Your Parenting Choices Suck!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dionna-ford/time-magazine_b_1507799.html

Years ago, in a little farce I wrote for the (late, lamented) CATCO Shorts Festival, I included a line in which a mother, talking about her son, says, " I breast fed him for a long time, till his high school barred me from the cafeteria." I thought, at the time, it was a joke playing on the absurdity of breast feeding someone long after babyhood. In my innocence, imagine my surprise to read this article, and the Time Magazine cover story from which it derived.

Ok, let's stipulate something right now. These women are wrong.

Moving on, the issue here seems to be--what's that? What are you saying? How dare I judge the parenting decisions of perfect strangers? Well...someone has to do it. Someone needs to hold these people up to ridicule. I volunteer. There is a third rail of social politics these days, which seems to be "Never criticize a woman's parenting." People avoid it at all costs, afraid of reprisals from the mommy warrior classes. Avoiding these topics allows dumbasses like Jenny McCarthy to get away with not vaccinating her kids, and calling herself an expert in autism research just because she can use Google. In fact, I don't remember anything about neurology being mentioned on her Playmate Data Sheet.

No. Not every parenting decision is sacrosanct, and correct in and of itself. Just because you aren't starving your child, doesn't mean you aren't an idiot. People may call it a difference in approach, or new age parenting, or maybe even an embracing of ancient methods (which we KNOW is not the case--in ancient times,  that three year old on the Time cover wouldn't be loafing around all day nursing, he'd be out in the fields, plowing behind a mule, and smoking unfiltered cigarettes).   Well, it's mocking time, my little friend (and I am assuming here that I'm bigger than you, so step off)

J'Accuse:

1. Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding past the age when the child can carry on intelligible dinner conversation seems like poor parenting to me. Why retard that developing verbal skill by jamming your breast into his face every time he starts a hilarious anecdote about pooping during nap time in pre-school? It's laziness disguised as parenting choice--get off your ass and open a can of Spaghettios like a normal person.

Ladies. Please. Breastfeeding a three year old? Never mind you, it makes the child look ridiculous. Look at the face of the kid on the Time cover. That's the last time you'll see it looking content, when you consider the 12 years of playground hell he's in for, for being the cover boy who nursed on his mommy while wearing big boy pants. And hey, if a child is old enough to cheat his chin toward the camera in the photo sessions, he's old enough to suck on a juice box. For christ's sake!

Dionne said in her article that her four year old does not look at her breasts with any kind of sexual context. Well, I tell you, after four solid years of nursing, neither does anyone else.

And while I am on it...public breast feeding...avoid it, please. I know, I know, it's perfectly natural. Well, so is lancing a boil, but I don't want to see that either. If I had to give up dragging on a cigarette in public, your child can give up dragging on a ...

2. Nakedness

Being naked in front of your kids is also a poor parenting choice. When they are babies, sure, who cares? But when they are old enough to point and say " Look, tits!" then maybe its time to put on the tube top. Some say it's perfectly natural, and this is how we teach kids not to be ashamed of their bodies. Bullshit. You are just too lazy to do the washing. This isn't Fiji, people. This is the American Midwest, and parents should wear slacks and a golf shirt, at minimum, at all times. Even in bed.

3. War Toys

My sister, probably after reading an article in which a celebrity parent (who always seems to be so amazed at parenthood, especially when their nannies tell them about the cute thing the kid did) mentioned she didn't allow toy guns in the house,  and decided to do the same thing. And my nephew pointed at her with his finger and said, " Pow!" Boys like guns. Most boys anyway. I myself dispatched so many Germans in my childhood my nickname was Audie Murphy. And this was in the 60s, when we weren't even at war with Germany. Let em play with guns. Don't feminize them. Not letting boys play with toy guns is really reverse judging--nowadays, we would NEVER discourage a boy who likes to play with dolls, would we? Don't judge the boy, just because he'd rather shoot Barbie than accessorize her. The same long-term breast feeders who claim it doesn't adversely affect the child's sexual development are usually the same people who say playing with toy guns will.

4. Deep Involvement

Be a person, don't be a professional parent. Believe me, your opinion stopped mattering to your child the day he or she made a friend. What do I mean by professional parents?...the ones who research everything, who involve themselves in all aspects of their child's life. Lighten up. Take the summer off--put some hotdogs and chips and Kool-aid out on the counter and relax. Read a book. Not a parenting book, unless it's Carrie. Accept that your children are secretive little newts who will come to you when they really need your counsel. And that will NEVER happen.

Take it easy. Low impact parenting is best. You don't need to join every committee in the PTO. You don't need to join the PTO. Show up to a few games, school plays, awards ceremonies. That's all you need to do. That's all your child wants you to do. Do you really think that by joining everything you'll  make a difference in policy and educational or social impact? Mommy, please!  My parents had me, then there was some childhood there for a few years, in which I saw them now and then, and then I was 18 and gone. This is healthy, and time-honored. Get out of your kids way.

It has been my experience that the people whose parents were extremely involved with their lives, are the people who tend to keep things from their parents even in adulthood. Conversely, laisse-faire parents tend to produce kids who enjoy their company (once they reach adulthood--no child enjoys his parents' company after the age of 6 --7 if he's still breast-feeding).

5. Names

Immature people give their kids stupid names, because they want the cool factor to reflect back on them. They don't think about the kid who has to go through life as Apple Martin. ( Actually, I have always believed Gwyneth Paltrow named her kid that in exchange for a healthy fee from Steve Jobs). It's like a bride who focuses everything on the wedding day, not so much the hundreds of days post nuptial. These parents are thinking only about the few years of people saying, " Oh what an interesting name!" and then later, to their friends, " What an idiot!"

Let the child's character be the most interesting part of her life. I submit naming a girl Jane or Sally, or a boy William or James requires them to rise above the commonplace nature of those names. A child named River Phoenix, however, may feel life is pointless and turn to drugs. Whatever happened to him, anyway?

And let's try to keep names somewhat consistent, please. No one named Seamus Moskovitz, or Jean-Baptist Zhang-wei. Please. Life is hard enough for all of us as it is.

So, I could go on, but I suspect you are tired.

Where I Fail As a Liberal...

I have always identified myself as a political liberal. Not "progressive", which is a cravenly concession to conservatives that they have succeeded in defining "liberal" is a pejorative word. I am a liberal. As such, unlike conservatives, the viewpoints I embrace have been on the right side of most social movements for the past couple of centuries--civil rights, women's suffrage, social security--I could go on and on.

 I am not talking about Republicans and Democrats, whose party philosophies underwent a magnetic reversal of the poles back in the late 19th century. When the Repubs were created, they were the radical, liberal party, opposed to slavery, while the Democrats were conservative, all about state's rights, which was code then and now for the suppression or reversal of personal rights and the law of the land. By the end of the 19th century, the Repubs were the party of the monied classes, and the Dems were the party of the people. So, enough with party affiliation...as someone once said, they ain't but a dime's worth of difference between them. I f you don't believe that,  look up how few the differences are between the Obama Administration and the previous Bush Administration. But do it on your own time--I am talking about other things here.

I am a liberal. Not progressive. And not that " social liberal, fiscal conservative" sort of hedge you hear a lot people call themselves. If anything, I am the opposite--I tend to be socially conservative, and fiscally liberal. There are many aspects to our social culture that I don't care for at all, or am uncomfortable with, or look upon with disdain. The difference between me and a conservative is that I am ok with those aspects of society existing and being protected by law, and conservatives aren't. And as far as fiscal matters, I think most of you have too much money and the government needs to relieve you of some of it. I think the government knows better than you what to do with your money, because you'll just keep it, or buy 4 wheelers, or pass it to your useless children, whereas the government will repurpose it to medical research, defense, infrastructure, schools, the poor.

So there we are. I can see some of my conservative friends and family--if they managed to make it this far--turning purple with apoplexy...

But there are some areas where my lib credentials kind of fail:

Environment:

Sorry, my brothers and sisters, I really don't care. No that's too harsh--I care, but not enough to do anything about it. And before you bombard me with stats, and pics of drowning polar bears, let me say again, I stipulate that all of it may be true. I believe the climate is changing, I believe man is causing a large part of it...it's just that if it's a choice between a documentary on the melting of the polar ice caps and a Reds game, it's strike three for the docu. We just got a blue recycling bin from the city. Unless Dani fills it, that thing is just gonna take up space in my garage...maybe I can use it to store the pesticides and weed killers that are cluttering up my shelves.

Food:

The bullshit about "organic" and "natural" and "slow food" and "eating locally" makes my ass tired. Literally. My ass hangs about six inches lower whenever I hear someone drool about the glories of their local veggie co-op. If I want an orange, and it's January, I am buying one. If I am looking for some ground beef, and the package I want states the animal was genetically altered, it's going in the cart. I hate politicizing food. I know the arguments for politicizing it, and they aren't persuasive to me. I think of the ancient days, when food was just food. You ate what you could get, and moved on. The world advanced to a global market for food, where out of the way exotic foods were available 24/7/365, and that, people,is a good thing. I know nothing can replace the smug feeling you get when you eat something grown within your county, but I'll stack up against it the smugness I feel eating Spanish grapes, Japanese beef, and Brazil nuts  all in the same day.

Crime and Punishment:

I get that society is to blame in many ways for a person's misdeeds. Our environment shapes, or misshapes, us. How else do you explain the massive number of bank robbers that came out of Charlestown, Mass., or the large percentage of smartasses that came from the Mann household back in the 60s? It's the environment.

I know that a person who murders another person is a complex mix of social and familial pressures, and these things culminate in an act of unspeakable rage. Maybe that person had a horrific childhood, and an adulthood of brutality and privation. Very sad. And it's something we should address as we strap him onto the gurney, and pump his arm full. I know, who among us is qualified to play God? Well...me. I volunteer. I'll play God. Bring me files, and I'll sentence to death the ones who need it. Because, even though I am not southern, I do adhere to the southern creed that "they is some folks need killin'"

NPR
I know, Pravda to the left wing. I listen to it every day. And every day, I laugh at it's pretentiousness, and grind my teeth at its...pretentiousness. Why? Jeez, where to I start?

Ok, style...these hosts reeeaallly wish they on the BBC. Why else do they say someone is "on holiday?" No one goes on holiday, not in America they don't. We go on a vacation. No one is "in hospital" or sitting "at table", either. Not here. Hospitals and tables are not states of being in America. They are things.  Here, we are "in A hospital" and we sit " at A table." If I ever hear Robert Siegel say he's goes to the 6th floor on a lift, I am gonna drive right to DC and kick his pretentious  ass. Also, NPR hosts, like their heroes on the BBC, ask questions the same way, prefacing it with " I wonder..." as in " I wonder, have you always been this pretentious and idiotic?" 

Another thing. Dead jazz musicians. Do you know how many jazz music stations there left in this country? 6. To cover the whole country. 6.

Ok, that's not true, I don't really know how many jazz stations there are in America, but if Columbus is any indicator, 6 can't be too far off. So...why does NPR feel the need to cover the death of every sideman who ever played a gig with someone who formed his own group after being a sideman for Charlie Parker? Or even live dead jazz musicians--the other day Terry Gross did an interview with a Dutch jazz drummer. DUTCH??? Not even American?

Why not cover the death of Shakespearean actors? There's a lot of them, in theatres all around the country. Surely some of them have died. But you never hear about that. Only dead jazz musicians. Why? Because it is assumed (wrongly) that an inside knowledge of jazz makes you seem cool. How else could these bespectacled, balding, sparse-bearded, early middle-aged liberals feel cool, unless talking about Coltrane's "incendiary and seminal" riffs on his Live at the Blue Spot bootlegged recordings? Reflected cool isn't very cool, guys.

Anyway, other than that, I say down with the rich and powerful, "bite me" to the privileged, and " I pity you" to the poor and average who have been conned by the fat cat Republicans to be their pawns on the front lines. Someday, you will all be re-educated...

If a performance fell in the theatre, and no one heard it, did it happen?

Sad as it is to say, I have decided not to go to any more live theatre. Or at least, I am cutting it down to a bare minimum. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is I simply can't hear much of the dialogue anymore. It's a combination of my increasing deafness, and the utter lack of skill in most stage actors to make themselves heard.

To be honest, I believe most of the problem lies with the latter, rather than the former. I believe this because I will often hear one or two actors perfectly clearly through the whole show, and their castmates, not so much. And I find I hear older actors better than younger ones, although this is by no means an absolute. It's turning me into a cranky old guy, and it's making my evenings in the theatre frustrating and pointless.

Let's face it, David Mamet is right, at least on this point. He said if you stand on a stage in a large theatre and you can't make yourself heard in the last row, get off the stage, because your training isn't over. Actors have gotten by for thousands of years without amplification...why do we subsidize this amateurish lack of attention to craft? I remember in my early days on the Schiller Park stage, the company had one body mic, but most of us didn't want it. Because to use it was to acknowledge you weren't skilled enough to make yourself heard across that large expanse of grass. Plus, a body mic taped to the face, or peeking out of the hair, is an eyesore.

I mean, it's a baseline skill--it's like not being able to draw and yet calling yourself a painter. I know lots of people who who paint abstracts, not because that's where their artistic sensibilities, after years of exploration, have led them, but because that's all they can do. I consider that invalid. Picasso could draw you as you stood there, photographically. He chose not to. He grew beyond it. If you are an actor, and can't or won't bother to learn to project, do TV or film or webcasts.

Of course, when I complain about this, I get the pained look, as if they are saying, "silly man...don't you know stage projection is old fashioned and out of date?" And you know who thinks this? People who CAN'T project.

I can't remember a single play I have seen in the last few years in which I heard everyone clearly. Unacceptable. Especially at today's ticket prices. Some theatres have headphones that they issue to help the hard of hearing, and Dani got a pair for me at the last show we saw at CATCO, but after a while, I took them off. Why should I go to the actors? It's their job to come to me. It's their job to bring their voices to my lone ear. If they can't or won't, then why should I help them in their amateurish ways?

I've tried to support my pals in the theatre, and attend their plays, but I just can't any more, sad to say. It makes me too angry. To any of my buds reading this post: you are not required to see me when I perform--let's just call it a wash.

Russell Brand

I have tried to like Russell Brand, but I have failed. I will say, however, he has managed to parlay a minimal talent and a single facial expression into a pretty healthy career, so there's that. In fact, his uni-expressionaism, as we'll call it, brought to mind another face from the massive flea market that is my brain...maybe he could play John Torrington, a sailor from a doomed polar expedition in the mid-1880s, who was unearthed from his permafrost grave a hundred years later...

Pepper

Tonight we took our 17 year old terrier Pepper to the vet, and had her put down. It's the bitter bargain we make-- there for them at the beginning, there at the end. Over the past summer, she became a very old dog, seemingly all at once--blinded by cataracts, deafer than me, crooked in her back from arthritis. She lost her house-training, and even seemed to lose her personality, which had always been formidable. She trembled much of the time, and often seemed not to recognize us. I have been feeling like Bob Cratchit this evening, looking at the empty place by the fire.

 The following is something I wrote about her a few years ago, entitled Our Wedding Dog:

Tonight, I have been sitting in my chair with my little dog curled under my arm, and we have spent a long time looking in each other's eyes, as we have been wont to do for many years. Pepper is 14 years old, a Yorkie/Schnauzer mix, and her formerly brown face is white now, and she spends most of her days drowsing on chairs and couches, or on any convenient lap. She is a stubborn old gal, and if she wants to jump up into my chair, and wriggle and push till she claims half the seat for herself, well, who am I to argue? Such a venerable old lady deserves all that she wants, and mostly what she wants is to be allowed to nap and feel the old clock inside her wind its way down.

We got her the weekend we were engaged. Dani and I were living in an attic apartment on the Hilltop, and the guy in the downstairs apartment raised and trained little terriers, and when Dani and I came home from a weekend's touring performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream (where we had announced our engagement to the stunned cast), he was outside with his kids playing with some little dogs, and when he saw us he asked if we wanted a dog. It seems he had given his mother one of his little puppies 2 years earlier, and when she moved to an apartment complex that didn't allow pets, she had to return Pepper to her son.

I think he was asking out of reflex, just something you say as a conversation starter, especially if you are a dog trainer. But I looked at her, and though it sounds lame, something passed between us. Maybe I was open because I had just gotten engaged to a woman I was deeply in love with, and had just finished a wildly successful weekend's worth of performances, and here was an offer to begin something like a little family. It felt right. I looked at Dani and she laughed--she later said she could tell right away this was going to happen. So we took her upstairs.

I spent a week holding her like a baby, protecting her from my cat Sugar, who was deeply offended that a dog had been brought into the mix. Sugar never warmed to her, and never missed a chance to swat her and send her yelping into another room. That whole week we looked into each other's eyes, bonding the way I imagine parents do with new-born babies. When the weekend came, we had to leave to do another set of shows out of town, and I asked the fellow downstairs to watch her for us. All weekend I worried she wouldn't remember us, that the week-long bonding hadn't been enough, but when we came home, it was like a scene from a movie: Pepper was in the yard playing with one of the neighbor's kids, and when she saw me, she ran top speed and launched into my arms and licked my face all over. That's when I knew she was ours for keeps.

Right away she established herself as my chair companion, and later she became part of our sleeping arrangement as well. Dani on my left, Pepper on my right, under my arm. I became quite used to this--in fact, once when I was in the hospital for a surgery, Dani was concerned I wouldn't sleep without a little creature nestled under my right arm, so she bought a little stuffed dog to tuck in with me during my week long stay.

Pepper has endured many moves, and many comings and goings of other pets, and not always happily. In fact, never happily. I don't think she has quite understood what we thought we were doing bringing all those other critters into the house. Especially Sonny, out Golden, who spends a generous part of his day, every day, for the last 6 years, finding ways to annoy her.

It has always been Mark, Dani and Pepper to our families. When my mother calls, her sign off is "give my love to Dani and Pepper." Family members have actually had her for sleepovers--she used to go with my sisters on their camping trips. Actors I worked with years ago, after getting back in touch, will ask after her health--she had a brief career on the stage herself, playing Toto in WoO, Sandy in Annie, and the family dog in Cheaper By The Dozen. But she's retired now. She lies on her warm blankets and dreams of her former stage glory.

Someday soon, the unbearable will happen. She has a bad heart murmur, and the vet assures us this will be the thing that takes her out. The day I got that diagnosis, two years ago, I drove her home from the vet, after first stopping at the store for some treats. I held her for a while, and we looked into each other's eyes, as we often do. Her bristly intelligent gaze was a bright as the day we got her ( and still is). I felt better that the knowledge of mortality is not a gift given to a dog. They live entirely and utterly in the moment. This makes it easier. We are entrusted with that knowledge for them.

So, these days, I let her have her way. She eats when she feels like it, goes outside whenever she asks, and sleeps when and wherever she chooses. She has given great value, our little wedding dog. She deserves our respect, and our love. Some of us who are childless need an outlet for our parenting instincts, I believe, and Pepper is in many ways my first child.

People Will Come

One of my favorite things in the world: baseball.

One of my least favorite things: any literature about baseball seeking--in rhapsodic, poetic prose--to contextualize or encircle the mystery of it all. Mostly written by men who never played the game,  is my guess. One exception: James Earl Jones' speech in Field of Dreams, but I think fully half of the appeal of that scene is a visceral response to the bassoons in Jones' voice.

and to that end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ1dZhh0_RQ&feature=related

REM disbands

Now that REM has officially called it quits (as opposed to artistically, which happened years ago), Michael Stipe has time to devote himself to his main passion--stalking unsuspecting mortals and drinking their blood...

Workers of the World, Unite!

Apparently I am hated on two continents. My brother Barry, who lives in Seoul, Korea and is a spy and free-lance assassin for the CIA, tells me his military and ex- military friends over there read my liberal broadsides on Facebook, and despise me to my very core.

This has become a source of pride with me. If only I could be hated in Europe and South America and Australia too! Then I'd be in rare company, with Hitler, Nixon, and Walt Disney.

One guy, an old-school crusty, red-faced, fat-fingered ex master sgt. finds me particularly appalling. Barry reports that he'll see the guy in a bar, and if the guy is staring at Barry for longer than 2 seconds, then that means he's gonna come over and start a conversation with " Did you what your goddamn brother wrote today?" Barry doesn't report whether he defends me or not--I suspect not. But then I wouldn't defend me either.

Barry was home this week, and told me about this, and we plotted out a little scheme--I asked Barry to tell me the one issue that chapped this man's wrinkled old ass more than any other, and he said it was illegal immigrants. So I went on the web, looking for the worst case of illegal immigrant criminality I could find, and after several promising leads (one was a case in which an illegal immigrant shot and killed a man in cold blood, and I thought this might be a winner, but later in the article it's revealed the victim was a pedophile who had messed with the immigrant's under-aged sister--not good enough for my nefarious plans)--I finally found the motherload-- I located a case where an illegal immigrant murdered three people in New Jersey, in premeditated fashion.

So I posted this article to Barry's FB page, along with as many boneheaded liberal comments as I could think of, and my nephew Nathan, who is more liberal than I, chimed in with a few of his own (I had emailed Nathan to tell him about this old master sgt., who hates Nathan too, and it turns out Nathan already knew of him, and calls him Sgt. Non Sequitur)...we are currently awaiting news of the old campaigner's massive stroke.

Barry is in the air, back to Korea, and his clandestine mission to topple Kim Jong il. I expect him to be met at the airport by his CIA handler, a ravishing Korean beauty with some anatomically-based James Bondian name, and one pissed off old master sergeant, trying to articulate his outrage through the profound aphasia his stroke has left him with.

Below is the FB posting--(as you can see, we ensnared one of Barry's friends in our net):

Film work

A number of my pals are doing lots of film work these days, which I find healthy, though I don't do much of it myself. It is the present and the future of acting, I believe. Stage is the past, but I feel most comfortable there. Sometimes I feel like Chuck Yeager in the film The Right Stuff--all his contemporaries, the generation behind him, actually, began to move to NASA and the space program, while he stayed with the original test pilot program.

I am not sure why I am so ambivalent about film. I have done one feature and one short, and I had a good time doing them, but I'd be quite happy if I never do another one. I know actors in town who do tons of them, and prefer them to stage (which I don't get AT ALL). Maybe it's the narcissism of seeing your image on screen. There are only a few who are immune to that, I suppose, and that notion must be part of it, I guess. It certainly isn't the money--which is always paltry on the local level, if there is anything at all. And it can't be the quality of the roles, either.

I have turned down so many film offers that word has evidently gotten round, because no one offers me film roles much anymore. I find the scripts to be generally awful, derivative, and bigger than the director's stomachs most of the time. They are written by non-writers, mostly. Very young non-writers, mostly. They are just images on paper, mostly. And so they are easy to turn down. Plus, these young writers tend to write roles for young actors, and have little insight for characters over 25.

I would consider them for more than a few seconds if the roles I have been offered were any good, but they aren't. Usually there is a need for a one-dimensional dad, or boss, and I can't be bothered. I am that way for stage roles too. As I have gotten older, and aged past the first and second rank roles (juvenile, hero/romantic lead), I find that most of the parts (film and stage) for actors my age are what I call the "dad" roles. As the producers of new theatre companies and film companies get younger and younger, they skew their choices toward actors their age. Still, these shows need someone to play the "dad" roles. And, my friends, that ain't me.

It's not ego, at least not entirely. I am pretty level-headed about what roles I am right for, type-wise. And I would be happy to plays dads, if the roles are strong. But the scripts are always about the younger protagonist, and these characters need dads and bosses to feed them cues. And that, as I said before, ain't me.

The way I see it, life is too short to be a supporter of other people's dreams, and I have no interest whatsoever in helping others achieve their goals by giving them whatever meager talents and industry I possess. I have had several offers from filmmakers for a featured role of one scene, and I know they are looking for the best possible actor to play this meaningless bullshit--but that's their dream, not mine. If you want me in your picture or play, it better be a strong role. And I mean a strong role before I see the pages. None of that "we'll work it out as we go along" crap.

Money is one of several motivating factors for me, but it isn't the only one. For me it's mostly been about the roles. Acting takes up a lot of time from your life, and it takes its toll in several, less tangible ways as well, and if I am going to commit to a part, it better have enough juice for me. Lots of people better see it too. Not interested in a doing a film role so your pals can watch it with you on your computer. Not interested in helping a film student with his project. Not even remotely interested in doing low-brow gory horror stories, think pieces where mostly 21 year olds sit in coffee shops and discuss their faux Tarantino-esque takes on life and relationships, half-assed detective stories, hit man stories (and ever since Quentin, it seems all hit men are required to discuss pop culture while wearing black suits and ties)...and...and...and...

So. This post ended at lot more sour than I intended. I suppose the takeaway from this post is that I hear "time's winged chariot hurrying near", and I simply don't have enough life left for anything that isn't pivotal.

Dark of the Moon

We open Dark of the Moon at Dublin Coffman High School in two days...as usual, the past few days have been fraught with last minute set painting, costume adjustments, prop gathering, etc etc etc...but the kids are ready, more than ready, to get this bad boy up in front of paying customers...this is my "From The Director", my thoughts on the play...

From the Director

Dark of the Moon is a supernatural fantasy tale that is made up of equal parts of Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Harry Potter, and old campfire tales that travel down the years, growing in embellishment with each telling. At its core is the old Celtic song Barbara Allen, though the playwrights rewrote the story of the song to suit the action of the play. It has a dark heart—one critic said its characters were the characters of the musical Oklahoma, if their true natures were really shown. I consider it a sort of satire of the old morality plays, in which the best people in the community are the worst people in the community—rather like The Beggars Opera, in which thieves and murderers are the cream of society.

The students and I had a number of conversations early on about the human world of Buck Creek, and the supernatural world that lurks on top of Mt. Baldy. We proceeded from the position that this is a “heightened” existence, meaning that it is a fantasy, and makes certain assumptions for the sake of the story that bear little relation to the “real” world—the Christianity depicted in this play is not the Christianity that is practiced in our churches. The wants and needs of the citizens are skewed and are not always logical (witness their dialogue which echoes the repeats and refrains of old songs)—even the mythology of the witchcraft practiced in this play is unlike any other “witchy” stories. This led us to discussions of “given circumstances”, and what constitutes “ truth” on the stage—and our conclusion is simply that, for the purposes of performance, “truth” on stage always trumps “truth” in real life. This is why characters in musicals break out into song at regular intervals, or Shakespearean characters speak in iambic pentameter as a matter of course. It’s why a magical school exists to teach young Britons how to hone their witchcraft, even why three bears keep a traditional house which is ransacked by a blonde child.

The play has survived, since it was written in the 1940s, because, simply, there isn’t another play quite like it. It has been the source of controversy over the years, since a young Paul Newman first played the Witch-boy on Broadway. Back in the 1970s, high school productions of Dark of the Moon were picketed or even shut down. By the 1980s, it became a staple in high school repertories-- Dublin Coffman last performed it in 1989, roughly five years before most of tonight’s cast was born.

At its core is a love story, between Barbara Allen, whose reputation for “easy virtue” has reached beyond her town to the dark beings who live up on old Baldy, and John the Witch-Boy, who, riding his eagle one night, looked down among the human world and was instantly smitten by her. Their story is one of an attempt at redemption, a kind of reset of their lives, a belief that true love can cure all evils. But as we see, it isn’t the moonlight that illumines and defines their tale, but rather the dark shadow from its other side.