On Actors and Their Acting

                             Disclaimer

      I am not now, nor have I ever been an actor-- not a real actor. I have worked at acting only as a teacher, seeking to know what it is that an actor does to enable me, a teacher-director, better to assist young actors on stage. I have wanted to understand what it is that actors do, strange as it is. I have stood at the door and knocked….

   To this end, I have worked, or touched upon, most every function of the theatre, the better to teach about it. I have not much distinguished myself in these efforts, but I was always deeply in earnest. I still stand at that door and knock. I want now, at this hour of my life, to tell someone how grateful I am for the privilege of having lived close to actors and their acting. I sense something holy about it.

   And so here follows the first of two ragged essays about it.

On

                                    Disclaimer

      I am not now, nor have I ever been an actor-- not a real actor. I have worked at acting only as a teacher, seeking to know what it is that an actor does to enable me, a teacher-director, better to assist young actors on stage. I have wanted to understand what it is that actors do, strange as it is. I have stood at the door and knocked….

   To this end, I have worked, or touched upon, most every function of the theatre, the better to teach about it. I have not much distinguished myself in these efforts, but I was always deeply in earnest. I still stand at that door and knock. I want now, at this hour of my life, to tell someone how grateful I am for the privilege of having lived close to actors and their acting. I sense something holy about it.

   And so here follows the first of two ragged essays about it.

An Obituary

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     Obituaries are one of a newspaper’s last, best services in these unhappy times. The obituary page is a record of the sung and the unsung, the rich and the poor, old and young, the remembered and the forgotten. Some are long. some painfully short, the kind that make you wonder..., and those who get no obituary at all. It’s all good reading.

     The notices of Boulder’s newly dead are particularly compelling, a record of the many remarkable people who have come to Boulder, to do their extraordinary work and to live the fullness of life that, in its strange way, Boulder affords. Boulder is an excellent place to live, in spite of the envy and spleen in which some outsiders hold it.

     Some of us were actually born here; some have lived out long lives here in Boulder. Some of us can give testimony to the history of the town and how it became the strange and distinguished place that it is.

THE SURGEON AND THE SCHOOL TEACHER

             

              “to talk of many things… of cabbages and kings”

                         

  We read in Luke 10, of the master instructing his inner circle, his staff, as it were, in how they should go about to teach-- and to heal. He insists that they ought not to go about ,from pillar to post, like mendicants, begging support for what they do, but attach themselves to a community, even to a household, and stay there, content with what they may receive. Then can they teach.  “…for the labourer is worthy of his hire.”

   There it is, verse 7, the center of the argument: that the workman is worthy, worthy in his employment. I think it works on three levels of meaning. The ambiguity is profound. First, I take it that the worker is worthy to be paid his bill for his work, of what he charges for his labor.

    The second sense, I believe, is a challenge to the worker to do work that is worthy in quality.

    And third, that the laborer must we worthy, as a person, to those who hire him.

  I believe these three meanings are lodged in those eight words, with emphasis on the first of them, the “for” meaning “because”. Because this work, this labor, is done in the world, the real world, where work is of enduring consequence.  

A Fashion Note

      My editor-in--chief feels that this essay may be frivolous and perhaps better junked. I respond that what draws one's attention cannot be altogether frivolous. It must mean something or we would not notice it. Human beings wear clothing: there has to be something in that somewhere…. So, you decide.                       

    Much is said of how superbly turned-out Ms. Obama was at the Inauguration. As kids we would have called her a “looker”, but been too young to understand the joie that informs her every dress and step.

   But it is not the great lady about whom I wish to write: it is of her husband,

Down in the Mine

                                                   for

                                            Velma Biddle

                                                 Beloved colleague

                                                     1909 --2013

              Cans’t work i’ th’ earth so fast? O worthy Pioner?

                                               Hamlet

   Back in the Golden Age, the shepherd Strephon lay on a sun-drenched bank of flowers and, with his oaten pipe under a cloudless sky, sang ditties of love to his beloved Phyliss. In that perfected pastoral time, all creation lay before him, an immediate treasure of experience, like gold and silver and precious gems, all round the earth’s exquisite, unchanging shore.

A December Story

                                              A December Story

     A bad piece of country lay ahead. We should have got across and delivered the packs we carried hours earlier. But the going on this brute of a barren mountain had been slow and hard. Now the night was coming down, darker and colder by the minute. Going on was more than we were up for. We thought we had not been doing too bad, the four of us with our packs and our dog, until the dark and cold stopped us in our tracks. And,to make things worse, we felt half lost, unsure of how to go on. So, we began to look for a place, protected, out of the punishing wind, where we could make camp-- such as it might be--and hunker down for the night.