Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I have read that David Thoreau, hero of live-simply-and-off-the-grid, periodically went home so his mother could do his laundry. Is that true?

The young man was wearing what appeared to be a tiny flask on a chain around his neck. I asked, “Does it contain a magic potion?” “No,” he replied, “some ashes from my dead dog.”

Class notes from my college alumni magazine reported on an alum who had retired after four decades in the medical sales field. He said that he was now doing what he always wanted to, play Santa Claus. Besides telling us about his Santa company, he also proudly reported that he had been inducted into the International Santa Claus Hall of Fame. Who knew?

Who first said “boots on the ground”? I hope that I will soon know the last to use the cliché. Boots don’t kill. Boots don’t get killed. Boots don’t lose a leg, an arm, an eye. Boots don’t get PTSD. Boots don’t leave loved ones behind. People do. Let’s talk about people in combat, not footwear.

What does it take to get into heaven? If it is not doing harm to others, I may stand a chance. If it is how much good is done to others, I am not so sure. If it is the amount of sycophantic praying to an Almighty, I won’t make it.

The local library asked me: “Please tell us about a favorite book, that provided inspiration, guidance, laughter.” I responded:

I have no favorite book. At different times, different books have been meaningful or touching or captivating. What was important at eight or thirteen would not be now. At one point, I read Huckleberry Finn every year. I no longer do. At one point, I read a Charles Dickens book every summer. I no longer do. When I first read Moby Dick, I just saw it as boring. Several decades later, I thought that it was marvelous. I thought Bleak House was wonderful when I first read it. When I picked it up again thirty years later, I could not finish it. However, I have read The Great Gatsby three or four times and each time I was awed by it. Nonfiction has also been important. Especially influential to me and many others is John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. There are many books that have added to my life. I hope that there are more to come.

Amanda Chapman writes in the Acknowledgements to Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library, “Someone once said that any author who claims they don’t write in their bathrobe is a damn liar.” I decided long ago that you don’t need to know what I wear and don’t wear when I write for the blog.

Often when I hear a group singing “Sweet Caroline,” I realize that it is an overwhelmingly white group some of whom are at least slightly inebriated and who feel that they are meaningfully bonding into some sort of community through their singing. And given the chance, they will soon be singing about a long-lost shaker of salt.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The Trump Bibles cost $60, but for $40 more, you can get a limited edition signed by Jesus, a recent immigrant from Chiapas, maybe undocumented. But, hey, who’s to know?

My doctor was excited that he had turned 66. He runs sprints competitively, and was now moving into a class where no one was younger and sprightlier than he. He went to a tri-state meet recently and found that he was one of six entered in the sixty-yard race. Three would get medals, and he thought that finally he would get one. He finished fourth and said that the 69-year-old winner was really fast.

I have stepped up my playgoing recently. The other week, I saw Appropriate written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Belasco Theatre, which is a Broadway venue. I don’t go to many Broadway productions. Often they are not serious plays but spectacles aimed at tourists. I’ve already seen some of these in the past and am looking for something different now. And this year quite a few potentially interesting plays are opening. A brief description indicated Appropriate was a thought-provoking play, and because I could get tickets on one of my discount services, I went.

The play reminded me again of my ignorance, this time about Broadway and its denizens. I often don’t recognize stage actors even though they have performed repeatedly on Broadway and are significant stars to others. Listed above the title of this play was Sarah Paulson, who received a round of applause when she first entered. I had no idea who she was but apparently many others did.

I had complicated reactions to the play. On one level, it seemed clichéd: Yet another dysfunctional family, this one set in a former plantation home in the southeast Arkansas of 2011. However, it transcended the usual clichés. It was not only well-written and well-acted, it also had shocking twists that made me wonder how well we can know someone else and how we should react to the skeletons in our family’s closets.

Other than a brief description I had read of it, I knew nothing about Appropriate before going. Afterwards I read Jesse Green’s New York Times review. It was an unusual one. He said that a decade ago when the play opened at a smaller theater, he had given it a scathing review—“neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming,” he had written. Now he was giving it a rave, and he felt he had to explain why. He said that the playwright’s rewriting had sharpened the focus of the play as had the direction by Lila Neugebaur. He also praised the “daredevil cast,” but he said that these improvements only partly explained his present reaction. “Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of it.”

I was not entirely sure what the playwright was trying to tell us. I know that I have sometimes had an intense reaction to a play or movie. Often, however, this has been highly personal, and I did not expect others to respond in the same way. Perhaps Green meant something like what has happened to me with books: I try to read a classic and give up. But after time goes by, I pick up the novel again, and understand why it has been thought marvelous. Moby Dick comes to mind. (I am still waiting for this to happen with War and Peace. Three times I have tried and have yet to feel its magnificence.) For whatever the reason, some books were not right for me when I first attempted them but became so later in life. (On the other hand, there are books that I thought good when first read but later did not think highly of. I read some early Hemingway right after college and enjoyed it, but when I tried to reread those early novels decades later, I found them embarrassingly adolescent.) In any event, although I might not be as effusive in my praise as Jesse Green, Appropriate is worth seeing, at least with discount tickets. And it will produce a reaction from you.