Last night was…something…I had not been feeling great Sunday and was fortunate to have minimal obligations so I hauled out the laptop and began working away on the part of the ‘To Do’ list that can be accomplished sitting up in bed in an old T-shirt and Space Jam sleep pants. I finished up the slides for a series of taped lectures I am doing for a geriatrics board exam review course, wrote up the weekly summary of progress on The Merry Wives of Windsor for the cast and staff, caught up on social media, started an essay that is to be part of the new book and wrote a Mrs. Norman Maine movie review as I have been sadly remiss at sending those in for the last few months due to being overwhelmed with life in general.
Around 4 PM, the thunderstorm rolled in. We’ve been having rain and storms all week but this one was a doozy, likely sent up here by the good citizens of Houston as they have been inundated for weeks. Sheets of rain, lighting flickering all over the skies. Huge claps of thunder. About half an hour in, the power went out. Without Wi-Fi or juice for the computer, I had to shut down what I was doing, but it was still light outside so I pulled out one of the four or five books I’m currently reading and did very little for the next couple of hours. The lights returned as the sun was going down.
There is a peculiarity about my building. When we lose power, the fire alarm goes off. It wasn’t a huge issue to have that obnoxious thing beeping every few minutes. I have two kinds of smoke detectors. Ones hard wired into the building and ones which are individual to my unit. Only some of them have a backup battery. I had recently changed those out so I figure it’s the hard wired kind that get confused when the power goes out. Just one more peculiarity of this place to be added to the master toilet that randomly fills with hot water. With power restored, I fixed myself something to eat and turned in early with bad TV figuring a good nights sleep would be best for whatever was ailing me. (Not covid, but something with rather unpleasant GI effects that I won’t trouble to detail).
I woke up at 1:30 AM to further storming, the power again going out and the obnoxious fire alarm doing its thing. Only this time, instead of beeping every few minutes, it decided to beep roughly every thirty seconds. So there I am in my jammies, flashlight in hand, in my pitch black condo climbing a stepstool to see if changing out the batteries again would shut them up. I was balancing on top of the step stool when whatever has been ailing me made itself known again, this time with vasovagal symptoms. When my gut goes weird, I tend to do that and have fainted in any number of inappropriate places over the years. I immediately scrambled down off the stepstool (shades of headlines reading ‘Local MD found dead in his condo after fall’ entering my mind), went back to bed and put my feet up and head down. There followed several unpleasant hours of continuous fire alarm, no CPAP so no good ability to sleep, and feeling under the weather.
The power returned sometime after 4 but by that time, I felt just awful so I texted work that I would not be coming in and decided to do next to nothing today in order to recover. I have something like seven months of accumulated sick leave so I figure I can take a day or two as I almost never do. I am feeling better after some sleep and some comfort food but I plan on continuing with minimal exertion through tomorrow so I will be ready for my usual ninety miles an hour pace on Wednesday.
The one thing I am doing today and tomorrow is attending rehearsal for The Merry Wives of Windsor (masked just in case I have something contagious) and sitting in the back and having my much younger assistant director do all the running around. The show is on its feet. It will be fully staged after the rehearsal tonight and now it becomes about polishing what we have. Merry Wives is one of those Shakespeare plays that everyone knows the title to, has some idea that it’s the comedy about Falstaff, but very few have actually seen or read. There’s good reason for that. It’s not one of his best efforts. Legend has it that he had to write the play and get it up on its feet in roughly two weeks. Queen Elizabeth explicitly asked to see a play in which Falstaff, a favorite character of hers from Henry IV part one (Henry IV part two was in process at the time but not yet completed), was in love. The Master of the Revels scheduled the royal command performance for the evening of the gathering of the most noble order of the garter at Windsor castle giving Shakespeare and his company very little time in which to work.
As a consequence, the play has more prose and less poetry than any other. I guess he just didn’t have time to put the speeches into iambic pentameter. This makes it a bit harder to learn and I feel for my actors who are struggling with lines as the rhythm and rhyme just isn’t there to help them the way it usually is with Shakespeare. While it ostensibly takes place in the time of Henry IV (early 1400s) all of the references are to the late Elizabethan court of two centuries later. There are subplots that go nowhere. Significant action and character development happens off stage. There are almost no famous or quotable lines.
I’ve taken out about 15-20% of the text to get rid of meandering subplots, repetitions, references that no one will understand, and jokes that lost their meaning sometime around the settling of the Plymouth Colony. I’ve instructed my actors to physicalize as much of their meaning as they can to help the audience better understand what’s happening, even if they don’t understand every word. I’ve told them to take a look at the American comedic acts that developed out of vaudeville and the music hall and went on to succeed on film: Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. They’re still funny nearly a century later. Why is that? What can they use from those techniques to make a four hundred year old play funny. I guess we’ll see in two and a half weeks if my thoughts and cajoling are successful at all.
The big story of the week is the start of the Paris Olympics and the ensuing uproar over misunderstandings of the symbolism used in ‘the opening ceremonies. The French, never known for dumbing down their culture or beliefs for others, staged a spectacle that had an enormous number of people confusing pagan symbolism for Christian symbolism and therefore deciding it was blasphemous. I have two things to say on the subject. One – never confuse the physical symbol for the concept that it represents. A bible is just a book – a collection of printed pages bound within a cover. It’s the ideas and concepts that it represents that are important. If someone destroys or desecrates a bible, it doesn’t damage those in the least. A religious painting is one artist’s way of attempting to represent the metaphorical divine in a concrete form. How that painting will look will depend upon the artist, the society within which that artist works, and the economic conditions that allow the art to be produced. Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ is masterpiece but was not greeted as such in its time. Issues with the fresco painting technique led to quick deterioration of the work and the monks that owned it thought so little of it that they cut a door through the wall it was painted on. It did not become iconic until four hundred plus years after its creation when the age of mass media began to disseminate images of famous art to the general public. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it has been parodied thousands of times and none of that has diminished either the genius of the painting or the spiritual concepts embodied in the gathering depicted. Two – yes, the tableau at the Olympics was not the last supper but a Dionysian bacchanal. However, pointing that out over and over again with smug superiority to people who have genuine issues of faith is not the way to win friends and influence people. Those who felt insulted are not necessarily less intelligent or less educated, they just see the world in a different way – as in the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s yet another case in this country of people talking at each other rather than to each other. It comes from the cynical divided politics we’ve allowed to develop. Now even discussions about imagery created by a completely different culture that has nothing to do with the US is invaded by the red/blue divide.
Given the nature of my life, most of my friends are of the more liberal persuasion, but I spend a lot of time with rural populations because of the work I do. I’ve probably spent more time in Appalachia than JD Vance and I go out into rural Alabama twice a week and have for years. The more conservative amongst us are just as worthy of respect as anyone else and this cultural condescension needs to end.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 