PLAY ACTING STOPPAGE

Acting? Play acting? Playing? What’s the difference when an actor is playing a part?

I’ve seen the difference from my third row center season tickets at The Armory.

For years my wife and mother in-law were theater buddies, two outgoing ladies of a certain age parking underground, riding up in elevators, and walking the cement sidewalks of northwest Portland, the most northwest in the Northwest.

After my mother in-law’s memorial, it was my turn.

The actors were on stage? Check.

The audience in the seats? Check.

Except one time.

The playbill said something about audience participation, but based on the tight seating in the third row center I knew I was out of range.

Public audience participation I avoid.

However, the staff had moved the first row to the left, the second row to the right, for side seating.

Whatever it was supposed to do, it left the third row, my row, front and center.

Toward the end of the play the audience participation began.

The actor swayed across the stage and down the short steps, pausing by the box seats, and swung down the first row, formerly the third row, my row, playing to the audience.

I was a fan.

It was Billie Holliday close up, real close when she chose me for audience participation.

Was I acting? Nooooo

Play acting? Nooooo

I was playing the part of surprised, unaware, audience member.

People say I was a natural.

 

Bitten By The Acting Bug? 

With social media, such as it is, everyone seems to have an acting bug nibbling away.

Through either natural pizzazz, or watching enough high school musicals performed by thirty and forty year olds, we baby boomers know how to work it between “ACTION” and “CUT.’

Endless excitement? Check.

Stunning surprise? Check.

Soulful calm? Check.

Facebook and twitter wouldn’t be the same without running the emotional gamut from A to B.

Like Noirchick In Old Hollywood posting old B&W movie photos, NO CONTEXT HUMANS with their goofy clips, and The Figen for insights.

Between all of them and everyone else, there’s so much to react to, to take in, to write about.

The wonderful part is they all seem authentic, and that’s where I stop.

Authentic? Check.

Unlike too many, I’m not digging into anyone’s life. Show who you are in your comfort zone and go from there.

I’ve got enough to dig into, which is my excuse for writing as I do in the vein of writers past and present who reflect their times.

 

“In a way, he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him. But at least he knew it.”

 

That was Robert Redford in 1973’s The Way We Were playing a college man when he was in his forties, and passing.

The part I like is, “At least he knew it.”

 

At Least We Know It?

In the movies the hero blows through these red lights unscathed on their way to save the world, the best friend, or a woman they care for and can’t have, but still loves with all of his big manly heart.

We cheer for him and hope for the best.

In real life? Don’t do it.

The movie hero won’t hit a train, a bus, or an airport shuttle taking sisters to a nun convention; they won’t get a ticket, won’t be arrested on the spot and their car towed.

You will. And it’s worse for baby boomers. We’re supposed to know better.

Endangering lives through play acting is wrong. Play something else.

 

As a kid I drove a ten year old pick-up truck, the firewood truck.

My Dad’s deal was us kids paid for gas and insurance by cutting firewood and delivering it on weekends after football games in exchange for driving to school.

One of the joys I remember was driving it around the gravel parking lot below the new high school shop buildings with the walk-up to the old gym.

The lot had wooden parking blocks in the center.

With all the cars gone I could drift my truck around the outside like a dirt track racer, steering against the turn and letting the rear wheel drive tires do the turning.

I’m planning on finding a place to drift a rental car with rear wheel drive and regain that jazzy feeling between man and machine where I was in command.

 

The Drift Of Time

So, bye-bye, miss American pie

Drove my chevy to the levee

But the levee was dry

And them good old boys

were drinkin’ whiskey and rye

Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die

“This’ll be the day that I die”

 

Those days are long gone. I went to my fiftieth high school reunion three years ago. That long.

Among my lasting memories from the reunion were the women as they were as the teenagers from those days.

At the reunion everyone looked like someone we’d met before, seen before. If you’ve ever seen a crowd of late sixties men and women, a certain uniformity stands out.

They’re old, but we all remember a shared youth, something you don’t get with anyone else in the history of time.

These are your people, our people, in the same frame.

If you’ve heard the early seventies was the best time to be a teenager, you heard right.

Girls from fifty years earlier? The teenage girls from the 1920’s looked nothing like our era.

Teenaged boys at the time usually had no idea, as usual.

I had a suspicion around thirteen after I visited a girl in junior high while her high school sisters had their cheerleader girlfriends over, girls so awesome it would take your breath away, so stunning you might go blind if you looked at them.

But there they all were, cheerleaders on a day off beautiful.

 

Setting The Standard

Since that time of innocence I’ve noticed other groups of girls, from sister’s friends, nieces and their friends, wife’s friends, my kids girlfriends and their friends, daughter in-laws and their friends.

Each group spent time together, still spends time, learning about the world they live in, the boys, the girls, the adults.

Each group had an adult guard around them, from parents, to teachers, to coaches.

Add fathers and brothers and uncles and husbands and they’ve got a cadre of commandos ready to fight, as they should.

Something happens when older men, men who know better, who should know better, who do know better, decide something is missing in their lives.

Maybe it’s their innate appeal, their hyper-masculine appearance, the feeling that being a master of the universe wasn’t enough?

Here they are, at the top of their game, the peak of their profession, the only alpha-male in their life and dominating the lives of everyone they know.

Here they are, and they hear whispers.

Not from the aging ex-wive’s they jettisoned for updated versions, not from the army of first-divorcee sharks circling him and his ilk in their pond, and certainly not from serious young women looking for foundation blocks to match theirs and build a meaningful life together.

Instead, they hear whispers about a guy, a house, an airplane, an island.

 

PS:

Asking for no one: where is the father, the uncle, the brother, the teachers, professors? Am I missing the link to these voices?

PSS:

When I walk around Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse I get a charge of American roots. That’s it in the picture.

I was inside once on a mission of history and saw the offices, the hallways, and on a now late winter afternoon I tried to feel how many lives had been changed by the rulings from such a place.

Oregon achieves statehood on February 14, 1859, and President James Buchanan appoints Matthew Paul Deady as United States District Judge.Author of the Oregon constitution—the new state’s early statutes and codes—and a member of the first state supreme court, Judge Deady dominates the Oregon legal landscape from the 1850s until his death in 1893. Judicial colleagues from United States Supreme Court justices to state judges praise his learning and ability. A prolific diarist, founder of the Multnomah Public Library, and a theater and operagoer, Deady is one of Portland’s most influential and powerful citizens.

The Pioneer Courthouse is completed at a cost of $611,165. United States District Court Judge Matthew P. Deady moves into his spacious chambers and commences trials in the formal second-floor courtroom. With Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field and Circuit Judge Lorenzo Sawyer, Deady occasionally sits as a circuit judge, hearing appeals from district courts on the West Coast.

The United States Supreme Court hands down a decision in DeJonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, holding that Dirk DeJonge, who spoke at a public meeting called by the Communist Party, could not be prosecuted for speaking at an event where no laws had been broken and no one was incited to break the law. DeJonge is represented by attorney Gus J. Solomon, who is later (1949) appointed United States district judge by President Harry S. Truman.

 

Courthouses are busy places, it’s a good sign, but there’s no play acting.

When you get cooked here, no one needs to stick a fork in.