Nostalgia Without Pleasure

Thumbing through a high school yearbook the other night, I was struck by how many attractive kids there were in my graduating class. Many of them weren't particularly well known, and certainly weren't the acclaimed beautiful people of the school; just a lot of pretty young women and handsome young men who never plugged into whatever social mechanism it is that turns some kids into the beauties and hunks of the school. Who knows why?

With some of those kids I vaguely remembered talking to them once or twice... I think a lot of people put out feelers to see if I'd be their friend, and I was too clueless and socially inept to even realize it was happening. I had important Dragonlance novels to read, vital Roger Dean coffee table books to study... who had time for new friends?

Moreover I think I was too cliquish. I really believed that if you weren't a card-carrying member of the Dungeons and Dragons table in the lunchroom, the prayer group that met Friday mornings, or the forensics team, then relations between us could never, and maybe should never, flourish. What was I thinking?

* * *

Speaking of what people were thinking in school, I had a teacher named Mr. Smith who taught Freshman world history. He looked rather like Dan Quayle. He took an interest in me and I in him. I don't remember much about these classes, but they satisfied my curiosity about other lands and my desire to, well, exercise my brain a bit. I think he stayed pretty close to the textbook, but had a speaking style I found engaging. I remember a couple of things about his class, though, that struck me oddly at the time and irk me now.

Uno: He skipped the chapter in our textbook about African history. He explained this by saying that Africa hasn't contributed enough to the world to be worth studying. !!! Africa contributed THE HUMAN RACE to the world. Maybe it hasn't contributed much stuff that Honkies named Smith can appreciate, but that's all the more reason to learn about Africa. Now I wanna find Mr. Smith and graft an African ceremonial mask to his face.

Dos: There were a couple paragraphs in our textbook about Buddhism. Mr. Smith devoted a day's class to "debunking" Buddhism by showing how, on the basis of the potted explanation of Buddhism our book offered, Buddhism was bogus. Weelll... any religion can be made to look silly if you come to it from the outside and take a reductionist approach. Smith and I were both outspoken Christians, and he loaned me a tract that I thought was pretty cool at the time. It might have been a genuinely intellectually stimulating class if a whimsical Buddhist could have offered a counterpoint by taking that tract to task.


This ties in to a recurring concern for me lately; what lessons did I actually learn, and from whom? These are the crap lessons I remember Smith teaching; what else did I pick up from him? I have a lot of bad ideas in my head, and lately I find myself wondering: how much of this did I learn as a youngster, and how did I learn it? How much of it was me misunderstanding what people tried to pass no to me, as opposed to people just misteaching me? I recall a church camp where they got all the boys in an auditorium so a woman could tell us all about what women want from men. I remember paying close attention but I don't remember what she told us. There's a lot of stuff like that in my past. How much of what's right and wrong about me comes from these lessons that I've conciously forgotten? Who taught me what?

I had at least one wonderful teacher whom I should write about later...

Theatre Yappin'

Thinking about theatre a bit.

1. I could write a quite critical review of a show I saw over the weekend, but I won't because I have too many personal ties to the show. This is why theatre critics shouldn't be chummy with the theatre crowd; it won't do to pull one's punches on behalf of one's buddies. OTOH critics should also be astute and knowledgeable about theatre, which is hardly characteristic of B'ham's arbiters of taste at the Birmingham News.

2. Rehearsing Macbeth at Sloss Furnace is one of the most remarkable theatrical gigs I've ever had. In one scene Banquo speaks about how birds residing in the castle are good omens... as we rehearse in the great pavilion that is our playing space, birds actually swoop through the rafters.

3. Our slim and sexy costume designer and her slim and sexy friends dropped by to show our slim and sexy director what our slim-and-sexy-person-centric costumes will look like. Those of us who are not slim and sexy (me) will look very bad indeed in these costumes. Are they just unaware that there are fat folks in the show, or are they trying to shame us for the sin of obesity? I'm an American, for crying out loud; I'm supposed to be fat!

FYI

Someone from Jamaica just googled across my blog while searching for "Dog blood tea." I don't know, and I don't want to know.

Edit: actually I did want to know. A little Google-fu shows that there's a "Dog's Blood Berry" in Jamaica, from which tea can be made with no harm to canines. Phew!

Narration Nation

The other night I called Laurie as she chilled in a hotel prior to one of them fancy scientist things she's always zipping around to. Over the phone she narrated the unfolding of dopey "reality" shows as she watched, then got bored with that and hopped over to a cheezy movie, which she also began describing in cackling detail. I have never, ever heard her sound as gleeful as she did narrating an old superhero movie. Maybe I should dress up as a superhero next time I see her.

My parents tell me that a friend of theirs is awfully nervous. This friend teaches at a Baptist-affiliated college. Very heavy conservative religious expectations in the air, right? And her husband is on a reality show over in Cali or somewhere. And the producers of the show are trying to railroad him into having a fake gay tryst with another dude on the show. It probably wouldn't be a problem if the show were unabashedly a drama, but since it presents itself as "reality" the woman is living with the fear that everyone in town will think her husband is publicly cheating on her with another guy. Then the show ends, he comes home... and will they be able to hold their heads up at the next Wednesday night potluck? Oh, reality TV! I guess it's the perfect entertainment for Neo-Con America. That and those Saw movies.

Pop

Went to Kannapolis to be with Laurie the past weekend. On the way there my tire burst outside of Leeds, Alabama. Thanks to AAA (And Laurie, who signed me up for AAA) I got back on the road pretty soon, but for much of the trip I was hyperaware of burst tires on the side of the road. There's a lot of them on Alabama highways. Leeds and Talladega seem to have tire scraps on the side of the road every fifty feet or so.

***

Laurie and I saw a play: Dark Play at the Charlotte Actors' Studio Theatre, CAST. It's a show about a guy who goes online and deceives people in chatrooms; things get pretty complex and intense. We liked it quite a bit: the cyberdecor throughout the theatre (chandelier-like arrangements of computer mice, etc.) was a compelling touch, the leads performed with energy and intelligence, and all in all it was the kind of vibrant theatre that gets me excited about the medium.

One big frustration: the play had big widescreen TV monitors over the stage adding (mostly unnecessary) illustrations of ideas in the play. There's a big final soliloquy near the end of the show in which the main character describes a near-death experience as a mystical breakthrough, and I got the feeling that it was the sort of thing I want to hear at the end of a challenging play. Sadly I'm not sure, because I was distracted by a barrage of bootleg Chris Cunningham rock video footage on the monitors. No doubt the intention was for the vivid and startling imagery to dovetail with the vivid and startling imagery of the monologue, but the effect was more like showing a bunch of explosions and striptease numbers during Hamlet's 2b or not 2b soliloquy: distraction rather than enhancement. You don't have to be Grotowski to think this kind of lazily conceived distraction from the heart of the show isn't exactly value added. I agree with Grotowski that the long-trendy notion that theatre needs big TV screens to stay relevant is kind of like how Democrats thought they had to be Republican-lite to stay relevant post 9-11. Down with multimedia bombast overwhelming simple human performances of rich and nuanced texts! It's like slathering ketchup on a spring roll.

Postscript: despite my cranky complaints I'm particularly exccited about CAST and hope that I'll be able to participate in their future work once I move to Charlotte. Laurie and I both think it's a going concern, and we want to help nurture it, despite the near-inevitability of a CAST person finding this blogpost and getting annoyed with me.

Alright, I'm sorry! For a brief moment of poverty-induced madness I put ugly stoopid ads on my blog. I don't know what I was thinking, seeing as how I never click on those ugly ads, and only five or six people ever seriously look at my blog in a day. I feel like I had the golden arches tattooed on my face. It's a little easier to clean my blog than to clean my face, though. Forgive me for offending your eyeballs with crap ads.

Anyway, my girlfriend pounded on my ads and adsense's shenanigans filter knew better. Instead of engaging in further get-rich-quick schemes we should probably make a movey about a couple that gets into doltish schemes.

Edited to note that I spelled "movie" as "Movey". I like "Movey" better and think I'll stick with it.

The Mystery of Pat Sotia

In my senior year of high school we were all assembled in the gym to hear a well-coiffed woman explain to us that we shouldn't have sex until marriage because promiscuity=pregnancy/genital warts, and that you can't trust condoms ("I know you love those orgasms, young people, but please..." quoted from memory). Unspoken subtext: get married quick. And if you do fornicate, then for crying out loud have the decency to not use a condom, because we can't have you skirting God's will, said will consisting of pregnancy and disease for nasty wicked disobedient fornicators.

The other day I found a picture of her in my yearbook, with the caption "Pat Sotia shares her views." A quick google on Pat Sotia and related phrases ("sotia abstinence", etc.) turns up nuffin. Did the yearbook screw up her name? Par for the course; it screwed up plenty of students' names too. But I wanna know what became of this woman. Is she part of the well-funded abstinence-only crew today? Has she gone into another line of work? I was the only kid in the school who

A. fell for it hook line and sinker, and

B. didn't run right out and get married.

So I have a few things I'd like to say to "Pat Sotia." Politely, but firmly.