I try to be very Zen about Christmas, which I know is a complete contradiction, because there is nothing Zen about Christmas at all. What I mean is, it is what it is, we are where we are, let us be grateful that people do try to make the world pretty and behave with kindness, in general, in theory, at this time of year.

Never mind the ghosts of Christmases past, which would find me rockin’ around the Christmas tree with my relatives from the House of Atreus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atreus. Or the ghosts of the present, which find me staring stupefied at gift certificates which cannot repair my piano, send me to a remote corner of the world just so I can say I’ve been there, or buy me more time.

I left my office Friday evening; my office is in Rockefeller Center, so I have to excuse-me my way each day through hoards of audience members queuing up for the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City. I am used to it; I slither through crowds like an eel; the little girls in their Christmas coats and tights and shiny shoes do not move me at all.

Except for last Friday night, when I encountered Miss Molly. She was perched on her tall father’s shoulders, rosy-cheeked, baby blonde, in a brass-buttoned navy blue coat and a wool stocking cap, imperiously pointing at some imagined destination, a coterie of women – mom, no doubt, some probable aunts, and two strollers containing mewing bundles of sibling or cousin. No matter. Miss Molly was QUEEN. She was at least the heroine of a children’s book – somewhere between the age of two and three, giggling and giggling at the beautiful lit-up world.

“Now, Molly, are you excited about seeing your friend Scott? Are you going to play nicely when you get there?”

Parents, I thought, nimbly stepping in front of the lot of them. They never know when to leave it alone, do they? Friend Scott? Play nicely? Molly was in the delicious now now now – there was no hold my hand, stand up straight, where’s your brother, hold this, don’t touch, wipe your nose, share …

Just then I almost tripped over another little girl, four or five years old, light brown hair in a black velvet bow, dressed in one of those red and black I-was-a-princess-in-Czarist-Russia coats favored by parents of a certain level of income and benevolent neglect. Her father said to her in a voice that was not at all doting but one of surprised, sincere but measured and provisional approval, “You look very pretty.”

For some reason, that hit me. I reared back at the sensation, held my face, gasped, felt a sneeze of unsummoned tears.

I fled across the street, to the nearest ATM. Must get tips for the super and the porter. Enough cash to buy groceries for the Christmas breakfast. And floral arrangements. And scented candles. And if I can find one easily, a CD of sacred songs because that’s what I seem to want to hear these days, not “Winter Wonderland” by the latest hipster but the St. Cecilia’s Boys’ Choir intoning “The Holly and the Ivy.” Ghost of Christmas presents, I suppose.

And here comes Miss Molly, again. I’m in line at an outdoor ATM and Molly and her entourage have just turned the corner, a corner which, as none of us at the long-lined ATM would have noticed, presents gushing fountains and light-bedecked trees. Pretty! So pretty! Molly pointed and emitted a joyful noise: “Eeeeeeeeeeeee!” “What are you screaming about?” her father asked, amiable, a bit embarrassed. “Look, there’s Daddy’s office. Look, Daddy works there. Why are you screaming?”

Well, because every tree she sees is a Christmas tree, she’s traveling so fast and so high without having to feel cold or tired and she’s the center of attention, everyone and everything is Molly Molly Molly and look look look. Because of the beauty of the world, from her perch.

Enjoy it, kid. It’s all downhill from here. I didn’t say it. But I thought it.

Labels: "The Holly and the Ivy", Christmas gifts, little girls at Christmas

posted by Elizabeth at 3:41 PM   0 Comments

Hyperhedonia. Noun. The state of deriving excessive pleasure from that which is intrinsically dull

I found this definition, which I have never been able to find a match for, in a dictionary of amusing and unusual words. The dictionary itself was among the stock of upscale bric-a-brac for sale in a yuppie home furnishings store in Georgetown.

My friend Kris was across the store, pocketing paint chips.

Kris collects paint chips. She takes them home and keeps them in a box and occasionally brings them out to look at them in different kinds of light “to see if I still like the color.” Kris’s husband, Chris, was smirking at a watercolor map of Colonial Virginia, which was neither drawn to scale nor historically accurate. Kris and Chris are hyperhedonists.

They would rather not be written about. Kris expressed this by saying, "Don't write about us. Don't write about us. No, don't. Write. About us."

But they make such interesting copy, with their profusion of masters' degrees, their obsessive interest in cataloguing things, Chris's unnecessary fluency in Swedish, Kris's collection of acetate negatives, their bird-watching, cat-grooming, map-making, mountain-biking, gardening, herb-drying, lawn-game playing idiosyncracies, along with the oddities imposed by their his-and-hers matching masters in library science and their upbringing in Indiana, a state which, if it can be survived and escaped, leaves its natives forever stamped with eccentricity.

Their hyperhedonism makes Chris and Kris very easy to buy Christmas presents for. A book on the history of how wind is measured, or which details everyday Dutch life in Rembrandt's Holland. A desktop croquet set. A pair of earrings shaped like hummingbirds. A CD of a capella Swedish folk carols. Big hits, all.

What did I get them this year? I can’t tell you. Although I can tell you that I received their gift and opened it already.

They gave me a book on the genealogies of characters in Shakespeare’s plays. I am so excited.

It seems that I, too, am a hyperhedonist.

Oh, I have always suspected as much. The warning signs were always there. The ability to stare at a manuscript, or a map, or a musical score, or even a photograph for hours, charmed by details, weaving out scenarios, histories, shadows, nuances. The capacity for self-amusement so common in only children, or lonely children. The ability to discuss at great length a detail that is so cool, so fascinating, did you ever notice that? -- only to notice, eventually, that your audience has wandered away, if not physically, then at least mentally, fixing his eyes on the giant t.v. screen showing the Knicks game behind you.

But that’s alright. We have our pleasures. I am going to start with Henry IV, Parts I and II.

Merry Christmas, Chris and Kris.

Labels: Christmas gifts, hyperhedonism, Shakespeare

posted by Elizabeth at 5:32 PM   0 Comments

You know you have ticked off one more rite of passage when, while visiting a distant city, you don’t seek to know the hot radio station, but the local real estate prices. Similarly, I think, you reach a point where you attend a movie or a play, especially if you’re in the business, even on the fringes of it, and say not merely, “I don’t like this,” but “is there an audience for this?”

Is there an audience – an American audience -- for Tom Stoppard’s “Rock’n’Roll”? I saw it on Broadway last week. I had been waiting for it to come to Broadway since I learned that it had been staged in London. I considered myself a huge Stoppard fan, but I see now that I was only halfway there, the R & G Are Dead, The Real Thing, Shakespeare in Love, The Invention of Love, Jumpers half, and not the Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Coast of Utopia half.

In general, I’m not a political animal. I’m not opposed to political theater, as long as it is actual drama about actual people. And yes I knew that “Rock’n’Roll” was about the Prague Spring and felt that I had all the education I needed to have in order to attend the play. I had been to Prague. I had toured the sites of its tragedies (and, other than beautiful architecture, free music and cheap beer, its tragic past is one of its selling points.) I had even done the requisite homework as requested by the little slip of paper that came with my tickets. (Not the kind of thing that happens, I imagine, when you buy tickets to “Legally Blonde.”)

Rock’n’Roll spans two decades, and begins in August 1968 when the Soviet Tanks rolled down Wenceslas Square and put an end to the experiment in political liberalization that then Czech-leader Dubczek had been testing out for a whole 8 months. Jan, a Czech student played by Rufus Sewell hightails it out of Cambridge to go back home to “save socialism … and my mother,” armed only with his vinyl LPs of the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. His professor, played by Brian Cox, protests with rhetoric. Back and forth for 20 years. Jan suffers real privations, Brian Cox suffers loss of idealism, the Berlin Wall comes down, the Stones play Prague, the end.

Not that there aren’t some terribly moving moments in the play, not that Rufus Sewell doesn’t deliver a character who wears his increasing years of experience and heartache with tender poignancy, not that I wasn’t glad as hell to hear Pink Floyd blasted on a Broadway stage (“I feel old,” muttered the man behind me.) But I just wasn’t engaged. The Brian Cox character, the idealistic Marxist professor -- ok, you lost me at “idealistic Marxist” -- not in the 80’s, pal, not when we knew.

Well, I know, it’s only Tom Stoppard, but I loved him. “Don’t you love him?” I asked a woman at the bar before the show started. A Brit in a decisive hat, she shook her head abruptly and drained her drink as the bells rang, calling us to our seats. “You don’t?” I pressed on, feeling as slighted as a soccer mom. (I had chosen her, by the way, at random.) “He has the autodidact’s need to always show how smart he is,” she sniffed.

You doubt me. Well, I rearranged the words slightly, but she definitely used the term “autodidact” because while she groped for it, so did I – oh, yeah, what’s that word that means self-educated, and why is it so hostile-sounding?

So maybe “Rock’n’Roll” is part of an autodidact’s agitprop education but as for me, sentimental capitalist, I was hoping for the moment of shivering recognition I felt while watching “The Invention of Love” when Robert Sean Leonard (may his tribe increase!) playing A.E. Houseman, confessed his love to the (straight) college colleague who proved to be the love of his life, “Did you really never know?”

That play had the same erudition, autodidactism, idealism – hell, that one came with a 30 page booklet instead of a link to website homework, but at the bottom of it was the beat of human need. ‘Cause that’s really what rock’n’roll is – not a rebel voice that threatens Authority, but the very pulse that keeps you free.

Labels: agitprop theater, Brian Cox, Broadway, Broadway audience, Prague, Prague Spring, Robert Sean Leonard, Rock'n'Roll, Rufus Sewell, socialism, The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard

posted by Elizabeth at 6:46 PM   0 Comments Links to this post