Things We Should Do Better

I have given this advice before, but apparently the world has not taken note, for in my latest play there is yet another line-learning refusenik. This man, Martin, is around fifty, rugged of look and coarse of manner. He smokes and eats a lot of candy to aid concentration. He likes to heave out his belly and scratch it in public.

Martin does not consider it to be his fault that he failed to learn his lines. He feels hard done by because the director had promised him a small part, and he did not have time to read the play before rehearsals started, at which time he discovered that he actually had one of the biggest parts. Therefore he was unable and unwilling to learn his lines.

“I’ve been doing too many films,” he said. “Films are so much easier. If you screw it up, you can do it over.” Ominous words, which should have alerted us to what was coming.

As of the night before the opening, he knew few of his lines. Somehow he managed to muddle through the first performance with only one scene going terribly wrong.

Afterwards, a little girl came backstage into the dressing room to get our autographs. Martin said, “Would you like a picture?” and pulled out a picture of himself from a clear plastic case. He could not remember his lines, but he had remembered to bring a supply of photos of himself.

He is older than most of the rest of the cast and much older than the director, Henrietta. He is the only one who dares stand up to her when she yells at us. At first I took pleasure in this spectacle, but when it became clear that he would not learn his lines, his self-righteous attitude began to wear thin.

“I love acting with Colin,” he announced in the dressing room, speaking of a fellow cast member. “It is so easy. I feel so comfortable with him out there. I couldn’t do films with him, but I love being with him on stage.”

If only we felt the same way about you, Martin.

On the second night he still had not learned his lines. He confided to some of us in the dressing room, “People thrive on praise. That’s the trouble with me and Henrietta. The more criticism she gives me, the worse I get. If you are friendly with Henrietta, just have a friendly word with her and say, ‘Lay off Martin. Cut him some slack.’”

Henrietta was seen crying during the intermission. The other actors were increasingly frustrated and enraged because Martin left them looking stupid on stage when he did not give them their cues, failed to come onstage at the right time, or skipped ahead a page.

On the third night Martin actually went back to the dressing room early and forgot one of his entrances. They had to run and get him because he was supposed to lead everyone else on for the next scene, and no one could go on until he was there.

He complained to the producer that the intermission was too long, and it caused him to lose concentration.

“I have a short attention span, and I have to keep going or I lose it,” he explained.

“I understand,” said the producer, “but we can’t start without the audience.”

Despite his bluster, he showed signs of insecurity. “You students, always got your books out. I applied to Cambridge, but I had spent too much time playing in a band and out on the rugby field.”

On the fourth night, I watched from the wings to see what was the matter with the notorious scene where they said he always lost it. I could see clearly that what was supposed to be a dialogue between him and someone else became, instead, a monologue by her as he failed to say any of his lines. I saw how much she enjoyed striking him with her fan while her character berated his character for his failings.

In the dressing room afterwards, he expressed irritation. “You really lost it tonight, Ann,” he said. “You missed a lot of lines.”

Ann was dumbstruck.

“Actually,” said the third actor who had been in the scene, “I think you’ll find it was you who missed the lines, Martin.”

In the end he became a pathetic figure. He was always talking about his film career, but he impressed nobody. People barely remained polite to him. The audience loved him, but he alienated everybody who worked with him.

The worst thing is, he was actually quite good in the role. I imagine there may have been another director in the audience who will think he is just the actor for a future production and will send him a polite, flattering email: “Dear Martin, I was very impressed by your recent performance, and I would love for you to join my cast for an upcoming production ….”

Ah, the fools!

Tags: fools, incompetence

In my most recent play, an 18^th-century comedy, one of the older actors played a rakish lord who takes snuff. He showed me his snuff, which came with a tobacco warning on the tin. It was a brown powder that looked like cinnamon but smelled disgusting.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“Personally, I don’t feel any buzz from the tobacco,” he said, “but in the old days it was a better smell to have in your nose than open sewers and streets strewn with rotting garbage.”

Hmm, I thought. I can do better than that. It looks like cinnamon, but it smells terrible. Why not just snuff cinnamon? In fact, if one were really keen, one could use a cinnamon stick itself to snort cinnamon powder.

That night, one of the actors got his finger run through with a nail that was sticking out of the scenery. He managed not to scream in the middle of the scene, but he came offstage looking very pale, with blood running down his hand.

“I don’t know how I’ll get through the next two acts,” he said.

I had cinnamon on the brain. I proposed its well-known cousin as a pick-me-up.

“What a good idea,” agreed another actor. “Let’s run around in our frilly costumes, knocking on doors and saying ‘I beg your pardon, do you have any cocaine? My colleague has run a nail through his finger but he still has to tell his bride’s family that they have been secretly married for four months before they make her marry someone else.’”

The next day I could hardly wait to try out my new snuffing plan. Before breakfast I poured a little cinnamon on a white plate, put a pinch in each nostril and inhaled sharply.

My ears tingled. I coughed, sneezed and blew my nose. I peeked in the tissue to see how much cinnamon had been deposited. I blew it all out and had to snuff again. It was a more intense cinnamon experience than I was accustomed to, as if someone had inserted a Christmas cookie into my brain.

As I sat at my desk, I snuffed more and more cinnamon. It gave me a sharp, bitter, earthy tingle (dare I say, a “buzz”?). I wondered if there was something wrong with me, that I should be snuffing cinnamon alone at eight the morning. Finally I decided to stop and eat breakfast – which, to my dismay, contained cinnamon.

My nose did not feel right for the rest of the day. I kept checking in the mirror to make sure no unsightly brown crumbs had emerged. I was blowing out cinnamon for hours. Everything I ate and everywhere I went were tinged with cinnamon. It was a bit much, really. Aromatherapy is all very well, but you don’t want to spend the whole day immersed in associations for a holiday season that is still seven months away.

I never thought of myself as the sort of person who would be keen to put any kind of powder up her nose. I remembered a hostel receptionist I met in Amsterdam, a beautiful girl whose nose had been eaten away, I suspected, by the use of just such a powder.

But cinnamon is so wholesome, so innocuous, so German! One thinks of gingerbread men, of Hansel and Gretel. Snuffing cinnamon is the kind of thing Santa Claus would do. Next Christmas Eve, I shall remember to leave out a special snuffbox beside the milk and cookies. I think I’ll get a little something extra in my stocking.

Tags: aromatherapy, gingerbread, Santa Claus, snuff

When we are perfect, everyone will hate us. Oh well! That is the cross we must bear.

Speaking of crosses, if the life of Jesus tells us anything, it should instruct us that being perfect will only get us killed.

Will we be happy, though? Please tell us that at least we will be happy when we are perfect!

Dear me, no. Happiness will be the last thing on our minds. The only thing we will think about is when will our perfection lapse, and how shall we bear it?

Why, then, are we going to all this effort to make ourselves perfect? Is it so that we can be more like God?

Not exactly. We are engaged in a competitive exercise. We are primarily concerned to show up all the people who have snubbed and ridiculed us over the years. The paradox of our striving is that, as we perfect ourselves, they will snub and ridicule us more than ever.

We cannot possibly win, and we cannot possibly be perfect, but that will not stop us from trying.

Tags: happiness, perfection, striving

My housemate Jeremy used to steal my butter because he was too cheap and lazy to buy his own. Then someone told me about how the Israeli Defense Forces would rake the sand in the desert outside the security fence so they could see any footprints if somebody tried to sneak into their country and blow things up. That gave me the brilliant idea of raking my butter. Jeremy did not dare invade my raked butter. He used our other housemate’s butter instead. Was that passive aggressive of me? I really don’t care.

As an added note, when it was Jeremy’s turn to buy toilet paper, he contributed free newspapers. He would also put his sweaty running clothes and shoes into the tumble dryer after he went running, causing an unholy stink to pervade the house.

There is not much you can do with somebody like that except drive them out of town tied upside down to the belly of an ass.

Tags: desert, passive aggression, poverty

Why are we wearing sweaters in the summer? Why are we shivering when it is ninety degrees outside? Why do we find our fingers encumbered by gloves at the computer keyboard?

Forget the earth’s climate problems. Something has gone terribly wrong with the climate of our buildings. This cruel cabal who control the air-conditioning systems in office buildings, shopping malls and movie theaters – who are these people, and what is their terrible plot? Dick Cheney is undoubtedly among their number. Why do they want to freeze us? Are they all morbidly obese and therefore in need of constant refrigeration to keep them from overheating? Are they afraid we might sue them if we happen to perspire a little? Are they simply incompetent? Do they think we will be better workers if our fingers and lips are blue?

Looking out on a warm, sunny day, only to turn back to our desks and don another layer of skiwear is not the most enviable way to spend a summer. Whatever happened to the trick of opening a window to catch the breeze? God forbid we should be exposed to any fresh air; but then, the freshness of air is just an old wives’ tale, surely. Presumably it is all as old as the planet. Besides, when was the last time we found an office window that would open? Doors will usually open, even in this day and age, though most of them are locked or alarmed to discourage the practice, and they often come in pairs, creating air-lock chambers which filter out unauthorized (so-called “fresh”) air.

The only way to survive in the air-conditioned microclimate is to follow the lead of our ancestors who struggled to make it through the winter. As well as investing in sheep farms to meet our growing demand for wool socks to wear under our sandals, we must spend the months leading up to summer consuming vast quantities of oily foods such as bacon and salted herring, thereby amassing a layer of blubber as quickly as possible. In this way we shall have some hope of getting through the harshest season of the year.

Tags: bacon, climate change, sheep

This weekend we were eating at a casual outdoor restaurant when I recognized a young guy at a nearby table: he is a college student in town and also happens to be the grandson of a notorious billionaire. One of my friends knows him, but I have never been introduced to him. He was with a woman and two girls, all of whom shared with him certain prominent facial features. I presumed they were his mother and sisters. Also at their table were a scruffy-looking man with a ponytail and a rugged face, who might have been a bodyguard or a hippie, and some other elaborately-dressed people, whom I overheard saying they had just come from “a fancy dress barbecue”.

I said to my boyfriend, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we kidnapped the billionaires in the corner? We could write a ransom note on the back of the restaurant check.”

He replied, “How would we do it? Would we bundle the little girl into the back of a car?”

I glanced at their table and saw that they were all staring at us and laughing. I had never been so embarrassed in my life. I had not thought I was speaking loud enough for them to hear. It was very strange that they would take such a jovial view of kidnapping conspiracies, but perhaps they were billionaires with a sense of humor. I immediately began to tell my boyfriend a loud, boring story about a friend who had taught English in Italy, but they kept staring at us and laughing. They seemed to be in a very good humor.

Then the scruffy bodyguard-type rose from the table. He approached us and took out a pocket knife.

“Oh God!” I thought. “He is going to slit our throats for threatening his billionaires.”

He opened the blade and said, “I just can’t watch you do this any longer.” He took a packet of ketchup from my boyfriend’s fumbling hands and pierced it with his knife. The ketchup sprayed all over my boyfriend’s jacket and shopping bag. The billionaires laughed merrily.

We thanked the bodyguard for rescuing my boyfriend from his ketchup packet impasse. Although his struggles to open the packet had escaped my notice, it was this which had drawn their attention. We smiled and nodded. My boyfriend went off to wash his jacket. I tried to eat the rest of my mushroom pie, but I was so traumatized by what had nearly happened that I could hardly taste the food. We left soon afterwards, and I resolved never again to make any kind of inappropriate remarks about anything whatsoever. Somebody must hold me to that.

Tags: billionaires, indiscretion, ketchup

That Austrian dungeon father has complained because people are saying he is a monster, rather than merely labeling his behavior as monstrous. A fine moral distinction, which we might develop further.

Rather than saying he ruined his daughter’s life, it might be more accurate to say that he ruined a certain number of days of her life. Rather than saying it was all his fault, we should perhaps consider that she interpreted his behavior in a way that made her unhappy, whereas if she had been a glass-half-full kind of person, she might have regarded the situation in a more positive light. For instance, she might have been grateful that her father loved her enough to whisk her away from the world and cherish her and keep her all for himself. As Hamlet advises, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

No?

These are the kind of arguments my father used when I was little, and he would do something and I would cry. “I didn’t make you upset, you made yourself upset. I can never make you feel a certain way. You are responsible for your own feelings.” Quite. I’m sure all small children would agree with this analysis.

George Bush to the Iraqis: “Don’t come crying to me about being bombed. If you don’t like it, that is your problem. I am not responsible for your tears. The wrecking of your family and social networks is only a cause for grief if you believe it is so. In America we stand for the individual.”

Osama bin Laden to people in airports: “Do not speak to me of inconvenience. Living in a cave in constant fear of death is inconvenient. Standing in a line for two hours, taking off your shoes and reading magazines is only inconvenient if you are a pampered lily-livered crybaby who deserves to be shocked out of your complacency. It is not my fault that you have let yourselves grow soft in the head. You should thank the warriors of truth for waking you from your dream.”

Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn: “Why so attached, my dear? Why do you insist you cannot be happy without it? You are a prisoner of your own thoughts, and I propose to liberate you. While a country such as England could never be happy without its head, I am sure a woman will do very well, and her husband will not have to listen to her treasonous nonsense. You will still have your hands to do embroidery and play the lute.”

Indeed. When we simply take responsibility for our feelings, every prison camp can be our paradise. We have nothing to lose. How strange then that we are so miserable.

Tags: George Bush, Hamlet, Henry VIII, Osama bin Laden

On May morning I got up at five a.m. and went into town to welcome in the spring with singing and dancing. I had had enough of Morris dancers in other years, so this year I watched some green people who played wonderful folk music with instruments resembling giant bladders. They had green unwashed hair and green faces and clothes; even their children were green. Their leader, however, wore a motley coat and a top hat, and his face was half black and half white. He was eager for the crowd to love him. To this end he made declarations such as, “The security guards tried to stop us from setting up here this morning, but we piss in the face of mediocrity! YEAH!” and “We’re going to exercise our right to democracy and not go to work today, right? YEAH!”

The green ladies and children frolicked in the middle of the crowd while the band played on the steps. One of the green men passed around a plate of grapes to the ordinary people, but he did not offer any to me. The crowd was ecstatic when a leafy tree came into our midst and began dancing with the green ladies.

For the last dance, one of the green ladies put on a backpack which was attached to a maypole that rose over her head. The motley man invited sixteen people to come forward and take ribbons. I was one of those who went forward. I took a pink ribbon near the top of the pole and began untangling it. When I got to the end, I discovered that one of the green people had given the other end to a bearded man, but I ignored him and kept the ribbon for myself. I did not apologize. My thoughts were something along the lines of, “Survival of the fittest.”

Then the music started. They counted us off into ones and twos. The ones went clockwise, and the twos went counterclockwise. We were supposed to weave under and over one another to create a pleasing pattern of ribbons. We were also supposed to skip and dance in time to the music.

This dancing and weaving act was a shambles. We rushed around the maypole woman, ducking and dodging out of the way of cutthroat ribbons. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bearded man whom I had dispossessed, but I was careful not to make eye contact. It was great fun, and I almost forgot about the hordes of people watching us. I hurried as fast as I could because I did not want to be the last one left with a bit of ribbon, running around and around the maypole by myself.

At about eight o’clock in the morning, as I was riding my bike home, I made a terrible discovery. I passed a man who bore a strong resemblance to the one whose ribbon I had assimilated. He had the same red beard, jeans and denim jacket. He was alone, stumbling and shuffling along the street, carrying a stick such as people use when they have trouble walking.

Lord have mercy! I had deprived a disabled person of his May Day entertainment. That is as bad as taking the ribbon from a child. The only thing worse would have been if I had seized the ribbon from a disabled child. What kind of shocking karma will catch up with me for that?

Sleep-deprived and lonely, having returned to an ordinary day after a morning with joyful green people, I berated myself for hours. This is why our mothers send us to preschool: so we will learn to share. Obviously I never learned my lesson. I should have been held back in pre-kindergarten and not allowed to progress to elementary school. I pored over my photos of the maypole woman with the ribbons wound around her. In the background, the red-bearded man is smiling. He does not have a stick with him. Is it the same man?

That is not the point! The point is that I welcomed in the spring with grasping ambition and callous disregard for my neighbor, who wished to take simple joy in winding a string around a pole. That was all he wanted, and I denied him.

Tags: green men, guilt, hippies, karma

On Saturday night we were coming home on the bus from a dinner party. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the double-decker bus was packed. Behind us a group of male college students were continuing their party. Most of the other passengers were sleeping, including me, but at some point my boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a plastic bag. I gave him a small paper bag with holes in it, which was all I had. He promptly threw up: partly in the bag, but mostly on the seat, on the floor and on his shoes. It was not a pleasant sight or smell. The food did not seem to have evolved much in the few hours since dinner. Luckily for me, we had not been able to find two seats together and had been forced to sit across the aisle from one another. His seat companion remained blessedly asleep.

Our fellow passengers lost no time in reacting to the odor.

“It smells like pesto!” (Actually, it was risotto with Portobello mushrooms and brie.)

“Excuse me, would you mind throwing that away?”

My boyfriend staggered downstairs to find a trash can.

“That guy has made my day!” exclaimed one satisfied traveler.

But darker voices dissented. “We need to throw that guy off the bus,” they muttered.

Did I defend his honor and stand up for him against those who wished to vote him into exile? I did not. I kept my mouth shut. I was not about to find myself dropped off in the middle of nowhere with nothing but owls and night rats for company. After all, I was not the one who had been intemperate with drink.

While he was downstairs searching for the trash can, his seat companion awoke to find himself enveloped in sickening fumes. He pressed himself back against the window and suffered through the rest of the journey in horrified silence.

The other passengers made merry about the vomit for the next twenty minutes until we reached our destination.

As the bus slowed at our stop, we were surprised to see two of our friends emerge sleepily from the front of the bus, on their way home from a wedding. I immediately enlightened them about my boyfriend’s contribution to the journey.

“I thought I smelled vomit,” said my friend. “Didn’t I say that? I said to Michael, ‘Someone on this bus has been sick.’”

“Should we tell the driver?” I asked as we got off.

“No!” hissed my boyfriend. “Whatever you do, don’t do that! I don’t want to be arrested for vandalizing a bus.”

“It’s a good thing they don’t have your details on a DNA database. As soon as they had analyzed the vomit, they would have been knocking at your door to arrest you.”

I then endured an hour of apologies and explanations as to why this unbecoming episode had nothing at all to do with drunkenness and everything to do with the lurching motion of the bus. I finally fell asleep, only to wake the next morning to another round of clarifications about how the bus vomiting was purely an issue of motion sickness but not intoxication, etc., etc.

“I don’t care if you were drunk,” I said. “How many times do I have to say that I really don’t care? It just doesn’t matter.”

Then I made the mistake of letting slip that the hubbly-bubbly water pipe which our hosts brought out after dinner had contained actual tobacco.

“I thought it was fruit!” said my boyfriend.

“No, it was apple-flavored tobacco. Why would anybody smoke fruit?”

“Do you mean that I smoked? You know how I feel about smoking!”

“It’s not the same as smoking cigarettes. You didn’t offend anybody. You have not irreparably damaged your health.”

My reassurances were in vain. I gratefully rushed off to a play rehearsal, leaving him to writhe in the torments of hangover and hypocrisy.

If we wish to be respected by the rest of the world, our best bet is to make more money. If this proves difficult or impossible, there is always the alternative path: become a hermit/ barefoot monk/ Jesus.

If we wish to take the path of the impoverished yet spiritually enlightened, we may win respect – but not, of course, as much respect as we would gain from having money. There has been one Mother Teresa in recent memory, but there is a whole host of billionaires, like a plague of locusts.

Even so, there is no harm in aspiring to be a famous ascetic. It is an inexpensive option, at least. Yet we must not sit back in the desert with our fasting and praying and wait for the admiration to pour in. If we are truly dedicated to our goal of winning respect, we must be willing to endure severe hardships and, more importantly, set up a good publicity machine.

Our best chance is to emulate the pillar saints like Simeon Stylites. We can set up our pillar in the middle of the city, thus removing ourselves from the world while simultaneously sitting right in the middle of it and remaining quite conspicuous and available to the photographer’s lens.

Our devoted followers/fans will pass up food and gather to hear our words of wisdom, if we choose to communicate; or perhaps we shall build our pillar so high that no one will be able to hear us. An image is worth a thousand words, and we must cultivate our image carefully. Shall we be ragged in the traditional fashion, or shall we accept endorsement deals from fashion designers who are keen to exploit our prominent position?

At first our hermitage on the pillar may strike the public as a stunt of the David Blaine variety. We may suffer from pigeons and unkind editorials which cast doubt on our devoutness. The city’s bureaucrats may require that we put up a safety rail on our pillar.

As the months and years go by, however, the residents of the city will comprehend that our way of life is not a passing whim but a kind of devoted madness. They will grow accustomed to their eccentric saint. When they pass beneath our pillar, they may believe that we are whispering words of comfort to them in the sanctuary of their hearts. They will come to look on us as a friend; they will stand beneath us and tell us their woes. Brides and pregnant women will hug our pillar. They will point us out to visitors with pride, saying, This is the city with the famous pillar hermit. We will be in all the guidebooks. All over the world, our frail figure on its pillar will look out from billboards advertising our city.

Passing our life in rigorous contemplation, we may one day become oblivious to our fame as a landmark. We may not even know that our image is as known and loved as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. Our admirers will see us everywhere; and what shall we see?

We shall look out every day toward the horizon. We shall look up at the gray clouds and down upon this endless city, on the roads and roofs, the cars and buses, the anxious people, from whom we are ever divided by fifty feet of slender stone and united by the futility of this world. Their days go by in such a hurry, and ours are everlasting.

Tags: billionaires, bureaucrats, desert, hermits, Jesus, locusts, Mother Teresa, pillar saints