Barbara Ardinger's Blog, page 3

Operetta Geek, Part 2

Operetta originated in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. (I recently
found a website that lists 99 composers of operettas. Nearly all of them
are 19th-century Europeans.) The operettas of Jacques Offenbach (with libretti
by Hector Cremieux, and Ludovic Halevy) are satires taken from Greek mythology
and applied to the age of Napoleon III (who was both emperor and president
of the Second Republic). In
Orphee aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) Orpheus and Eurydice
are not ever-loving mates. Eurydice hates Orpheus’ music. She runs away
with Pluto, who is in disguise as a shepherd, and it’s only a character
named Opinion Publique (who tells us she’s a newer, better version of the
old Greek chorus) that persuades him to go to the underworld to retrieve
her. Down in Pluto’s realm, Eurydice is seduced by Jupiter in disguise
as a fly, and of course Orpheus fails in his mission. Here’s the “
Infernal Galop” that ends the show. You’ll recognize it as the famous
“can-can” music. That’s Jupiter in white in the center, and Eurydice in
black in disguise as a bacchante. I watched this operetta the night I came
home from the hospital after my adventure with the cat bite and five antibiotics.

Another Offenbach operetta is
La Belle Helene, in which Paris seduces Helen of Troy. The final
act is set at Nauplia, where the Greek armies are gathering to invade Troy.
Here in a modern production are Agamemnon, Menelaus (the chubby guy in
the bathrobe—no wonder Helen ran off with Paris), and Calchus singing the
“
Patriotic Trio.”  (The guy with the good legs is Laurent Naouri
as Agamemnon.) Thanks to my DVDs of Offenbach operettas, I can identify
half a dozen French opera singers. Is that weird, or what?

Probably the most famous of the so-called Viennese operettas (it’s a style,
not a setting) is
The Merry Widow by the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehar and
Leo Stein and Victor Leon. It’s set in Paris at the Pontevedrian Embassy
(but in some translations Pontevedra is called Marsovia—I guess one imaginary
kingdom was a good as another). It’s basically about Anna (or Hannah),
the fabulously rich widow (she’s worth 50 million), and Prince Danilo,
a poor nobleman now working as a bored civil servant. They were in love
when he was rich and she was poor, but he was forbidden to marry her, so
she married a rich old man who conveniently died and left her the 50 million.
Now Danilo spends his time at
Maxim’s  (the famous bistro that the handsome hero of
Gigi also visits) drinking and flirting with the
grisettes(a word I don't need to translate, do I?). Love wins out,
of course, and Anna and Danilo are reunited. Meanwhile, the ambassador’s
very young wife is carrying on with a Parisian gigolo (the show’s tenor).
Here’s Beverly Sills singing one of the other famous songs. It’s about

Vilja, who is either a “witch of the wood” or a “nymph of the wood,” depending
on the translation. And, yes, operetta properly requires operatic voices.
My favorite version is the
San Francisco Opera production, whose art nouveau sets and costumes
are as gorgeous as the music. I find the newer production from the Met
starring Renee Fleming and Nathan Gunn less fun.

The other most famous composer of European operettas was Rudolf Friml,
who gave us
The Firefly,
The Vagabond King, and
Rose Marie. Jeanette MacDonald starred in a 1937 movie titled
The Firefly, but except for a couple songs like “
The Donkey Serenade" --be sure to listen to this one-- sung by Allan
Jones, it has little connection with the stage version.The song made Jones'
career. He sang it for the rest of his life. 

In
The Vagabond King, the historical French poet and “king of thieves,”
Francois Villon, trades places with King Louis XI, the Spider King. Paramount
made two movies of it. In the 1930 movie, Dennis King plays Villon and
Jeanette (her second movie) plays Katherine. King’s acting style is Victorian-declamatory,
but he sure can sing. (And there’s an actor in this movie who was born
in 1853!) The 1956 movie is truly awful. Villon is played by an extremely
loud Maltese tenor named Oreste. (It was his only movie.) Friml wrote half
a dozen new songs for this movie; he shoulda stayed home.




Friml’s most famous operetta is
Rose Marie. Although the 1936 movie almost completely changes the
operetta’s plot, it’s still fun to watch. Opera star Rose Marie (Jeannette
MacDonald) is out in the Canadian wilderness searching, with the help of
Mountie Nelson Eddy, for her outlaw brother (James Stewart in his first
movie).Here are Nelson and Jeanette singing the famous “
Indian Love Call.”   

In 1959, Rick Besoyan wrote a glorious parody of all these old-fashioned
operettas. In
Little Mary Sunshine, Mary sells cookies. Here’s the “
Colorado Love Call,” a spot-on parody. (Yes, that’s the same Patricia
Routledge from
Keeping Up Appearances. You didn’t know she could sing, did you.
She was also in the famous Joseph Papp

Pirates of Penzance,  starring Kevin Kline, Rex Smith, and
Linda Ronstadt.

Next month: Part 3 of Operetta Geekery.

Operetta Geek, Part 1

I think I must have some kind of strange, musical genetic mutation. Some
of the letters in my genome must have grace notes and fermatas. I really,
really love operetta. What’s to love? Richard Traubner answers this question
in his book,

Operetta: A Theatrical History.  Operetta, he writes, “attracted
its audiences principally by means of its contagious melodies [and] clever
libretti, satirical jibes, romantic intrigue, mesmerizing stars, lovely
chorus girls, and scenic splendor” (p. viii). Plus those yummy, rousing,
virile male choruses—ya gotta love ’em—like “Stouthearted Men” from Romberg's

New Moon. It was the songs, Traubner adds, that “were always
the most important element in the popular genre” (Ibid.). The melodies
and lyrics stick in your head. You walk around all day singing them.

As I see (or hear) it, operetta lies (floats) on a continuum with, say,
Giacomo Puccini (
La Boheme) on one end and Jonathan Larson (
Rent,which is based on
La Boheme\) on the other. Parisian and Viennese by by birth, when
operetta came to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, it was what
audiences wanted on stages until the Great Depression and in 1930s movies
like those starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald, no doubt because,
like the Fred and Ginger musicals, they’re so wonderfully escapist. Operetta
is a close neighbor to musical comedy—which is said to be more realistic—and
existed alongside shows by George M. Cohan, George and Ira Gershwin, and
Rodgers and Hart. Some experts say operetta was done in, first by Kern
and Hammerstein’s
Show Boat (1927) and Irving Berlin’s many shows, then by Rodgers
and Hammerstein (
Oklahoma,
Carousel,
The Sound of Music, etc.) composed between 1943 and 1959. In a brief
interview on a DVD of
The Desert Song, Nelson Eddy says that operettas are fairy tales
for adults.

Who are some of operetta’s greatest composers? More or less chronologically
from the mid-19th century to the third decade of the 20th century: Jacques
Offenbach, Johann Strauss II, Oscar Straus, Gilbert and Sullivan, Victor
Herbert, Rudolf Friml, Franz Lehar, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern, and Noel
Coward, plus maybe Frederick Lowe. (And would you believe that John Phillip
Sousa also wrote a dozen operettas? I don’t know if any of them feature
the military marches he’s more famous for.)

Johann Strauss II, better known as the Waltz King (he also wrote polkas
and marches) and the composer of the “Blue Danube Waltz." Surely you remember
how it was used in

2001: A Space Odyssey.
Strauss alsowrote many operettas, including
Die Fledermaus, which some people call light opera. The BBC did a
TV miniseries about the
Strauss family in 1972. One thing we learn is that when the Strauss
Orchestra played concerts in ballrooms in late 19th–century Vienna, the
audience didn’t sit in the dark like we do today. They got up and danced!
There’s also an operetta based on Strauss's life and music. The Great Waltz
was produced on Broadway in 1934 and like the famous biopics of the 40s
and 50s had no connection to reality.

Oscar Straus’
The Chocolate Soldier is based on G.B. Shaw’s comedy
Arms and the Man. Though Shaw at first forbade the librettist from
using any of his dialogue or even the characters’ names, he finally gave
in. It’s a nice bit of anti-war satire whose “hero” is a Swiss mercenary
who carries chocolates in his ammunition pouch instead of bullets. It’s
also romantically gooey, and here’s the gooiest song in the show, “
My Hero.”




If you want clever libretti and romantic intrigue, you can’t miss with
Lerner and Lowe’s romantic, old-fashioned shows:
Brigadoon (1947),
Paint Your Wagon(1951),
My Fair Lady (1956),
Camelot (1960), and
Gigi(originally a movie in 1958 and adapted for Broadway in 1973).
One characteristic of operetta is that the setting is often a romantic,
usually make-believe (usually Balkan) land. Lerner and Lowe give us a mythical
Scottish town and the mythical Old West. I think
Camelot also qualifies. Here’s the original
Arthur, Richard Burton, singing about the magical land. 




I invite you to come back next month for Part 2 of operetta geekery

Stepping into the 21st century with my new computer

 

“Mother, it’s time for you to join the 21st century.” This is what my
son has been saying for twelve or thirteen years. He said it again a day
or two ago. I’ve heard him every time. Gee whizzly—I know it’s a new century.
Didn’t I work on a Y2K project?

 The Y2K project happened when I was still doing temp work in 1998-99.
Sixteen temps were hired by a large company (I think it made auto parts)
to make email and phone queries to suppliers around the world: were the
suppliers’ computers going to crash or explode when the clock ticked into
2000? (Just so you know: the new century/millennium actually began in 2001.
The 2000 is the 10 in the sequence of 1-10. The new sequence starts with
11, or 2001. Got that?) The large company liked me because the last time
I took a typing test I scored 65 words per minute (one of the other temps
typed about 15 wpm) and I knew how to say please and thank you during the
phone calls. As we temps worked through the long list of suppliers, some
temps were let go. At the end of the Y2K project only a computer geek named
Andy and I remained. Andy was really smart. He knew so much about computers,
we teasingly asked if he was a silicon-based being in disguise as a humble
computer tech. It was while I was working on the Y2K project that I started
writing Finding New Goddesses. Which explains why my Found Computer Goddesses
are so old-fashioned. I need to Find goddesses for cellphones and tablets
and all these other new thingies that kids learn about when they’re two
years old. (Or do they start younger?) I’m wondering if a Found Goddess
of Social Media might be Viralicious. No, now I’m thinking Virabella.

The Y2K project had computer adventures that I still remember. Like when
one of the temps downloaded an .exe file and sixteen computers promptly
crashed. Or when the official tech guy switched servers without testing
the new one first or telling us. Sixteen computers crashed again. Or when
one guy was fired because he was watching “foot porn” (I’m trying to imagine
what that is) instead of researching suppliers in South Korea and China.
No computer crash, but a lot of joking.

 The first computer I ever saw was in 1967 at Southeast Missouri
State University, where I had just begun the coursework for my M.A. and
was supporting myself as a secretary to five educational psychologists
(two of whom are my friends to this day). No, I didn’t type on a computer.
I sat at an IBM Selectric. And took shorthand. The old-fashioned way, in
a steno notebook. The computer was a mainframe that filled an entire room
with an elevated floor and special air conditioning. I don’t know what
the university used the computer for because during enrollment, we still
stood in long lines with papers in our hands. I also remember seeing other
secretaries doing mysterious things with punched Hollerith cards. They
also painted them red and green and stapled them together to make Christmas
wreaths.

 I also remember seeing the word processors (the talented women,
not the software) using ice picks to sort Hollerith cards and poking tape
cassettes into the computers sitting beside their workstations at some
of the office jobs I had during the 80s and 90s. Also during the 80s I
got a job at a minicomputer manufacturer. “It’s better than daytime TV,”
the tech pubs manager told me during our interview. (You may be asking
why I was doing work like this after earning a Ph.D. in English. The answer
is that there were no jobs of newly-hatched Ph.D.’s in 1976. The English
department that graduated me had one opening. And 1,200 applications to
fill it. There were only a dozen openings for medievalists in the whole
country. So I did a bunch of interviews, didn’t land in a university, and
moved to California to live with a friend whose two sons were about the
same age as my son. Then I got my first job as a technical writer.)

 Does anybody remember what a minicomputer was? In my memory, it
was about the size of my new Asus computer and looked somewhat like a really
big typewriter. We tech writers didn’t get to use any kind of computer.
We had old typewriters or wrote by hand on legal pads. Our work went to
the word processors, who typed it up. While I was at that company, they
bought an NBI word processing system. It was vaguely like a very early
version of WordPerfect. I learned to use it, and when the head word processor
quit, I got to be head of the word processing group—two women nearing retirement
age and one over-eager girl who flirted with the department chair. As you
probably know, demand for minicomputers went nowhere. We had almost no
work to do, so I started doing my own writing at work. I was fired for
stealing the company’s electrons (!) by a manager who was younger than
I was, held only an M.S., and who probably weighed less than I did. About
two years later, I heard that the two remaining tech writers had been laid
off, two more word processors had quit, and the whole tech pubs department
consisted of one word processor. Then the company’s board fired the company’s
founder (whose main occupation seemed to be getting his secretaries pregnant)
and moved the company to Texas, where it soon faded into oblivion.

 Sometime later I was hired by a tiny company (a highly technical
man and his wife, a retired ballerina) to run their office. Their computer’s
name was Aurora, and Aurora greeted you with music when you turned her—it
on. That job didn’t last very long.

 I used Word XP for fifteen-plus years after WordPerfect more or
less went away. I wrote my first book on a portable typewriter and wrote
my second and third books using WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1 on a computer a
friend gave me when her company upgraded. I bought new computers in 2002
and 2008 but stuck with Word XP after Microsoft stopped supporting it.
My new computer came equipped with Word and Excel 2013 (I think). Back
in the 90s, I was really good with Excel because every time I was sent
to a new temp assignment I went to the temp agency’s office and practiced
Excel and PowerPoint. And almost never got to use them. So now I’m having
to relearn a bit of Excel to keep track of my spending and earning.

 My computer started seriously crashing while I was editing on December
14. Panic! I was able to recover my work. Then, on December 15, it crashed
ten times before lunch. Now I was in a total panic, but my regular, long-time
tech was on vacation, so I sent emails (using my iPad) to friends and begging
for referrals. Kathryn, president of the Long Beach branch of the California
Writers Club (I’m the secretary), sent the first of four or five replies
and recommended Joey. He and I had a couple long phone conversations and
exchanged some emails, after which he did some research on what might be
best for me. We met at the local Best Buy on December 18, I bought the
computer, and he installed it for me. Then I bought the software I’m using
now. Joey has given me a lot of help, like walking me though three new
email programs, and explaining a lot of Mysterious Stuff. My friend Eileen,
also a writer, has also given me lots of tips and good advice. Is the newer
version of Word better? Some of it is, but some so-called features are
of no use to me. Is it easier to use? Maybe. A few features are very handy.
So, yes, my son, I am tiptoeing into the 21st century. With a little help
from my friends.

This Year’s Solstice Story

 

Apollo is a busy god! He’s the fellow who drives the sun chariot across
the sky every day. From horizon to horizon. Forever. Has the earth ever
experienced a day with no sun anywhere above it? Even when volcanoes erupt,
there’s still sunshine above the smoke and ash. Apollo has major job security.

 

Maybe it’s possible that as gods lose their popularity or their worshippers
are converted to some new-fangled religion, they fade away or die. So maybe
today’s sun god is a great grandson of the Greek god. And maybe today’s
Apollo put the horses out to pasture and now drives a nifty solar-powered
vehicle. Let’s call it a Sunnewagen. (SW for short.) There are lots of
sun goddesses, of course, and some of them no doubt ride with Apollo. They
keep him from speeding or driving too close to earth. (Thanks to Icarus,
not to mention climate change, we have enough deserts, thank you.)

 

The great and powerful sun god gets to rest four times a year on the equinoxes
and solstices. A week or so ago he began noticing that the clouds around
him were releasing their snow. “Ahhhh,” he says with a great yawn, “it’s
that time again. I get a few days of vacation!” He decides to spend this
year’s solstice in an antique kingdom at the edge of the Southern Desert.
The kingdom, founded by a many-times-lost swashbuckler, had once been the
colony of a vanished Balkan nation whose king was overthrown and banished
to this southern colony. But the peoples there in the south have grown
fond of the old gent, King Saffi, and they let him remain in the palace
as king, governor, and presidente, all in one.

 

King Saffi and Queen Hesperida have twelve beautiful daughters, none of
whom are named Barbie and all of whom love dancing and other entertainments.
But their father is very old-fashioned and wants to keep his girls pure
and virginal until Real Princes come to court and to court them. After
these yet-to-arrive princes have solved the standard riddle, “What is born
each night and dies at dawn?” they will marry the princesses. No one has
succeeded in solving the riddle yet, so we occasionally see bones floating
in the moat. The door to the princesses’ bedroom is locked every night,
but of course, every morning Papa and Mama eat breakfast with twelve exhausted
girls and the maids keep finding tattered dancing slippers under their
beds. “What am I to do?” the king keeps asking. ‘How can I preserve the
virginity of my daughters until princes come to marry them and take them
away?”

 

Queen Hesperida has been reading the calendar in the kingdom’s daily newspaper.
“Look here,” she says. “The winter solstice is almost upon us. That means
Apollo will come to visit us again. You know how much he loves our girls.
Maybe he can help us tame them.” (What the queen and the king don’t know,
of course, is that Apollo, who also loves to dance, often makes nighttime
visits the hidden ballroom under the palace. He does indeed love these
girls. Frequently.)

 

And so a day or two later, when the sun god drives up and parks his chariot,
he is warmly greeted by the royal family. He nods to King Saffi (a god
would never bow before a mortal king), gallantly kisses the hand of Queen
Hesperida, and enthusiastically embraces the twelve girls (moving in order
from Janua and Februa to Novemi and Decemma) while also affectionately
pinching their bottoms. “And now,” he says, “I am ready for rest and recreation.”
To which young Augusta looks up. “I remember the recreation,” she says,
“but I’ve forgotten the rest.” The other eleven girls giggle.

 

Fortunately, before her parents can figure out what she meant, Chaliapin,
the major domo, and Norma, the duenna, step forward. “We are honored to
present a company of players,” the duenna says to Apollo. “They are world-renowned,”
says the major domo. “They perform every kind of play: tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
and tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.”

 

This is of course the cue for the Traveling Illuminati Opera Players to
arrive. They park their portable stage near Apollo’s chariot and, as strolling
players must, stroll into the audience hall. After general greetings are
exchanged, Norma the duenna takes the player king aside and they whisper
together in a corner. Commenting that with twelve girls to supervise, her
work never ends, the duenna hands the player king several pages, then retires
to her office.

 

That night the royal court and their visitors gather in the ballroom,
which is hardly ever used, to enjoy the performance of the traveling opera.
“What’s the title?” the king asks. “A Trap for Mice,” says his wife with
a covert nod to the duenna.

 

Act I. The curtain rises to reveal a king surrounded by his large, affectionate,
musical family. After two or three bel canto arias about the seasons of
love, the prince (a handsome tenor) enters from stage left and sings his
opening aria, “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Apollo, who is also famous for loving
girls, applauds noisily, but he is shushed as the player king asks the
tenor the famous riddle: “What is born each night and dies at dawn?” “The
moon,” the tenor replies. It’s the wrong answer, of course, and—shazaam!
the lad is changed into an old beggar man. After a choral lament, “Waiting
for the Sun,” the curtain descends.

 

“This must be a new opera,” Apollo remarks. “Usually when I visit someone
during the solstice, I have to sit through the same old show about virgin
mothers and little sun gods being born. Last year, I think it was the birth
of Attis I saw. The year before that was Horus.”

 

Queen Hesperida taps him on the arm. “Did you notice that masked man who
just tried to sneak on stage?” she asks.

 

“Yes, Mama,” several of her daughters reply. “And we saw that great big
hook come out and pull him back into the wings. What a foolish man!”

 

“Wrong opera,” Apollo tells them. “Wrong opera house! And look—none of
the chandeliers are moving.” He squeezes the hands of the two nearest princesses,
April and Julia. “Let’s see what happens in Act II of this Traveling Illuminati
Opera.”

 

Act II begins with the disguised tenor playing his magic flute (“There
Goes My Baby”) and singing a very long comic duet with his rascally servant.
“How,” the tenor sings, “can I get back into the palace and into the arms
of my beloved? There is much comical stage business as the servant offers
one foolish idea after another. Scene ii opens as the player king’s daughters
sing in counterpoint about how dull their lives are without men. Suddenly
their grandfather, a retired libertine called Il Commendatore, enters from
stage right. After singing his basso aria, “Good morning starshine, the
earth says hello,” he gathers the girls around him and tells them he will
magically bring not just one young tenor to them, but a dozen demigods,
all handsome, rich, and tuneful.

 

The curtain rises on Act III. The disguised prince, his rascally servant,
and Il Commendatore are now standing outside the palace. A trio “Here Comes
the Sun,” ensues and is followed by tympani and trombones signaling the
rise of a great gilded pyramid. The pyramid opens to reveal a ballroom
filled with princesses dancing their slippers to tatters. Ballet concluded,
they begin bemoaning (in light soprano voices) their fate, which seems
to be to remain single until they find suitors who can solve their father’s
riddle. The answer, they sing, is “hope,” and they have no hope. Scene
ii begins. Il Commendatore claps his hands dramatically and—lo and behold!—the
disguised tenor sheds not one disguise but two. He is not a wandering prince!
He is the sun god! Clouds and winged chariots driven by warbling putti
now sail across the proscenium and a countertenor wearing a golden mask
is lowered on a golden swing to sing an ode to joy and carnal love, “You
Are My Sunshine.” The princesses are joyful. “I can see clearly now,” they
sing, and now there is a final reveal. The sun god has twelve new sons!
The formerly virgin princesses dance a celebratory fandango with their
tenors and the curtain falls.

 

And even before the curtain calls can commence, Apollo is on his feet.
“Will you look at the time!” he exclaims, waving the e-sundial on his smarterphone.
“I can’t stand still a minute longer—I’ve got to get up to Newgrange and
shine my light down the passage. And I’ve got all those other famous stops
to make, too.” He looks at the twelve blessed virgins, whose new-born godlets
have descended from the stage and are now cuddled in their mamas’ arms.
“Gaia bless us, everyone,” he calls out as he dashes to his chariot.

 

And so the long winter’s night is over and we’re all alive to face the
new year. Brightest blessings to one and all!

 

P.S. If you want a real parody opera with music and operatic singers and
scenery, check out The Abduction of Figaro by P.D.Q. Bach. Professor Schickele
wrote some really fine faux Mozart. 

A meditation on (and in) silence

Because of the work I do, which requires close concentration so I can
spot misplaced commas and see when the period is missing after Ibid., I
like to work in a quiet room. No daytime TV, which rots your brain. How
do I know this? My grandfather, who had worked in the accounting department
of one of the big St. Louis department stores, retired and started watching
daytime TV…and with five years he was hospitalized with Alzheimer’s. (It’s
a blessing that he died within a couple weeks of his hospitalization. My
family didn’t have to witness the awful decline that comes with the disease.)
Nor do I listen to daytime radio, which is mostly talkradio, i.e., nasty,
misogynistic, or “hip” men babbling on and on and on.




I don’t even, alas, listen to my vast collection of CDs anymore. They’re
mostly old musicals, Broadway and studio cast albums originally released
on 33 rpm long play records. I used to have a huge collection of these
records, but after I found the CDs, I gradually gave the records away.
If I played CDs now, I’d be singing along and not even see those superfluous
semicolons or funny spelling mistakes like “taking my dissertation to be
printed and bounded within the next few days.” (This came from a Ph.D.
candidate.) Or I’d be singing along with
Pete ’n’ Arlo or
Noel Coward  or
Tom Lehrer and be missing things like “‘Wholly shit what the hell
is happening,’ he yells” or “From the removal of her coverall, she revealed
the skimpy black string bikini that barely covered the aerials of her breast
and the small patch of black cloth that laid over her crouch.” If I were
singing along with the
Bobs I’d miss just plain awful writing like “Toni’s eye breathed fire
as she mentally locked horns with this woman” and “‘Get off my car,’ I
said through gritted, perfectly straight teeth.” Folks, I am not making
these things up. A decade and a half of editing has given me some wondrous
gifts that, as they say, keep on giving.

I learned the value of silence when I was in graduate school. You don’t
want to be reading
The Faerie Queene or
Paradise Lost or anything by Shakespeare or Dryden or Donne with
folk songs or operettas saturating the air around you. The professor who
taught the classes I took on Spenser and Milton and a whole lot of Shakespeare
gave pop quizzes on the footnotes! I also needed copious peace and quiet
while I was writing my dissertation, which is 255 pages of literary criticism
plus thirteen pages of bibliography plus three appendixes. All that writing
required a lot of time alone in a quiet room. (No, it wasn’t a padded room.)

So how does the quiet meditation work? It’s not anything fancy. You can
do it anytime, day or night. You just sit with your eyes closed and your
hands folded or in a meditative position. And then you listen. Take note
of what you hear. (Yes, you guessed it—this is a mindfulness meditation.)
Ahhh, I’m hearing the crows across the street having a very loud conversation.
At least two squirrels are engaging in what I call the “squirrely love
call.” It’s flirtation (to put it politely). Now it’s quiet again. All
I can hear is the hum of the refrigerator. Good. That means the electrical
grid is working and sending power to my apartment. Now my neighbors are
talking…something about bus routes. Our front doors are within a couple
feet of each other, and on warm days we just have our screen doors between
us. I can also hear when she’s cooking or washing dishes and when one of
them takes ice cubes out of their freezer and slams the tray on the counter.




Now it’s quiet again. Just the hum of the fridge…oh, here comes a cat
to help me listen. Cats love meditative vibes. They purr along. Now I hear
a helicopter. It’s probably near the beach and could be from the Long Beach
Police Department, the Coast Guard station at the ports, or one of the
Los Angeles TV stations. There are always helicopters buzzing around the
L.A. Basin. When it’s really quiet, I can also hear the cars and trucks
on the 710 freeway. I live only a couple blocks from Fire Station #2, and
the fire engines frequently travel up my street. When I hear the sirens,
I always murmur, “Blessings to you and where you’re going.” You can do
that, too.




Remove your earbuds, turn off your devices, and try this meditation. Don’t
make a big deal of it. If you’re feeling a bit frazzled, just sit in silence
and listen. Let the sounds come to you. Identify them, comment on them
if you want to, and then let them be. Keep listening. Wait for the next
thing you hear. Whether it’s soft or loud, identify it and let it be. Unless
it’s an emergency alarm, don’t let it disturb you. If it is an emergency,
or course, get up and take action, but otherwise, just let the sounds be
what they are.




It’s good to sit in silence. You get to listen to what I think is the
electricity in your brain, to hear your synapses popping, maybe observe
your brain chemistry in action. Well, there’s some sort of sound in there.
I can hear it. The key is not to go to sleep, although if that’s what your
body needs, that’s what will happen, so don’t fight it. I fall asleep sometimes,
even when the neighbors and their TV and the helicopters and the people
walking up and down the street are making all the noise they can make.
What often happens when I’m sitting in silence, though, is that ideas for
blogs wander into my mind. Sometimes whole paragraphs march in. Like this
blog just did.

Shakespeare Behind Bars

The visits by Pope Francis to three U.S. cities last month got a lot of
attention in the print, broadcast, and social media. Although I’m not a
huge fan of patriarchs and patriarchal religions, I’m interested in this
pope. He’s showing what I consider to be elements of the truest and best
teachings of Christianity. That’s the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew: 5-7).
I wish the followers of all the gods would take these teachings into their
hearts:

     Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.


     Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown
mercy.




One thing Francis did was to visit a prison, where he greeted and blessed
every single prisoner. He treated the men like human beings, not subhuman
criminals to be punished forever. He was kind and courteous to them.




The pope’s visit to the prison reminded me of
Shakespeare Behind Bars. There are actually two works with this title.
The one I came across first (I think I saw it on PBS) is the documentary
written and directed in 2005 by
Hank Rogerson and set in Kentucky’s Luther Luckett Correctional Complex,
a medium-security prison. I bought the DVD right away. (The nonprofit organization

Shakespeare Behind Bars, which is now twenty years old, “offers theatrical encounters with
personal and social issues to incarcerated and post-incarcerated adults
and juveniles, allowing them to develop life skills that will ensure their
successful reintegration into society.” Go to their site. It’s fascinating.)

The documentary begins with the prisoners self-selecting their roles in
The Tempest. It’s like reality TV as we watch them in rehearsal with
their director, Curt Tofteland, who says he’s really a facilitator and
tells us he picked
The Tempest because of its themes “leading to redemption and forgiveness.”
The actors—at least five murderers, a drug dealer who “shot it out with
a cop,” a man who abused seven girls, and an armed robber—also speak directly
to the camera. One’s in handcuffs when he speaks, another is just out of
“the hole,” a couple of them argue and justify themselves to the camera.
You know what I learned? These guys are real people! As Hal, the reporter
for the prison’s radio station who plays Propero, speaks about the banished
duke’s lesson in forgiveness, he has to wipe his eyes. He sounds educated;
the other guys, not so much. But they’re all honest and eloquent.

They aren’t really good actors, though. There’s a lot of shouting of lines,
and Trinculo, Caliban, and Stephano turn Act III, scene 2 into a funny
iambic pentameter rap. They also pronounce Milan as “Mill-ANE.” (Shakespeare’s
actors probably pronounced it “MILLen.”) But they work and work and work
on understanding and expressing the meaning of their lines. They also accept
and share the insights into their own lives they get from Shakespeare’s
lines.




When the day of the performance finally arrives, we see that they have
real (though limited) scenery and props. The men wear their costumes over
their prison uniforms and stage makeup is not used. Sitting in the audience
are their families and other visitors. The show’s a success! We learn,
in fact, that it was so successful that the men are invited to travel to
other prisons…and a minute later we see them by the bus, all lined up in
red jumpsuits and shackles.




These men, as the director says, have committed heinous crimes. Even so,
they’re honest and forthright when they speak to the camera, and by the
time the documentary ended, I was nearly weeping for the men who were denied
parole, for the kid who hanged himself with his shoelaces, for the understanding
these men have gained about why they committed their crimes. Pope Francis
should go see one of their shows.




Two or three years after I bought this DVD, I came across an ad for a
book titled
Shakespeare Behind Bars. Oh, I said to myself, it must be about the
same men. It’s not. It’s about female prisoners at the Framingham, Massachusetts,
Women’s Prison, said to be the most secure women’s prison in the U.S. in
the early 1980s. The book was written in 2001 by Jean Trounstine, an English
teacher. As I read about the lives of women in prison, it seems to me that
if
Orange Is the New Black (of which I found three episodes plenty)
is any indication, things have not improved for female prisoners, even
though back in the 80s, they got to wear just about any kind of clothing
they fancied and they had nail files and nail polish and even knitting
needles. The male guards are macho and vile and male-chauvinist-piggish
as they prey upon the women prisoners. (So what else is new??) Unlike the
Lockett center, which is clean and orderly, Framingham is described as
filthy and rundown. It’s the cliché of a place where people are punished,
not rehabilitated.

Trounstine taught at Framingham for ten years. Although she was engaged
as a writing teacher, she added Intro to Drama to her curriculum early
on. One night she showed a film version of
The Taming of the Shrew (that dreadful, slow-paced, Liz ’n’ Dick
version) to her class. “We talked,” Trounstine writes, “about what problems
Kate has being open to love, since she is slighted by her father for her
younger sister, and known around town as a shrew. I asked the women to
write about Kate and to decide if she really needs all that ‘punishment’
to come around…to loving Petruchio. … I asked them to write about what
it means to be ‘tamed’” (p. 31). Female prisoners being tamed? This is
something about the play I’ve never considered before. They also study
Othello (I’m guessing the movie Trounstine shows is Olivier’s version)
and
Lysistrata, the Greek play in which the women refuse sex to the men
until they stop going to war. After they study 
The Merchant of Venice, they get permission to present their version
to the other prisoners.

Trounstine’s word pictures of the prisoners are heart-breaking. Like the
men at Luckett, these are real women who have committed real crimes. One
of them murdered her four-month-old baby, another was an arsonist who set
another woman on fire, others were prostitutes. In the book’s epilogue,
Trounstine writes that “Art at Framingham was a catalyst for transformation.
However, it does not produce the kind of metamorphosis that is easy to
measure. … In my prison classes, drama enabled the women to believe more
deeply in their abilities, to use their risk-taking natures in ways that
were productive and to create a community where they valued themselves
and others” (pp. 235-6). She also writes that “to convey the world of women
in prison, …I have changed [the prisoners’] names, created several composite
characters, reconstructed dialogue, and rearranged some incidents…” (p.
242).




As Chapter 8 opens, it’s June 1988 and the performance of
The Merchant of Veniceis at hand. It’s been really hard going. Cooperation
from the prison’s administrators and guards has ranged from indifferent
to hostile. The gym’s never available for rehearsals. Some of the women
have dropped out, one has died, and a new one comes in to play the judge,
but the other women hate her and there’s a big fight that nearly shuts
down the whole program. They’re still working on learning and rewriting
lines and blocking the action. They do a lot of rewriting of Shakespeare’s
verse so that it’s intelligible to their audience, some of whom speak very
little English. And they have a really awful dress rehearsal. (But everyone
in drama knows the cliché: a bad dress rehearsal means a good performance.)
Opening night finally arrives. The gym is filled. Practically everyone
at Framingham is there, even guards and administrators. But they’re not
doing the whole play—there’s no visit by foreign princes and Bassanio to
Portia’s home to select a gold, silver, or lead chest, no elopement by
Jessica with Lorenzo and his buds—so Trounstine stands in front of the
curtain and tells those parts of the story.

Now the curtain opens on the trial scene. The unpopular prisoner playing
the judge (changed from the Duke of Venice) is still trying to upstage
everyone else. Antonio, Bassanio, Gratiano, and the other guys are dressed
in “pimp suits” and acting tough. Portia (there’s no Nerissa) is not disguised
as a man but is there as a woman working to show her power in the all-male
courtroom. As she begins her famous “quality of mercy” speech to Shylock,
she is “preaching not only to Shylock but to the audience, who nod and
yes her, caught up in the outpouring of her plea for mercy” (pp. 206-7).
It’s obviously an issue near to the hearts of female prisoners who have
never received any mercy. Shylock doesn’t get his pound of flesh, of course.
He loses everything and is forced to convert to Christianity. As the curtain
closes, the audience hears his “lonesome howl,” which is Rose’s imitation
of Laurence Olivier’s
off-stage howl in his 1973 movie.  I have this film on DVD and
find it almost impossible to believe the prisoners stayed awake when Trounstine
showed it to them. It’s set in high Victorian London—er, Venice, and though
the line readings by Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Jeremy Bret, et
al., are well-nigh perfect, except for that famous off-stage howl, there’s
no passion in the film, not even among the three brides and grooms. The
film ends with the Kadish being sung, though whether for Shylock or Jessica
it’s hard to know. At Framingham, the audience explodes into applause.
Even the guards applaud. I sure wish I could’ve seen that performance!

Earlier, Trounstine quotes Rose, the prisoner who played Shylock. She
was not initially accepted by the others in the class. Now the class is
being interviewed. “Rose backs away from the circle…. ‘This prison life
isn’t important to most people, [she says to the reporter]. They’re not
gonna do anything different when they read about us. But me?’ She lets
out a little laugh, which is almost painful to hear. Then she shakes her
head. It’s as though she’s having a conversation with herself, trying to
sort out what she’s feeling. ‘I get very serious when I set high goals
for myself. I have to wake up, look in the mirror, and like who I see.
I have to deal with myself every day in here and face my mistakes. And
believe me that’s not easy. The class makes me feel I can.’ Rose pauses
and looks at me. ‘That’s the God’s truth’” (pp. 121-2).

The real reason why we forget as we get older

I keep thinking I have a pretty good grasp of consensual reality and a
pretty good memory. But a few days ago, when I was trying to tell someone
about the revisionist fairy tales and other stories I write for Feminism
and Religion, I couldn’t bring the word I wanted to mind. I was aiming
for—oh, gee, I’ve just forgotten it again. When this happens, I’ve learned
to let it rest for a little while. What I’m looking for always appears,
though occasionally it can take all day to pop up. Ah, there it is! I was
looking for “satires.” Perfectly ordinary word. But not quite on the tip
of my tongue. Or at my fingertips. When I’m editing and an author makes
a poor word choice—a creature with a
vacillating tail, a house built of
troglodyte, the
throws of passion, the
roughage of an old woman’s throat—my job is to supply the correct
word. But it doesn’t always pop right into my mind. Sometimes I have to
sit here for a couple minutes and run through my mental thesaurus until
I can grab it. Has this ever happened to you? Sure, it has. When we forget
a word or a name, it is not, however, a so-called senior moment, nor is
it the onset of dementia. Our brains are just too crowded with information.
It’s a traffic jam in there!




The experts, of course, can give us good, scientific reasons why we forget.
These reasons are based on brain chemistry, brain cells, synapses, and
tangles of plaque in our heads. They’re no doubt correct. I’ve read some
very interesting books about brain chemistry and fMRI and other discoveries.
But science doesn’t keep me from hewing to my own theory of why we forget
as we age




Here’s my favorite metaphor. Picture this. The inside of your head is
a big room. There are file cabinets in it, old-fashioned ones with drawers
you pull out and files inside them that are overstuffed with papers. No
modern technology. No thumb drives or external hard drives or disks. Paper.
Lots and lots of paper. Your brain room is jammed full of papers upon which
is written (or typed) everything you’ve ever learned, seen, heard, or experienced.




When we’re little, it’s a tiny room and there’s maybe one cabinet. As
we grow, the room magically expands and additional cabinets are trucked
in. And there are messengers in there, too. Cute little forest critters,
like mice and fawns and bunnies and the occasional coyote, all of them
wearing cute little jackets and caps, all of them singing in cute little
warbly voices. You want to remember who your second-grade teacher was?
One of the cute little bunnies dashes to the Age 7 filing cabinet, pulls
out the Second Grade drawer, and comes back with a paper with the teacher’s
name on it. Mrs. Lane. Plus stories about her. She wore dark blue wooden
bracelets that clacked together. She had a windup Victrola in the classroom.
Before Christmas vacation, she brought in a radio and played
A Christmas Carol with Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge. (It
was on the radio from 1934 to 1953.)

Think about how big that room must be by the time you finish high school.
When you graduate from college. If you paid attention in your classes,
you added half a dozen filing cabinets each year. One of my filing cabinets
holds all the boring philosophy I had to listen to the year my husband
majored in philosophy. It also holds the folk songs he sang and the guitar
etudes he played. I earned two graduate degrees in English, so I have more
cabinets filled with lessons in English grammar, the complete works of
Shakespeare and Milton, plus a lot of history and comparative religion,
even some French. My computer and technology cabinet, however, is pretty
barren. I’d rather hire people to do the technical stuff. I still read
a lot of history, so that cabinet is getting more and more overfilled.

But it’s good to have all those files in my head. While I’m editing, I
have to know enough to know when something is just plain wrong and I need
to do some fact checking for an author. I have to be able to tell an author
who wrote a children’s book about a shepherd who visits the baby Jesus
that, no, the inn that had no room for Mary and Joseph was not owned by
a
gemütlich German family. There were no Germanic tribes in the Roman
colony of Judea during the reign of Augustus. I have to give another author
the correct date of the Terror during the French Revolution. (The Terror
started in 1793.) I have to inform another author that the planet with
two suns is Tatooine. I have to be able to tell some authors to use fewer
adverbs so they can avoid writing Tom Swifties (“I’ve always been a successful
tennis player,” Tom said winningly. “Where’s my coat?” Tom asked coldly),
which are usually inappropriately humorous.

The room in my head? It’s really big and it’s totally filled with ceiling-high
filing cabinets whose drawers are so stuffed they’re impossible to close.
There’s paper all over the floor, too, piles and stacks of papers upon
which are scrawled esoteric and probably useless facts. (Hatshepsut lived
in Egypt before they called the rulers pharaohs, and because she was the
king of Egypt, she wore a false beard for official ceremonies.) And you
know what? My cute little forest critters are about as old and busy as
I am. They’re exhausted. They don’t always remember where to look for stuff
they used to be able to find right away, so now they just yell at me to
try Google. Some days I can’t help but wonder when the cute little forest
critters are gonna throw off their little jackets and caps and run away.
When will my brainy room and the filing cabinets in it either implode or
explode? Hopefully I’ll be able to let you know when that happens. Meanwhile,
if you find yourself forgetting things you know darn well you know, just
be patient and tell the cute little messengers in your filing room to look
in another cabinet. And to tidy up the papers on the floor as soon as they
have time.

Guest blog: John Fulford on English Spelling

I have a guest blogger this month.
John Fulford is my client and my friend. I’ve edited five of his books
(thought
not the cat cookbook) and we occasionally go to the theater together.
John is an Englishman who still speaks the Queen’s English, in which we
share an interest…well, I call it gooder English and my accent is pure
St. Louis, whereas his accent takes us right to
Masterpiece Theatre. Below are two excerpts from
The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules. John and I have had
some spirited conversations about spelling. I’m just not ready to accept
“fotograf” or “nosis” (for “gnosis”), and we’ve also argued about “catalogue”
and “catalog” and “dialogue” and “dialog.” He likes the versions unencumbered
with that silent “-ue,” whereas I seem to be more old-fashioned. Nevertheless,
just about anyone can benefit from reading John’s book.

Chapter 60, Dictionaries




A good dictionary is indispensable. English spelling is so complex that
nobody can claim that they have a perfect grasp and that they do not need
a dictionary. But there is a huge variety of dictionaries. They come in
all sizes and cover all subjects. There are scientific dictionaries and
medical dictionaries, and there are dictionaries of almost every known
language. There are dictionaries of proverbs, of quotes, of slang, of strange
words, and of obsolete words. One might wonder if there is a dictionary
for every subject under the sun.




Many publishers, both small and large, have produced a dictionary and
many of them call their product a “Webster’s dictionary.” Because the name
is not a protected name, as the name Merriam-Webster is, so there is nothing
to prevent any publisher from using it, and many do. Since no modern dictionary
is even remotely similar to Noah Webster’s original masterpiece, the name
has no real meaning today.




The accuracy of a dictionary can not be taken for granted. A detailed
study of any three or four dictionaries would very quickly produce scores
of disagreements and even some contradictions regarding the correct spelling
of some words. Unfortunately, when there is a difference in spelling, most
dictionaries play it safe and offer the reader a choice of what is available
with little, if any, explanation.




Modern publishers do not tread the path first blazed by Noah Webster.
For the most part, they are merely compilers of word lists, content to
stick to the status quo. They see themselves as recorders of what exists
today with no duty to give more than the necessary facts and, perhaps,
the etymology of the word. They sell their product by trumpeting the number
of words they have listed and increase the size of the book by adding material
that better belongs in an atlas or encyclopedia.




Few, if any, dictionaries attempt to influence spelling by coming down
firmly in favor of a particular spelling that logically follows the spelling
rules as against a spelling that is an aberration. Also, most dictionaries
are hesitant, almost reluctant, to accept new spellings despite the fact
that English spelling is constantly changing




Noah Webster would be most annoyed. He saw his dictionary as a teaching
tool to be used as a powerful influence on the language. He believed that
a dictionary should lead, not follow, and that it should do so energetically.
He forced Americans, and the world, to re-evaluate English spelling in
order to make it more logical. If Webster had been content to simply list
all the words as they then existed—complete with illogical spellings—the
American version of the English language would not be what it is today
and Webster would have vanished into obscurity like the dictionary compilers
who preceded him.






From Chapter 62, The Many Fascinating Attempts to Reform English Spelling




Since Noah Webster’s time there have been a number of attempts to reform,
or at least to improve, English spelling. They vary from the thoughtful
to the ludicrous. At the present time there is a widespread belief that
perhaps English spelling could be made more phonetic, despite the fact
that English is not a completely phonetic language. Roughly half of our
words are already spelled phonetically, but the other half could never
be spelled according to the rules of phonics without utter chaos. In the
words of the great writer Jonathan Swift,
Another cause...which hath contributed not a little to the maiming of
our language, is a foolish Opinion, advanced of late years, that we ought
to spell exactly as we speak, which besides the obvious inconvenience of
utterly destroying our Etymology, would be a thing we should never see
the end of(Webster, 1806, p. 15).




This is not to say that spelling is sacrosanct and should never be allowed
to change; on the contrary, our spelling is constantly changing, sometimes
at glacial speed, other times quite rapidly. But not all change is for
the better. A change in spelling is acceptable if it purges the original
word of superfluous letters or illogical construction. Simplification is
to be encouraged only if it does not change the meaning of the original
word in any way. It is imperative that the new spelling conform to the
spelling rules and that it resemble the original word as closely as possible.
Care should be taken to try to avoid the creation of yet another homophone
or homograph.




Many attempts to reform English spelling have been targeted at the alphabet.
George Bernard Shaw left the bulk of his fortune to a committee charged
with producing a better alphabet, but with no success. On the other hand,
the 19th century geniuses who produced the International Phonetic Alphabet
were very successful and the IPA, has proved immensely valuable.




Probably the most famous person to tackle the problem was Benjamin Franklin.
Although he was a friend of Noah Webster and an enthusiastic supporter
of Webster’s work, he was much more radical than Webster. Franklin designed
an alphabet containing six new letters, and he eliminated the c in favor
of either the s and the k. He showed his specially carved type to Webster,
but Webster declined to use it. Initially, Webster had proposed quite a
few revolutionary changes to English spelling, but the resistance that
he encountered soon persuaded him that the average person was—and still
is—not prepared to accept extraordinary changes to his or her mother tongue.
Although Webster gradually modified his suggestions, quite a large number
of his improvements were eventually accepted on both sides of the Atlantic.

I think I can. I think I can.

As you may already know, my cat, Schroedinger, bit the third finger of
my left hand on Tuesday night, June 16. There was blood all over the place
and my hand started swelling immediately. It’s a good thing I know some
first aid. At least I could clean and bandage it. But two days later it
was more swollen, so I called my primary care physician. She had no openings,
so I went to see her partner. He gave me a tetanus shot and a prescription
for antibiotics. He also wrapped my hand in about a mile of gauze. What
I've learned is that there's a bacterium (which I guess lives in cats’
fangs) that kills the cat's prey. My finger is not as big as a mouse, hence,
major infection. By Sunday, June 21, the back of my left hand looked like
a ripe plum. That's when I went to the ER. They kept me in the hospital
until Friday afternoon, June 26. The last time I was bitten by a cat was
in 1969.

Before I went to the ER and in spite of my swollen hand, I put my June
blog up in this space. Why did I do that? I had to. I owed it to the people
who read my blogs here. Remember The Little Engine That Could?




The Little Engine That Could is a children’s book that was first
published in the U.S. in 1930 (though there was an earlier version in 1920
that was part of a set of children’s books sold door-to-door). It’s still
in print and has appeared in numerous editions with numerous small changes.
It’s also been voted by teachers to be among the best books for children.
In the story, a long train needs to be pulled over a mountain. It asks
several large engines for help, but they all find reasons not to. Finally,
the long train asks a little engine, and the little engine works and works
and works—“I think I can, I think I can”—and gets the train over the mountain.
“I thought I could.” (You can read more
here.) 




Little kids like me who started school in the post-war years got fed a
lot of lessons in the middle-class values that had, our parents said, won
the war: hard work, perseverance, optimism, etc. My schoolmates and I at
Central School in Ferguson, Missouri, got thoroughly
Dick-and-Jane’d  and
Little Golden Booked. We were primed (brainwashed??) for the rise
of Middle America in the 1950s.

I posted my June blog and went to the hospital. I arrived at the ER at
6 p.m. and arrived in my hospital room on the sixth floor at 12:30 a.m.
The first thing they did (after giving me one of those highly fashionable
hospital gowns) was start an IV antibiotic. Then another one. One once
a day (at 5 a.m.), the other every six hours. For three days. Then we noticed
a streak moving up my arm. Two different (presumably stronger) IV antibiotics.
But I have psychic veins. They’re small and when they see a needle coming,
they hide. This means I ended up with IVs in five different places on my
right arm (not all at the same time) because I kept swelling up and they
kept having to find new veins to stick the catheters in.

Nobody likes to be in the hospital, and I was on the acute care floor,
where everyone else was dreadfully sick. Except for that swollen hand,
I was fine, so I struck up conversations with everyone who peeked in my
door. I met some terrific nurses, one of whom is a witch! I bet I was the
only Pagan patient at St. Mary Medical Center, which was founded in 1923
by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word (yes, it’s a Catholic hospital)
and my nurse is no doubt their only Pagan nurse. My daughter-in-law (also
a witch) came to visit me on Monday while the nurse was in my room. That’s
when the Catholic chaplain stopped by to chat. Was he surprised! He tried
and tried and tried to cite movies with witches in them, and we had to
keep telling him that movie witches are not us. Nevertheless, it was a
very cordial conversation.




I talked to the guys who empty the trash and scrub the floors, one of
whom is a philosopher; we had a good long conversation about, among other
things, ecology. I also talked to the young volunteers. One referred to
a website about a movie (I think) about people who travel back in time
to prevent other time travelers from changing things, like the works of
Charles Dickens. So I told her about Dickens’ life. I also told them my
nurse story: When I was in the sixth grade, I wanted to be a nurse. They
took us to a hospital. I saw blood. That’s when I said, “I’m going to be
an English teacher!” I introduced myself to all three of my physicians
as
Dr. Barbara Ardinger and told the nurses that Ph.D.’s were scholars
600 years before M.D.’s learned to wash their hands. When one of my doctors
came in on the Friday the Supreme Court made its wise decision about marriage
(June 26), he was wearing in a pink shirt and tie. He’s gay. And we have
mutual friends. I also got to explain who the Goddess is to a bunch of
people. Among other things, I told them about
Lucia Birnbaum’s  thesis that people walked out of Africa 50,000
years ago carrying their dark mother goddesses with them. (Lucia invited
me to lecture to one of her classes several years ago.) My guess is that
no one on the floor had met anyone like me before. Ya think??




Soooooooo, I ended up in the hospital for five nights and five days. My
neighbor fed the cats and my daughter-in-law brought me some stuff from
home—clean underwear, deodorant, books, my iPad, my phone and iPad chargers.
Comfort food: chocolate-chip cookies and pretzels.




My neighbor and my daughter-in-law both petted Schroedinger, but only
on the head. Since I've been home, we have both been to see our doctors.
Three times each. Schroedinger had a huge, painful abscess on her hip,
but I couldn’t see it under her beautiful Maine coon fur. When I touched
it by mistake, she bit me. She has an extreme sensitivity to fleas and
was going into what were almost seizures when a flea bit her. She was more
or less eating herself. Her doctor examined her, shaved her hip, and gave
her shots of antibiotics and other things. She is now completely healed
and the fur is growing back in.




And The Little Engine That Could? I’m not quite totally thrashed anymore.
But I can’t just sit around while my finger is healing, can I. Things have
to be done, and when your only roommates are two cats, you’re the one who
has to do those things. Go to the grocery store and the gas station. “I
think I can.” Fix meals (well, sort of—I haven’t been hungry). Nothing
heroic. Doing what has to be done. Feed the cats, empty the little box.
Do the laundry. “I think I can.” Take out the trash and the recycling.
Work for a living. “I think I can, I think I can.” The back of my hand
no longer looks like a plum and though my finger is still stiff, I can
type again. “I thought I could.”

Hangin’ out in the Parking Lot

This is a pretend diary based on notes in my organizer (which is a binder
with actual paper in it) and real events. I tried keeping a real diary
back when I was in college, but it got cumbersome and I got bored.

Thursday, June 4. I’m going to see the new production of

Mary Poppins  on Saturday up at the
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.  I’ve been there a
bunch of times and know how to get there, so that’s something I don’t need
to worry about.

I decided I wanted to see this Mary Poppins, which is based on the
1964 Disney movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke and based
on novels by P.L. Travers, as soon as I noticed that the book for the play
was written by
Julian Fellowes.   I’m a great admirers of Fellowes’ work.
He wrote

Gosford Park (2001), which was more or less based on

Upstairs Downstairs (BBC and PBS, 1971-75), which introduced
us to the dramas of the servants of the great families of the great houses
of England. Gosford Park won Fellowes an Oscar for the screenplay. Fellowes
is also the creator of

Downton Abbey,  whose fifth and final season will probably
begin in December. He is also an actor. I have a box of Noel Coward plays,
one of which is a 1981 production of

Present Laughter starring Donald Sinden as a famous English actor
with a complex life. Fellowes plays a crazed (or crazy) young playwright
who arrives to visit Sinden and steals the show. So, yeah, his work on
the book is the reason I want to see this Mary Poppins.

Friday, June 5.
Mary Poppins is tomorrow. Yikes! I just discovered that I bought
two e-tickets. That was months ago. But who’s gonna go with me? Phone calls
to friends. Penny is busy tomorrow. Tom is going to ballet. Lianne is busy,
too. But I talk her into it.




Lianne is another Cancer, and we’ve been friends, as far as we can figure,
for 15 or 16 years. Early on, she said she wanted to see Wicked, and I
said, “Hey, you need to see
Wicked with a real witch! Me!” So she and I went to the Pantages
in Hollywood and saw
Wicked and loved it, and that started our trend of going to the theater
together four or five times a year. A few years ago, she also had season
tickets to the Pacific Symphony (seats in Row J, center) and invited me
to go with her from time to time. We went to some wonderful concerts.

“Lianne,” I say, when she finally agrees that she wants to see
Mary Poppins, "let’s meet in the
Katella Deli parking lot and drive up to La Mirada in one car.” We’ve
done that before. Katella Deli is more or less equidistant from her home
in Santa Ana and mine in Long Beach and sort of on the way to La Mirada.

Saturday, June 6, noon. E-tickets in my purse. Check. Double-check. Binoculars
in my purse. Check. Food and water for the cats. Check. I pet them and
say, “I’m going out now. I’ll be back. You be good.” Of course they understand
me. An almost full tank of gas in my car. Check.




Saturday, June 6, 12:30. Here I am in the parking lot. Lunchtime at an
extremely popular restaurant, and I thought I could find a parking place??
Who am I kidding? Even armed with the Parking Place Word, I drive around
the lot twice. Finally, I say the Word with a whole lot of feeling. “ZZZZZZAAAAAAZZZZZ.”
It works. A spot opens up and I pop right in.




First thing, I get out my phone. “Lianne, I found a parking place. When
you get here, I’ll back out and you can pull in and I can drive.” “I should
be there in about ten minutes,” she says.




So I clean the canvas bags out of the front seat and stand behind my car
where she’ll be able to see me. And I stand there. And I stand there. Well,
it’s fun to look around. There’s a small bus from an assisted living center
parked in the first handicapped spot. The driver comes out and walks around
the bus. He starts the bus and opens the door, which is on the side I can’t
see. Pretty soon, elderly people are coming out of the restaurant and heading
for the bus. Most of them use canes, and two of them also have younger
people helping them walk. Uh oh, a man is heading off in the opposite direction.
The driver notices this, whistles a brief tune, and the wanderer immediately
turns around and heads for the bus. A few minutes later, the driver closes
the door and backs out of the parking space. Good for those people! It’s
nice to get out for a lunch that’s not institutional food.

Oh, there’s that huge Cadillac SUV going around again. I followed it up
and down two or three rows before I said the Word out loud. The driver
is a tiny woman who can barely see over the steering wheel. An old Pontiac
backs out of a space in the second row.
Spit spot!Cadillac’s parked, driver’s heading into the restaurant.
Oh, and that big pickup just found a space, too. A compact of some sort
rolled out, and the pickup backed in. I can still see a dozen or so cars
circling the lot and another half dozen stopped and lurking with their
turn signals on. They followed people coming out of the restaurant and
are claiming their parking places. Do people do this in parking lots outside
of Southern California?

My phone rings. It’s Lianne. “Traffic’s backed up. I’m at Chapman. I’ll
be there in about fifteen minutes.” Good grief. It’s 12:45, we’ve got at
least a 20-minute drive to La Mirada, and the curtain goes up at 2:00.
I’m one of those obsessively early people. Lianne isn’t.




It’s cool to see what people wear in public. There’s a little girl in
a soft pink T, an organdy skirt with ruffles of pink, yellow, and blue,
and pink ballet slippers. Has she just come from her ballet class? I played
piano at a ballet school when I was a teenager. That’s how I read
Quo Vadis. I memorized the waltzes real fast, so during barre exercises,
I propped the novel up on the music stand and read it while I played. Baby
ballerinas are beautiful. Now I see several men wearing T-shirts with team
names on them. None of which I recognize. And the people coming out of
the restaurant are nearly all carrying take-home bags. You get big—and
delicious—food at Katella Deli. There goes the guy in the sports car again.
Is he chasing the old Beetle or is it chasing him?




12:55. Lianne arrives! She comes close and calls out her window to me.
“Do you want me to drive?” Well, gee, it’ll take more time for me to back
out and her to pull in, and I feel like we’re already late. “Yeah,” I call
back, “lemme check my car, and you can drive. You remember how to get there?”
“Yes.” We’re pulling out of the lot. “Turn right,” I say.




We arrive at the theater, which has a big lot and free parking, in plenty
of time. The show is terrific. Wonderful dancing. Leigh Wakeford’s as good
as Dick Van Dyke. Brandi Burkhardt’s as good as Julie Andrews. Fellowes
changed some plots points of the story. No penguins. Material from a couple
of the other Poppins books. Mary Poppins flies out across the audience
before the curtain calls. And what do I find when I get home after supper
at the deli? My Netflix disk of

Saving Mr. Banks ,  which I saw and enjoyed when it came
out in 2013. It’s been a really good, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
day.