Monthly Archives: June 2026

Why Do We Do It?

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It’s 1989.

It’s warm June evening.

We’re rehearsing KING LEAR.

Wait…

It’s an older story than that.

It’s an old and favorite tale among theatre folks, told a variety of ways. Here’s how I remember hearing it first (probably from my raconteur friend Chuck Pogue, a man untethered to accuracy, but always firmly adhered to poetic truth).

Sir Laurence Olivier was on a train, passing the journey studying the script of a possible next project on the stage, when another traveler plopped himself into the seat adjacent. The gentleman noticed Olivier’s reading material, expressed interest, and introductions ensued. The gentleman, it turned out was an avid actor in a small village theatre. He energetically regaled Sir Laurence with his hilarious and tedious adventures and misadventures on the boards as the miles dripped away ever more slowly.

Know anyone like that?

I can only sense your smirk and assure you this narrator is fully cognizant of “there, but for the grace of God…”

Eventually the gentleman thespian reached his stop. He rose from his seat, looked back at Olivier, and smiling sadly farewelled; “Why do we do it, Larry?”

Well…

…I have a thought or two.

It’s 1989.

It’s warm June evening.

We’re rehearsing KING LEAR.

It’s an outdoor summer Shakespeare festival in Woodland Park in Lexington, Kentucky. We’re rehearsing on the usable parts of a set still under construction built around a big tree that just might be as old as the play. At least we like think so. An anachronistic concrete sidewalk slashes about 20 feet across the front of our stage. It originates from the park’s swimming pool up the hill. The pool is not as old as the play.

In fact…

(Oh my God, here comes another side note.)

The pool in Woodland Park is another symptom of Lexington’s perverse love/hate of water.

I’ve been told that Lexington is the largest North American city lacking a large element of water. No ocean, no lake, no river, no bay.

Yet, I believe we harbor (le mot juste) a genetic longing for water.

The Town Branch of Elkhorn Creek formerly ran through downtown Lexington. It wasn’t scenic or particularly useful and it may have contributed to the cholera epidemics in Lexington in the mid-1800’s. We covered it up with concrete and bank buildings. It still runs under downtown Lexington. A few years ago, as an art installation, a microphone was lowered to the underground branch and as you walked between businesses on Vine Street, one could faintly hear the sound of running water. Today, Lexington is building a new park and hiking trail in the downtown area and striving to include some semblance of flowing water.

Similarly…sorta…

In 1885, Woodland Park had a lake; Lake Chenosa. Lexingtonians recreated on Lake Chenosa until the 1950’s when the city drained it and made baseball fields instead. Now, I love baseball, but…what kind of mind? But Lexington’s longing for water will not be denied. Lake Chenosa was replaced by a public swimming pool. Go figger.

(End of side note…thank…)

So…

…we were rehearsing KING LEAR. Lear had just been advised; “Thou should not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” (a line delivered precisely and definitively by yours truly.)

Three young boys strolled up the sidewalk from the pool. They looked to be nine or ten years old; barefoot, swimming trunks, no shirts, towels draped about their necks; last icons of a Huck Finn summer. They paused and listened to us for a few minutes, then gathered their satiated, chlorine-wearied towels of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore (apologies to Tom Stoppard).

A bit later, I was watching from the wings as Lear roared; “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes.” I noticed that one of our swimmers had returned, spread his towel on the sidewalk, and was sitting akimbo and devouring every line. He stayed until we finished; “We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

Why do we do it?

We do it for the applause, the instant gratification.

We do it for the narcissistic thrill of hearing great lines launched into the ether by our voices.

We do it (as Stephen King suggests) to let the gorillas out.

Yes, I believe all that is so.

But perhaps the collateral benefit might be to at least intrigue, and at best inspire young swimmers.

Perhaps it’s a genetic longing.

Perhaps it’s a story older than KING LEAR.

I dunno.

It’s above my pay grade…

…sigh…

…but I did deliver that one line pretty well, dammit.

Deja Foolishness

Lexington-70's
The Younger Fool

Lemme see if I’ve got this straight.

Mr. Trump says we have a “deal” with Iran.

It’s not in writing, but it will be signed “in two or three hours” according to Mr. Trump. Pakistan, who has brokered this “deal” says the “memo of understanding” will be signed in Geneva this Friday. Iran says we have neither a “deal” nor a “memorandum of understanding,” but we are nearing an “agreement” for a “memorandum of understanding” to agree to negotiate for another 60 days. There is to be a cessation of military action during this period unless the cease fire is violated

This old peace-nik hippie believes all this is possible.

I believe that Mr. Netanyahu (needing this conflict to continue to avoid prosecution in his own country) will refrain from attacking Hezbollah to protect the cease fire. I believe Hezbollah (seemingly receiving support and instruction from the military leaders of Iran) will stop launching attacks on Israel to protect this cease fire. I believe the Iranian negotiators will negotiate in good faith and not delay and obfuscate while they repair and prepare for the next chapter in this 47 year exercise in hate and betrayal. I believe everything that Mr. Trump has said last time he spoke until the next time he speaks.

I believe these things, but I guess I’ll not plunge on the stock market this evening.

I also believe my Reds are gonna storm from ten+ games back and send me hunting and gathering World Series tickets. I believe a wrasslin’ match on the White House lawn is an inspiration to high aspirations in all Americans. (Hey! Let’s see that AI escape from an arm bar!). I believe Chloe, the Wonder Pup when she assures me she won’t requisition my pillow when I get up to pee.

I believe we should give peace a chance…but remember how to duck and cover.

A memorandum of understanding to not kill each other as we negotiate to agree on something at some uncertain future date.

It reminds me…

50 years ago I was asked to represent a local arts organization at another local arts organization.

I attended the first meeting.

We were deciding who should be on a committee to determine who should be on a committee to decide who would be the best person to ask a local doyenne to approach a local businessman for a donation. We couldn’t agree in that meeting so we agreed to meet again at a future date. As everyone whipped out their calendars, I whipped my butt outta the room and outta that responsibility.

Even 50 years ago, life was too short.

Livin’ Up to the Title

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Well…

…it does that.

Movie night!

Tonight it’s an exercise in exquisite tedium called; Monster from Green Hell (1957).

I never have thought of the Bronson Caves area of Los Angeles as green hell, but apparently director Kenneth Crane did…or at least his budget did. I just couldn’t keep from recalling the last time I saw these caves, a man in a gorilla suit and deep sea diving helmet was wobbling out the entrance in the classic Robot Monster from Outer space (1953). I suppose that kind of aesthetic decision-making is to be expected from the same fellow who directed the remarkably bothersome quasi-Japanese horror piece; The Manster (1959), featuring an unfortunate guy with a murderous Neanderthal growing out of his shoulder.

You can’t make this stuff up…yet…someone did.

Tonight’s flick features a volcano of the deux-et-machina variety, a giant wasp, water scarcity, cigarette lack-of-scarcity, elephant stampede stock footage, native stampede stock footage, and lots of bare-chested young Jock Ewing of Dallas fame (aka Jim Davis).

How can you miss with ingredients like that?

Perhaps the footage of Jim Davis coulda (shoulda) been stock.

YouTube Giveth and…

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Movie Night!

A double feature of YouTube’s offerings from the 1930’s yielded a strange dichotomy of performances by two actresses of whom I’ve previously never heard.

DOUBLE DOOR is a 1934 conte cruelle directed by Charles Vidor. Mary Morris, in her only film role, plays the matriarch of a 1910 ridiculously rich family who lives in, and are practically prisoners of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Ms. Morris is intense and wicked…wicked……WICKED! The film is worth watching for her malevolent portrayal alone.

The mansion itself is a mighty character in the film. The insistence of Ms. Morris to keep the windows tightly and thickly curtained, the heavy mahogany paneling, the ponderous doors of the rooms, all reinforce the feeling of barricade. But is it a barricade to keep the world out, or to keep the treasures in? And just what are the treasures? Family? Tradition? Breeding? Style? ………or just treasure? We find out clearly, if a bit implausibly.

JUGGERNAUT is a slouching 1936 British film starring Boris Karloff as a murderous, insufficiently funded doctor. It’s not good at all, but Mona Goya’s performance (she took her performing name from her favorite painter – I wonder if she asked permission) is an un-tasty ragout of hysteria, shrieking and frantic lurching. It’s a performance for which the Razzies were later created.

YouTube; “It’s like a box of chocolates.”

The Glory of the Hummingbird

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Pssst!

Winter’s over.

I know it’s the 1st of June, but I despise the cold and dark winters. This last winter wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, but there was a very difficult period of snow under a lacquer of ice, under another layer of snow, wrapped in two weeks of below-ten degrees. This is not typical of the Bluegrass, and it’s not good for Lexingtonians, and it’s debilitating, it’s depressing, and certainly not de-lovely for yours truly.

I’ve been fooled before.

I remember the dismay my winemaker friends felt one April, when the temperature plunged to below freezing for a week, and yes, I have seen it snow on Derby Day (quelle horreur!).

Thus, I don’t truly accept that full-fledged summer has arrived until I see a hummingbird.

Yesterday, I saw my first of the year.

<<  sigh  >>

I love hummers…inordinately.

I think it’s because I don’t remember seeing any growing up. In fact, the first hummingbird I remember seeing was in 1986. Janie and I were visiting Chuck and Julieanne. We were sitting down to breakfast and I gazed out the window to admire their canopy of bougainvillea when a magical tiny critter zipped up to the feeder, that until that moment I had considered purely decorative. Little did I know the true decoration was this mini-pompous bird. Astonished, I quickly mentally revised my animal classifications, moving hummingbirds off the list that included unicorns and snipes.

The glory of the hummingbird…

I wish I had thought of that description.

T. S. Eliot beat me to it. In his 1930 poem “Marina,” he posits;

“Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning death.”

Later, Peter DeVries entitles his 1974 novel; THE GLORY OF THE HUMMINGBIRD.

Eliot and DeVries are seeing this small bird acting like it’s something special and big, when it’s merely special. It hangs, still, in the air. It flies backwards. It wiggles in the air.

It preens.

Like larger birds, it poops whenever and wherever it damn well pleases.

I remember when I would wrinkle my righteous nose when an arm would extend from a car in front of me at a stoplight and flick a depleted cigarette butt out into the street.

I would invariably think; “The world is my ash tray.”

I am heartened by the fact that you rarely witness this heinous act today. I take it as positive proof that we can improve as a species. Maybe we really can make it to Mars.

Today, I watch my much-admired hummers and when they randomly and heedlessly relieve themselves I think; “The world is my commode.”

They probably won’t make it to Mars.

But they made it to summer.

Thank God.

I Like CASABLANCA…but…

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I like the film CASABLANCA.

No, I really like CASABLANCA.

The moment I see that map opening of the film, I stop blinking (except to dismiss the tears) until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Less happily, the moment I see a map opening of any film (Indiana Jones, Mister Moto, Marlin Perkins…), I expect to not blink until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Some days, if I’m asked to name a favorite movie, I will unhesitantly answer; CASABLANCA.

But how many times can you watch it until you have it memorized and inevitably clear every room by singing “As Time Goes By” and “La Marseillaise” with an execrable Vichy accent?

You eventually start longing for more.

Yes…

…more like CASABLANCA.

Thank goodness, they’re out there; films that are liberally flavored with spies, bazaars, boozey night-club piano-players, men in fezzes (who don’t ride miniature motorcycles), crooked police authorities, bumbling Nazis, and beautiful women with a back story that involves Paris. The movie may set in the Casbah, Greece, Portugal, Tangiers, or Martinique, but the beautiful women “always have Paris.” Films like PEPE LE MOKO (1937), THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) can assuage the longing to visit Rick’s Café Americaine for a couple of hours.

I’ve recently added two more flicks to this list.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER (1950) is set in Portugal and stars Trevor Howard. Mr. Howard’s fine, but others in the cast are more interesting to me. This is one of the first films of Anouk Aimée. She’s 18 years old, and while she’s not yet the luminous beauty she later became, you watch nothing but her when she’s on the screen.

Walter Rilla menaces convincingly, dripping with corruption and lethality. This is not a man I would wish wanted to hurt me or help me…just leave me alone, please.

Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the Hoagy Carmichael/Dooley Wilson piano-player with a soupçon of Walter Brennan. It’s a remarkable departure from the gentle aristocratic characters in which we are accustomed to see him. This ain’t MY FAIR LADY.

One villager rationalizes his lack of protest against the clear evil of local authorities;

“The world has more evil than a dog fleas. We were given eyes, but for our comfort, the wisdom of knowing when to shut them.”

Admirable?

No.

Redolent of segments of today’s American conundrums?

Most certainly.

CANDLELIGHT IN ALGERIA (1943) stars a young James Mason and, again, a wickedly driven Walter Rilla.

But a delightful moment is spun by Pamela Stirling as the tragic Yvette;

“Madame, in love, you can fool a man, you can fool yourself, but you cannot fool another woman.”

In 1943, WWII was still quite in doubt. This closing moment in the film must have been stirring, if troubling;

“I know when I light this candle, I light a flame that will drive the enemy out of Africa, a flame that will be carried across the waters and across the heart of Europe to the very heart of Berlin.”

Feel free to light that candle…and grab a tissue.