Getting Off My Ass

Today I’ll be out putting the last coat of stripper on the kitchen island. Then I’ll have to hoist myself up into the attic above the garage (an unfinished room, actually, and really cool. If we buy this house, it will be made into a bigger and better room for Nathan) and drag down the wood stain that was used in the kitchen (country pecan) and the leftover granite tiles that were stowed up there.

Wish my digital camera wasn’t all f***ered up.

My goal is to have this project done this weekend, weather allowing.

Can’t forget, however, to say Happy Birthday to a great man whose spiritual presence I will never cease to miss.

One Less Great Man

The world lost one of its last great men yesterday. Playwright Arthur Miller died at his home in Connecticut at the age of 89.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Death Of A Salesman, or when I first read After The Fall. I was a 17 year-old 4th year drama student and I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. But that’s how Miller’s work hit people. As a personality, however, Miller always felt familiar and approachable to me, and I suspect many others have felt that way about him. He was down-to-earth and pragmatic, and people who knew him say he possessed a wonderful sense of humor. Brian Dennehey, who played the role of Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman on Broadway last year, said that Miller was never bored by anything because everything interested him. He was a truly great man — a true intellectual. How many more can we have left?

Miller was a man with much to say and he was never afraid to voice his thoughts. Although The Crucible is a dramatization of the Salem witch trials, it’s very clear that through it he was voicing his outrage at McCarthyism. Later, he was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In his autobiography he wrote that during a performance of The Crucible, after the scene in which John Proctor is executed, the audience rose and stood silently with their heads bowed, because it was at that very moment that the Rosenbergs were being executed. One wonders what he felt about our country’s current climate of moralistic ideology, the Conservatives’ desire to write discrimination into the Constitution, and the blurring of the lines between church and state.

Many people know his name only because he was married to Marilyn Monroe for a while, but his genius is what will carry him into history, where he will sit among other great playwrights such as Wilde, O’Neill, Chekhov, Kaufman, Coward, Shaw, Ibsen, Inge, Pinter, and probably even Shakespeare.

Is There a Diva in the House?

On Saturday afternoon I complained to Lynette that I miss our friends, all of whom live in other states and other countries. I miss our impromptu get-togethers with George and Noelle, I miss “doing the weirds” with Debra, and I just generally miss having time with other adults, doing adult things, talking about adult things.

I love our family beyond description, but it’s easy to get lost within the needs and problems of adolescence when raising three teens. It can be a little overwhelming and I sometimes feel like I’m run over like a speed bump on the road of teen life. I miss talking about music, travel, philosophy, politics, and all those things, now that our topics tend to focus on diets, dirty bedrooms, homework, sibling rivalry, skin, and emotional dramas with no seeming cause. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not diminishing the stresses and concerns that our kids face, because living with three young people does keep one young. I receive great satisfaction from the new discoveries I make about life as I watch these kids make their own new discoveries; things that kind of passed me by when I was their age. I suppose we can’t grasp every single thing as we grow up, and this is a great opportunity for me to fill in the gaps. I learn a lot from our kids, but I’m half a century old and I sometimes need to share conversation not about what I’m learning, but what I’ve learned. And all too often I see the kids’ eyes glaze over when I utter those verboten words: “When I was your age…” I learned back in the 80s (when I was fifteen years older than most of my friends) that young people hate it when you bring up age, and I have to say that I felt a certain amount of diminishment coming from them, as if my being older was a liability rather than an asset.

Anyway, I needn’t have complained to Lynette, because on Sunday afternoon she went to a recital at the university, where she met up with her voice teacher, Kate Butler, April Golliver (another voice professor) and our friend Allen Scott, who is a professor of Music History. After the recital, they all congregated here at our house, along with two voice students, for pizza, beer and wine. It was Super Bowl Sunday here all right, a Super Bowl of milk… MEOW!!! Apart from Allen and myself, it was a room full of operatic sopranos, i.e. Classical Divas.

It was great! I spent most of the evening talking with Allen, selecting just the right CDs to play and pouring drinks. But I knew I was in with these gifted ladies when I placed a dish of Dove chocolate hearts on the coffee table before them. As their eyes saw what it was I had, a collective, “AHHH!” rose to the ceiling, filling the room. I was in their good graces.
Do I know opera singers, or what? I should. As a classical composer I’ve worked with and have been befriended by Divas for twenty years now.

Allow me to me share a little of that knowledge with you. Opera sopranos are pirates. Burping, farting, beer-swilling, cat-scratching pirates in pointy-toed stilettos. Don’t tell me about Cecilia Bartoli, Kiri te Kanewa, Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, or Leontine Price. They’re all wild women. And who would want them any other way? Not I! I love sopranos. They’re delicious, petulant, driven, spoiled and vain — and they’re goddesses, all of them. They’re usually the most intelligent women on the planet, and the most fun — as long as their claws aren’t being sharpened for, or on, you…

After Allen left, I put on my last CD and slipped upstairs to allow them the sanctity and comfort of their own breed. It was a great evening.

Just Freakin' Cut It!

I should know better than to stop flipping through the channels when I come across one of those inbred talk shows like Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. This morning, while working the crossword and enjoying a cup of Earl Gray, I happened to stop on the Maury show. Today’s angst-filled subject was long, crazy hair. Well, hey, I’m an old hippie and this was up my alley — I thought. Except that the longhairs on the show weren’t old hippies, just people from Ohio who were missing teeth, couldn’t walk entirely erect, and who were whining about how their long, crazy hair has proved traumatic for them, stunted their personal growth, and has held them back their entire lives.

WHAT?

Just when I think Americans can’t get any more ridiculous and pathetic, I have to see this.
Come on people. It’s hair. Just Freakin’ cut it! It’s not like you have three eyes. It’s not like you were a thalidomide baby. It’s not even like you have only two brain cells that have never come close to colliding. I have a crack in my butt, but it hasn’t held me back.

I couldn’t help but think of our Lauren, a 16-year old who also happens to have struggled with Cerebral Palsy her entire life. She drives, she maintains a straight A grade level. She works a job and is saving money to go to Paris this summer. She plays the trumpet like an ace and is in a local jazz ensemble. She swims, rides a bike, and is considering a career in politics. Nothing holds this young lady back. Hell, she even types faster with one hand than I do with two.

One woman was certifiable, I believe. Even after she got her make-over she was unhappy — more so than before. It showed in her face.

“How can I be happy now that I have nothing to blame for my being a loser? How can I be happy if I’m not miserable? Maury, you’ve ruined my life! Get me back to my trailer. I need a cigarette and a bottle of J.D.”

Have we really gotten so pathetic that we blame our meaningless, hollow lives on the fact that we haven’t cut our hair in thirty years and can’t do anything with it? Don’t be helpless. Just Freakin’ cut it!