Poems A Dead Boy Wrote

Last night was the final night of the Theatre Oxford production of A Streetcar Named Desire and Shelly and I were in attendance.  The babysitter arrived on cue at 6:15, giving us time to dine at Thai restaurant, Rice & Spice, one of our favorite spots.  I had the Red Curry with Tofu and my date had Pad Thai with Shrimp.  The first time I had Tofu, I was living in Martin, TN and in the same apartment building as a Japanese woman who occasionally made Won-Ton stuffed with Tofu along with some kind of Asian soup with the spongy curd.  She may have been Chinese...or Korean.  Anyway, I recognized the coolness factor of Tofu immediately and about once every 10 years, when I am at my most fraudulently hip (such as when attending a local theatre production),  I order something with Tofu.  Once every 10 years, I regret it.

The play started 10 minutes late and ran on about an hour too long.  Some of the blame for this must go to Tennessee Williams, the author whose Columbus, MS childhood porch I once sat upon, but most I assign to me, for being old and tired.  The actor (Alice Walker) who played Blanche DuBois did a fabulous job and the "Stella! Stella" of the earnest thespian (Gregory Earnest) with the impossible task of following Brando, was delivered admirably.  I haven't seen or read Streetcar in many years and I had forgotten how beautifully it is written.  Or maybe I am better able to appreciate it now that I am long of tooth and beaten. 

There are many memorable lines in the play but my favorite is Blanche's description of the yellowed letters kept in her trunk as "Poems a dead boy wrote."  I could live a whole year of my life powered merely on the beauty of that description.  As a matter of fact, I believe I will.

Performance Art Piece as a Law Student (My real law school story) - Part One.

I visited New York City in the late 1970's in order to study Method Acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio.  Because I didn't want others to realize that I was acting in many of the subsequent roles I played, I kept it a secret from all but a few close friends.  At the time, I claimed that I had attended an Ayn Rand's Objectivism convention.

While the vast majority of my actions since beginning training have been sincere, on occasion I have gone  into character for an isolated event or, more than once, an entire relationship.  The time that I almost married the habitual liar from Dyer County because I was convinced, at least initially, that God had sent her as an answer to my prayers and then I was too ashamed to admit she was actually a sociopath after having bragged so much about her - Acting.  Another notable performance in which I relied heavily on my improvisational skill for a specific event, was when I decided to see what would happen when I tried to go back to my girlfriend after having vanished for three months.

I decided to take on the role of "the repentant boyfriend" shortly after last call at the Amvets early one summer morning. Upon arrival at my girlfriend's apartment, I found the lock on the front door had been changed. Committed to the role, I went around to the back of her apartment and began pulling myself up to her  bedroom window.  I found the window unlocked and after quietly raising the window and parting the curtains, I found her lying with another man.  For a moment I was stunned because this was so out of character for her and I struggled for an appropriate response.  I slid down from the window and started walking back around the apartment to my car.  Then, suddenly struck by improvisational genius, I wheeled around and charged back to the bedroom window!  Regardless of whether the others broke character, I would remain faithful to the muse!   I leapt back up to the window ledge and crawled partially through the window.  The window opened right behind the headboard, affording me the opportunity to immediately start choking the gentleman while declaring with loud and colorful language my firm intent to kill him.  For dramatic effect, I tore the curtains down on top of both of them and then resumed my effort to get better leverage so as to apply maximum pressure. When through the woman's desperate screams, I was finally able to ascertain that this was not my girlfriend with another man at all, but a woman and her boyfriend who were house-sitting for my significant other while she was out of town, I instinctively feigned a drunken stupor, slid back out the window to the ground, and left without even a mumbled apology.  I consider this to be perhaps my finest "event" performance.

Through the years I did roles as diverse as:  late-night bartender; roustabout on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico; an admittedly disastrous performance as a juvenile probation officer; and, most famously,  a six year run as a finance manager in a Ford dealership.  There were many others. In 2007, wanting to shake things up a bit, I posed as a lesbian to increase my chance for a role as a Starbucks Barista  but I was unable to get past the second interview.  Dejected, I took a trip back to NYC for a refresher at the Studio. While running along the East River early one June morning, the seeds were planted for my most challenging role. (to be continued)