A Doll’s House

Tonight I saw Ibsen's "A Doll's House" for the first time ever. (I know, I know, how is this possible with such a famous play? But there it is.) The production strove for a very modern look. Some of Torvald's speeches sounded a little dated, but Nora's speech as she left could have been written yesterday. (I wonder if they updated any of the lines, but I'm willing to believe not.)

What really struck me though is that if Wife had written a play about our marriage, that could have been it. Obviously that's not my view of the marriage, but you've heard my view. And certainly the details were different. But did she think I micromanaged her spending? She did. Would it have been easy for her to get involved in a shady financial transaction without realizing it was criminal, all from the highest motives? I think so. Did I fly off the handle when I discovered some new crazy or dangerous thing she had done? All too often. Would I have lectured her about the immorality of it? Not for sexual improprieties, but surely for financial ones. Would I have been bereft if she walked out? In the first few years it is likely, and she preserved that belief long after it was no longer true. 

The only one of Torvald's deplorable behaviors that I am reasonably sure I would not have repeated was his hollering, "Don't you realize how your bad behavior is going to damage my reputation?" I'm pretty confident I would have said "our" or "your". Also if I had had time after my tantrum before the reprieve, I would have become more reasonable and started to discuss What are We going to do to move forward? But I would have had the tantrum first; and in the play Torvald has no time to get over his tantrum before the reprieve, so he goes straight to a really condescending forgiveness. Would I have done the same with no intervening time? Maybe. 

It's an unflattering thought. Maybe I should keep thinking it.

Sent from my iPhone

Not needing LSD

Many years ago, long before we had kids, Wife and I were at a Christmas party thrown by a good friend of mine from work, and his wife. These two were good people, salt of the earth in every way. Once upon a time they had both been hippies, and then gradually re-joined conventional society as they grew up. My friend from work (M) had also been on a long spiritual quest that had by then taken him to seek out adult baptism in the Catholic Church. His wife (C) was maybe less driven in this direction, but she followed him into the Church lovingly.

 

Whenever they threw parties, they always organized it so that their old hippy friends would congregate out in the back yard, while their more square friends from church stayed in the house. There was plenty of food and drink, good music, and always good conversation.

 

Anyway, at one of these parties I was talking to C, and she was explaining earnestly about her experiences with LSD. M had said earlier that he felt LSD had brought him as close to God as he had ever come – he ranked it on a par with really good sex, or with the Mass. (It sounded like he rated all three about equal in that dimension.) C phrased it differently, but she said that LSD had taught her some very important things. I wanted to hear more about this, so I tried to encourage her by saying that I had never tried it myself, but it sounded interesting and maybe it would be a good thing to do some day. She looked at me very seriously and said, “I don’t think you need LSD, Hosea.”

 

Fast forward thirty years.

 

I just got off the phone with Son 2. He is working as an intern at a nature preserve about an hour’s drive from here. What with one thing and another I haven’t seen him much this summer. Anyway, he told me that last week several of the people at work were talking about the new research that is being done in the uses of LSD to treat mental illness. Apparently the conversation built for a while, the way conversations do, and then Son 2 ventured a comment on his side. His boss turned to look at him very seriously and said, “I don’t think you need LSD, Son 2.”

 

He said it was minutes before he could stop laughing. And he asked me, “Is this just part of being a Tanatu?”

 

Gosh, I have no idea. Is it?

__________

P.S. added four years later: I just noticed that I already told the first half of this story as a comment on Apollo's blog, here. Note added 2022-07-24.   

 

 

Movie meme, 5

My first contribution to this meme was almost ten years ago. My last contribution (till today) was almost five. Since that time my posting has gotten a lot sparser and more erratic. But also, the cast of characters has changed. I no longer spend time with Wife, so her parade of boyfriends and (perhaps) girlfriends no longer interests me. My focus is more on my own relationships -- Debbie, for a while, and then Marie -- and on members of my family. And it hasn't always been easy for me to decide whom to cast in those roles. But I've been mulling it for a while, and I think I can make some headway.

The last four contributions were here, here, here, and here. And the next batch of additions follows below.

Debbie: Saoirse Ronan

Partly the similarity is physical: Debbie looks something like Saoirse Ronan. Partly it is related to a sense I get from the characters she has played in, for example, "Brooklyn" and "Lady Bird", exhibiting a kind of simplicity and directness that isn't the least bit aggressive or abrasive, but that is self-possessed enough to say, "This is where I stand, this is where I am; let's start from here." Debbie is older than Ronan -- as of today she is in her early sixties. But a good actress can play any age.

Marie: Elizabeth Moss

Here too the similarity is physical, though I never noticed it before watching "The Seagull" a couple weeks ago. But there it is: somehow the broad face, the sharp chin, and the dark hair come together just right. Again, she'd have to play older than she is now, but that's all.












Father: Peter Sellers, playing Ricky Gervais

This one is trickier, because my father spent his entire life playing a role. The role changed from time to time: for a while he was a liberal college professor; then he became a conservative business owner; then after that he was an out-of-work actor who listened to Rush Limbaugh. But the longer I think about it, the more convinced I become that none of them was really him. They were all simply roles.

So casting him is more complex than it is for some of the others. Certainly one of the people he pretended to be looked a lot like the public persona of Ricky Gervais. There's even a physical similarity to my father as a very young man. But it's the personality that I think of first: the loud, outgoing, self-centered and socially clueless personality that entertained people endlessly at parties and offended them when they tried to engage seriously, the bon-vivant cheerfulness that was always ready to pour you a drink and that made women feel creepy when he got too close. It's a complex, subtle combination, but I think Ricky Gervais captures it.

Except of course that it wasn't real -- like all of the other personalities he tried on for size, it was a mask. A mask concealing what? Sometimes I think even he never knew. It's true that he could slide into and out of any role almost effortlessly. But it's not clear to me that he ever gave a lot of still, quiet thought to what lay behind all those masks. So that's why I think the best way to portray him is not with Ricky Gervais himself, but with somebody else playing Ricky Gervais. And who better than the man who could play anybody, the best artist ever at disappearing into a role.

Once when Peter Sellers was a guest on "The Muppet Show" Kermit the Frog encouraged him to relax and "be yourself." Sellers replied, "I can't do that. There is no me, I do not exist. There used to be a me... but I had it surgically removed."

Yup. That's my dad.






Mother: Myrna Loy

 

In some ways it is easier to pick actors to play high-profile individuals. See the very first one of these posts, where I pegged Bette Davis to play Wife. My mother is quieter than that. When my parents would go to a party, people always called my father "charming" and my mother "serene". There was always a bit of a risk that she would disappear against the wallpaper -- especially in comparison to my father's boisterousness. She always seemed like "the normal one" of the family.

But she's whip-smart: in her intellect (Ph.D. in mathematics), in her wit (she's the one who taught me to pun), and in practical life (she kept the family business afloat for years despite my father's fecklessness and ruinous business sense). And beautiful: when I was twenty and she was in her forties the two of us went out to dinner one evening, and the waitress took her for my girlfriend. Until the day she decided to cut her hair short and wear granny glasses, she was seemingly ageless.

I debated a long time what actress could fill this bill. She couldn't be too flamboyant or exotic; but neither could she be drab or dull. At the same time she should be quintessentially American, summoning up images of domestic normality, and yet she had to be smarter and more beautiful than any of that. It's a difficult combination to achieve, but I think Myrna Loy pegged it perfectly. If you haven't seen her in anything, stop reading this blog immediately and go binge on every movie she ever made with William Powell.

Brother: Frank Zappa

I've often said Brother is the rock musician in the family. So the actor to portray him should be a rock musician -- one who is unafraid to do his own thing, regardless how outré it might appear. Brother has never had children, but I wouldn't put it past him to name one of them Moon-Unit ... except that name has already been taken now. Something else, then.






SIL: Audrey Hepburn

Part of me wonders if Audrey Hepburn might not be too extreme a choice for SIL, Brother's wife (and formerly twenty-years-girlfriend). Is she the most striking beauty in a century? Well, ... she's certainly pretty but it would be hard to call anyone the most striking beauty in a century. But then I started to think about other things. Hepburn was noted for her sense of fashion; SIL makes her living doing fashion design for commercials and other photographic shoots. Hepburn was noted for her ease in international settings; SIL routinely travels for her work, and has spent months in Spain or Berlin on one job or another. Hepburn described herself as shy; SIL is quiet where Brother is loud, and is adept at avoiding confrontations ... but you can sense an unswerving determination underneath it all. So yes, let's go with Audrey Hepburn. I compromised by picking a photo that shows her closer to SIL's real age, I think, rather than one of the ultra-glamorous shots of her youth. But I think it works.

I hope this helps bring the dramatis personae up to date for you.

Sixth of July

My last post ended on a pretty upbeat note. I'm not feeling so upbeat any more, but it is not easy for me to figure out why. So I'll write about it and see if that helps.

The plan for the Sixth was that Brother and SIL were going to do just a little bit and then leave. In fact they stayed all day. They did a huge amount of work. My mother's garage looks cleaner than it has in decades. There are still boxes in stacks ... but there is more empty floor space than filled floor space, and you can walk around easily. Also, they are organized now so that each stack is something different: these boxes here are all books; those boxes there are all papers; the ones over yonder are all housewares; and so on.  This is all good. Right?

So why do I feel grumpy and resentful about it?

One easy answer might be that they showed me up. I kept urging them to knock off because of the heat (it was well over a hundred degrees), and I didn't join in the work; they worked straight through the heat of the day and got all this stuff done. So maybe my vanity is wounded. That explanation doesn't feel right to me, but then it wouldn't -- would it? Vanity is clever at disguising itself as something else.

What I find myself feeling over and over, is, rather, "May God protect me from ever getting such help when I'm the one who is old!" I start thinking of the times that D helped Wife and me clean out our house -- twice. (See this post for the start of the first story, and this post for the start of the second.) And I think of how my Uncle and Aunt cleaned out my grandfather's house after my grandmother died, and my grandfather always complained he could never find anything after they'd been there because they just threw everything away. One way to look at it is to consider this a motivation to keep my stuff neat and orderly, so that it doesn't require fire and the sword to tame it when I'm old. And I've been on the other side, the side that is doing the cleaning. I know that sometimes you have to be decisive and ruthless. That's all true.

But then there was the time that Brother found some shower rails in the garage -- I mean the kind of handrail you can install in the shower if you don't trust your balance, for example if you are old and afraid of falling. He asked my mother to confirm that he could throw them out and she said No. My mother is 78 years old, and she is getting more worried about her balance these days. So she wants to have the rails available to install when she needs them.

And Brother argued with her. Even as he admitted that his objection was purely emotional, he tried to persuade her that she is fine, she doesn't need these rails, even if she feels a little unsteady her bathroom has a counter within easy reach .... I wanted to interrupt and slap him down: Dude, she said No! It's her house and her stuff; if she says No, that settles it. But I didn't. Maybe that was good sense in not pouring oil on the fire -- after all, he'd already admitted that his real objection was emotional -- or maybe it was just cowardice. Probably cowardice.

To be clear, it's not really the same kind of case as with Wife. Mother is no hoarder; it was my dad who piled up all this junk in the garage. Yes, Father has been dead for a couple years now and Mother hasn't cleaned out all the crap yet; but did I mention she's 78 years old? It's a big job and I think she finds it a little overwhelming. So that's why she needs help. That's why it is great that Brother and SIL come and push through all this stuff for her. But if she says, No I want to keep that one specific thing, I guarantee that she has a clear, logical, and practical reason for it. That's who she is.

Maybe I'm just intimidated by that much energy and decisiveness. But I hope Mother isn't. She will back away from fights rather than stand up to them, so it's possible. I hope Brother isn't pushing her around.

At the end of the day Brother and SIL went out for a couple of beers; then we talked by phone and agreed to meet for dinner. Mother told them when she and I were leaving the house, and they were an hour late. This in itself is hardly unusual -- Brother and SIL are regularly late, for pretty much anything -- but it didn't soften my mood. Then they slept over one more night after all ... although somehow they hadn't gotten back from the restaurant by the time Mother went to bed, nor by the time I did. No idea when they actually got in.

This morning I got up and had breakfast with Mother, while Brother and SIL slept in. Then I packed up my stuff and left. I'm back in my apartment now, still trying to figure out why I feel so disgruntled over all the great help that Brother and SIL gave my mom. Maybe it's just the unusually hot weather that has me in a bad mood ....
   

Fifth of July

I went to visit my mother for the Fourth of July and stayed for a couple of days. Brother and SIL were there too. The day of the Fourth itself was very low key. Lots of food, plenty of beer, splashing in the pool ... good, relaxing, holiday stuff.

The Fifth got busier. That is to say, it didn’t start off busy. But at some point in the afternoon Brother and SIL went out into the garage to straighten up some of the stacks of boxes and do a little bit more on a project of cleaning things out that they had begun helping my mom with last weekend.

A couple boxes here led to a couple more boxes there. There were two or three boxes of books of my dad’s — mostly self-help or “You too can be a millionaire” books, though I spied a volume of history on the conflict between Keynes and Hayek that I grabbed. And then I heard, “Hosea, you better get out here. There’s a box labeled H&W’s books that you need to take a look at.”

“Need to take a look at.” The books had been eaten through in so many places they were unreadable. But more than that — the pages had also been pasted together, as if they were reverting to wood pulp instead of paper. In some cases I could still pry the pages apart to read words; in other cases all that was left was the shape of a book and a splash of color from the cover, that crumbled into dust when I touched it. And there was some very solid brown waste product filling in the gaps between the books and the side of the box, like a hard and very durable mortar cementing bricks of ash. What the ever-loving hell could have done this? Rats? Termites? No clue. But it was stupefying.

There was maybe one book salvageable from that box — one of Wife’s, with an inscription from a couple of her students back in 1989. But by the time I’d got to the bottom here came more boxes of books from the same shelf, and could I go through those? These ones were labeled as Tartuffe's books and they were mostly in the same shape: what had been a complete 20-volume hardbound set of the Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung in pristine condition had been reduced to maybe five volumes in usable shape. (I adopted the rough criterion — not always consistently applied — that the pages had to be spotless except for debris that could be brushed off, and the bindings could not have holes going all the way through.) The rest went into the trash.

Then there were a couple more boxes from the same shelf: one of music and one of cookbooks. I let my mother go through those ones. By the time that shelf was empty — and vacuumed clean — Brother and SIL had started to tackle other boxes, at least to understand what was inside them. This included three or four more boxes of books with my name on them — not destroyed this time, thank heavens. But some of these were Wife’s books; do they really need to be in my mother’s garage? I culled those ones. Then ... there’s a big shelf inside the house with my books too. I combed through that looking for books that were plainly Wife’s. In the end I had three very full boxes of her books, which I put in the back of my car. This freed up enough space on the shelves indoors to house those of my books from the garage that I still want to keep ... or, more accurately, those of my books from the garage which were fully intact and also satisfied one of two other criteria: either I want to keep it, or else I’m not certain that I want to discard it.

So the books are out of the garage.

We stopped for lunch about 4:30-5:00, mostly leftovers from the Fourth. About 9:00pm, Brother shooed me out of the garage and told me to stop helping, as nicely as he could given how hot and exhausted he was. My mother figured that applied to her too. So I went for a swim (finally!) to cool off. Brother and SIL finished reassembling the stacks of remaining boxes and closing up the garage about 10:00.

Does anybody want any dinner?

God no, just gallons of water.

Do we have any beer left?

Looks like we are all out.

After this much hot work we should have cold beer.

Yeah, that’s true.

So while I was clambering out of the pool and drying off, Brother and SIL went to the store. They came back with beer, noodles, and some pre-made vegan red sauce; distributed the beer (cold, bless their hearts!), boiled the noodles, and started heating the sauce. So they had food ready about 11:30pm. (To be clear, we’d been sitting around the table talking over the beer while it cooked. Before they got back I had been prepared to make do with ice water and a little bourbon — I kept thinking I was going to bed any minute and might not be still up when they arrived — so I had those both out when they got back. SIL joined me in having a splash of bourbon on the side of her beer.)

Anyway, when the food was ready at 11:30 — that’s about when my mother packed it in. I kept thinking I’d better do the same, because I had an early morning phone call for work that I figured I had better join even though technically I'm on vacation. But the noodles also looked good. So I turned in right around midnight, and got up just before 6:00 this morning (for a 7:00 call).

What’s the plan for today? My mother will be out all day: she has tax clients at the office in the morning, and then a couple different doctor’s appointments in the afternoon. SIL is still asleep. Brother says he wants to do just a little organizing in the garage yet, and then draw my mother a map so she knows where things are now. Then he figures they will go home. I had kind of cleared my schedule until Sarah House tomorrow, and I don’t get down here to see my mother nearly as often as Brother and SIL do. Also it is supposed to get up to 112° today, and I have no air conditioning -- neither in my car nor in my apartment. But this house has it. So as my mom left for work this morning I told her I’d stick around another day, and she looked very pleased.

Prodigies

[NOTE: It is December 12 as I type this, but I wrote the note to myself in June so I am going to back-date the post correspondingly.]

What do prodigies do?

All the elementary stuff is so easy for them that they never settle down; they never develop the discipline of a single craft; by the time they reach middle age they are forgotten and anonymous, eating the wrong things and drinking too much and there is nothing left of their talent.

Oh good! It’s great to know I count as a prodigy! Hey ... I heard somewhere that failure is freedom. Right?

Sure. We can go with that. Failure is freedom. So is homelessness. On that scale, have you considered there might be something to be said for slavery?

Isn’t it nice, though, to have been smart and capable once upon a time?

Sure. Isn’t it nice to have memories?

 

Visiting Debbie, 2

Once again ... I guess this is about a year later, or almost ... I got the chance to visit Debbie at the tail end of a visit to Sticksville for work. Like before, it was a pleasant visit: we talked together and cooked together. Unlike the last time, I detected no underlying romantic tension, no effort being put behind Not Doing Anything Sexual. So maybe that's now a thing of the past? Or maybe it's just a matter of Different day, different atmosphere. I don't know which.
 
What follows is slightly reworked from the email I sent Marie about it. 

• So I talked to Debbie about my job situation, mentioning the following points:
• The change of status changes my bonus potential, but not my base salary. Losing the bonus at the same time Son 1 graduates from university is close to a wash, because all I ever spend my bonus on is his tuition.
• My boss assures me that there is no risk of my losing the job itself, but I don’t believe him. I think I’ll be overpaid if I’m reclassified as a non-manager, but that’s my idea and nothing anyone has said.
• Saying I’m overpaid is synonymous with saying I’m underutilized, and according to one way of looking at it that’s bad for me too. Underutilization makes it easy for me to grow dull and fall into a rut, which in turn makes me more likely to lose my job.
• I used to tell myself that I was highly mobile and loved exploring new places, but at this point that’s more of a religious self-identification than a reality. (“Of course I’m a Methodist / Episcopalian / Jew / whatever, ... just because I’ve never been in a house of worship in the last 50 years doesn’t mean anything!”) That is to say, in the last 27 years I’ve really settled into Beautiful City as home. And I would really miss Beautiful City if I were to move.
• On the other hand, I have somehow organized my life in such a way that it involves a lot of travel.

Maybe there was more. You’ve heard me talk through this a lot.

Debbie didn’t comment on any of that directly at first, but talked about her own moves: to Los Angeles in the fall of 2013 for her M.Div. studies, to Wisconsin for a year of practical apprenticeship after getting the degree, and then to her current home a year ago for this job. Talking through her experiences, she said that she missed Beautiful City enormously. While in L.A. she’d come back from time to time to visit, and every time she got here she would start to cry. She expected to hate L.A. when she first moved there; and in both Wisconsin and her current home she felt very alone and culturally isolated.

 

All that having been said, she has also found the process of breaking out into something new to be incredibly rewarding on many levels. She has felt revitalized and challenged, professionally and personally. Yes, she still misses Beautiful City terribly. (I brought her some marmalade, made from fruit from my neighbor's tree, which she gladly accepted.) But she didn’t hate L.A. when she moved there — she loved it. Moving to her current home was a big change, but she made friends through the Unitarian Church, through her work, and through hobbies like quilting and fiber arts. And not only has she thereby made a new place for herself, but getting in motion again has reminded her of other places she wants to go too — to travel or to live — while she is still able-bodied. (She turns 64 later this summer.)


So that’s the filter of her own experience, which she offered as a perspective on my question. From there I started to talk more about the details of the job I've recently applied to, and we brainstormed some questions I should ask when I talk to the manager on Tuesday. (Gosh, I hope I can remember them all now!)

After that she got me to help with some of her gardening, and then we drove a few towns over to visit her daughter, her son-in-law, and their two-week old baby. We stayed there for a few hours; drove back, set up a bed for me in her guest room (after moving the ironing board and a couple of sewing projects), and went to our respective beds. Breakfast this morning was out on her deck in the back yard — she said that this house is the nicest place she has ever lived as an adult, and certainly the view of the yard in the morning was lovely — and then I drove 4.5 hours to the airport....