I got new glasses about a week ago, and I have been marveling at the clarity of my vision ever since. The world has at last regained its sharpness and shed its gauzy mantle. You're supposed to get your eyes checked once a year, but I had put it off for more than five. In that time, I saw distant lands, hundreds of plays, the faces of my niece and nephew for the first time--to say nothing of the faces of the Mona Lisa and Ryan Gosling--and none of them were in proper focus. I mean, I literally let life pass me by in a blur.
What a shame.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Griffin Theatre Company's Punk Rock is in this week's Time Out Chicago.
One day last week I happened to catch a few minutes of Days of Our Lives. In one of the scenes I saw, Dr. Marlena Evans (played by Deidre Hall, who was fired from the show a couple of years ago but has evidently been rehired) was confronting her villainous daughter, Sami, about something or other, which provoked accusations from Sami that Marlena cared about no one but herself and her lover, John Black.
This scene could have been taken from virtually any episode of the series since about 1993. There's nothing especially noteworthy about that, seeing as how most soap opera story lines are best measured in geologic time. What I did find surprising--what I found, in fact, downright eerie--was the fact that no performer employed on the show seems to have aged a single solitary day in the last 20 years.
Marlena, Sami, Kate Roberts, Dr. Lexie Carver--they all continue to sport their Clinton-era faces. At first, I figured this feat must have required some combination of surgical intervention and soft focus, but even the non-babe characters--your Abe Carvers, your Victor Kiriakises--look exactly the same as they always have, and I can't see them going under the knife to preserve their looks. The only explanation I can muster is that the rapid aging rates of the show's young characters, who often enter their teens a handful of years after they're born, has somehow screwed with the space-time continuum and arrested the movement of those sands in the hourglass.
I expect it feels like a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you never have to age. On the other, you spend your whole life acting out the same scenes with the same faces. Sort of like purgatory, but with more evil twins.
Books
READ: The Curtain by Milan Kundera, trans. by Linda Asher [a seven-part essay detailing the author's thoughts on the novel, a prosaic-comic-epic form that reveals the nature of the quotidian by pulling back the curtain of conventional wisdom, preconceived notions, readymade interpretations; paradoxically, then, capturing the everyday requires bold experimentation and embracing the new (it's not called the "novel" for nothing)].
COMING UP: Don DeLillo, Evelyn Waugh, Zoe Heller.
Plays
SAW: Fuck You, I Love You, Bye: The Rahm Emanuel Story (The Annoyance) [as part of my New Year's resolution to see more extracurricular theater].
Movies
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: Lesbians.
KITO'S SELECTION: Set It Off (dir. Gray, 1996) [Queen Latifah plays a lady bank robber with a mute, ever-writhing moll].
MINE: Personal Best (Towne, 1982) [don't worry: I held Kito and dried his tears during the sex scenes].
Art
SAW: "China Revisted" @ Schneider Gallery [a group show of photos and paintings about the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of old and new in contemporary China].
Current Interests
Coffee, movies, Chicago history, US politics, Chicago theater, attractive men, fashion, kids, TV, female pop stars, books.
Fool's Four
FOUR THINGS HEDY WEISS SHOULD SHOW US NEXT:
1. Her medicine cabinet.
2. Her dream journal.
3. Her collection of Civil War memorabilia.
4. The silver-plated hairbrush she runs through her waist-length hair each night while chanting self-encouragement slogans into the mirror.
Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "Four Songs My Mom Can't Get Out of Her Head."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "It'll be a cold day in Brisbane before I let The Coast become a portal to naked ladies."
&
"Travelling is a fool's paradise."
Glitter
I'm seeing Gypsy on Thursday at Drury Lane Oakbrook. So let's watch Bernadette Peters, who was in both the second national tour as Dainty June's understudy and the 2003 Broadway revival as Mama Rose, perform the climactic breakdown scene. Here she is, boys! Here she is, world! Here's Rose!
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Lookingglass Theatre Company's Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting is in the latest Chicago Reader.
Fuck You, I Love You, Bye: The Rahm Emanuel Story (Annoyance Theatre). Seventy years in the future, an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry recounts the rise to power of our short-fused mayor. Though not as biting as it could be, Marc Warzecha and Andy Cobb's script captures Chicago's peculiar fondness for dictators. Through February 25.
Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting (Lookingglass Theatre Company). On the eve of integrating the Dodgers, team president Branch Rickey and an assemblage of black superstars get together to argue. J. Nicole Brooks's ideally cast staging is crisp and exciting. Through February 19.
I Am Saying This Right Now (The Plagiarists). Audio recordings and short scenes, spliced together by Kaitlin Byrd. Part collage, part heartbreaking archival project aimed at retrieving lost time. Through February 11.
Ironmistress (Oracle Productions). April de Angelis's 1989 verse play about a mother-daughter pair straining at their 19th-century fetters. Karen Yates's stylized staging creates a fitting and effective sense of constriction. Through February 11.
Last fall, a production of Love, Loss, and What I Wore prompted Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss to give readers a glimpse into her closet, which turned out to be full of cinched-waisted jackets, granny boots, and voodoo dolls of Tony Kushner. Now, to complement her preview of a show called Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out, Weiss has provided a look at her Hoarders-like workspace.
I really hope nobody's planning a revival of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel.
[Thanks to Kris Vire for bringing this troubling trend to my attention.]
When I got my vision checked last week, the examiner noticed a spot in my left eye where the retina has worn thin. This is something to keep an eye on (pun intended) because the retina could come loose, filling my peripheral vision with streaks of light and requiring laser surgery to reattach it. She also recommended that I have my cholesterol checked because it looked to her as though tiny deposits have begun to accumulate in my eyes.
And I thought, so this is aging: acquiring an ever-growing list of things to watch out for, waiting for them to become serious. After which comes a parade of pills and procedures, until they lose their efficacy and the monumental effort to maintain, just maintain, spirals out of control and then it's a short trip to the grave.
On the bright side, I did pick out a really cute pair of frames.
Books
READ: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley [I'm totally on Team Goneril now].
COMING UP: Edward Mendelson, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon.
Movies
SAW: North by Northwest, Young Goethe in Love, The Conquest, The Iron Lady [which is just Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher, putzing around the house].
THIS WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
MINE: Blackthorn.
KITO'S: What's Your Number?
NEXT WEEK'S THEME: Lesbians.
Television
WATCHING: The Simpsons (Fox), The Good Wife (CBS), Glee (Fox), Top Chef: Texas (Bravo), 30 Rock (NBC), Parks and Recreation (NBC), Project Runway All Stars (Lifetime) [there's no Heidi Klum, Tim Gunn, Nina Garcia, or Michael Kors--which is bullshit].
Food
ATE: a 14-course prix fixe meal @ El Ideas [the meal took forever, but oh my God, y'all, there was this pork and parsnip dish that was the living end]; sausage and mushroom pizza and house salad @ Barbari.
Current Interests
Poetry, diabetes, my adolescence, my appearance, movies, attractive men, lesbians, pop music, US politics, the gays, TV, musicals, TOC, my dog Lucy, children's literature, my family, fashion.
Fool's Four
THE FIRST FULL SENTENCE ON PAGE 69 OF FOUR BOOKS I'M GIVING AWAY:
1. "The British colonial enterprise was the fairyland upon which the sun never sets and its capital the mysterious Asiatic Delhi whence the prince wanted to escape with his princess from foggy prosaic London."--The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
2. "Human beings are not, however, as a rule so made as to understand, without much previous education, what in fact will render them happy; nor, often enough, even when they do know, have they sufficient strength of character to pursue such courses, being prey to many distracting passions."--Political Ideas in the Romantic Age by Isaiah Berlin
3. "'And it bit off your face?'"--Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
4. "Here were the same low houses and palm fronds, the same impression of staged lighting, exclusively frontal, as if the backs of these buildings dissolved into unpainted slats and rotting canvas, into weeds and warm air--that stagnant, balmy, expectant air of Hollywood when the sun goes down."--Bech Is Back by John Updike
Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "There comes a point in any public Q&A session when some audience member asks a Q whose true A is, 'Jesus Christ, why do I even bother?'"
FOUR YEARS AGO: "With thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "The Four Most Played Songs in My iTunes Library."
SIX YEARS AGO: "I envy the lives of characters in foreign language textbooks: the days are always sunny and everyone's always smiling and asking one another the time."
Glitter
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is Monday, here's Billie Holiday performing "Strange Fruit," her haunting song about Southern lynchings.
ELSEWHERE:
My short review of Oracle Productions' Ironmistress is in this week's Chicago Reader.
Condensing my book collection was so cathartic last summer that I decided to kick off 2012 by marking a dozen more volumes for removal. I found all of the following works interesting when I read them, but I can't see myself ever cracking their spines again and there's no sense in them sitting on my shelves collecting dust. I plan to donate them to goodwill.
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt Political Ideas in the Romantic Age by Isaiah Berlin
[Berlin & Arendt, together at last!] Slouching towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Political Fictions by Joan Didion [I now have We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a single-volume collection of seven of Didion's nonfiction books, so I no longer need these individual copies] Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America by Alma Guillermoprieto Star Island by Carl Hiaasen Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra Bech: A Book and Bech Is Back by John Updike The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty Home at Grasmere by Dorothy and William Wordsworth
I finished working my way through Upstairs, Downstairs last fall. I didn't immediately dive into another TV show afterwards because, for one thing, I couldn't decide on one and, for another, I needed a break from the pressure of unwatched episodes weighing on me like an unread novel set aside after chapter four.
I feel I am ready to view again, however, and the show I have chosen, based on the recommendations of the BFF and a recent review in The New Yorker, is NBC's Parenthood. The show is currently in its third season, but I'm watching from the beginning via Netflix. I'm only a few episodes in, but so far there has been a lot of crying, both on the screen and on my face.
I have just one complaint: I feel that I wasn't adequately warned of how much Lauren Graham there would be.
