Sunday, August 26, 2007

Tears in all the right places

Beloved visiting the OSF Elizabethan stage in the 1970s

Last Son and I went to Ashland, where Beloved took me every summer in the mid-seventies, to have a look at a couple of Shakespeare plays and to walk around and gawk at all the rich Californians. The walk-around was all the horror show it promised to be, and we found ourselves spending more and more time in remote corners of Lithia Park in recovery from exposure to humanity. He's far more sensitive to this sort of thing than I, as he's dealing with a mild case of Asperger's, and sometimes I had to get up and walk, relying on him to stay with me, so that he could vent without terrorizing the objects of his dismay. It's a little like going for a walk with Dr. Swift, at his most misanthropic, through the heart of the madding crowd.

I suppose, if driving a huge SUV through hundreds of miles of scorched semi-arid country to buy bits of jewelry for two hundred dollars and sit down in sun-blasted open-air bistros to thirty-dollar plates is the kind of thing that you like, you will like the kind of thing that downtown Ashland is becoming.

Son appreciated the Green Show and The Tempest but had little liking for As You Like It. My views were in accord with his, though more muted, though for me there's relatively little harm that a company can do to AYLI, even when they try.

I had forgotten that there is a tendency for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to experiment wildly with the temporal settings of the plays in the Bowmer, as compared to their more conservative treatments on the outdoor Elizabethan stage. This AYLI was done up in Great Gatsby/Depression styles, complete with Charles the Wrestler spouting off in Brooklynese and the forest of Arden as a hobo jungle. The Shepherds were Oakies... this sort of thing can be hard to watch when lines about "What shall I do with my doublet and hose" must be declaimed by a character in overalls, complete with hammer-loop and screwdriver pocket.

To their credit, the players were full-on in both their comedy and pathos, none of the set pieces sounded at all trite, and the Rosalind (Miriam Laube), a very New-York-socialite Rosalind, reached and won over the audience and provoked tears in all the right places. Her relationship to Celia (Julie Oda) was also delightful. Son and I were in the second row, far left, so we often missed facial expressions in crucial scenes front and center on the thrust stage, which were to our right in the midst of most of the audience, yet I felt the blocking was well-directed and as fair as it could be to those of us on the periphery. Worth going to see? Yes, though perhaps not all by itself after such a harrowing drive...

The Green Show that opened for the Tempest was pleasing, though not at all what I would have expected from bygone days. We had been raised up, so to speak, on sackbuts, crumhorns, and peasant blouses, whereas this was sweat-glistening dancers in red and black Spandex. In keeping with the sense of aerial spirits from the play, though. The music was original compositions in a traditional Irish setting, with pennywhistles, drums, keyboard, fiddle, contralto and soprano. Very world-class.

I mentioned to Son that while the music was as good as its kind would be even in Ireland, the dancing was, while terrific, clearly not New York. To which he replied, "You forget, even New York is not the New York everyone hopes for. This is just fine."

When we got into the Allen Pavilion, I saw that the changes to the structure were unobtrusive even though there were now far more seats. Ours were in the last of the old rows, Q, behind which were the standing room only spaces. Far from the stage, yes, but with the acoustically enhanced balcony directly above us, the sound was improved from what I could remember.

This Tempest proved very spare, with minimalist attention to staging or costuming, and required much of its magic to come from within the actors, particularly Prospero (Derrick Lee Weeden), Miranda (Nell Geisslinger), Ariel (Nancy Rodriguez), and Caliban (Dan Donohue). They all delivered, and this was the best Prospero I had ever seen. The father-daughter relationship was strong and completely believable, and Prospero's conflicts in letting go -- of her, of Ariel, and of his mastery in his "arts" -- foregrounded beautifully. Shakespeare seems, through this interpretation, to be saying that that which renders us most human is a capacity for abjuring power over others.

The "entertainment" for Miranda and her Prince was one of those classic show-stoppers of the kind for which OSF is known. The backdrops of the inner stages were lit with a myriad of stars -- light-emitting diodes, I would guess -- and the ropes that had served earlier for rigging for the King's ship became climbing ropes for balletic spirits, softly lit from above, spinning slowly in unison while singing a capella. I caught myself with my mouth hanging open, and I'm sure I was not the only one.

The standing ovation for this production was richly deserved.

At the Tudor Guild, Son bought a Renaissance hat for Daughter and a "claymore" letter-opener for her young man.

For Beloved, I bought a refrigerator magnet with this quotation (Sonnets 119):

A RUINED LOVE,
WHEN IT IS BUILT
ANEW, GROWS FAIRER
THAN AT FIRST,
MORE STRONG,
FAR GREATER.

-30-

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Hours of amusement

The geese, ducks and chickens grow on apace. The first and rather skimping plum crop has been gathered and savored. Conditions are rather dry, so those plums which fell before we could get to them were found and commandeered immediately by ants. The rush to get at the plum juice was a bit of a risk for the ants, some of whom were trampled and drowned in the cracks on each dropped plum. We gather these separately, along with the bruised fallen apples, and toss them into the poultry yard, where they seem to afford hours of amusement, along with the thinned lettuce and such.

There should be free-range eggs in about three weeks. With this many birds there will need to be extra refrigeration for eggs, and Daughter has left her mini-fridge with us for the purpose.

Beloved's lush vegetable garden surpasses any we have ever had, showing her dad's wisdom in providing to us a homestead-sized compost tumbler, among the many things that have gone well. There are cucumber beetles and aphids, but almost everything looks healthy -- perhaps too much so. All the plants seem to be much more interested in foliage than fruiting. Shortage of bees? It would hardly seem there is too much nitrogen, as we don't apply commercial fertilizers.

Patty-pan squash is coming in, and is a big hit with us this year. Beloved slices these thin, radially, so that the result resembles slices of pear, and stir-fries them with her purple kale in a sauté of home-raised onions and garlic.

There are green and yellow zukes and straightneck summer squash as well, and great expanses of winter squash and pumpkin vines, though I don't see much besides the greenery at present. The brassicas mostly succumbed to the early hot spell but eggplant and peppers have recovered, and there will be crops. All the various beans look good, and the corn is spectacular, despite aphids in the silk. We will make a batch of very dilute soapy water and harass them a bit.


The cordwood is coming, and Beloved and I are stacking together when not doing other things. A delivered cord of firewood necessarily blocks the driveway and stacking cannot really be put off. A friend wanted me, or us if I could manage that, to come to a barbecue in town, and I had to say we were spoken for, which is true; we are more place-bound than most of our friends because of the high level of personal labor that goes into what we could call rural intentionality.

In rural intentionality, you do for yourself many of the things that, in convenience-oriented Western society, are handled by "labor-saving" (and often much more carbon-intensive) appliances. We hand-wash our dishes, sweep, use hand tools almost exclusively in our farm carpentering and maintenance projects, gather seeds, plant seeds in flats in the potting shed, "pot-on" our seedlings, transplant wild trees, hang clothes in the sun when we can -- all of which uses up precious time that could otherwise be spent sitting in front of a television.

And we like it better.

The downside will be that we don't see as much of people we like as maybe we'd like to do. However! Some of these will not want to "come over and help pull weeds." Some will think they'd like to do that but find out, in the process, that it's not really their thing. A few do find that this is a way they like to visit, yet we often discover we're a bit distracted and withdrawn while they're here; the fact is, we're something like hermits. We each want heaps of alone time, either working on our chores or having down time, or we want time together, as when stacking the wood. There has been so little of that, the doing of chores actually together, and we've really noticed of late that we're getting on in years.

I put on my gloves and take a chair down to the woodshed and begin laying a course of logs, perhaps sitting in the chair to avoid back strain. Then Beloved arrives with her own gloves and chair, and maybe a couple of glasses of homegrown mint tea, at about the time the row has reached knee height. She puts the tea and the chair in the shade and begins handing me the Douglas fir "sticks" -- each weighing five to fifteen pounds -- two at a time, which I place in the stack, with a rhythm which I once described to an acquaintance as "like playing Tetris." When we reach the ceiling of the woodshed and have tucked in the last bits on the top of the row, at about seven feet, we back out of the woodshed and the pile, remove our gloves, sit down side by side and drink the tea, murmuring over the profound work of art before us.

"Nice stack."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Looks better than last year's."

"Yep."

"I love this stuff."

"Me too."

"We're only going to get to do this maybe twenty more times, though."

"If we're lucky."

"Yep."

"Yep."

Back in the house, later, the phone rings. It's my mom.

"Whatcha been doing?"

"Stacking wood."

"Oh, you poor things. Why don't you put in some gas, already?"
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