Greetings for the building that looks like a stack of pancakes. For those of you keeping track, it's about midnight on a Sunday evening/Monday morning, and I'm sitting in an empty office, on guard. Today, I decided to push the envelope; there is no moratorium on using your own laptop to make contact with the outside world, and it's not like I'm downloading porn.....I'm just bored with the book I'm currently reading (A new edition of BULLFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY), I cannot take another five minutes of the PelosiBashing on FAUXNEWS, and I've eaten all my pretzels.
If you haven't seen it, I would encourage you to see a pretty decent documentary titled THE LOSS OF NAMELESS THINGS. It deals with the interesting turn of events in the life of Oakley Hall III, from his breakout as a playwright/director, to his near fatal accident, to his re-birth. I was captivated by this. Since seeing it, I've been doing some research, and what I've found is depressing me to no end...
In a strange tale of two theatres, the Foothills Theatre in Massachusetts, and the Foothill Theatre in California, have been forced to close after more than two decades of work. They closed within a week of each other; unable due to financial constraints to even finish their current seasons.
The economy affects so many things. As a former artist, I find it especially sad that these organizations, dedicated to bringing new art and new points of view, and new voices to the American theatre scene are silenced because the American people have managed to boil their attention span down to just long enough to appreciate a Quizno's commercial, and the American Governing body sees the Arts in this country as just as important as....well.....a Quizno's commercial.
Truly, when you think that most of the arts budgets in America have been financed by....wait for it....the automobile industry, it makes the current situation even MORE sad than it was just a few paragraphs ago.
But I was talking about Oakley Hall III.....wasn't I?
In hearing his story for the first time, and from doing some research into the topic of his play (Meriwether Lewis, of "and Clark" fame) and the fact that the protagonist is mysteriously dead at the end of the play......I wonder about the nature of defining moments.
First of all, I think it rather rude of Fate to give us defining moments without telling us that they ARE defining moments.
Take, for example, Millvina Dean's defining moment was being on the TITANIC; alas, she was two months old at the time, but she is forever defined as TITANIC survivor. I don't know if I could live with being defined at two months old.
Oakley Hall was defined twice, and as much as Greek Tragedy would allow apparently; the son of a brilliant novelist, Oakley was reported to be even more brilliant than his father. And on the verge of great success, an accident off of bridge onto the unforgiving rocks below now defines him as a man who must literally re-invent himself after having EVERYTHING taken away from him.
Meriwether Lewis was defined by a trip up the Missouri River, and visiting the Pacific Ocean, and becoming the talk of the nation at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. And where do you go from there?
I surely wish I had a point to all of this, but I don't.
It's now just before 1am on a Monday morning in a building that looks like a stack of pancakes. My battery is slowly discharging, and my computer will soon fade to black. My mind races at the idea of "defining moments," and I wonder when my was, or will be.
I hope I get to slay the dragon.
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