Posts from December 2007

Am I crazy or would this kind of be a cute outift?

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I love my new riding boots, but I sort of adore this enormous shopping bag. When am I ever going to land another J. Crew bag this size?

But it serves absolutely no practical purpose, so I’m documenting it before I put it to better use.

I’m going to go through my closet for clothes and shoes I don’t wear anymore and use the bag to carry them up to Grand Army Plaza later this month. The Council on the Environment of New York City and the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket will be collecting used clothing, footwear, and household linens on behalf of Goodwill. The program is called Second Chance Saturdays. Textiles can be dropped off at the Greenmarket from 8-4 every Saturday until the end of March.

Just a smidge behind the Times OR On Peter and Jerry

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It was early October when I saw Peter and Jerry at the Second Stage Theater, and it closes tomorrow. But since the closing itself warranted mention in The New York Times weekend preview e-newsletter Urban Eye, it must not be too late to talk about it.

In 1958, Edward Albee wrote one act about two characters and called it The Zoo Story. Peter is a meekly stuffy upper-crust textbook editor from the Upper East Side. Jerry is a gregariously unsettled urban meanderer. He dwells in one room in a pitiful boarding house on the other side of town.

In 2004, Albee revisited Peter and Jerry. He put his characters, his script and his story into a time machine called Poetic License and went back to write a first scene. It serves as sort of an extended prologue to The Zoo Story. Peter and his wife tiptoe toward each other until they pounce violently on one horrific tidbit from Peter’s past, and then tiptoe away again. Peter retreats to the park to take a bit of buttoned-up refuge in his tightly-wound solitude. And there, he encounters Jerry, who unwinds the stagnant routine on which Peter depends.

I’ve read far more plays than I’ve watched and I think that has lead me to look at theater productions through a watching-from-the-wings sort of lens. I struggle to divorce the delivered dialogue from lines that were first printed in a script. I associate the performance with the writing process before considering the on-stage delivery. Sometimes it’s a challenge just to watch actors act without thinking of them as third-party messengers passing along the playwright’s text.

For this reason, Peter and Jerry was endlessly fascinating to me. There’s nothing I like better than a gimmick of artistic process.

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Let your heart be light

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“Shelf tree” by ijm photography via swissmiss.

After your stocking is empty and before your Christmas nap, have yourself a merry little Christmas by Injunction with this short story by O. Henry. It was first published one hundred years ago for Christmas, 1907.

“In Yellowhammer the empty storeroom had been transformed into what might have passed as the bower of an Arizona fairy. The ladies had done their work well. A tall Christmas tree, covered to the topmost branch with candles, spangles, and toys sufficient for more than a score of children, stood in the centre of the floor.”

Nostalgia will bring you to your knees in the snow

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If my spirit starts to wane on Christmas Eve Eve, The Snowman, British illustrator Raymond Briggs’ wordless Christmas epic, is the only thing that can save me.

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The picturebook was originally published in 1978 (by Random House in the U.S.) and the animated adaptation first aired on Christmas Eve in 1982 (here is the best scene on YouTube), and the artistry, the accompanying score (composed by Howard Blake), and the story still charm me.

The tale includes a ride on a retro motorcycle, a visit to the North Pole, a penguin encounter, a cruise ship full of “revelers” drunk on champagne and holiday cheer, childlike humor and an enchanted friendship. The conclusion uses one of my favorite children’s story plot devices: a physical article left behind to prove that the magic is real, not just a dream.

I really love the Snowman—this particular Snowman—for his roundness. His disproportionate limbs, the inelegant brim of his hat, even his nose. We have a stuffed Snowman that winds up and plays Blake’s Walking in the Air. When the music box starts to wind down, the melody creeps tenderly along to its ending. I know it’s just mechanics, but the effect is perfect.

I’m holding very tight
I’m riding in the midnight blue
I’m finding I can fly so high above with you
—Howard Blake, Walking in the Air

Constance

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I don’t really know what to make of it, though it was so odd that there must be something to be made. It was Wednesday. It was mid-morning. And it was on the subway.

I was riding the F. I had all my bags in my lap and a New Yorker in one hand and in the other, a travel cup full of coffee that was burning the undersides of all my fingers. I was sitting in a seat on the end of a bench, by one of the doors, the one everybody wants.

The pages of my magazine were coiled around the spine and I was holding it upright but blatantly, as in not even pretending, not reading it. And that’s why I noticed when Constance came lumbering down the car. She tossed her tote bag on to the pair of seats that face the front of the train and then crashed herself into an empty seat-and-a-half on the opposite side of the train.

The weary haze across her eyes seemed a veil between her and the other passengers, but it took just a few moments for her to focus in on a guy sitting near by. Her expression sharpened and she shot forward in her seat and implored him to “listen, listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying.”

Constance rides the F a lot. Constance isn’t her name. It would be a mind-blowing coincidence if it were, anyway.

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