That's What He Said

I don't remember exactly when it was, but I was directing an Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Life of Henry V (which really should be called Henry V's Wars and Courtship since it doesn't have much to do with any part of his life other than those) at the time.  I was puzzling over modern figures who would be analogous to Henry and was summarizing his personality and achievements in my head.  I thought this process might help lead me to a production approach that would bring the audience closer to the play in performance.  So Henry was a young leader, thrust into the limelight when his father died relatively early in his reign.  His father was beloved by some and derided by others and a great warrior.  Henry was a bit of a dark horse as Prince--he hung out with low-life drinkers and thieves and other entertaining figures who are prominent in the Henry IV plays and whose lives diminish in Henry V in ways that are engaging but less funny as time goes by.  Henry also has this strange speech in Henry IV where as Prince Hal, he explains to the audience that the reason he is behaving so badly is that when he does take over as King, he will be that much more impressive for having come such a long way in his journey toward leadership.  Kind of Machiavellian, if you ask me, and I don't mean that in a good way.  Sadly, we can't ask Shakespeare if he thought that was a positive or a negative trait in Henry, all we have to go on is what portrayal we get in Henry V.

I have often said that I think the role of Henry is the most challenging of all of Shakespeare's leading man, in that we see so many aspects of his psychology as the play goes on.  Besides that the role is epic in the sheer amount of words he speaks, Henry's called upon to handle such a variety of situations in the play--private and public, as a diplomat and a warrior, and even a fairly broadly comic scene at the end of the play where he courts his future Queen in spite of a severe language barrier between them.  But one of the most notable traits of Henry's is not that he won a war over insane odds on foreign turf, but that he was the first English King to bring together forces from all of the British nations to do so.  Shakespeare makes caricatures of the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish soldiers who join in with Henry for comic purposes, but he also shows how valuable these forces were to Henry, and Henry's gratitude for their presence.  In point of fact, Henry must be quite a diplomat back in the homeland, to have those soldiers go with him against the French, rather than have them take over England while he's gone, as his predecessors experienced.

I was thinking about the diplomatic side of Henry when I walked through Central Park one day to hear the Dalai Llama speak in public.  In perfect Buddhist fashion, he said something that addressed my Henry conversation quite directly.  I'm going to paraphrase, since I wasn't taking notes at the time, but he said something like, "Our enemy is our best teacher; from him we learn the most difficult lessons: patience and understanding."

This Saturday I was invited along with Bruce Wayne to a football game and due to my love of the sport, I jumped at the chance.  The challenge presented to me was that our hosts and most of their guests, none of whom I knew, were all politically about as far from me as they could have been.  From them I learned patience and understanding, at least for the day.  I didn't succumb to their views, but I did try very hard to understand their perspective.  I don't agree with the premise, nor the conclusion, but I continued to find common ground with them throughout the long day, and I came away with an appreciation of a branch of humankind of which I have had little contact in my sheltered academic left-wing socialist Jewish intellectual life.  But now I live in Virginia, where people love guns and cigarettes and tractors and Jesus in a way that feels to me more like a cudgel than a helping hand.  I'm sure they think of me as a radical Communist Jew lesbian-loving minority-supporting nut trying to take over this great nation which they think was founded for them and not for me.  But we cheered the home team, ate super tasty onion dip together, and talked about our memories of music from our youth and hopes for our grown children and for large blocks of time, you never would have known that I was a fly in their ointment, or they one in mine.

Thug Life

So what's it like here?  Beautiful.  Quiet.  Slow.  Nice.  All of which are kind of weird to me.  It's summer so it should be super crowded and smell a little rotten and be really noisy and fast-paced and a bit rude, in a happy urban way.  The Virginia dialect is more like molasses than the mustard I'm accustomed to.  It did take about five times longer than I'm used to checking out of the grocery store, but they greeted me multiple times in the store, made sure I found what I was looking for, and offered to carry the two little bags to the car for me.  The library put Bruce Wayne to work as a volunteer right away--no background check or suspicion or training or trial period.  The gas station that inspected my car charged sixteen dollars, for which I can't think of any service and not even too many meals I could have gotten back in Metro NY.  But it's all really disorienting.  I have to have a fan running at all times, not to circulate air, but to cut the alarming silence.  Weehawken was never silent.  Never.  Although here I guess there are tree frogs and stuff which can be pretty noisy, but the quiet is really really really quiet.  Really.  Quiet.  Last night I made a last visit to the bathroom before sleep and although I could hear the tree frogs through the window, there was a deafening silence in the room.  It made my ears feel like when a plane is landing and I need to swallow to clear my ears.  And the politeness makes me suspicious.  Are these people really nice? or do they want something from me? People wave when I drive down the road, even though they don't know me.  People say hello, have a nice day, but not like they have to, but because they seem to actually mean it.  It will take some getting used to. 

Return of the Son of the Sequel

Well, I'm back.  It's been just over a year of nothing pleasant to report.  That's a bit of an exaggeration.  But I thought that I would start by reviewing the good stuff as an exercise in remembering in the hard times that it wasn't always like this and that therefore it won't always be like this in the future.  So I have bonded with some old friends and new friends, including the fabulous guy who is pulling the old oil tank out of my driveway in my house while we're selling it.  I probably would never have predicted that he and I, out of the universe of humanity, would have so much to talk about, but there you are.  So he's doing that, and we have a buyer and a few backup offers just in case, and we are 90% out of the house and in the process of settling in with my in-laws at their gorgeous little gentleman's farm in the Virginia countryside near Washington, DC.  Clark Kent is staying where she is, of course, since she is all grown and has a life (and a secret identity) of her own.  I'm sure I will miss her considerably more than she, me.  Peter Parker is going to enroll in school here where schools have fields and separate rooms for different teachers and parking lots and finish out her final two years of indentured servitude to the public school system.  She sees it as an adventure and I'm truly grateful for that.  Bruce Wayne is about to go off to college (yikes) and we are all thrilled, as long as we can pay for it, which is definitely the first semester and probably the first year and then, who knows?  Sandman is staying with the house until the closing date.  I have no idea what he is doing there, besides petting the cat, but whatever it is, I'm sure it's delightfully stress-free and good for him.  The doggies are with me and for that I am truly grateful as they are happy and sleepy and dopey just like always and that makes me feel like things may one day be normal, whatever that means.  The farm is beautiful.  The house is beautiful.  My life and things are not so much and I'm having a little trouble finding a balance between my things that make me feel at home and the farm's beauty which I have no interest in disturbing.  Luckily the outdoors is something I cannot tackle whatsoever.  I have the opposite of a green thumb.  So on that score, I just enjoy.  My bedroom, which Sandman and I will eventually share, when he gets here, is in process--I've claimed my side of the bed, closet, and dresser.  I'm trying to, for the most part, hide my things in the room.  I did move a mirror that feng shui says is in the wrong place (on the wall past the foot of the bed so when I sit up, I look at myself) and replaced it with a photograph of the lighthouse by which my mother's ashes are scattered.  She took the photograph herself from the spot where she wanted us to leave her, I think to make sure we stuck with her plan, but it's beautiful too.  Beauty, beauty, beauty.  I'm also creating an office/living room/study/game room for Peter and I to use as our own work space.  I even put a bunch of musical instruments around and hope that within a few days, I'll make some music.  I'm thinking that I need to move my desk.  I thought that facing the lovely view of the Japanese garden and the pool would be ideal but my computer screen perfectly and completely blocks the view from my line of sight which seems silly.  So perhaps I will make some adjustments and see the beauty instead of just knowing it's there.  I do though, in the process, want to make note of a particular strange disorienting thing that has been happening this week.  I have been blurting out things we have to do in New York where we no longer live.  I don't mean to suggest that I will never visit or move back there; I have no idea what the future holds in that regard.  But I definitely have caught myself referencing things to do, places to go now, in a way that reminds me just a little of how I see something that makes me think of my first husband or my mother.  As in, "I should get those cookies for Mom as they are her favorite," forgetting briefly that she isn't with me anymore; or "That's a concert I should go to with Zippy as he is the only one I know who would appreciate that band" even though I'm no longer responsible for buying him birthday presents.  So I thought I would share some of those things here that I'm already missing about NYC: Little Miss Matched at 565 Fifth Avenue where all the socks come in threes; fruit vendors every few blocks with cherries, 2 pounds for $5; Katz's stuffed derma and pastrami on rye with mustard, even though I did eat exactly that just last Thursday; seeing people and pets I know while walking down the street both in Weehawken and in Manhattan; my synagogue community.  More soon.