The Intern last night was really exceptional. Whip-smart, erotic, hilarious, and haunting. Even the stage was cool, kind of multi-layered and black with lots of steep stairways. It reminded me of Escher’s “Relativity.” My enjoyment was diminished slightly only by the knowledge that this fabulous piece of theater was playing to an audience that was smaller than the cast, while somewhere a great steel coliseum is groaning under the weight of a hundred thousand NASCAR fans. It’s not just sf writers who get the shaft from society. In the end, I was only able to get one person from my department, Erika, to go with me, but she was terrific company, and became the first vict…er, beneficiary of my George R. R. Martin largess. As we filed into the theater, we noticed a man lying facedown on the stage. Erika said, “Who’s that, do you think?” and I responded, obviously and jokingly, “I think he’s part of the play … not just some random guy,” and then in a funny voice, “Hey Joe, how many times have we told you, ya gotta sleep on the couch.” Ha ha. The actor could probably hear me. Probably some smartass at every show makes some variation on that joke. And speaking of jokes, as we were walking to the theater, a girl outside a comedy club handed us a flyer and said, “Come in sometime. It’s a great show. I pee myself every night watching it.” We laughed. I asked Erika later if she thought that girl ever got sick of telling that same pee joke to everyone who walked by. Erika suggested that maybe the girl had like 5 jokes like that just to mix it up a bit. I suggested we could test that by walking up and down the street repeatedly, but we never did. I guess we’ll never know.
This afternoon I went to a symposium on solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Needless to say, the issue was not solved. I had felt pressure to attend, since the event was co-sponsored by my department, and the head of my department had been handing us all tickets. Apparently, the rest of the grad students are not so susceptible to pressure. Only three MPW students (including me) showed up, and only I made it through the whole event. (Though, to be fair, the other two left after the event had run well past its stated time limit.) Still, three people? Out of 160? I know there are that many because I’ve seen their mailboxes, but I’ve never seen more than about 40 around campus. Where are the rest? Who are they? They’re like grad student dark matter.
Anyway, some of the speakers had interesting insights, but some were really tedious. Despite an early directive that the talk should center on the future and solutions and avoid dredging up the past, one guy spent a solid 20 minutes giving an 8th-grade level history lesson on the conflict, full of such searing historical insights as “Anti-semitism in Europe reached its apex during the holocaust.” Gee, you think? You might imagine that my extensive experience as a panelist at sf conventions would have inured me to public speakers who are going to blather for half an hour without making a point, but in fact my patience threshhold has taken a nosedive. I used to give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Now I recognize them within the first three sentences out of their mouths.
I only stuck around at the end because I was curious what characters the Q&A session would dredge up. I’ve learned through painful experience that not even the sharpest sketch comedy routine can compete for sheer ludicrous risibility with an average member of the public given more than 30 seconds to unload their personal baggage upon an audience. Today brought a woman who commented that how could we expect to be peaceful when we polluted the “temples of our bodies” with the beings we killed, by which I inferred she meant eating meat. Okay, totally irrelevant to the issue at hand, but perhaps a fair point. But then she got in line to speak again, and said, “I didn’t get a chance to say everything I needed to say the first time.” Here’s a tip: if you ever find yourself tempted to speak this line, you have almost certainly said way more than you needed to already. Anyway, this time she said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems intractable now, but we should all take consolation from the fact that the Mayan calendar predicts the dawning of a new age of Aquarius in 2012. At this point, I just couldn’t contain my snickering. Even on her own terms, what she said about the Mayan calendar is totally wrong, and besides, anyone whose civilization has been totally wiped off the face of the earth is automatically disqualified from consideration for “people who could accurately predict the future.”
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