Today, and today, and today –
never today will it be tomorrow,
the cat creeping about like yesterday,
filling her box like there’s no futurity.
Yet tomorrow times our day without delay,
though it remains as dark as ones past.
Today’s light will soon turn cold, burnt to nub
where the candle once stood so tall and proud,
center stage, lighting all around and into all
corners and crevices, minutes and seconds.
Poor today whose hour is usurped by what’s
yet to play and whose voice can’t be heard
over yesterday’s, and what happens off
stage makes more noise than this display.
Tag: Drama
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Today, and Today, and Today
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What to do
“Nothing to be done,” Didi and Gogo bicker, essentially about what to do, like an old couple of a long suffering, loving marriage. Nature is no refuge; the one tree in their world seems sick. They can’t go anywhere, for fear of missing their appointment with Godot. They hang out and talk, express various physical complaints, visit the past, ask questions they can’t answer.
The play, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” is famously about nothing. Nothing fills the stage, informs the dialog. If they carried cell phones, their batteries would surely be dead. In any case, they’ve no one to call, and no one to call them.
The two (often described as tramps, bums, or hoboes of some kind, clowns of some sort, lost from their circus, or stripped to being human without diversion down-and-outs) might be among the last few of a pandemic, or simply retired, their pensions just enough to enable them to do nothing but talk freely, which is everything in a world of nothing.
It’s not easy – doing nothing. Even contemplating nothing can be a nerve-racking business, fraught with anxiety. Consider, for example, what nothing is. Nothing is what is not. In the beginning – well, just before the beginning, all was nought, and from naught came all.
And it’s not easy doing nothing responsibly. nān thing. And yet, if you make a practice of it, you are called a do nothing. But there is no such thing as nothing. Nature overkills. If the universe is infinite, and the universe is composed of things, there can be nothing within, and nothing without.
Consider a bottle out of which you suck everything, leaving nothing, and you cap it, a bottle of nothing. Would it be dark in there? Like dark matter? For if everything is taken out, light too must be absent. If scarcity creates value, what could be more precious than nothing? And Didi and Gogo are its brokers.
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Theatrical
Older then, one more yesterday notched
into this haggard wasted belt, tight about,
turning in the widening gut, but must
be the clothes, despondent, I seem,
up the block quirky bobber says,
and I think he’s talking shit on
my writing, but no, he says, your mien,
like a traveler lost his way,
fearful forged face, luggage jowls,
over needy and under taken.Ate too much, talking to self,
I don’t travel well, I say, when
he tells me, Go to Hell, but
let’s go for a beer sometime.
Drank to gorge, piss like a glacier
melting, violating the graces,
not a single work of mercy,
no incense in my crucible,
my feet leave a trace of beach tar
on the pavement parchment.As the third and final act ends,
the boards weathered smooth,
the audience awakes to the smell
of coffee and petrichor coming
down the aisles, the ushers throw open
the great doors of the hall.
But what’s this, another act?
The players pretend nothing really
happens backstage dressing room sweat
when I present sweet flowers to the star. -
Dinner Walk & Theatre
The Willamette River flows north through the Valley roughly parallel I-5, and after making the turns near the Falls at Oregon City, moves through Portland before joining the Columbia on its way to the Pacific Ocean, but no worries, this isn’t going to be a geography lesson.
Ross Island, from the west bank of the Willamette River, south of Portland (Mar 2016) After passing under the Sellwood Bridges (there are two currently, the old one and the new one, side by side), the river wraps around Ross Island, across from the Old Spaghetti Factory’s rococo restaurant – where we met friends last night for dinner before heading up river to the Headlee Mainstage of the Lakewood Center for the Arts, tickets waiting at the Will-call window, to see Spencer Conway play Hugh in a live production of BULLSHOT CRUMMOND: THE EVIL EYE of JABAR and THE INVISIBLE BRIDE of DEATH.
The four of us shared a carafe of house Chianti and ate lasagna, pasta with clam and tomato sauces, fresh oven hot bread, salads and minestrone soup. We sat upstairs, at a booth in the bar area, paying scant attention to the river slooming below about sixty feet to the east. After dinner, we took a short, giddy walk along the river and paused for a few silly, group selfies with the island in the background.
After the short, after dinner walk, we hopped into one car and drove upriver to the theatre and picked up the tickets with still time to lengthen our river walk down to the local historical park to check out the 19th Century iron smelter.
We had seen Spencer Conway a couple of years ago in NOISES OFF at Portland’s downtown Newmark Theatre. All acting is, in a sense, a physical activity, and Spencer excels at employing his entire body in his work. When, for example, as Hugh ‘Bullshot’ Crummond, Spencer is hexed by a magnetic trance and becomes a human magnet, or slips into a parachute prop of sand, or rides the magic carpet, and more, he’s as good at physical acting antics as the great Jerry Lewis.
I had not heard of Bullshot before last night. The form is satire, not quite farce, since there are targets – a causal argument of British colonialism reduced to buffoonery via the vehicle of a B movie on stage. Using inventive props in what seemed a record number of scene changes, the cast and production hands succeeded in creating the stage magic that allows the audience to suspend for a couple of hours and float effortlessly down the drama river. Rick Warren was perfectly cast as the evil Otto Von Bruno. Stephanie Heuston and Kelley Stewart each created original replays of B film vixen and heroine. Andrew Harris and Burl Ross filled out the cast, each frequently quick changing costumes to play multiple characters throughout the laugh-out-loud play.
All the world is a smelter. -
Hamlet’s Status (A Play in Six Posts)
Hamlet, at his computer. Enter Polonius:
Polonius: What friends thou hast, add them fast, Lord Hamlet.
Hamlet: Polonius advises us to link our souls with hoopla,
When twice this same moon updates us,
But still to me she hath not chatted.Polonius: Light lord, thy status in disconnect must be,
Causing you this dark and dour distress.Hamlet: Fish not, sir; I fear she hath deleted me.
What post supports this knotted matter?
False light quickly fades, casting us in dark shadows.
Let the clouds betide, let the rains come
So thick and dark not the bark of the ark stays dry.Polonius: Despair not, care not, Lord, care less than not.
Some new compeer will soon light your night
With comely links and notes bright.
Light be your aim, Lord, light your audience,
And this will give light to thee.Hamlet: Nay, sir. In this book of faces there is but one for me,
And I am trapped in this light box like a wench in a nunnery.End
The Coming of the Toads 