Two Subway Stories

The day before yesterday I was riding the subway home at about 7 in the evening; it was a Sunday and the car was about half-full.  The crowd was mellow after an unusually warm day, and I was coming from an almost 12-hour volunteer stint during which I ate very little and stood on my feet the entire time.  I was inputting reminders to myself in my cell phone for things I had to do the following day, and out of the corner of my eye I made out a somewhat imposing man in his 60's in dark clothes.  He had a large, bushy gray beard, and was singing to himself; too low for me to hear what he was singing, but loud enough to make me think he at least had a real song in mind.  He would switch every so often to a falsetto -- a real, practiced falsetto -- and then back to his normal voice; and it made me second guess myself and wonder if he was actually singing gibberish.  He sort of chuckled to himself a little, and mumbled something, then in a raspy voice asked a little too loudly, 'Hey miss!  Do you know what time it is?'  I looked over at him, then back at my cell phone, and answered 'Ten minutes past seven.'  He gave an emphatic nod and answered, without hesitating, 'Xie xie'.  Let me explain that this man was as white as the driven snow, and the ease and perfection with which he pronounced 'Thank You' in Chinese was surprising to me, even these days, and in this city.  I loved that he spoke my mother tongue, that he cared to speak to me in it; and I responded almost as quickly, but with a huge smile, 'Bu ke qi'.  This must have gratified him, because he immediately dug into his bag for a peppermint candy which he subsequently offered me.  I took it, laughing a little, and muttered my thanks; but then had to get up because we'd arrived at my stop.  As I approached the train doors, he saw that I was carrying a large black bag--which people invariably mistake for an instrument--and he said a little too loudly "Very talented too!"  I smiled and said goodbye, and I'm not sure I heard him correctly but I think he said the same thing to me, but in Chinese.  As I left the train I thought about how many times I was told as a kid never to accept candy from strangers.  This time, of course, I kept it.

Yesterday I was coming home from taking my companion (I love this word; the perfect intermediary between significant other, lover, and boyfriend) out to eat for his birthday, and we were waiting at a station to transfer from an express train to a local train.  Various people were staring into the tunnel to see if they could make out the headlights of the subway train in the distance, and all of a sudden an unnaturally bright light appeared there.  Whatever it was, was approaching the station, slowly, and as it came closer the light coming from it became brighter and brighter.  I thought, 'it couldn't possibly be a subway train' but everyone who was waiting with us kept looking at it expectantly, even when the light became too bright to look at comfortably.  Then it ceased to move, not in front of us like a regular train, but at the very beginning of the platform.  And then the strangest thing happened.  People on the platform began to walk toward the light.  I had this feeling that they were all walking toward some alien mother ship, à la Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  But if these were aliens, there was no way I was going to stand there and avoid making contact with them.  So I started to walk toward the light too.  It was so bright I had no choice but to look away, but all of us were still kind of swarming to it, in slow motion.  Nobody was sure this was the train, yet something about the light was drawing us to it.  Once we got very close, it became clear that the train was not a train at all, but a sort of moving office.  It had a few windows, and through them we saw what looked like desks, chairs, and people looking at instruments and holding clipboards.  The bright light turned out to be coming from several very large lamps attached to the front of the vehicle.  When the vehicle started to move again, slowly, we all stopped walking toward it and went back to where we had originally been standing, in the middle of the platform.  I wasn't disappointed that it wasn't the subway train as much as I was sorry to find it wasn't an alien vehicle that had appeared out of nowhere and was planning to take some of us with it.  I will never forget those eerie few moments when we were all beginning to approach it without any real idea of what it was.  Later, after my companion and I had gotten off the subway at the stop near where we live, I saw the office car--probably assigned to test various things along that subway track--again.  Since our stop is an above-ground stop, and we were walking downstairs to street level at the time, we watched it pass overhead with its ultra-bright lights.  It reminded me again of being in a movie.  That is probably the closest I will ever get to an encounter of the third kind.

'Kalkwerk'

Not half an hour ago I walked out of the Gerald Lynch Theater, away from a theatrical piece that I almost didn't want to leave behind; 'Kalkwerk', (or 'Limeworks') directed by Krystian Lupa and performed by the Theater Company Narodowy Stary Teatr, based on the novel by Thomas Bernhard. It was so engrossing that I forgot where I was, I forgot what day it was, and I forgot what I had been doing before I entered the theater. I have rarely experienced such whole immersion in a theatrical piece; usually it will happen when I am watching a complex, emotional, epic film. This astonishing play was four hours long, and at each of the two intermissions, I couldn't believe what had just passed had only been half an hour. What Lupa did with sound/music, with perfectly calibrated actors, with time and the ebb and flow of minute-by-minute existence was beautiful. I made lots of notes, mentally and on paper, and by the end I was overwhelmed with all Lupa had done. There are moments when I recognized myself in the characters, and then moments when I was fascinated with their strangeness. There are scenes like when the main character, a mad scientist in the truest sense of the phrase, drags his wife from her wheelchair to the window so that she can see a little of the sky. Or when his wife, newly draped in a long gown, powders her old, worn face obsessively until she is caked with it and the dust from the powder has all but obscured the actors on the stage. But what I found most impressive was his pacing; there are times when I was so connected to the rhythm of play that I felt (not knew) how the next scene must happen; and, as if by magic, the scene would come, slowly (or rapidly, or rhythmically), the way I hoped and imagined and believed it would. I still cannot quite believe I watched a four-hour play; it was like watching an Apolcalypse Now or a Fitzcarraldo...by the end, I was speechless.

Good independent film is great!

Last night I went to my first Rooftop Film, Voices From El-Sayed, a documentary about an Arab village in Israel who have a larger-than-usual deaf population. Early in the film, a man from the village explains that the reason for the unusually high rate lies in a genetic anomaly that persists in that community. There are some in the village who state that they prefer deafness; that if given the choice between the ability to hear and their status quo, they would opt to remain deaf. There are others who are eager to provide new hearing implants for their children. (The implants and all hospital care surrounding their use are offered free of charge by the Israeli government.) The film is beautifully rendered; a documentary that takes skillful advantage of images and juxtapositions, and one that mines powerful moments from quiet, domestic occurrences--such as the time a child repeats for the first time the word people have been saying to it over and over; a moment of recognition that probably happens every few minutes all over the planet. As the story unfolds, one is struck by the simplicity of the villagers' lives--they have access to electricity seven hours per day, from 5pm to midnight; the familiarity of their situations--one of them is nervous about complaining to his boss about a low paycheck; and the ease with which rich personalities and a rich story come out of this community. The film renewed my faith in filmmaking and particularly in documentary storytelling. And, it gave me great ideas for my in-the-works theater project.

I Have Been To Hiroshima, Mon Amour--

--A play by Chiori Miyagawa, a Japanese writer who came to the States when she was 15. I saw it at the Ohio tonight; it runs through the end of May. The piece stimulated my brain the same way watching a Buñuel film does; I felt I could keep one part of my brain on the play while another part went deliberately from unrelated thought to unrelated thought, in good and interesting ways...I figured out how the seating arrangement for a new play might look, all the while listening to Joel de la Fuente and coming to the realization that he's a pretty good stage actor. The piece was layered, and fell together nicely (i.e. without feeling too obvious or too obtuse). I would love to work with this director, Jean Wagner, some time. It included some video and movement as well, in ways that seemed to fit and serve the piece (rather than take over the piece, as sometimes happens). I came away feeling as if I saw Hiroshima (and by association Nagasaki) from a new and different angle; it was not a jarring discovery or an emotional journey, but a thought-provoking view from a different vantage point.

Deer season

We are dropping Bartholomew off at Ian's aunt's house before heading to Baltimore. We arrive to find his uncle, a tow-headed, bespectacled software developer, carving the fat away from a fist-sized hunk of meat. Surrounding him in glass casserole dishes and ceramic containers are piles of deer flesh from the legs and back. It smells good in the kitchen--spicy--and my brain is trying to work out why it doesn't smell more like blood. After a while, I notice there is a Yankee Candle in the middle of the kitchen table, burning furiously, causing the entire room to smell like a home-made apple pie. Ian's uncle grins at us, tells us that the deer were on his property. Then he points his knife as if aiming a gun, and says in his soft, unassuming voice, "First I shot Bambi, then I shot his mother." The deer have been feeding all year on the soy and corn of his farming neighbors, his wife tells us. The three deer he's shot that season will last them, a family of seven, all the way until the next hunting season. I saw a dead male deer with a large rack of antlers on the side of a highway once, and think to myself it is many times easier to stand among freshly butchered sides of deer than to drive by a dead, neglected animal.