Fun Stuff

I said there was fun stuff, and I'm going to write about the fun stuff, because it was fun. One can't always dwell on the unfun, can one?

Hey, that's almost a tongue-twister. Not quite, but listen--
one can't always dwell on the unfun
can one?
okay, not even almost a tongue-twister. But it rhymes.

Anyway, one could always dwell on the unfun, but it wouldn't make for a very fun existence. I won't call it a life because it wouldn't be a life. It would be a walking death. A living anesthesia. I choose to live.

So on with the fun:

Gertrude Stein.

Let me say here and now that a life immersed in medieval literature does not prepare one for the intricacies of Gertrude Stein. "Sugar is not a vegetable." Hello! Chaucer said reasonable things. Well, okay, I mean, it's true that sugar is not a vegetable, so I suppose that's fairly reasonable. Let me find another Steinism. "Luck in loose plaster makes holy gauge and nearly that, nearly more states, more states come in town light kite, blight not white." WTF? WTHFF? (That's from "Tender Buttons" in case you're wondering, more specifically, "Lunch." I have no clue what she means by that. No clue whatsoever.

Please don't take that to mean that I believe everything Gertrude Stein said is bosh. Not at all. I like a lot of what she said. Here are only a few of my favorite Steinisms:

• “A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”
• "A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables."
• “An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.”
• “But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’”
• “Considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really frightening.”
• “Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”
• “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.”
• “The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”
• “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
• “We are always the same age inside.”
• “We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don’t know that men can do what women can do. That’s absolutely crucial. We can’t go on doing two jobs.”
• “What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?”
• “When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.”
• “You’ll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.”

Get the picture? I could go on and on and on, but I think I've made my point. Woman had a lot to say, and she said it. She didn't always say it in a way that was easy to understand, but she said it.

So the play we're doing, What Happened, A Play, is one of those things that isn't very easy to understand. Reading "Tender Buttons" is giving me a little bit to work on, although that's its own challenge. In the intro to the two plays in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (Carl Van Vechten, Ed.), she says this about the play: "And so all of a sudden I began to write plays. I remember very well the first one I wrote. i called it, WHAT HAPPENED, A PLAY, it is in GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS as are all the plays I wrote at that time. I think and always have thought that if you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A Play. I had just come home from a pleasant dinner party (elsewhere she tells us this dinner was given by Harry and Bridget Gibb) and I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives that are always happening, there are always plenty for the newspapers and there are always plenty in private life. Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many. In the country it is perfectly extraordinary how many complicated dramas go on all the time. And everybody knows them, so why tell another one. There is always a story going on. So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know or always tell. By everybody I do of course include myself. And so I wrote, WHAT HAPPENED, A PLAY. Then I wrote LADIES' VOICES. The idea in WHAT HAPPENED, A PLAY was without telling what happened, to make a play the essence of what happened."

So that's Gertrude Stein.

REHEARSAL:

Fun. Just, fun. Warm-ups, trying not to laugh as I watch everyone around me making extraordinarily grotesque faces and sticking their tongues out and knowing that I'm making the same extraordinarily grotesque faces and sticking my tongue out. Trying to keep up with Vanessa in the vocal warm-ups. Failing, but continuing to try.

Sidenote: "I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying." (Michael Jordan)

Tongue-twisters. I heart tongue-twisters. I stink at them too, but I still heart them.

And then we play. We play with props and space and movement. It amazes me anew each time how intense the play is. We get physical. I'm playing musical chair with another actor; the music stops; she moves to sit in the chair; before I know I'm going to do it, I pull the chair out from under her and triumphantly sit down. She falls on her ass. I pull over a little stool, and gesture to her to sit on it, apologizing in a whisper (we're not supposed to talk) for getting too caught up in the playing.

Another actor is stomping back and forth, back and forth, pacing furiously. I keep step with her, curious. Then I lock arms with her, hoping to slow her down, get into her mind, to without words find out what is troubling her. I put my arm around her shoulder. We slow down. I put my arms around her and hug her. Another actor joins in the embrace. She hugs back and suddenly there are real tears. The emotions that she has been carrying during the day have erupted, and we stop playing for a few minutes. Meanwhile, a fourth actor, feeling left out, goes to sit alone in a corner.

We play again without words. Someone begins beating on an overturned bucket with a rubber arm. Rhythm. Another person begins tootling with a squawking rubber chicken. Music. Another person ties a yoga strap to a hula hoop and begins strumming. We have a band, and we play and dance.

We form a choo-choo train, and chug-a-choo throughout the rehearsal area. When we begin to get tired, we go more slowly. When we feel more energy, we move more quickly, we raise our bodies up. When the train is almost at a stop, someone rushes up and pours coal into the engine, but the train is out of water, and we must stop then.

Someone hangs a hula hoop on the light fixtures on the wall. Another person is transfixed, and carefully lays a rubber hand on the light fixtures. We all work together until every single prop is suspended somehow on the light fixtures on the wall. We appreciate each other's work, and then after a moment of silent appreciation of our efforts, we then shake our heads and begin to undo everything. After working together to create, we then take it apart separately and are off in our own little worlds again.

It sounds crazy. Maybe it is. I love how we start off separately with a prop or two, a thought in our head, and we can all come together to create art. It's very moving to be a part of something like this.

Perhaps that's why my emotions are running high right now.