Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 28

Marriage is a game and two can play it

BANK STOCKS SKID was the scary headline days ago sending shivers of 1929 and old newsreels of breadlines on Wall Street and Dorothea Lange photographs of migrant women and naturally the thought of a Crash makes me think we need to go out for entertainment, of which New York has plenty.

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks are playing at Birdland, a 12-piece band reliving Twenties stomps and blues with Vince’s bass sax honking at the head of the formation. The New York Phil is playing Messiaen’s Turangalîla symphony. There’s an Emo Ball with DJs playing disco hits and an All-Night Singles Party at which ladies drink for free. (How do they make sure you’re single? Or a lady?)

The Met is doing “Lohengrin,” so you could sing along (“Here comes the bride, big, fat and wide”) and then go to a club that offers Afro-Caribbean dancing from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Friday night. Four hours of German mysticism followed by euphoric dancing and then go out for waffles and sausage: what better way to get financial distress off your mind?

The Missus and I will be going to the Phil for the Messiaen, which is 80 minutes long and has an enlarged orchestra with maybe eleven percussionists. I married up, she’s a professional musician, and she loves Messiaen, and I will sit quietly and write in my program:

The composer O. Messiaen
Caught the measles and almost was gone
But was saved by physicians
To compose compositions
That go on and on. And then on.

She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.

The guy majored in economics, he’s on track to become a vice president at Amalgamated Linguini, they vacation on the Cape, the kids are in private schools, and suddenly she wants him to be an art critic and talk about ambience, brushwork, and chiaroscuro? And she walks on to the next piece as he follows her like a dog on a leash.

I find this more interesting than anything on the walls, the competitive aspects of marriage. Women’s ace card is the eye roll; they learn this by the age of 14 and use it on their mothers, and then on the husbands.

My sweetie has an eye roll that makes the room spin. Due to the fact that I’m an author and have so much on my mind, I have a hard time finding my glasses and keys and phone, even shoes, and she rolls her eyes and I have to sit down and put my head between my knees until I can see straight.

I go to the Met and am naturally drawn toward sculptures of naked people, some of which the Met places near the entrance so as to pull in folks from the Dakotas and Wisconsin where nudity is rather rare, big Roman figures with proud buttocks and muscular thighs and naked women standing tall and proud, but I only give the statuary a sidelong glance as she leads me toward the Egyptian pottery exhibit. She is fascinated by it. I am fascinated by her and the fact that she is interested in things that bore me to tears. Such as myself.

I’m rather tired of myself, if you want to know the truth, I’ve heard all my good lines dozens of times, but a few days ago when I stepped out of the shower and had to go to the hall closet to get a towel, she walked in and saw me and smiled. This was a smile you could take to the bank and it showed interest on her part, maybe not 100 percent but more than 7.5. “You’re dripping water on the floor,” she said but she said it softly and she didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t rip the towel off me and hurl me onto the bed but she was very nice to me the rest of the day. That’s all I can say for now. Wild horses couldn’t drag the rest out of me.

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Thanks to Lutherans I skipped ballet

I talked to a friend last week whose Lutheran church in Minneapolis is trying to attract people of color. Lutherans have been white for centuries, coming as they did from Scandinavia and Germany, countries that were never great colonial powers and didn’t grab big chunks of Africa and Lutheranize the indigenous people. Some Lutherans are more gray than white, but if you go to a Lutheran church you sense a monochromaticism due to the fact that people in the pews tend to be descendants of Lutherans, the faith was handed down, it’s like farming — most farmers grew up on a farm — not many Manhattanites develop a passion for soybeans and head for North Dakota to buy 400 acres and a John Deere.

“I know that,” he said, “but still.”

It’s a complicated subject.

I grew up in Minnesota, which is a Lutheran culture. Even Catholics are Lutheran, they tone down the glitzier aspects of Romanism and speak in flat tones and don’t make big sweeping hand gestures and the incense is simply Glade air freshener. Even the atheists are Lutheran. It’s a Lutheran god they don’t believe in. Of course, one shouldn’t generalize but Lutherans without exception are very polite and never say anything harsh about anyone — “I don’t get it” is as harsh as they get — and if you take them to a dreadful play, “It was interesting” is as negative as they’ll go.

They are dutiful people who, if you put on a party they stand off to the side and discuss public education and infrastructure needs and around 9:45 p.m. they start to clean up the kitchen and put things away, even while other people are opening a third beer and singing “I Saw Her Standing There.” Personal charm is not high on their list, they associate it with insurance salesmen. They do not express personal preference, and when offered a choice of desserts, they say, “Either one is fine, whatever, makes no difference to me, I’m happy either way, whatever you have more of.” This refusal to make choices is responsible for the very high rate of Lutheran strangulations.

The low point of their year is the summer vacation. She wants to go to California and he prefers Washington, D.C., so they compromise by going to the Happy Bison Motel in Bismarck, a warehouse surrounded by forty acres of asphalt and semis going by all night, and the air conditioner sounds like a power lathe. They go because her cousin lives nearby whom neither of them likes. And they are good and glad to get back home.

The question I ask myself is, “Do people of color really and truly wish to enlist in this army?” It isn’t just a religious faith, it’s a culture.

I’m not putting down Lutherans. There are advantages to being one. I read a review last night of two books by ballet dancers, both women, about the cruelty of the Swan Lake world, the physical pain, the abusive ballet masters, the starvation required to attain impossible physical perfection, the endless mindless repetition, and it struck me that, growing up in Anoka, Minnesota, among Lutherans, we didn’t know a leg extension from a dining room table. Had I grown up in the Hamptons or Boston I might be writing my own miserable memoir about suffering at the hands of choreographers, leaping around in black tights and hoisting skinny women up over my head while standing tippy-toe, and as you can see it didn’t happen. I am a comfortable guy with a good appetite and no back problems.

Growing up among Lutherans also helped to deter me from committing tax fraud, soliciting state officials to commit election fraud, fomenting an insurrection, and perpetrating big lies, which means I’m not waiting for the phone to ring, someone calling to tell me I’m under indictment in several different jurisdictions all at once, facing a long summer in courtrooms, dreading the thought of being led away in an orange prison outfit.

Instead I went to church Sunday and said the prayer of contrition for my sins, which include pride, envy, and sloth — I seem to have gluttony and lust under control for now though maybe that’s pride speaking — and afterward I shook hands with people in the pews around me. We’re Episcopalians and it’s New York so there’s a variety of people around, but people are people. Some of them may be secretly Lutheran, I don’t know, we don’t ask. God loves them all.

 

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The worst play I ever saw: a landmark

I went for a walk in the park Wednesday and saw crocuses blooming and cherry trees budding and high school gym classes out running and it really seemed as if spring is coming to New York, a great city that deserves a break. An excellent story by William Finnegan in last week’s New Yorker opens a window on the Democratic incompetence and squalid corporate corruption that frustrates all attempts to replace Penn Station. Every Democrat should read it.

This hellhole sits in Midtown making millions of people miserable, and nobody in power holds out any prospect of success, meanwhile the Democratic Party is plagued with progressives out to prove their purity by winning defeat.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, populated by liberals who read the Times religiously and grieve for the sorrows of the world and then comfort ourselves with an $8 croissant and a cup of premium Ecuadorian rain-forest coffee with oat milk. As an old lib, I felt obliged to go to a play Wednesday night about homelessness, which had no story line, just a good deal of suffering onstage (then in the audience), some shouting, weeping, most of it incomprehensible, but the audience worked diligently to appreciate it and gave it a partial standing ovation.

The Times, of course, gave it a rave review (“heartbreaking”) and the critic, who had the advantage of having read the script, managed to find a sort of narrative, but to us groundlings, it was ninety minutes of sheer misery, like sitting on the floor of Penn Station waiting for a train and being hustled by panhandlers and crazy people, but given our upbringing, we felt guilty for not enjoying it.

Well, I refuse to go to the theater and pay to be punished.

The theater is for entertainment. It can be light or dark but it must have a story and be comprehensible and engage the audience and take them someplace. The Times critic found it meaningful that the actors glared at the audience — it “implicates the audience,” he said. Well, I’m not implicated: I didn’t write this play. I’m not responsible for making hundreds of people waste an evening.

I grew up in Minnesota so I was brought up to be nice. I have never raised my voice except at athletic events. I do not complain to the person at the drive-up window that the onion rings seem to be day-old rings. When I call to refill a prescription, I say “Thank you” to the clerk and I’m gratified if, instead of “No problem,” she says, “You’re welcome.” It means she was brought up as I was. “No problem” is a brush-off. “You’re welcome” is a kindness. But I am ashamed of myself for not walking out of that play.

My fellow Minnesotans may imagine New Yorkers as pushy and rude but they’ve never ridden the C train during rush hour with a hundred people in a lurching car standing a few inches from each other and avoiding contact. An exercise of extreme delicacy. Sometimes a homeless person comes into a car and makes a pitch for money. People listen. But the homeless person needs to have a story that is understandable and succinct, and if it is, people will put money in the hat. It’s not enough to just glare at people.

I go to church and if, one Sunday, Father Dylan lashes into us for our indifference to the poor, I will accept it up to a point if the man seems Spirit-driven, shouts, weeps, is passionate to the point of lunacy. But I won’t pay $75 to go to the theater and be glared at. That’s just privileged people flagellating themselves with dental floss.

The social justice movement is very appealing. There’s no need to march and carry signs — that ended decades ago — now you just check the boxes and click on LIKE and you’re in. This is likely to wipe out comedy and lead to more dreadful theater, perhaps a play about climate change in a theater full of smoke and the thermostat set at 105. Actors moving through the audience jabbing people with plastic forks.

Raise the minimum wage to $15. Fix the health care system to provide drug rehab. Rebuild Penn Station. Enough with the charades. Be real.

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Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson – The Family Car

 

 

 

 

 

(Watch)

 

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The old man’s winter weekend

In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, so it was odd to wind up in comedy, but my mother loved Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, so there’s the hitch. I started the show to amuse her, and I succeeded. And the one Saturday night in Omaha did too. A tall woman and I sang love duets while a piano player with wild hair kept the beat and I did octogenarian stand-up and the audience accepted this pretty well.

I get sort of euphoric singing harmony because I’m a writer and writing is drudgery, not so different from cleaning hotel rooms. All writing is rewriting and it’s never finished. No writer reads his own work with pleasure. But singing harmony to this woman is like a trapeze act, I hang upside down and swing and she times her leap and catches my wrists and it’s sort of amazing every time.

We sang Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies,” a song I love though I don’t understand it (“This is the story of how we begin to remember … after the dream of falling and calling your name out”???) and the piano player gets a great rambunctious break and then the tall woman whistles through her teeth, grinning, and the audience whoops and yells, and then I talk about a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.

Omaha is a well-kept city with a handsome classic downtown and I ate lunch in a downtown café a few tables away from a long table with six middle-aged guys around it and I loved listening to them talk. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but the tones of the voices, the cadences, the overlaps, made it obvious they’d known each other for decades, the harmony of old friends. The tall woman, our producer Sam, the wild-haired one, and I have known each other for decades and our conversation on tour is not so different from the six guys. Old friends. It’s a blessing you don’t expect when you’re young and beset with your own troubles and then it dawns on you that familiarity is beautiful.

The plane descended through scattered clouds and suddenly there was New York harbor, the tiny statue of Miss Liberty, the towers of lower Manhattan, Governors Island, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, the Brooklyn Bridge, the great panorama of boxes and plazas and the stories contained therein, the intensity and density of human life, and the great park in the middle of Manhattan where my love is out for a walk. She missed me when I was away. She saw the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and it was fabulous but now it’s time to resume daily life. I take a cab to the apartment and I embrace her, we talk to our girl up in Connecticut, we play Scrabble.

I could live cheerfully in Omaha, I can be happy in New York, all I need is my love, a good church, a few old friends, and a measure of good luck. The city has a place in my heart because my dad brought me here when I was 11 and it was the only time in my life I had him all to myself for a couple weeks, a great privilege, and I think of him here. He spent his Army years in New York working in the main post office, which is a few blocks from the main library where I like to go to work. I sit in a long reading room, at a table with reading lamps, surrounded by people in their twenties all studying, most of them Asian, and I like being among them, these young strivers. I’m striving myself. It’s crazy but I feel I have yet to do my best work. If I’m in St. Paul, I’m surrounded by my past, and in New York there’s only the future.

Except when I cross over to Grand Central Station. My dad took me there, for the sheer grandeur of it, and when I walk in and look up at the arched ceiling with the sparkly lights, I get to be 11 again. Then down to the subway, take the shuttle to Times Square and ride the C train home.

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Thinking about that woman in Kentucky

I was down in Frankfort, Kentucky, last week and sat in a café one morning and a fortyish woman in a white uniform approached and said, “What can I get you, Hon?” and I, being a Northerner, was rather touched because female food service workers up North don’t go around Honning male customers. I’ve been Deared a few times but only by women older than I and they may have Deared me from dementia. Once a waitperson in Minneapolis Friended me and I almost spilled my coffee.

(Notice that I don’t refer to them as a “waitress.” The “-ess” is a diminutive, it’s a patronizing relic of male dominance; she is a Waitperson, even though that term could be mistaken as “Weight Person,” meaning “fat lady.” Anyway, female service personnel in Minnesota do not address a man as “hon” or any other term of affection and if he addressed her as Hon, he could be arrested, handcuffed, and taken downtown.

I’m fine with that. We live in a changing world and I try to go with the flow. But I can admit to you, dear reader — may I call you “dear,” sweetheart? — that “Hon” touched me and I also admit that I overtipped her, and the Honning was a factor in that. It made me feel like it was 1958 again and Jerry Lee Lewis was on TV playing stand-up piano on “Great Balls of Fire,” back when rock ’n’ roll was more fun, before it was taken over by alienated loners.

I ordered biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Southern food, I wanted to fit in. I didn’t want other patrons to look at me and see my bowl of artisanal granola and think, “That man wants to confiscate our guns and teach our grandchildren about transgentrification.”

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.

I am a privileged white Anglo male — privileged in that my parents loved each other and didn’t drink and I got a decent basic education in the public schools and I grew up fundamentalist, which once you’re done with it, life gets much easier, and attended a land-grant university back when you could pay your tuition with a part-time job and I got into radio by virtue of the fact that I was the only applicant for the job — and the woman who waited on me probably didn’t have those advantages.

Maybe the “Hon” was an appeal for kindness by a woman who’d suffered indignities and felt exploited and trodden upon. Maybe she hates her job. Maybe her younger no-good brother got to go to college and she didn’t. She’s smarter than he is by a long shot and look how he messed up his life. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” In other words, we’re not so different from the mouse who scurries through the underbrush only to feel the claws around his neck and hear enormous wings flap and suddenly he’s fifty feet in the air being delivered to the eagle’s kiddos.

But I’m not looking over my shoulder. I am pledged to cheerfulness. I was supposed to die twenty years ago but surgeons got to work and my sentence was commuted and I am very grateful. You would be too, buttercup.

One beautiful thing about getting old is the irrelevance. It’s a troubled world and my importance in it is very slight, not like when I was young and the center of the solar system, and now I enjoy the world more than ever, including biscuits and gravy in Kentucky, home of Mitch McConnell (“Be good, Mitch baby. Lighten up, kiddo.”), and I advise you to live longer. Smile at the woman who serves you breakfast and don’t order biscuits and gravy. Bran flakes with berries is much better for you.

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I missed out on the big storm regretfully

I flew down to Florida for a few days and regret missing the blizzard in Minnesota. I love snow, but I’m afraid of slipping and falling and joining the Joint Replacement Society, whereas in Florida you’d only slip on a banana. I needed to walk and take long strides, which facilitates clear thinking. And what I think, after a brisk walk, is that Florida is a lovely place if you don’t have anything to do and want to be with other people who don’t either. The major industry is relaxation. The bars open at noon, people have a few screwdrivers and go home and take a two-hour nap and watch a golf tournament and then maybe read Instagram or hang out with their iguana. The air conditioning is so cold, you have to wear a parka indoors. There is background music everywhere. Every lobby has a television on that nobody’s watching, music that nobody’s listening to, an environmental drug to keep people from thinking.

Northerners go to Florida to find happiness and after about thirty-six hours they realize that climate does not solve their problems: even though it’s 75 degrees, they still are themselves and that’s their problem. They feel isolated, their life is purposeless, they believe stuff they know is not true. You don’t notice this sort of thing in Minnesota because you’re struggling for survival. Your sidewalk is under deep snowdrifts you are morally obligated to shovel, otherwise you’ll be a pariah in the eyes of your neighbors, and they will never invite you to their potluck again, so you pick up your shovel and heave heavy snow ten feet over the snowbanks and then sit down on the icy sidewalk to rest and the coronary hits you and now you notice the coyotes closing in. You live in south Minneapolis but carnivorous animals are on the lookout for the halt and the lame so you call your wife on the cellphone and she comes out with the shotgun and kills a couple of coyotes and hauls you on a toboggan out to the street where the EMTs pick you up and take you to the hospital where you find out it wasn’t a coronary but a colonary — when you sit down on ice, you get polaroids. So you sit on a butt warmer and you’re fine.

In all of this, you never feel isolated or pointless, just terror.

In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight and seem to prefer this life to their former working life, which calls into question the very meaning of our free-enterprise culture. I mean, if Methodists preferred to be mollusks, then why bother going to Bible Study?

Senator Scott of Florida had a good point when he suggested cutting back on Social Security and Medicare. Why should our tax dollars go to subsidize inertia?

I had a couple empty days in Florida and missed out on the snow adventure in Minnesota, a bad choice, though the 16 inches they actually got fell far short of the historic Halloween blizzard of 1991. That was a high point of my life. I was living in a log cabin in the woods, snow up to the windowsills, my water heater frozen, power lines down, pump was dead, and brown bears were clawing at the windows, making deep anticipatory feeding sounds. I was resigned to meeting my Maker when instead a young woman rapped on the door. She was on skis, holding a flare to scare the bears. She came in, lit a fire in the fireplace, taped up the power lines, started the pump, the water heater came on, and she made a pot of dandelion tea. I married her of course and it’s been thirty years of happiness, aside from a couple of misbegotten vacations in Florida. Florida gives a woman a chance to show off her legs, but Minnesota winter demands competence, which is a better basis for falling in love, so I have found. Opening a window to a chill wind gives you reason to crawl into bed with your arms around each other. Sitting in adjacent chaises and clinking your pineapple mai tais is not the same thing.

If you read about a snowstorm forecast for Minnesota, get on a plane with your lover and head for Bemidji, the headwaters of the Mississippi. It’ll be an experience you’ll cherish forever. Guaranteed.

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So much is known but mystery remains

We’ve learned something about privacy lately, namely that it doesn’t exactly exist. The case against the man accused of murdering four students in Idaho shows that cellphone tracking and ubiquitous surveillance cameras make it possible for law enforcement to learn a great deal about a person of interest. Spy satellites enable intelligence agencies to focus in on you as you park at the drive-up window and see how many Egg McMuffins you ordered and whether you take your coffee light or black. And a defamation lawsuit against Fox has subpoenaed internal memos showing that the network’s top stars managed to forget what is fact and what is not and why they should care.

There’s no getting around the fact that we’re more visible than we can imagine and if you care to be paranoid, you now have a reason to be, though in fact the spyware is gathering so much data, gazillions of gigabytes, more than anybody can analyze, and so there is safety in confusion.

Our ancestors came to this great vast country expecting to find freedom, including the freedom to pee in your own back forty without the Department of Urination ticketing you and when the neighbors got too close they headed west and crossed the Missouri and looked for wide-open spaces where you could see for a mile and not see anybody and so know that others aren’t watching you.

To be observed, or feel observed, is to be inhibited. And as I write this, I realize I’m sitting in my living room in my underwear and the shades aren’t pulled and if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go put on a pair of pants.

Okay. Good. Thanks for your patience.

Anyway, I live in Manhattan where privacy derives from anonymity. Living in St. Paul I felt watched, passersby wondering why someone from the town of Anoka is wearing such a nice suit, people who know people who used to know me and who say I need to be taken down a notch, but in New York I’m just one more old white guy and unless I collapse on the sidewalk, they leave me alone. There are a million of us OWGs here and we are easily overlooked, thank goodness.

Frankly, the number of men and women who could walk down a New York Street and be instantly recognized is rather low and getting lower. Frank and Elvis are gone and so is Marilyn. Pop culture has become so diverse, subdivided, stratified, overpopulated, that famous people are famous to only a few. They may have millions of followers on TikTok but nobody is following them down Columbus Avenue.

At the moment, the biggest star in New York is Flaco, the owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo when a vandal cut open his cage, a big six-pound owl with pointy ears and a six-foot wingspread whom the cops saw walking down a sidewalk and tried to capture but he got away and now he’s living in Central Park, feeding on rodents and squirrels and birds, and authorities have decided to let him be.

My wife spotted him Saturday perched high in an American elm in the park, very well camouflaged — she spotted him only because a crowd of fifty or so stood around the tree, many of them with big-lens cameras on tripods, as many cameras as you’d see at a presidential press conference. Flaco’s breed of owl has a life expectancy of 50 years and he is only 13 and Central Park is his hometown so he may well be around here long after us OWGs.

He is a true celebrity. He grew up in the zoo so he is accustomed to people staring at him and now, thanks to the intervention of a vandal, he achieved freedom. Flying was a problem and evidently he spent some time as a pedestrian but he managed to get up into a tree where he can now gaze down on his fan club. He has become our own adolescent child. Does he feel the urge to leave home and does he have the strength to head for the Catskills? Or will he stay in his enclave of woods surrounded by apartment towers? He is a Eurasian eagle-owl, unlikely to find a suitable mate in Manhattan, and what if he should take up an illicit romance with a swan? We wait. We watch. We worry he may eat poisoned rats. A city is in wonderment. We don’t know or care who is mayor but we care about Flaco.

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SING ALONG (July 2022)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sing Along (Watch)

 

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We get around correctness by means of comedy

I am an American and the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings is my source of sustenance, just as I prefer baseball to soccer or a republic to a monarchy. My sweetie serves me locally sourced non-GMO tofu with artisanal farro, which I regard as cattle feed but I eat it knowing that she is right and it is good for me.

Wives tend to be right about 87 percent of the time and this high incidence of correctness can be hard to get used to; a man may start to feel that marriage is a correctional institution. I put on a suit the other morning and she said, “You can’t wear that, people will wonder how can his wife let him go around looking like that.” She said the pants were not the same shade of black as the jacket. I couldn’t see it. I guess I’m so occupied with the environment and economic justice that I don’t have time to worry about matching colors, but I put on a different suit. I don’t want to be a public spectacle unless people are buying tickets to see it.

I love this woman and will do anything to make her happy. Anything. I was making my breakfast a couple days ago and she looked at me and said, “Your jeans are falling down.” I was cracking eggs into a saucepan. She said it again. I had an inspiration and ignored her and scrambled the eggs as my pants descended. “What are you doing?” she said as my pants slipped down to my ankles. She laughed so hard, she almost fell over. I never did slapstick before but this was a wonderful Buster Keaton moment and I pass it on to other men as a useful maneuver. She was highly amused and this is a woman who loves Tchaikovsky and opera and books about European history.

If you want to endear yourself to your spouse, drop your pants. It works.

I write this as I sit in a hotel room in Wichita, on a weeklong tour of doing shows. We miss each other but we also enjoy being apart. She can get together with her musician pals and reminisce about Tanglewood and who was the guy who played the viola solo in “Don Carlo” and wasn’t he married to that pianist who played that Philip Glass sonata at Aspen and bats flew out of the rafters and attacked her, the one who became a veterinary aromatherapist in Oklahoma?

Meanwhile I’m on the road, eating greasy food, keeping a diary, a diary, as it turns out, of diarrhea. And every night I stand in front of a mirror, practicing dropping my trousers. There’s an art to doing it, slowly, naturally, no-handed, and the facial expression of inept solemnity and profound unawareness. I’ll never do this in public; it’s only for her. I love making her happy. Once she accused me of poor aim while urinating and I told her that Minnesota is the center of North America and this gives us the right of continence, to pee where we like. She laughed. Not hard but convincingly.

I believe I am a necessity in her life. You can’t walk up to a stranger on the street and ask him to scratch your back up between your shoulder blades. You can’t ask a man at the bus stop how he feels about your hairstyle. You tell a stranger on the street that his pants and jacket don’t match, he may post an unflattering photo of you on Instagram.

For her I am willing to leave Minnesota and live in New York where I don’t know anybody. But after thirty years together, I know when she’s happy. She comes back exhilarated from a hike around Central Park; she is delighted as the chandeliers rise to the ceiling at the Met and the lights dim, the orchestra tunes, the maestro enters the pit, bows, baton raised, and a gorgeous familiar story is about to begin.

I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”

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