Local Wonders

"If you can awaken inside the familiar and discover it new, you need never leave home..."

Ted Kooser
Nebraskan and U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-06



Perhaps I hadn't quite learned this lesson.  Perhaps it was because it was that time of the year that required vacation - the lull before the work cycle storm of January.  Perhaps it was my restless mind seeking a rest and, like a homing pigeon, looking to the home of my youth and a chance to reconnect with friends from that time I missed the last time around.

Christmas is the season of eternal nostalgia - the season of scents remembered, of songs sung, of crunching snow, of lights and color, of musky midnight masses.  I needed an assist to prepare this year and when I saw that one old friend, Paul Amandes, was opening in a production called Local Wonders, based on a Kooser book, with music he wrote and a play he co-wrote with Virginia Smith, that fact became the anchor, the set piece for an excursion to Chicago in the dead of winter.

I'm a homer, so my bias and admiration for the artistic efforts of those I know is evident.  Still, this production touched me, in that quiet place that reflects and ponders and is as certain as the eternal cycle of the seasons.  I marveled at my friend's artistic maturity.

The 90 minute play with music is both particular and universal.  We follow the specific threads of Kooser's life as a Nebraskan, a writer suddenly faced with a cancer diagnosis.  This rut in life's road is examined as the facets of the man's life are revealed and rolled out through anecdote and song.

Kooser's Nebraska and his Nebraska life, that landscape shaped by storms, is detailed in all its particulars through the spoken word and song - - the tilt of its geography, the treehouse in the backyard and the child who leaves, the pair of geese that come and go with the seasons, the order and disruption of the organization of a man's tools, his very practical mother, the old highway 30, the uncle in his recliner, the old blue heron, a father's hands, monarchs blanketing a distant tree.  No detail too small, every rock and track observed and noted, the wrestling of human nature between the poet as writer/craftsman and the poet as celebrity.

The musical interludes wind throughout the narrative much like the course of the Platte River, with Anne Hills providing lilting lyrical support (big vocal biceps!) and sharp observations and particular contrasts as Kooser's wife and a cast of locals.  Despite the difficult nature of this type of multi-character assignment, the flow of the play and physical stage coverage allowed her to neatly evoke key players who interact with Kooser in a series of tilts from scene to scene.  Harmonic support, both as an actor and singer.

I needed to see it twice - it's densely aural - and richly textured.  For those friends who may live near Chicago - do see it.  Twice, if you can.  It leaves you with that warm feeling, that Christmas feeling of touching base with old familiar experiences, of small things now noticed like the first snowflake in a winter sky, of the promise of hope and magic that lies just out that open window in your own backyard.  Like leaving home to come home. 

You can order tickets here:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/132271

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Equinox

My favorite season is here at last. 
The early-now nights a little crisper,
The trees prepare to launch the pirouetting leaves,
Between sun and shade, the illusion comes
Nature's ironic wink - recycle and replenish

My illusions are more obvious
Solitude approaching holidays tumbling one after another

Is this a reminder of endings or beginnings
The conflicting colors of autumn
The greens yielding to reds and golds and then muted earthtones
Influence my dreams
I think of you.

This season of our birthdays
Of manic election years memories
Of drives beneath a glowing harvest moon
Removing the car top
The last hurrah tbefore the grey rains come to stay
Passion's last play before hiatus

Autumn, you are my favorite child.

Cris 9-22-10

 Earworm for today:  Tim's favorite autumn song by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues - an oh so poignant memory of concerts and long talks and longer moonlit drives:  Forever Autumn

Blog Photo Credit:  Anthony Dunn, Photographer  - Bidwell Park in Autumn

The Golden Door

"The New Colossus"

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                   Emma Lazarus, 1883

Another July 4th, another chance to evaluate the grand experiment, this America of ours.  When Emma Lazarus wrote this poem, the nation was only a few decades from the formal end of the Civil War.  The same war-originating tensions - between states rights and federalism, between property rights and individual rights, betwen the entitled and the disenfranchised , between the educated and the ignorant, between the Northern European settlers and immigrants - were tensions existing since the Founders first wrestled with the question of nation-forming.  Although the Civil War ended, the remnants of confederacy never really disappeared.  Yet, the nation survived and prospered.

These historic tensions are evident today.  The complexity and nuanced compromises of the Founders' positions resulted in a flexible structure which would serve the ages but, by its nature, would also be open to interpretations.  I don't know that the Founders, men educated by the Enlightenment, would be amused by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin simplifying these very nuanced and sophisticated founding documents to support shallow, uninformed and divisive political postures. 

Today's America is fractured, divisive, browning demographically.  It is a nation still wrestling with its founding tensions, a nation struggling to shake off a corporatization that mirrors a monarchy, a nation with growing pains and facing modern challenges to redefine its place in the world.  The neo-confederacy is re-emerging into the sunlight and we dare not squint.  What is at stake is the heart of America, that nation symbolized by the Lady who invites all to reject the old model and walk through the golden door.

Artwork:  LeRoy Neiman