deigned just once to fuck him and now wants him not just gone but gone gone.

Now I warrant you: in this sort of piece the modern playwright is up against the shadows not only of Congreve but of Wilde and Moliere and Albee and Guare, and them's some fierce fucking shadows to measure up to. Nonetheless, I sat there disappointed that scene after scene failed to measure up to the wit or emotional depth of Sex and the City.

Imagine my surprise when, most of the way through the second act, the play—and the character of Renée—abruptly grew up. In the space of a single scene, a confrontation between Renée and Henry that starts and ends quietly but contains all the screams of the damned, Ms. Rebeck goes all in—and wins the pot. It is breathtaking to watch. No offense to Luigi Sottile, who plays Henry, but apart from the author it is Ms. Nielsen who really pulls off this coup: with this scene—and then again in the play's final scene—she complicates her character, and the play's character, tenfold. One minute she is a near-cartoon who, in attempting to seduce a gay man, misuses the phrase amuse bouche; the next she is a woman of immense dignity, anger, passion, self-doubt, joy, regret, and survival instinct. The shift in tone is palpable. It is almost but not quite violent enough to capsize the play—it certainly casts some shame on the hour and a half of blithely caustic bitchery that preceded it. But that really salvages the whole from mediocrity. The play ends in uncomfortable ambiguity, its lackluster comedy dragged back from Hades by a glint of deadly serious drama.