Some Private Thoughts

How I miss you so much already. I have so much sorrow for having lost you as a friend. It's true---I let things get out of hand in my mind, as I am prone to. In some ways, I knew exactly that it would cause you to say what you did. It was almost as if I were trying to make you say that, on some level, just to get a reaction out of you.

You say: I was a good friend. I don't think so. A good friend would have found a way to stay friends. I spent so much emotional effort this year, trying to make contact with you again, trying to restore our friendship.

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of old feelings to burn off. A lot of it was guilt over my actions from years before, that I was the cause of your pain. I wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was, for the pain I helped cause you. I wanted to tell you that I would do it all differently, if I could. I was trapped by that, for all these years. For some reason, it was important for me to tell you that I would do the things now I should have done, those years ago. But I know that is not what is meant to be. Yet somehow it was important for me to convey it. Forgive my wretched clumsiness, I beg you.

If I had a wish, it would  be for you to give me yet one more chance, to be friends. I know you need one. I need one too. We can be friends to each other, I truly believe, and leave the old things behind. I'm ready to do that. I think it took your last message to really wake me up, and let me move beyond the old.

I'm ready to help you, if you want. You know that I know things about you that you have told to no one else. I am not scared of the dark things in you, that scare you to talk about. Maybe I am the only person in the world for which that it true. But it is true.

When you are ready, come back to me. I will never give up hope of hearing from you---ever. You are too close my own soul. And yes, I love you, as Jonathan loved David, "like his own soul." (1 Samuel 18:1-4).

@The Nomad, Boulder

So it begins...
Last night I found myself down in Boulder for the first time in many weeks. I had wondered how I would feel being back there, thinking it might fill me with a heavy heart, but instead all I felt was great release and joy. Perhaps it was the warm wind coming down off the mountains before sunset.

I was there to attend an event at the Nomad Theatre, a peformance space on Quince Street in North Boulder. But I was not there to see a dramatic performance, but rather to go to a town hall meeting of Occupy Boulder.

I'd read about on Facebook and had decided to go, as the first step in what seems to be my new direction in life, which is to attend and observe as many events as possible of what appears to be this chaotic proto-revolution and revolt that is in progress, and which I believe will grow only stronger and bigger in 2012.

The meeting started around five o'clock. The purpose was to discuss strategy to combat an impeding rule from the Boulder City Manager that would basically outlaw the current occupy encampment at Sister City Park.

The building is an old quonset hut---a very quaint space. There were already cookies laid out on the table at the entrance, and a row of clipboards with email signups and petitions.

About a hundred people showed up. Ironically it felt much like a theater performance. They even were handing out folded paper programs with a "cast list"---an lawyer for the homeless, an ACLU representative with an Arabic name, and a grey-haired local activist woman. As I watched them speak on stage, and discuss the proposed ordinance, I couldn't help but be struck by the complete blending of dramatic performance and politics, all rolled into one.

I loved watching it, partly because it all felt so haphazard. What the hell is this all about? Nobody really knows. It just feels like democracy, as if we are rediscovering something long lost in this country.

I enjoyed it all, until the fourth speaker, who was a Denver lawyer who spoke about filing injunctions. He went off on a tangent decrying the "Tea Party" (which got some applause from the audience) and speaking about how this whole thing was not an issue of individual rights but "collective rights." That made me cringe. Then he spoke about how this issue wasn't about the Constitution, but could actually be fodder for the Organization of American States human rights council, which he said was the human rights organization "for this part of the world." The old liberals in the audience let out sighs of happiness at the bashing of the Constitution and the mention of unelected world government, whereas I felt disgusted. It reminded me of how much I differ with many of those in this "Occupy Movement."

But that's OK. I can deal with that. For now I'm just going to keep going to these "performances."

Solstice Decision

On Dec 20, 2011, at 5:55 PM, Matthew Trump wrote:
Uncle ChainSaw,

> Have decided to start traveling the country after Jan. 1 visiting as many Occupy sites as possible and handing out free food and the Word. Am spending NYE at Occupy Boulder.
>
> After thinking I would not go, am starting to strongly consider going to the Million Tent Occupy in DC on Jan. 17.
>
> See you there?
>
> -m


On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 10:55 PM, XXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

Puzzle tzar,

Welcome back to Jazz and Justice.

I have a few old tents I could take for a, hopefully crowded, walk mid January.

XXXXXXXXXXXX



On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Matthew Trump wrote:
Awesome. See you there. I'll be the one in the camouflage hunting cap.

To Aurora

Forgive me.
I don't need the things you said
that I need from you,
that you can't give me
I know they are not in your power to give
I know where your struggle must be
I felt the deep despair in you
and rejoiced at being needed as a friend
at being greeted with such relief
as a balm to your anguish
even as I suffered with you
I felt your pain and reached out
And spoke in the only language I knew to you
The clumsy metaphors of our old ways of being
To at least show that you are loved
Thinking I might provoke your tears
To help speed your healing
Instead I drove you away
And earned only sorrow
for both of us
I hope someday the songbirds sing again
That I hear your voice in gladness and friendship
In some epoch when the stars have come back out
Forgive me.

You Gotta Believe

Sunday evening's fun activities with my nieces culminated in a game of "drawing," with Sarah pretending to be a teacher leading Maura and I in making a drawing. It starts with "Put your name on the top of the page...and the date..." And then we have imitate everything she puts on the page, using the same color markers from the plastic tub. She handed them to me as she finished, so I could copy what she just did.

At one point she used a brown marker to color in an entire section she had already drawn. She made it dark and thick on the page. When it was my turn, I asked, "Is it ok if I do it lightly?" I asked. "I don't want to dry out the Magic Marker."

"It's not MAGIC, Uncle Matt!," said Maura, completely amused at my comment.

Generation gap, I guess.

Beautiful Day

It was over sixty degrees today here in Colorado. I was lucky to get to spend the day down in Westminster with my sister's family, and in particular with my nieces. We watched part of the Broncos game (my sister has a case of Tebowmania). During halftime my nieces and I went out into the park across the street to play soccer. The "soccer" was really just them kicking their balls around while I tried to intercept them. But after about five minutes it gave way to a sunnyday snowball fight. A perfect last Sunday of Advent, all in all.

Fresno Loves Me Redux

This afternoon I got a call from my friend Nick Z. who lives in Portland. I knew him back in college and he has gone on to be a successful playwright, among other things.

He wasn't calling about anything theater related, but rather because I had seen his post on Facebook requesting people to purchase raffle tickets for his son's private school fundraiser. I was happy to jump in with the chance to help a friend. Besides the first place is a trip to Hawaii, one of the few states of the Union I haven't visited yet. I had a chance to go there many years ago in college, and foolishly didn't go. I told Nick that I intend to get to Hawaii in 2012, and it would awesome it were free.

He asked when I was coming back to Portland and I told him I intend to be there sometime in Spring, but I'm not sure when. I told him that I was planning to be there after heading down to Fresno again, as I wanted to see a friend of mine there in a new show.

Since Nick is a theater professional, I entertained him to no small measure by my stories of being entangled with the amateur theater community of Fresno, and how I had become an acting coach helping Rick to perfect his Gary Cooper imitation, something I blogged about a couple months back.

"The director of the show even started asking me for advice," I told him. This part I didn't blog about. It's a fun story.

The show that my friend Rick had an interesting history. It turns out that the original director of the show was a local Fresno guy who had gone to New York and made it big directing Broadway musical shows. His specialty was choreography. The locals had brought him back in order to direct a show in his hometown, but for some bizarre reason, they made him direct Stalag 17, which a serious drama about American prisoners in a German prison camp in World War II.

Moreover, the returned local guy directed the show only through rehearsals and up to opening night. After that, he promptly returned to New York and left the show in the hands of a local woman with the strict stipulation that nothing about the show be changed. He enforced this stipulation by review of nightly video feed of the show to New York.

The whole weird situation left no small amount of grumbling among the cast. By far the strangest part was the curtain call at the end of the show. Instead of a straight conventional bow, the cast came out onto the stage area of the black box and then, spread out among the cots and tables of what was supposedly spartan prisoner barracks, launched into a chorus-line type dance routine, with both the SS Nazis and the American prisoners pretending to march happily together and doing several awkward leg kicks. Tick warned me about it in advance, yet nothing could prepare me for how absurd it looked when I saw the first time.

I should mention that every night I went to the show, I sat in back near one of the stage entrances, all by myself, mostly because I'm claustrophic and like to spread out. I noticed during the second night that the replacement director sat only a few feet away from me and one row down. I could tell it was her because of red hair, and the fact that she was taking notes during the show.

After the Friday night show, I told Rick that the dance-number curtain call was the stupidest thing I had even seen. He told me that the grumbling was getting worse and worse each night among the cast at having to do it. "You gotta get them to change it," I told him. "It's the worst thing about the show."

On Saturday night, the last night I went to the show, I noticed the director sitting near me again. At the end of the show, I was prepared to see the same absurd Nazi-American dance number, but instead the cast came out and performed a simple conventional bow to the audience. Something had changed.

As the applause died down and the actors left the stage, I waited for everyone to leave, as I usually do. The director stood up in her house and walked past me. As she did, she asked me directly, "So did you like the curtain call tonight?"

You could have knocked me over with a feather. What the hell? Why was she asking me that? "Oh yes, much better," I said.

Outside in the alley I asked Rick what had happened. He said that before the show that night, the cast had risen up and finally demanded that to the replacement director change the curtain call, and she had agreed, notwithstanding orders from New York.

So it didn't have anything to do with me at all. Just a coincidence that the director had asked me that. She had obviously seen me sitting there on previous nights.

Just a coincidence...

Meanwhile Rick has started rehearsals for Crimes of the Heart. It opens a couple days before New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to seeing him on stage, and to being back in Fresno, where Rick said that the folks in the company still ask about me, and where somehow I have become a theater guru.

Fictons, Foreshadows, Flasbacks: Senior Dance Showcase @ University Dance Theatre, Colorado State University

Seen: this evening

So here I am, back where it all began.

Last week after I went to Fiddler on the Roof at the new building of my old high school, I realized it was probably time at last to go see some kind of show at the old building, the one I and my friends knew as Fort Collins High School, and which is now the University Center for the Arts for Colorado State.

The renovations were done over the last decade---the entire building was gutted and remodled. I'd been inside since then, but only in passing. I hadn't poked around much, or gone to any kind of performance.

After looking over the schedule at the CSU website, I decided the senior dance recital was my best bet. It was to be held in the University Dance Theatre inside the building. I was curious to see where that was, in relation to old school plan.

I got to the box office about an hour beforehand, which left me time to walk around the building, which was open, as an campus building was, during finals. I walked along the first floor and up the main staircase where we used to sing the Alma Mater on the landing every Friday at noon.

What I was most curious to see is what had become of the old auditorium where I had performed on stage. The sign above the entrance indicated it was now the Organ Recital Hall. I tried the door: it was open. I walked inside and saw the old space I knew, now dominated by a giant pipe organ on the old stage.

The lights were on, but the auditorium was empty. Delighted at the chance to be there, I walked up towards the stage. I could see that besides all new seats, the stage itself had been extended about fifteen feet and was occupied by a grand piano. I could see where the old stage still was. It seemed some of the same wooden planks were there, by their wear compared to the newer part.

I walked up onto the old part and crept out towards center stage in front of the pipe organ. The first thing I remembered was the very first time I came out on stage, as Mr. Webb in Our Town, thirty-one years ago, introduced by the Stage Manager, my friend Ken, who passed away a few months ago while I traveling on the West Coast.

I paced around a few minutes and remembered other lines from the other dramas I had been in.  

My skin...it's...healed...

As I stood leaning against the wall soaking in a few moments of remembering, the door opened on stage and a young Asian man poked his head in. He saw me and said, "the concert is over now." Evidently there had been a vocal recital there earlier in the evening.

I explained to him my story in brief, and that was just there to reminisce. I told about parts of the auditorium that had changed. He seemed to know more than he should have.

"The tower...," he said, pointed upwards. "It's blocked off now."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I climbed it once. There used to be all sorts of secret passages backstage. I guess those are gone," I said, looking at the massive pipe organ.

Having gotten my fill, and having exhausted my memory of my lines from various roles, I left and went back down the hall towards the dance theatre, which turned out to be inside the space once occupied by what we called "The Small Gym" of the high school. My main memory of that place was the ritual of card pulling at the beginning of each semester to select classes.

Before the performance I sat in the nice chairs in the remodeled hallway and kibbutzed on the conversations of the dance students and their parents and boyfriends.

The recital was well attended and entertaining. I'm not much to judge either the choreography or the performances, so I can't say much.

There were four solos, and two ensemble performances, the largest of which had about twenty dancers on stage. Of course over eighty percent were young women---beautiful and graceful. The content seemed so innocent when the world is so uninnocent. There were no political statements or anything of that type in the content or choreograph. I couldn't help thing how little has really changed from the days when co-eds were required to take "eurythmy" as part of their undergraduate coursework.

May it always be so innocent, I thought to myself.





















 

All About Eve (1950)

Seen on TCM, last month.

It seemed appropriate to begin my discussion of Monroe by this, her first real speaking role. I've seen it a couple times now, and also fairly recently, so it is fresh in my mind.

Bob Osbourne, the host of TCM, loves this movie, as I've come to infer over time. It took me a while to understand why classic movie buffs like him love it so much.

Simply put, one can argue that this movie, released as it was at the midpoint of the Twentieth Century, is in fact the quintessential motion picture, and the movie that defines the transition to Postmodernity itself. Certainly it would be on the short list of any movies that one could nominate as such.

I realize that this is a strong endorsement, but it is a very powerful movie. Among other things, it is perhaps the defining role for arguably the greatest single actress of the 20th Century---Bette Davis. And of course it is the movie that introduced Monroe to the world.

But what really makes this movie so singularly great, in the way I've described? Specifically why is the movie that defines the transition to Postmodernity?

It has a lot to do with the fact that it is a movie about the theater, that is, the legitimate theater, as it was once called. Most of the characters are Broadway actors, and the movie is about the world of stage actors.

One can see the essence of the importance of this in the famous "party scene", the one which Davis utters arguably the most notable line of her screen career: "Fasten your seatbelts..."

Watching this scene the last time I saw the movie, I could not help be struck by the lines uttered by the "actors" to each other. The lines dripped of insinuation, irony, and sarcasm. There was a tension of subversion and misdirection in almost every line.

To today's audiences, irony delivered in this way is quite normal. To say we're used to it is an understatement. In fact, it is the norm today. Yet sixty-one years ago, it was not the norm. It was, in fact, shocking for most audiences to see people behaving this way to each other.

It hit me: we're all supposed to be actors now. It brings to mind something I read, about how until recent times in history, actors (that is, stage actors) were held in fear and contempt by ordinary society because of their seeming "magic" ability to change personality. Actors could not be trusted to be "real" according to normal definitions of character. They were fluid.

This kind of transformation is the essence of drama. The surface is not the real. There is a deeper level. The purpose of drama is to reveal it.

The core idea of Postmodernity is a takeover of society by the dramaturgical. Everyone now knows that personality is fluid. Irony is king. We must all "act" this way and must all be aware of this in each other. The real is fleeting and an illusion.

In other words, we are all supposed to be at that party scene from All About Eve now, all the time.  And like the characters at the banquet that frames the story, we are all supposed to be privately miserable while clapping our hands with a smile on our face.

The movie has even deeper levels. One of the richest aspects of it is the focus on the transition of the feminine character in Postmodernity (hence the title), anticipating the emergence of the ubiquitous "princess" of contemporary society. The vanity of women, once considered a vice, is now promoted shamelessly as a great virtue. The goal of love has been replaced by the desire for universal attention through fame. Nowhere is this more eloquent than in the very last shot of the movie, when Eve, supposedly the young ingenue, is usurped by her even younger version, who seems shockingly contemporary in her ego-driven nature. One could almost argue that it hinges on horror at that moment (especially coming on the heels of the scene in which George Saunders delivers his "I own you" speech in the New Haven hotel room).

Horror, yes---another one of the cornerstones of Postmodernity.

So what about Monroe? Her performance is limited to one scene---the aforementioned party scene. She is introduced as the bubbly "new find" of Saunders' character, and treated by him with contempt. She's a throwaway to him.

But the great meta-message of the movie if you will is how much Monroe utterly dominates the scene during her brief time on it. It is impossible not to look at her.

Even though it is supposed to Anne Baxter (Eve) who is the young starlet, Monroe is utterly in a class by herself among the other actresses there. It is as if she is a new type of woman, emerging out of the already nascent world of Postmodernity destined to become its archetype and queen. She has synthesized all the elements of the entire previous generation of Hollywood actresses and is the living personification of the next phase of American culture.

It would be easy to say that next to her, Davis looks old fashioned. But the genius of the movie is that Davis is supposed to be old fashioned. But so is Baxter.

Here she is...there has never been anyone like her on screen. Just watch her eyes as she is listening. There is genius in them. It is unmistakable.

Operation Monroe

These last few weeks I've been laid up with a shoulder and neck injury---tendonitis, as it turns out. My mobility limited, I've taken refuge in my old habit of watching old movies. Since I don't have TCM where I am staying, I decided to rejoin Netflix and catch up on some classic films I've been wanting to see. Usually this would be too daunting of a task---too much choice, but I decided to make it easier on myself by assigning myself a theme. Last month on TCM was "Blonde Bombshell Month," and since I didn't get to see most of those movies, I decided I would go with that as a basis, but would go to even one more level---a Marilyn Monroe film festival.

Rather shamefully, Monroe is a big blank spot in my appreciation of classic films. As I've mentioned before, I think I saved watching many of her films until I'd absorbed the generation of actresses before her---Stanwyck, Rogers, Davis, Crawford, Garson, Dunne, Hepburn, Garland, Young, and their contemporaries. They got their start in the 1930s and would have been the actresses that Monroe watched while she was a girl.

Now I feel like I'm ready for a fuller appreciation of Monroe. My first three disks from Netflix are sitting on my DVD and ready to be loaded. It's going to be a fun couple weeks.

Fiddler on the Roof @ McNeil Peforming Arts Center at Fort Collins High School

Seen: last night (December 3)

So there I was, back at my old school, the place where I first set foot on stage as an actor, and where I did nearly all of my theater work.

Except it wasn't really. The old building, the one I went to, was closed in the 1990s and is now part of the CSU campus. The new one was built on the edge of town to replace it. Back in the day, we used to pride ourselves on our cool building---towers and pillars and all that. We thought it made us better than the other schools with their inferior postwar boxlike buildings.

I got tipped off to the production by a friend on Facebook and decided to go. It was my first time in the new building. I drove through the cold and ice and navigated the maze of the parking lot to get to the entrance.

I can't say that I was impressed by the building itself. It was completely the kind of cheap blah structure one might have feared they would build. I felt no connection to it all. The only jolt of feeling like I was in anything like my old school was seeing a girl in a purple and gold letter jacket in the lobby. That took me back.

But the auditorium is nice and expansive. It's named after the beloved orchestra director back from my day.

Driving there, I couldn't help but muse at the irony of the production I was about to see. During my three years at FCHS, I had three large dramatic roles, one per year, and was also the stage manager of the fall musical comedy during my senior year. One of the dramas was about the life of a small New England town at the turn of the century. One was about a soldier going off to die in Vietnam. In both of those. The third was one based on the Old Testament and was about the trials of believing and trusting in divine Providence. The musical comedy that I stage managed was about the excitement of the outside world coming to a small Midwestern town.

It occurred to me that if you rolled all of those productions up together into one, you would probably come up with, well, Fiddler on the Roof.

In fact, in my last role, I played a Jewish father of a large family. But in that case, my children didn't have as nice a fate as Tevye's daughters. Not at all.

What can I say about the production? It was a high school musical. It made me wish I could see our production from the fall of 1982, to compare it. The auditorium was beautiful. We would have given our eye teeth to have that kind of facility. Or maybe not. There was something charming and rustic about having to make due in the old auditorium. There were so many weird secret nooks and crannies. It felt like a real "theater" somehow. So I didn't envy the kids in the new building at all.

Among the changes in the new facility is that the seats have numbers and the tickets actually were reserved. Our seats didn't have numbers at all. But we did have a balcony. I asked for a seat in the very back. During the intermission, I stood against the railing by the light booth and looked out over the parents and students and everyone else in the audience, standing and moving in the aisles.

At that moment I had a flashback to how I used to feel way back when, about my place in the world, about the town I lived in, and about the world as a whole. I was so idealistic back then, and I knew it. I wanted to be connected to everyone, and feel and experience love in a universal way with humanity. I knew it was a grandiose notion, but somehow I had the notion that I should capitalize on my youthful idealism to soak in as much of that as possible.

That kind of attitude made me feel so alive. Back then I wanted to talk to as many people as possible, and experience as much of life as possible in the outside world, like an ambassador of hope and love. It's an attitude that carried me forth all around the globe and late me make friends everywhere I went. All of that kind of feeling of connection kept getting reflected back to me.

As I looked down the rows at the people in the auditorium, it occurred to me that I have not felt that way in a long time. Instead I have been going through the world with such isolation. I have not wanted to connect to people. I have not trusted that. I have been able to see only the blindness and desolation of the people in my town, and in the world. I have felt on a solitary mission.

I miss feeling that connection. Perhaps it is the way the world has been spinning so rapidly lately, but for a moment, I had a glimmer of a window back to my old self, that one who wanted to connect and project love, and experience it back from others.

After the production I walked back out through the lobby and saw the same girl with the purple and gold letter jacket. I thought of a girl I knew from long ago, my date for the junior prom. She hated this place and the people here. She left behind Fort Collins right after high school and never looked back. She went off and married a naval officer, and had a couple kids. The world have to end for her to show up on Facebook. Maybe she had it right after all.

I am so sick and tired of this war. When do we get America back?