#81: Variety Lights

(originally published May 9, 2011)

Carla del Poggio’s eyes widen when the curtains open in Variety Lights. It’s one of the oldest stories in showbiz, yes? The dewy ingénue clawing her way to the top. But who hasn’t harbored the dream of being a star, of making it big, even if it’s that brief moment while watching You Can’t Do That on Television: I can do that. I can say ‘I don’t know’ and get a bucket of slime poured onto my head.

*

Every year, for their final project, the high school seniors in the theater mounted a one-act play. My final year, I was invited to play the Valet in No Exit. I was never a full-on thespian—rather, I was someone who ate lunch in the theater room because my friends were in theater. Still, I thought, Why not? I put on a dark suit, white-powdered my face and drew black tarry streaks under my eyes, and memorized my lines. There are two theories of acting: that one can find one’s self in every character, or that one can find every character within one’s self. For me, it was neither; the character I played was simply myself, speaking the lines the way I would have said them normally: Silly questions, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Where’s the torture-chamber? That’s the first thing they ask, all of them.

*

At brunch recently in New York, my friend and I ogled our waiter: he wore dark-rimmed glasses and had his hair in ringlets. He seemed like a graduate student, studying something liberal artsy. English, for example. Or classics. We had arrived in the bright-morning crush, and he graciously acceded to our useless requests. More coffee? A bit of honey, please? Maybe he sensed us watching, the way a passer-by is dimly aware of being watched by window-side restaurant patrons. But he left work before we finished our meal, carrying a Strand Books-branded messenger bag. This cemented our conjectures further. We asked the other server, a spunky blonde, what she knew of him. “Oh, he’s an actor,” she said. We asked our server what she did. “Well,” she said, “I’m in acting too.”

*

A student told me that, for a summer job, he was auditioning for Sea World. I didn’t know one had to audition for Sea World. Yes, he said. Since I don’t have any animal training, I can’t work with the animals. But they have other shows and performances. Does one even notice other humans at Sea World? Who can compete with a school of dolphins, a killer whale? I wish I’d known what I wanted to do with my life earlier, he told me. He was a biochemical engineering major. I didn’t discover acting until high school. I wanted to tell him that I had had the exact opposite experience. If I had asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know,’ no slime would have fallen from the sky. Acting is a calling as much as anything else, but know this, my young friend: there will always be starry-eyed dreamers, and there will always be broken bulbs on Broadway.

#50: And the Ship Sails On

(originally published July 3, 2010)

Orlando, from Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, on the nature of cruises: “This is the funny thing about sea voyages: after a few days, you feel as if you’d been sailing forever. You feel you’ve always known your fellow voyagers.”

David Foster Wallace, from his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” on the same subject: “The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will…. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun.”

Frank Conroy, on his cruise, as quoted in “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”:  “We entered a new world, a sort of alternate reality to the one on shore.” And, when asked by Wallace why he wrote that: “I prostituted myself.”

***

Who hasn’t dreamed of dining with Astors and Guggenheims in gilt Grand Ballrooms? Dancing to the orchestra; clinking champagne glasses; chewing very, very slowly as not to distort your face while eating. I’ve suggested a gay cruises to Matthew before, but he takes one look at the brochures, fraught with glossy men who have gestated in tanning oil, and says, “Are you kidding?” I try to convince him that every cruise will feature an opera competition in the boiler room—but no dice. He suspects—probably rightly so—that we would most likely be roped off on deck somewhere, like Serbian refugees.

But cruises as a sign of class status have disappeared. But the democratization of sea voyages isn’t a bad thing, per se—it’s allowed, for instance, people like my parents to travel. And though they may be the targets of Wallace’s good-natured scorn (retired, prone to videotape and photograph every little movement), they’re still my parents.

Their first cruise they took spun them through Central America. They returned with a fist full of photographs and t-shirts for the whole family. Did I want the nautical flags under the word Panama or Panama: Puente de los Americas? I chose the former.

I looked through the pictures. The first was of a tiger.

“That was at the lunch buffet,” my mom said. “It’s made out of cheese and chocolate!”

The next was an Arcimboldo-style spread.

“All fruit!” she said. “Every breakfast, you can have all the fruit you want.”

Then came pictures of the bath towels folded into origami animals: a swan, a snake, a giraffe, a lobster, a lobster wearing my father’s glasses, my mother sitting next to a towel lobster wearing my father’s glasses.

“Never the same animal once during the whole week,” my father said.

“Where’s the Canal?” I asked. “Where are your pictures of Belize?”

My parents looked at each other and shrugged—“Did we tell you about the midnight buffet?”

#49: Nights of Cabiria

(originally published June 30, 2010)

You can’t watch Nights of Cabiria without falling in love with the title character: she’s spunky, outspoken, fiery, proud, and, at her core, eminently hopeful. She’s like a mouse encased by concrete. Giulettta Masina plays Cabiria as a female Little Tramp (as opposed to a regular tramp, I suppose), replete with a cute blonde bob and a fake fur shoulder wrap. She picks fights with stuck-up prostitutes and is spry enough to dash away from the cops when they raid.

What struck me most, however, was the community that the prostitutes had formed for themselves. Sure, they teased and tussled and got into spats, but they also organized a carpool for themselves to the Feast of the Assumption. There, as they bought candles and queued in the mass of good Catholics, they kept track of one another in the crowd, even as, one by one, they prostrated themselves before the Virgin Mary, to ask for a miracle.

I’ve known only a few prostitutes—and none in the Biblical sense. Rather, in 1998, on a trip to Vietnam, my sister and I hung out with the various bar girls and rent boys in Saigon, though, for the life of me, I can’t remember any of their names now. We saw them mainly at Apocalypse Now, open seven days a week until four in the morning or later, depending on how many people were dancing. The dance floor was almost always full: the music, a condensed overview of American pop hits from the 60s to the present. The helicopter-rotor ceiling fans barely dried the sweat coming off all those bodies.

Apocalypse Now served soft drinks without ice, conscious of tourists who didn’t trust the water, but beer was the main beverage. There was a two-tier pricing system: Vietnamese, $2; foreigners, $3. The lighting came from twenty-watt bulbs in frosted glass globes. A bloody blotch of red paint covered each globe, dripping like a war wound. The bar resembled a thatch hut, and a surfboard hung from the wall. It read: Charlie Don’t Surf.

Obviously, my sister and I weren’t the clientele for the working girls. Whenever a Westerner walked in, bar girls surrounded him in a feeding frenzy, and we’d lose sight of him among the girls clinging to his arms, following him. My sister would point and giggle with her slatternly pals, while I hung out mostly with the rail-thin, gay Vietnamese boys, all of whom, it seemed, had foreign boyfriends who sent them gifts: clothes, cologne, occasionally cash. They rarely, if ever, dated one another.

“It’s like dating your sister,” they told me.

One night, as we waited for our hotel to let us in (the doors were bolted at night, and metal grates were pulled around the premises; my sister and I had to ring a doorbell to wake the maids sleeping on the floor), she asked, “Why is it that, wherever we go, we always make friends with the fags and whores?”

I shrugged.  “Birds of a feather?”

She wasn’t pleased with my answer.

#4: Amarcord

(originally published Feb. 27, 2010)

I admit: this is the second time I’ve seen Amarcord, and it’s also the second time I’ve had to stop the movie in the middle for some sleep before picking it back up from the beginning the next day. And while I could give several reasons why I needed a break, including having just taught a long day of classes, or the boyfriend coming down with the aches and pains of stomach flu, or the cold, windy weather that would bring down four inches of snow over the night, I’ve found that it’s usually much easier to blame the artist.

So, I blame Fellini for my inability to stay awake. I blame Federico for the fractured narrative and picturesque vignettes that make it easy to hit the stop button, yawn, and go downstairs for a shower. I place the blame squarely on his shoulders for the continual breaking of the fourth wall, Brechtian-style and for Nino Roti’s infectiously jazzy score. I blame him for sending lyrical puffballs in the air; for community bonfires that celebrate the Bakhtinian carnivalesque; for lawyers and other intellectuals interrupted with fart noises; for schoolboy crushes and urine-soaked pranks; for lusty, callipygian women and even lustier, but less booty-licious men; for crazed family dinner; for priests fussing with flowers; for automotive circle jerks; for ridiculously trumped-up and smoky Fascist parades; for a Mussolini composed entirely of flowers; for a Grand Illusion-like shoot-out (of a poor gramophone playing the “L’Internationale” instead of an fife-tooting, escaping prisoner); for castor oil toasts that signal the dark side of flatulence; for the Grand Hotel with its vampiric princes, midget emirs and Bollywood fantasy harems; for dwarf nuns from insane asylums; for Fascist steamships; for white bulls appearing out of fairy tale-thick fogs; for Grand Prix racers who lose their ears; for peacocks pluming their tailfeathers in the middle of winter; for funeral processions draped in black; for the irony of rain on your wedding day; and, once again, for those damn puffballs.

The stomach flu, on the other hand, I blame on students who don’t wash their hands before handing in papers.