It’s something after midnight, Birmingham time, and I’m sitting in the departure lounge of the Seattle airport waiting for my red eye flight back to Atlanta – at which point I get the wonderful job of driving for three hours on next to no sleep in order to get home. The combination of short staffing at work and a show in rehearsal have made leaving town for anything other than the briefest periods a tricky business so this particular Seattle trip was just a bit over 48 hours. It was long enough to catch up with the family, have Thanksgiving dinner with as many of the tribe as were in town, and get the holiday shopping done for everyone so that I could get it wrapped and leave it behind me and not have to worry about shipping it later. I have become the dotty old uncle that gives everyone a book. The younger generation are now fully adult and I’m not around enough to know their wants and needs and books have always held a place of high esteem in my family. I suppose in another five to ten years, the next generation will start to arrive and I can switch back to educational toys. I only have one hard and fast rule. I don’t provide anything that makes noise. I leave it to parents to make that mistake.
Tommy’s great nieces and nephews are still children but I don’t see them all that often so they get age appropriate books as well. Which means I have to sit down every year and try to remember their approximate ages so I’m not giving a copy of ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ to the fifteen year old. With them, I tend to go with classics that I enjoyed in my childhood or with those kids reference books full of facts that ten year olds love like the amount of poop the average elephant generates in a year. I don’t know that it will ever get me a nomination for great uncle of the year, but I probably have a better relationship than Scrooge and his nephew Fred pre ghostly visitations.
I did put some work in on my lines for Birmingham Festival Theatre’s production of Seven Santas which is slated to open on December 8th. I have the monologue more or less down. I know my lines for the scene work, but not firmly, and I probably won’t be able to fully get them into my body until we’re actually doing that very long and complicated scene on its feet, off book, every night this next week. I tend to polish my performances organically and I have to have the sound of others voices and my blocking and other people to react to in order for everything to fall into place the way it’s supposed to. Tickets are for sale on line for all six performances if you really want to hear me curse routinely and get violent with Mrs. Claus.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the rather hopeless situation in the Middle East. The news has been appalling from all quarters and, unfortunately, people are oversimplifying matters and leaping to postures of virtue signaling without having any real understanding of what’s going on or why. I am no expert in Arab/Israeli relations but I have been around long enough to know that Hamas, which leads the Palestinians in Gaza, is a terrorist organization (their actions on October 7th certainly proved that if nothing else). On the other hand, Bibi Netanyahu’s governmental policies towards the Palestinians have also been outrageous for years. American Muslims are not responsible for Hamas and American Jews are not responsible for the depredations of settlement so the uptick in Antisemitism and Islamophobia are heinous and show how much we have abandoned critical thinking for Tik-Tok video propaganda. Whose side am I on? I am on the side of life, of the innocent who suffer on both sides for decisions they have no voice in, and I wish my Jewish and my Muslim friends nothing but peace.
A dear friend of mine and sometime writing partner wrote a musical many years ago called ‘Abraham’s Land’. In its initial conception, it was a fable in which an IDF soldier, Yitzak (Isaac) and a Palestinian student Ismail (Ishmael), end up swapping places and each of them learns important lessons about the other side. Over the years, she has rewritten and revised it and with each subsequent draft, as the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians has become more fraught, the material has become more complex and darker. It finally received a production a year or two ago (delayed by Covid) and I thought that she and her collaborators, Jewish and Palestinian alike, had succeeded in holding up a mirror to both the region and to our attitudes toward the conflicts creating a balanced look at all of the heartbreak. If Equity will allow it, it would be a good time to get the pro-shot Video of the show out there. Sometimes the arts are what we need to show us our true selves. Of course, the hyperpartisans on both sides would likely object to the humanization of the ‘enemy’ but isn’t the first role of religion welcoming the stranger and offering hospitality? It’s the first step in making a perceived enemy into a friend.
They’ve opened the boarding door. Time to get on the plane, wedge myself into my corner, and try to snooze for a bit so that I have some energy for unwritten progress notes and a rehearsal tomorrow.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 