This Clumsy Living

Theoretical love

92 Theoretical love I’ll join the Community Theater or establish the Community Theater if the Community Theater doesn’t exist to join. I’m tired of checking my e-mail every twelve minutes, hoping a message of love has arrived, tired of being alone when I’m alone and alone when I’m with people, and a musical version of The Grapes of Wrath wouldn’t be hard to stage. We’d need dust mainly which is skin mainly so we’d need bodies mainly, need grapes and wrath and one chair for the director and one tree to suggest loneliness at first and later desperation and finally the tree would be a symbol for the reach of the human spirit. I often cry over symbols for the reach of the human spirit though not when I encounter the actual thing. When you turn my age as I have just about turned my age, you give in to some flaws such as the belief that jam is one of the food groups or the tendency to be more engaged by art than the souls art intends to glorify. And obviously there’s the flaw of using the word art twice in one sentence and also mentioning the soul in that sentence means I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the distillation of experience to some kind of point and the distillation of the response to that experience to some kind of point and the fact that people will pay for tap dancing about starving and singing about tap dancing and costumes, everyone loves to see other people in rags. I’m thinking, this could save me, spending all day in the theater, 93 all night rewriting the book, sewing sequins to the eyelids of the actors, dreaming of New York and roast beef sandwiches too tall to fit in my mouth. I would most like to stage the end, which I remember best from the movie because I live inside the movies, when the Henry Fonda Joad tells the mamma Joad to look for him “Where there’s a fight ’gainst the blood and hatred in the air.” Everyone’s eyes would swell with proletarian feeling and fellow man and woman feeling, each person would think he is that guy, she is that spirit, and I’d be clapped onto stage, stomped into the light, I’d bow and there’d be a party behind the curtain and kisses made of champagne and I’d slip away as soon as I could, as soon as we became ourselves again, bewildered, unscripted. ...