Same Old Lang Syne

The recent passing of Dan Fogelberg took me back to the summer of 1982. I’d graduated from high school the year before and was trying to put a responsible young adult’s life together, which meant going to work part-time and going to college part-time. My neighbor and childhood friend S— had just graduated from high school, and in the fall she was headed for UC Davis, but we were still hanging out, and that summer we played tennis and piano and guitar and occasionally went to the movies. S— was…how can I say this? She was my benchmark for what “good” in the conscientious sense meant to me, and although I was not a “bad” person, I struggled to be “good.” Though I appreciated music that was "bad" in the Sex Pistols sense, Dan Fogelberg was the sort of “good” music we listened to most, and when he swung through the Bay Area on tour for his double album “The Innocent Age” we bought tickets. S— drove us there and back in her Toyota Corolla. My parents—my mother especially—approved of S- whereas if I had been going to a beach house for the weekend with a bunch of other teenagers, approval and permission to go would not have been granted. In any case, I did like Fogelberg’s music, his voice, and in secret, his looks. I couldn’t tell S— this; I wasn’t out to her. I wasn’t out to many people. Among the various things I’d learned from all those missteps in Late High School was how far out of the closet to step, and with whom. But I could and did talk openly and freely about how much I loved Fogelberg’s voice and songwriting, and I realize as I’m writing that this provided a way of talking about a man turning you on without talking about a man turning you on.
Of course, I knew of Fogelberg from the single “Longer”, which peaked at Number Two on the Billboard charts back in 1980. “The Innocent Age” yielded four Top Ten singles, including one of the great all-time pop ballads, “Same Old Lang Syne.” The song is reminiscent of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” in that it tells a somewhat mawkish personal story, but it was an instant classic. Even at 18, I'd already suffered real love and real heartbreak, so I related to the song. Listening to some other samples from “The Innocent Age” while I’m writing this, I still hear the easefulness of the melodies and the lyrics that first, in combination with Fogelberg’s voice, captured me. I also hear the sound of a man who had found his passion and his gift and was using it, and I can’t help wondering now if that captured me as well.

This will be my last entry for the year. On Friday I am returning to New York City for a week. It will be my first visit there since my move to Buffalo in May. I am looking forward to seeing friends there; just as I now have a Buffalo family and a West Coast family, I still have a New York City family, and I need/want to see them. I also intend to “do” New York the way I need/want to: lots of social visits, but also sightseeing, restaurants, and maybe even a Broadway show. I am also curious to see what it is like to be there again, the city where so many of my own stories occurred, the city where I also found my own voice. Who knew that I would learn that you can, as Fogelberg did, take your voice anywhere and still sing the way you're supposed to? Wherever you are now, Mr. Fogelberg, I hope you're still singing.

A Few Acquaintances in a Big, Noisy City

Henry James has long been one of my personal passions. I’m not entirely sure why. He’s both hard to read and prolific, an irritating combination when just one of those distinctions can be annoying enough, but that challenge also appeals to my prideful side. I can say (with pride, yes) that I’ve read enough of James to know his work, but I can’t say I’ve read everything he’s written. Several times I have tackled one of his late-phase novels—The Golden Bowl, for example—and given up in complete frustration. It’s like the triathlon—you have to be ready. But I can say I’ve tried, just as I’ve tried to read Proust. I’ve read most of the tales and the early novels: Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady. I especially love The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square, and for a long time my favorite of the novels was The Bostonians. I read this many years ago in California and enjoyed it, but it took living in the East and seeing more of the world to develop a better understanding of and appreciation for the novel’s large subjects and themes. I’d be willing to bet that Claire Messud had The Bostonians at hand when she was writing her last novel, The Emperor’s Children. But I think I’ve a new favorite among the novels James wrote during this phase.
Like The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima was written in the 1880s. It’s a long novel, divided into six books. The hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is a bastard, the issue of a liaison between a nobleman and a courtesan. He lives in London in the mid-nineteenth century and falls in with some revolutionaries and radicals. He meets the title character, who has been converted to the revolutionary cause as well. The novel is lively, more energetic than one might give a writer like James credit for. Like The Bostonians, individual scenes and the overall story have the liveliness of a certain kind of Robert Altman film. Some of the secondary characters in The Bostonians, like Mrs. Birdseye, are as memorable as some of those in Nashville, like the Jeff Goldblum character, a magician who never says a word of dialogue. In The Princess Casamassima a number of personalities meet, connect, disconnect, and meet again. As in The Bostonians and Nashville, they are driven—sometimes together, sometimes apart—by purpose, ambition, cause. It’s remarkable that for the novel’s length, we don’t really meet more than two dozen characters, but we stay with them and close to them, while the teeming society they wish to change is this constant presence, with its implied constant motion, just beyond their garrets and parlors. I saw the new movie version of Sweeney Todd yesterday afternoon, and was aware of how Sondheim’s musical and Burton’s film version frame this pocket of people within a teeming city-society. Dickens has this aspect; I’m thinking of scenes in Great Expectations where the reader observes two characters in conversation, yet a lot of implied activity is going on in the street behind them. Middlemarch, one of my favorite reads of all time, has this as well. I feel like I know everything about mid-Victorian England by thoroughly knowing its four main characters. One contemporary novel that does this, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, goes even further I think, taking us so far into the lives of many, many individuals in the city of New York that rather than our having a sense of the blur beyond the immediate action, we have a sense of the main characters gradually dissolving into that blur.
I’d love to re-read The Princess Casamassima someday, but those other James volumes are lying in wait. The late Mr. Dwyer specialized in James; he has a complete hardcover set of the New York Edition and there they are, above my own paperbacks. Six volumes down, twenty to go.

Tradition

A friend and I used to have a tradition of making up a top-ten list of the movies we’d seen during the year. Actually, we used to see so many movies that we sometimes had top-twenty lists. This friend was sometimes able to say she saw at least one movie a week, often even more than that. I was intermittent about movie-going; some years were heavier than others. Still, I usually managed to cram in some of the summer blockbusters, or at least the year-end releases. This past year the following movies were memorable for me: Zodiac, Knocked Up, Hairspray, 3:10 to Yuma, and No Country for Old Men. I mention these five because they were the only movies I saw all year. Even taking into consideration those years when my moviegoing was light, this year was unusual. Part of this is due to the huge change I made in my life. I don’t have a circle of friends or even casual acquaintances to see movies with here in Buffalo. My brother and I have seen things in the past, but we didn’t rush out to see anything this year. I wasn’t compelled by the latest Pirates of the Caribbean installment and I’m not into Jason Bourne. I watch more movies on cable and DVD that I did in years past, but even that has dropped off as the months have gone by. In New York City, one felt socially pressured to participate in the sport of moviegoing. Moviegoing there is practically an amateur sport that most people participate in whether they know it or not. I would even go so far as to say that movie-avoidance in New York is a sport. You are bombarded with trailers and posters and publicity; you are likely to hear about movies before they open, as they open, and after they open. So the admission that one didn’t go to the movies in New York City would be like saying you didn’t read, almost as bad as farting loudly in a crowded elevator. Here in Buffalo, I feel in no way pressured to see the latest from the Brothers Coen or the newest documentary about the situation in Iraq. I read, of course, but not the way I did in New York; all that time on public transportation was especially useful there. So I miss long stretches of reading, but maybe I’m still adjusting. Because I’m in a car for several hours a day, I do listen to NPR more avidly, even compulsively. I websurf more, and stay in touch with current events via Internet, but I’ve stopped watching cable news, which has frankly gotten pretty silly. (The tipping point was CNN’s unveiling of an expensive new Weather Center the year after Katrina. The set looked like the stage of American Idol; you could feel the producers rubbing their hands in anticipation, then disappointment when an active hurricane season failed to materialize.)
But today, with the first truly heavy snowstorm of the year, I was ready: I wanted a movie, something escapist, ideally set on a tropical island, because of the weather outside. And there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Bee Movie. August Rush. Awake. Hitman. Alvin and the friggin' Chipmunks. Nothing.
(Sigh.)
Well, at least It's a Wonderful Life was on Friday night. Suspicion is on Turner Classic Movies, and I bought the Tim Weiner book on the CIA. A birthday present for myself, a tradition that hasn’t changed. Even if the kind of books I’m buying lately have changed. But that’s another story.

Solid Water

Of all the weather I’ve ever lived with, New York City weather was the least predictable. Because there weather is not the deal-breaker it is in other cities or parts of the country, a truly “beautiful” day—clear, dry, sunny, even a little warm—is a surprise and a gift, the kind of day that brings the masses out to lunch on the Bryant Park lawn or to Central Park to sunbathe. When I moved to NYC in 1992, the weather patterns still regularly brought spectacular electrical storms, as well as snow by the foot. I used to live on the sixth floor of an apartment that looked out over the Hudson, and when a good thunder-and-lightning storm approached from the west, I would open the window to watch the periodic flashes make their steady progress across New Jersey, sometimes counting “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand.” When the rain finally came down in a gust, I’d close the windows and watch the storm pass.
One evening in winter (based on where I was living, in Morningside Heights, this would have been the winter of ’93 or ’94), I came off the subway and noticed that the trees along Tiemann Place looked like they’d been dipped in liquid glass. They looked fragile, beautiful, magical. They caught and reflected light like jewels. I looked around and saw that every tree and even the fire escapes had the same clear coating of ice. During the day the snow must have started to melt, then the temperature probably dropped so fast that it froze quickly enough to remain perfectly clear. I’d never seen anything like it. I even went upstairs and looked up the word “rime,” as in “rimed with ice.”
The weather pattern here for the past few week has been the same: grey, cold, but not frigid. There’s a heavy dusting of snow on the ground. Lake effect snow comes at some point each day, but for now we’re not experiencing anything like the cold of last week. Even long-time residents were saying it was too cold. But there wasn’t much snow yet, so it wasn’t cold and snow. I asked my sister- in-law this morning if the sun ever comes out. She laughed, and said that it does, but that when it does it’s usually clear and cold. I’ve figured out where to keep my scarf, hat and gloves at all times, and I’ve learned out to use the four-wheel-overdrive on the battered used truck I often drive. I’m ready. Bring it on.

In the Wings, Part Two

And then it’s opening night (day, actually). You have a lot of work to do in the front of the house—briefing the ushers, answering questions, directing everyone to their dressing rooms, greeting the school groups and teachers—before double-timing it backstage, getting into your costume, distributing tasks to volunteers and collecting payments from the school groups who have reserved for the performance. Then you go back upstairs and cross behind the curtain because you are the one making the welcoming remarks and reading the synopsis of the ballet. The stage lights go out, the music rises in the darkness, and your heart races. It’s started before you know it, and you know there is nothing you can do but go on, that your cue is about to come up, that the woman playing Clara’s mother is miming to you as Clara’s Father to enter. Which you do. You’re moving onstage for the first time since the high school production of Auntie Mame. You’ve learned your gestures, your blocking, your two dances, and you begin to realize that the scene is going by much, much faster than it did in any rehearsal. Then you and the woman playing your wife are dancing stage front and center, and then you’re back against the wall again. You help Grandmother offstage. With that, your part onstage is done.
But not your part backstage. No, that is just beginning. You have a lot to do. You have to help drag the sofa into the wings during the fight between the Soldiers and the Mice. You have to keep the kids away from the side lights, so that the audience doesn’t see them. Now it’s intermission, and you have to help untie heavy canvas drops and roll them up and out of the way: the clock is ticking, you’re hands and fingers fly across the bar, and you feel like a crew member in the America’s Cup. You can’t look around; there’s so much going on you’ll get distracted. It’s like the worst restaurant rush you’ve ever seen, multiplied by ten. As the call for curtain is made, you hustle offstage and the second act begins. It’s less frenetic than the first, and you can actually watch some of the dancing. But you help pull Clara’s sled into the wings, and push Mother Ginger out in her five-foot-tall hoopskirt-and-stilts costume. When the soundman jostles the CD player (your humble troupe can’t afford a live orchestra, not yet) and the soloist has to improvise, you are enthralled and astonished and proud because she does so, like a pro. And you realize the Nutcracker doesn’t have to be what it was to you for so long, a piece of kitsch that came ‘round once a year like the Oscars. In fact, the ballet will never look—or sound—the same to you again.
The curtain closes and you hear the applause, and you know that part of it is yours. You still have work to do: organizing costumes. Where are the props for the first scene? And why is that crewman sitting down? Up! UP! There’s work to do. And when you next look out into the theater, it’s empty. Everyone’s gone home. There may be some little kid who thought the whole thing a waste of time, boring, stupid, and what was up with those guys and their crotches? He’s the one who’ll become you. But for each one of him, there’s a boy or a girl who might take this production to heart, who will believe—who wants to believe; needs to believe—in magic. He or she has no idea who you are, or what part you played, and there is no reason to know. Sure, eventually every artist needs to learn how to take art apart to see how it works. By and large, that’s for critics. Not dreamers. And you are still a dreamer.

In the Wings, Part One

You were sick of it: the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Waltz of the Flowers, that five minute Overture. Perhaps you saw (and were tortured by) Care Bears: The Nutcracker, or Barbie in the Nutcracker. Maybe you managed to reserve a bit of critical snobbery for the dancing mushroom sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. (Perhaps another kind of mushrooms helped.) In any case, it was the first ballet you were dragged to when you were a child. You snickered at the men in tights, yet wondered how that Christmas tree magically grew. You knew that theater mechanics were required to make it all work, yet a part of you believed—or wanted to believe; needed to believe—that magic was still possible.
You grew up; you thought, No way. You lived in San Francisco, but the Nutcracker staged by the excellent ballet company there…well, that was for kids from Contra Costa County and retirees from Hillsborough. Not you. You had taste. You moved on. To Trisha Brown, Mark Morris, Lar Lubovitch. When one of the New York or European companies swung through the Bay Area, you caught at least one of their shows. When you moved to New York City, you subscribed to dance wherever you could. You were in the dance capital of the country, and there were so many venues for dance, almost too many. The Joyce. Brooklyn Academy of Music. City Center. And of course, Lincoln Center. And the companies and choreographers! Ballet Frankfurt. Paul Taylor. Martha Graham. Rosas. Pina Bausch. You made discoveries of your own, companies you’d never heard of out in California: Susan Marshall, Doug Varone, Wally Cardona. You realized that the Joyce didn’t have a bad seat in the house; you noticed that Mark Morris went through an ecumenical phase and came through it a better choreographer. You saw a performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Rain,” set to Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians,” and tears came to your eyes because how could anything be so simple, so beautiful, and so moving. How could movement be moving?
Eventually you found yourself living in Western New York, with your brother, a retired professional dancer, who started a ballet school with his wife, also a retired dancer. You thought you could be of some help to them, at least for a couple of months, and two months turned into four, four into six, and before you knew it, you were caught up in preparations for their non-professional production of that tired old chestnut. They wanted to cast you as Mother Ginger, as a lark, and even considered you for Drosselmeyer, but you ended up as Clara’s father. You have other duties, important duties, in and around the production beside this role: grantwriting, fundraising, writing press releases, handling various administrative tasks, and you make light of your upcoming “debut” in the Nutcracker.
Until it begins to dawn on you that these kids have studied dance all their lives. That they have done so regardless of their color, their weight, their body type, their ability, their talent. That their parents make sacrifices of time and money to get them to class, weather permitting. That those parents drive them faithfully, for the most part, to rehearsals every weekend. That they’ve helped with fundraising and volunteer work. You realize that your own grantwriting and administrative work has been a part of this production, like it or not. And during rehearsal, you find yourself wanting to be as good as you possibly can. You keep missing the count in the parents’ second dance, and you haven’t rehearsed enough yourself, but you’re good at the miming and gestures that help bring the Party Scene to life. You recognize cues in the music you didn’t know were there, because you’re familiar with Tchaikovsky’s suite and not the full ballet score.