“I’m a pretty happy fellow, you know?”

Side-zip dresses – yeah, I don’t understand those.  I understand the engineering behind the ones that go on over your head.  Or the ones that a girl might step and wiggle into.  I’ve tugged up a few back zippers.  (And down…)  Even zippers in the front, yep.  I completely believe in the row of tiny white buttons up the back of a wedding gown.  Crossing Delancey at Theatre LJCC, though, used a dress with a tiny little zipper on the side from like hip to underarm.

Most dresses are girly, yeah.  Duh.  But there’s something particularly old-school feminine about a dress that zips on the side.  “Like Grace Kelly at her dewiest.” It’s just all nipped in and fitted in a way that nothing I wear ever could be.

Lynne Long, Emily Lunsford, and Martha Summey

What’s strange about it is that I just can’t understand how it works.  I mean, a zipper in the back means that the dress isn’t even on until someone zips it up.  It won’t stay up.  But one of those side zippers just cinches the whole thing up nice and tight, neat and tailored.  But it was already on, right?

I really can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just something wonderfully dainty and feminine about it.  What’s the most fun is that it’ll never mean the same thing to me that it does to a girl.  To her, I’m guessing, it’s just a little practical thing, like bobby pins.  But to me, it might be among the least practical thing ever.  It would make more sense to do it any other way.

Romantic comedies.  Chick flicks.  Same thing.  I don’t know if I appreciate them in the same way as some others might.  And I don’t know if I could.  Sure, I’ll admit to listing When Harry Met Sally as one of my favorite movies of all time.  But Dirty Dancing means nothing to me.  I just don’t understand.

That being said, I think I’m glad they exist, because they imply several things about the fairer sex that I really like.  Kind of like side zip dresses.  See, I was going somewhere with that.

“Any man who loved me enough to make a fool of himself would be good to me.”

Yeah, I think I just did that a little.  Moving on.

“It’s hard, this business of getting acquainted.”

This play is all about finding romance.  Or not finding it, because you’re too busy dreaming Disney about boys.  So then your Bubbie finds a matchmaker to hook you up, because you couldn’t do it yourself.

I’ve never been married.  And I just noticed the other day that I’ve had more people – strangers and friends – try to set me up in the last few months than ever before.  At the same time, fewer and fewer women seem to be willing to offer a stranger any kind of fair opportunity to get to know them.  More than ever before, if I don’t know her already, she’ll visibly flinch when I try to say, “Hi.”  Men are apparently scary.

Notice a disconnect there?  No one knows how to meet anybody.  No wonder we all need a Shadchan – or eharmony.  I’m offering fabulous door prizes – pickles and hats – to anyone who can set me up with someone I go out with twice.

Okay, this has been all over the place.  But I really am discussing Crossing Delancey somewhere under there.  While I’m being all over, I thought Jeff DeGarmo (Sam) and Emily Lunsford (Isabel Grossman) both had a few genuine and sweet moments in this performance, even though I think Jeff might have almost choked to death for real on stage.

Thanks very much to Emily Lunsford and the LJCC Theatre for letting me come see their show.

I remember – I think – two teachers in high school who told me that I wrote exactly like I talked.  That is, when they read something I’d written, it came out just like something that could have come out of my mouth.  I’ve carried that around with me for a long time.

At first, I thought it might’ve been a bad thing.  Like, writing is s’posed to be formal and stuff, you know?  So if I wrote like I talked, then I obviously wasn’t going to pass any AP exams.

Later on, I wondered whether I just talked formal and stuff.  So my speech must’ve sounded boring, stuffy, and proper.  And not cool and hip and groovy like the rest of the kids.

Now I’ve got enough experience to think I probably just have my own thing going on – whatever that is.  And I can’t get away from it.  So when I write, it sounds like me.  And when I talk, it sounds like me.

I’m not a big fan of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s work, but she knew at least one thing: “Art is a wicked thing.  It is what we are.”

You can’t get away from yourself.  When you write, there you are.  When you paint, there you are too.  When you sing, you’re definitely there.  In fact, it’s a funny paradox that you can’t even do art like someone else, really, because you’re still in there.  It would be amazingly hard to lose yourself completely and completely imitate the style of another person.  I can’t be you any more than you can be me.

This has poignant implications for actors, of course.  Lots of actors just play themselves, over and over.  Then you have dudes like Edward Norton – actors who fade into roles like ninjas into inky blackness.  But he’s still there.

It’s also true for any sort of writer – fortunately or unfortunately.  I’m sure you could unleash a team of trained psychologists on the blog and study my painting, music, and writing for signs of crazy.  (There they’re there.)  To find out what makes me tick.  (I honestly have no idea.)  Or to find out what I like.  (Milkshakes and pretty hair, but not necessarily in that order.)  I’d like to think that people have occasionally been interested enough in me to expedition through this all to try and figure me out.

Knowing this, I can’t help but peer transparently into the arts when I’m an observer.  I remember going to a Jackie Chan movie, years back, and laughing too hard in an inappropriate place.  The friend I went with commented later something like, “Only Daniel could laugh so hard at a plot device.”  It’s true though.  I was watching what the writer was doing – the mind behind the work – and not just watching the protagonist run up walls.

Art uncovers the artist.  Even when an artist uses art to try and mask himself by leaving false tracks or red herrings, the result is – fortunately or unfortunately – the same.  You leave traces and pieces of yourself behind whether you’re trying to or not.  Maybe that’s why being an artist can be so scary.  There it is.  That’s me up there.  Even when you’re not an artist though: yes, that’s still you not up there.

Which brings me the long way around the cornfield to the After School Special by Theatre Downtown.  I think this play was the world premiere and written locally by Billy Ray Brewton, who is the Founder/President/Artistic Director of Theatre Downtown.  I didn’t get a program this time, so I’m not entirely sure.  But it had his fingerprints all over it.

At this moment, I’ve got 43 blog pieces on Birmingham theatre.  I’d put Theatre Downtown up there with any of the other consistently good theatre experiences in town.  In no particular order, you’ve got a pretty decent chance of seeing something pretty decent when you see a show by the Magic City Actors Theatre, the Park Players, Red Mountain Theatre Company, Theatre Downtown, or Theatre UAB.  Just like how a play can have fingerprints all over it, an entire theatre company can, too.  Yes, that’s still you up there.  And After School Special was – all at once – silly, sassy, sarcastic, stoopid, sour, shocking, and subtly sincere.  And I laughed out loud more than a few times.

It reminds me of a critic I read years ago who reviewed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut in the same week he reviewed Eyes Wide Shut or something.  In doing so, he complained about the imprecision of the 5-star system.  Was South Park a great movie?  No.  But was it trying to be great?  No.  But Eyes Wide Shut was deeply flawed while shooting for greatness.  So it was disturbing when he had to give South Park five stars and Eyes Wide Shut just three.  But not everything is shooting for great and sometimes – fortunately or unfortunately – you just want some Katy Perry.

Thank you very much to Billy Ray Brewton and the rest of the kids, teachers, and parents who are seriously involved with (or just casually seeing) Theatre Downtown.

“By God, woman!  Can’t you see I’m thinkin’?”

Everybody’s got their demons.  Sometimes it’s sex and you’re addled and attached to a prurient and insatiable beast.  Sometimes it’s drugs and you’re stuck to the repeated rush of chemoxizine or a simple escape from the end of your workday.  Sometimes it’s the rock n roll lifestyle and you starve yourself so you can keep fitting into your leather pants.

No matter what your demon, it helps to name it.  You gotta get it out in order to get it out.  Back in the 1930s, America had some demons, and Erskine Caldwell and Jack Kirkland spent some time trying to name them in Tobacco Road.

“PLACE: The back country, Georgia – thirty miles or so from Augusta.  It is a famished, desolate land, once given over to the profitable raising of tobacco, then turned into small cotton plantations, which have been so intensively and stupidly cultivated as to exhaust the soil.  Poverty, want, squalor, degeneracy, pitiful helplessness and grotesque, tragic lusts have stamped a lost, outpaced people with the mark of inevitable end.  Unequipped to face a changing economic program, bound up in tradition, ties, and prejudices, they unknowingly face extinction.  It is a passing scene and fast fading, hurling the lie at nature’s mercy and challenging a God who reputedly looks after his own.  Grim humor pervades all, stalking side by side with tragedy on the last short mile which leads to complete, eventual elimination.  The pride and hope of a once aggressive group, pioneers in a great new world, thus meet ironic conclusion.  The world moves on, unmindful of their ghosts.”

That is, America was unmindful of these ghosts until they were named in Tobacco Road.  Wildly popular for years, one New York Times review of the play in 1933 said: “The theatre has never sheltered a fouler or more degenerate parcel of folks than the hardscrabble family of Lester. . . . It is the blunt truth of the characters he is describing, and it leaves a malevolent glow of poetry. . . .  Plays as clumsy and rudderless as ‘Tobacco Road’ seldom include so many scattered items that leave such a vivid impression.”

Even 75+ years later, I agree with this assessment.  The play itself is clumsy and rudderless.  The characters – and I mean all of them – are foul and degenerate.  After only a few minutes, I wrote down: “These are BAD people!”  Though, as actors, I thought Mel Christian (Sister Bessie Rice) and Dane Albright (Lov Bensey) were ‘specially good.  All that evilhood makes it hard to watch.  And hard to love, especially for someone who’s always preferred Cheers to Seinfeld.  But there’s a malevolent poetry to it.  And it’s memorable in the same way you’re guaranteed to remember every time you’ve been hit in the face.  That’s what they call a vivid impression.

No one said naming demons was easy, but admitting the problem is often the first step.  When there’s a relationship problem, you’ve got to bring it out in the open.  When there’s a work problem, you’ve got to discuss it to make things better.  And when there’s a family problem, you’ve got to admit that you’re actually related to those people.  They are your family, like it or not, even dysfunctional as heck.  Only then can you work on fixin’ it or just gettin’ on past it.

Thank you to Mel Christian, Michael Walters, and the Birmingham Festival Theatre for putting on this challenging and difficult play.