Mark Twain said “write what you know,” so I share. For anyone having read my previous essay will know I’ve wandered off to France in search of my lost heart and what better place to search than the stage, for as Master Shakespeare himself has told us “ All the world’s a stage, / And all men and women merely players.” Fortune has favored my script with lodging in the home of a young actress in the city of Paris. My first week in France was spent in astonished confusion by my good fortune at having fallen in with such interesting folk, for she and her beau also happen to be, as I understand the French expression “très sympathique” - never mind my boorish frontier manners or my borderline grasp of reality for having believed any young woman would have pity or interest and respond to my earnest efforts to find a live-in model/companion/business partner ( http://josephtstevens.blogspot.fr/2012/05/model-companion-business-partner.html ) willing to parley my life’s work into cash as a financial buffer from the inevitable ravages of decrepitude, and/or for us a great deal of fun and profit in a world quickly going to hell-in-a-handbasket . .
Being old has benefits other than the inexorable decay made so apparent by own nation’s imperial posturing; for example, at my age vanity is so much a part of my existence that it at times feels like a skin which may or may not be torn from my skeleton depending on the jagged edges of whatever environment I’m in or whatever foolishness I may be engaged in. The old French adage “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes” is particularly applicable with this essay, for while I’d like to think with age I’ve acquired some dignity unavailable to the gangly arrogance of youth; no such luck. My gracious hostess invited me to the opening of her play, the efforts of which I could only appreciate by the enormous time and dedication that had occupied her waking hours in my short week in her home. I felt giddy with the prospect of becoming a witness to the culture de Paris, however tangential or imperceptive that awareness may have been. I began to doubt my salvation while sitting in the lounge waiting the call, and it was Shepard Farely’s tired ripoff of Lichenstein’s groundbreaking exposure of modern comic book culture decorating the lounge area - a hand grenade turned into an aerosol nozzle - très original.
But we are here to laugh at my peccadillo here, not the limits of ruling class capitulation to urban scrawl, besides I had a responsibility to my hostess to fully appreciate her work and to honor her kindness and that of her beau for opening their home to me - a barbarian from the western fringes of culture, California. Never mind that my language capacity rendered me deaf and dumb to an art form derived from the epic foundations of modern literature - Greek Drama with its ancient muses transformed by our keen modern sensibilities into a clarion call to humanity in post-history Paris. I was determined to render my meager perceptions fashioned slowly by decades of assiduous application in service of beauty, nor would I allow for any distraction from the artistes by being recognized as a pretentious infiltrator. No, I would use my keen undercover skills to blend in perfectly as just another pre-apocalyptic human seeking solace in tradition. I don’t think I could have been any cooler were I sitting on park bench in Omaha Nebraska on Valentine’s Day - good thing too for the play required all of my attention and focus just to imagine my hostess in her role as 16 year-old disaffected ingenue in a dystopic family when for the entire 1st half of the play, all dialogue was between two men of vastly different backgrounds in a set resembling a disturbed “Waiting for Godot” arguing over monetary issues full with what appeared to be constant double entendre which I conjectured solely from a tittering audience at middling bawdy mimicry.
However determined I may be to affect the sophisticate, I am not genetically capable of laughing at humor incomprehensible to me, so when the play passed the halfway mark and my hostess, nor any players suggesting anything resembling family dynamic appeared I began to suspect my location in the universe was suspect, so I surreptitiously began to inspect my playbill and documents searching for clues that might explain any absence of family in a play named “Une Famile Aimante.” Funny how close giddiness and humiliation can reside in the gut, for my play bill did not read the same as my ticket, yet my gut felt about the same, except now more of a sinking feeling than exaltation. What next - 20 Euros is a lot of money to spend to stand on ceremony, and my mute participation added nothing to the intense performance the two men were working so hard to present. Yet to walk out of a performance any performance - be it the miming poverty of a street beggar, or the proud exclamations of an infant mastering the use of tongue is as hard and heartless as accumulating the world’s booty from the film of human sweat and broken bodies only to retreat into the opulence reserved for the profiteers posing as leaders on our self-extinguishing planet once called paradise.
I am not without heart, but it is so scarred that the choice of silently affecting the dynamic of a performance of those I know not by walking out, or supporting the effort of one in which my late entrance may have had a useful effect by walking in, was not a difficult choice to make. And again my arrogant assumptions proved my undoing, for the same young dame who affably took my ticket for the first performance was now in the role of magistrate and executioner - what else could she do, a philistine unable to appreciate the complete work of a renowned playwright; exiting midway; and then to urgently seek access to another venue underway - vraiment! “Death to the Infidel” may have been read in her eyes if there was a language capable of interpreting the indecipherable - though I felt the daggers clearly enough. The real irony would be the amount of self-knowledge available in such a circumstance if one is able to quiet the shame and panic enough to hear the kind admonition of my actress friend’s beau when hearing my version of hell later that night; “ah,” he said “something happens to everyone,” and while this did not fully assuage my shame or humiliation - a process each individual in isolation with his or her particular puzzle must solve it did help me to fully appreciate the title for the play which my own barely acknowledged limitations allowed me to only partially appreciate “L’Homme de Paille - The Straw Man”
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