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Theater
Sixties Reminiscing:
Musical offers flash of the past.
Special Features
Books: East
coast poet James Merrill. Plus: Booknotes.
Wine: Don't
thumb your nosés at the Rosés.
Gardening:
Worm in the bud: flowers that never open.
Outdoors:
The journey of a thousand miles begins with ... (gag)... a single 'action step'.
Coming of Age
A man and his friends.
By Quail
Dawning
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Nope, it's not
the Country Fair. it's Hair, showing at ACE.
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For a show without much semblance of a plot, HAIR actually
does surprisingly well. It is fast-paced, upbeat, and well-arranged. And yes, even
in a production that nixes the nudity, the show is still compelling -- charismatic
performances and impeccable direction create some-thing that is fun and easy to watch.
No costume or set design is too garish for this peacenik extra-vaganza, so Joe Zingo
goes all out with rainbow tie-dyed cushions, tapestries and t-shirts.
I'll admit: The material does not much appeal to me. On most occasions,
I grimace slightly at the mere mention of "HAIR." It's just not
my groove, baby. But despite my bias, I was quite impressed by ACE's version.
In the opening sequence, frontman Berger makes his bold entrance
blasting a didjerido to accentuate the importance of a masked mystic figure, bedecked
in glitter, sequins, feathers and a barely there loincloth. Tribespeople float between
the tables at Actor's Cabaret, bearing relics of the past: sashes, candles, peace
sign patches, and so on.
They stop and converse with audience members, blowing glitter kisses
and spreading the groovy love revolution. ACE regulars are not fazed by this in the
slightest, having been involved in their share of interactive theater antics in the
past.
Before too long, the impressive, large tribe is assembled onstage
beneath the glowing tie-dyed tapestries, seated cross-legged, when suddenly, they
launch into their first song. Lights go up, and immediately the chaotic, improvisational
feel that was created by the audience mingling is replaced by a tightly choreographed,
everyone's-on-top-of-things musical number.
Their voices sound great, something not always found in local musicals.
The look is also fantastic. The cast is synchronized, in tune, colorful, and in character.
What follows the first song, "Aquarius," is essentially
a hippie musical revue. Song after song preaching free love, peace, freedom, lots
of sex and even more drugs. There is a vague storyline loosely interwoven between
the brilliantly staged songs, tying in all of what they're singing about with human
concerns.
Berger (triumphantly played by Tyler Holden) is a potent young
fellow with allure to spare and abounding arrogance. He leads the pack with his foxy
administering of various psychedelics and his unabashed flirtation with both the
boys and girls of the tribe.
His best buddy, Claude (Gerald Walters), comes from a bourgeois
upbringing, but insists upon maintaining the fact that he is from "Manchester,
England."
Meanwhile, Sheila (Gillian Weeks) is desperately in love with Berger,
and quite public about it as well. While he gives her special attention occasionally,
most of the time he'd rather cold-shoulder her than give in to what she wants. Claude
is in a similar predicament with Jeanie (Elizabeth Davis), who is a bit sassier than
Sheila but just as undesirable, from the guys' point of view.
For the first half of the show, the tribe spends all of their energy
getting high, making sweet love, and pissing off authority. True problems arise when,
abruptly, Claude is selected for the draft and slated for Vietnam.
One of the most beautiful pieces in the show is Sheila's moping
solo, "Easy To Be Hard," which she sings while bemoaning Berger's rejection.
Among the funniest moments is Brandon Finch's cross-dressing turn as uptight Margaret
Mead, who professes her grandmotherly love for the hippie kids through an amusing
song.
The primaries play their parts with energy and conviction, and
the tribe wholeheartedly backs them up. Tyler Holden is perfect in the role of Berger,
while Gerald Walters is slightly mismatched from the rest of the cast in terms of
age but makes up for it with his powerful voice. Gillian Weeks gives Sheila just
the right amount of heartache, and Elizabeth Davis plays vivacious Jeanie to perfection.
Benjamin Newman, playing Woof, is one of the most motivated and energetic performers,
while Katie McClatchey creates a hilarious cameo as Claude's hippie-phobic mother.
The entire tribe is a joy to watch -- each of them an individual
bright spot in the chorus. HAIR isn't a dynamite theater experience, but it
is fun, vigorous, colorful, and, above all, a nostalgic acid flashback to the immortalized
hippie era.
HAIR runs through Aug. 11 at Actor's Cabaret.
Back to Top
James Merrill
Consummate, East-Coast
Poet.
by Andrew
Feld
COLLECTED POEMS by James Merrill.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Hardcover, $40
In a recent conversation with the owner of one of Eugene's excellent
small bookstores, the topic of "What are you reading now?" came up. I mentioned
the subject of this review, the poet James Merrill, whose poetry I have been reading
with continual astonishment and pleasure for as long as I have been reading poetry.
The bookstore owner, another Merrill admirer, said, "You know, his books just
don't sell in Eugene." We then discussed the reasons for Merrill's scant popularity
on this, the other coast.
And that clearly is part of the problem. The son of Charles E.
Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch, James Merrill was, in many ways, the consummate,
East-Coast, patrician poet. Born into enormous wealth, he never held a "real
job" in his life. Instead Merrill traveled, socialized and wrote volume after
volume of impossibly polished, radiant verse. On the surface, his life doesn't really
seem to belong to our age. In his leisure, erudition and skill, Merrill seems to
have stepped out of the past: You can easily imagine him traveling with Shelley and
Byron, and being accepted as their peer in every way.
As this 885-page volume, Collected Poems, makes clear, Merrill
was born equipped with the kind of formal skills most poets spend their lives struggling
to achieve. When compared with the elegance, ear and prosodic virtuosity demonstrated
in his early poem, "The Black Swan," the rest of us are lifelong ugly ducklings:
Black on flat water past the jonquil lawns
Riding, the black swan draws
A private chaos warbling in its wake,
Assuming, like a third dimension, splendor
That calls the child with white ideas of swans
Nearer to that green lake
Where every paradox means wonder.
Already we see a poet who has mastered what he later referred to
as Stevens' "great ease in combining abstract words with gaudy visual or sound
effects," along with a stunning skill in meter, rhyme and stanza-shaping.
From his 1951 volume First Poems to the poems that he was
writing shortly before his death in February 1995, collected for the first time in
this volume, Merrill never tired of elaborate stanza forms. He continued to display,
at seemingly effortless command, a level of linguistic fireworks unmatched by any
other twentieth century American poet.
Merrill's art grew, book-by-book, and his forms increasingly became
less strict as his subject matter changed. By the time he published Water Street
in 1962, Merrill's private life, his family and personal history had emerged as one
of his great subjects in poems such as "An Urban Convalescence" and "Childlessness."
His art was expanding, like the universe, in every direction, even as he began to
write his long epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover (issued in a separate
volume).
Ultimately the intersection where the individual and history collide
became the poet's most fruitful territory. In "18 West 11th Street," Merrill
remembers a former residence, destroyed when a Weatherman's bomb laboratory in the
basement accidentally blew up, killing one of the wealthy young revolutionaries.
The poem moves as a newsreel seen in reverse, through the destruction: "dry
film / Run backwards, parching, scorching, to consume / Whatever filled you to the
brim." The poet envisions his way back to the past, which is the poem's source,
to see the "Original vacancy. O deepening spring."
Merrill's last poems collected here have the plain-spoken grandeur
of the late Wallace Stevens, a quality poet/critic Randall Jarrell praised as coming
"from the other side of existence -- a world in which everything is enlarged
and yet no more than itself."
How else to view "Christmas Tree," a poem in which the
poet speaks as the tree, knowing: "That it would be only a matter of weeks /
That there was nothing more to do." He continues, unflinching: "what lay
ahead / Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals / Plowed back into
the Earth for lives to come." Luminous and engaged, his art is the opposite
of artifice. As is the poem's ending, in which the poet provides fit words to live
and die by, as he did:
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love lit,
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.
BOOK NOTES: Poet Alix Olsen
reads from Only the Starving Favor Peace at 7 pm July 16 at Mother Kali's
Books. See Calendar for Oregon Country Fair appearance. ... Activist and author Arundhati
Roy reads at 7 pm, July 17, at Mother Kali's Books. Roy was the first non-expatriate
Indian author and the first Indian woman to win the U.K.'s prestigious Booker Prize
in 1997 for The God of Small Things. ...Catherine Comer and Lavon
Swaim talk about The Travelling Woman at 7 pm July 17 at Barnes and Noble.
...Ray Vukcevich reads at 7:30 pm in the Browsing Room, Knight Library, from
his new story collection, Meet Me in the Moon Room. ...Dr. Usha Honeyman,
(Free To Be Well), speaks on menopause at 7 pm, July 21, at Barnes and Noble.
...UO Professor Lauren Kessler reads from The Happy Bottom Riding Club:
The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes, at 7 pm, July 23, Barnes and Noble. ...Sena
Naslund (Ahab's Wife) reads at 7pm, July 23, at Mother Kalis.
Back to Top
Hot Pink Panting
Don't thumb your nosés
at the Rosés.
by Lance
Sparks
Suddenly, it was hot. It was time to work.
As usual, summer in Oregon had crept on us like a mugger in an
alley. One minute everything was normal -- lead-gray skies, cold wind, rain -- and
the next minute we were sweating. When it happens, Oregonians get this look of wonderment
on their faces and turn to each other and say trite things like, "Say, it's
kinda hot, isn't it?" Or my favorite, "Hot enough for ya?" Naw, the
sidewalks are smokin' but I'd like it a little hotter, say enough to melt concrete.
Outside, it was topping 80 degrees, and the people, if not the
concrete, were melting. Inside our temperature-controlled wine tasting laboratory,
I was meditating, focusing my mind on the vast emptiness of the American political
landscape, a void like no other for reaching Zen-state consciousness.
Mole came into the lab. He's my main snitch, my ear on the wine
trade. He's not much in the way of eyes, peers through goggles thick as bullet-proof
glass, but he's got a nose that can detect bad wine through a lead-lined casket.
He wore a full-length lab coat and offered me another. We began preparing for a challenging
round of sippin'-'n-spittin'. We ticked off our pre-tasting checklist:
"Wash hands, face, mouth," I intoned.
"Check," Mole responded.
Hair covering ... Check ... Goggles ... Check .. Rubber gloves
... Check .... Neutral-flavored water crackers, spit-bucket, water for rinsing glasses
and mouths, towels for dribbles, gag bucket ... Check, check and check.
We looked at each other. Mole must have seen something in my eyes.
He cocked his head, squinted at me: "What?" he asked. I only smiled and
led the way to the steel door of the tasting room. I punched the code, watched Mole
as the room opened. He gasped. I grinned.
"Sleuth," he moaned, "dey're PINK!"
"Yes, Mole, they're pink. We're tasting for hot Rosés
for steamy days and cool nights."
"But not" -- his pain was visible -- "White Zinfandel!"
"Yep, even White Zinfandel. Gotta be fair."
While we worked, I launched my lecture on the beauties of pink
wines and my hopes that American wine lovers and wine novices might be led out of
the Cave of Shadows where they believed that pink wines are sweet, sugar-added schlock
with no flavor and no character.
Wines for fun: Rosés can be lovely, but they're generally
not profound. European winemakers usually make their pink wines from red grapes that
are not the highest quality. The grapes are crushed, then fermented with little contact
with the skins, just enough to impart pretty colors (more later). After fermentation,
which can go all the way to bone dry or leave just a point or two of residual sugar,
the wines are usually bottled without spending time aging in oak casks. Vintages
can make some difference -- in great vintages, even the lesser grapes can have richer
flavors -- but generally rosés are not meant to be taken very seriously. They're
meant to be drunk at times when it's too hot for big reds or when the foods they're
served with will be simple and often served cold. They're for fun.
Serving temperature: On that note, don't almost freeze these wines.
Most fridges are set at about 38 degrees. That's under the taste threshold (46 degrees),
below which we cannot really detect flavors. Rosés should be served chilled
to around 50 degrees. If kept in the fridge, take the wines out about an hour before
serving.
Age: These wines are meant to be quaffed while young and fresh,
within a year or two, at most three. Older Rosés tend to dry out and lose
their charm.
Foods: Pink wines are wonderfully versatile and can be served with
a wide range of dishes that challenge other wines. For example, Kat grilled some
fresh halibut, topped with a lemon/caper sauce, with sides of sauteed beet greens
and slices of cold fresh beets with crumbled blue cheese and roasted walnuts. We
matched this lovely meal with Ch. La Canorgue 2000 ($14), an organic/biodynamic
wine from the Cotes du Luberon (France), light salmon color, but lovely and lively
in flavors. For contrast, we poured Ch. de Pennautier 2000 Cabardes ($9),
light red with ripe cherry/rhubarb/red pepper notes. Both were delish with the food.
Serve pink wines with salads, cold or grilled meats (even burgers), cheese and veggies.
Discourse delivered, Mole and I slogged furiously through a late
morning of tasting, finally selecting some affordable and flavorful pinks (besides
the two above):
Penascal 2000 ($7): Spanish, dark pink, simple cherry flavors
but easy to glug.
Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare 2000 Pink Wine ($9.50): Pretty
and fresh, light red/dark pink, lively flavors, hints of citrus and tea, a Rosé
that served a little time in barrel.
Bergerie de l'Hortus 2000 Rosé de Saignée
($11.50): From the Languedoc region of France, the wine is dark pink, fresh, with
a touch more complexity than most, flavors of red pepper, cherry, raspberry, tea,
hint of spice, very nice.
E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone 1999 Rosé ($12): Dark salmon
color, lively and zesty, as serious as pink wine gets.
King Estate 1999 Vin Gris ($9): This is what folks mean
when they call a Rosé "pretty," lovely shade of pink, made from
Oregon Pinot Noir grapes, pretty flavors on a balanced structure, just puts a smile
on your face. One of our favorites of all pinks.
What about White Zinfandel? If you must, try Beringer 2000
($6.50): it's pink, not too sweet, can be served very cold.
That's our report. Mole had the last word: "When summer surprises
ya, we gotcher surprisin' wines. It's hot pink for 2001!"
Back to Top
Worm in the Bud
Who to blame for flowers
that never open.
by Rachel
Foster
What do you think of when you hear the word geranium? A few dedicated
perennial gardeners will immediately think of the genus Geranium, a useful
tribe of long-blooming hardy plants for borders and rock gardens. For others, the
plants most likely to come to mind are the frost-tender, pungent-leafed geraniums
we buy for annual color. Although they were assigned long ago to the genus Pelargonium,
geranium is still their common name.
The most familiar pelargoniums are zonal geraniums, named for a
conspicuous dark band in the leaf of many varieties. Most zonals are bred to produce
big, spherical heads of solid floral color, and you can rely on them to do so all
summer, in full sun or light shade. They tolerate neglect and dry soil and actually
prefer to dry out briefly between waterings, although they also do fine in well-watered,
mixed containers provided the soil drains freely. In recent years, fancy-leafed and
scented geraniums have been making a comeback. Being bred for something other than
sheer quantity of bloom, most have an airier, more elegant style of flowering, with
space between individual flowers.
My personal favorite is a vigorous plant named 'Platinum,' with
cream-edged leaves, a showy but uncongested head of bloom in deep salmon pink, and
a distinctively rangy, angular way of growing. Geraniums are tender only with respect
to cold. Perennial in greenhouses and frost free climates, they are tough and long-lived.
It is very little trouble to over-winter these easy-going plants and propagate them
from cuttings. Any idiot can do it: I generally have no patience with plants that
cannot over-winter outside without assistance, yet even I have managed to keep 'Platinum'
going for several years by bringing a plant into the house, watering it once a month
and rooting a few cuttings in a jar of water some time during the winter.
Aside from an occasional case of wilt, I have encountered only
one health problem with geraniums. Starting around late July, caterpillars eat the
flowers, and they do it in a particularly sneaky way. The tobacco budworm is the
culprit. The mother moth lays eggs individually, on or near the immature flower buds,
and the tiny hatchlings bore into the buds, where they are quite invisible. They
gorge on the little petals in the bud until they no longer fit inside, then emerge
as sturdy green (occasionally brown) monsters that clean up any remaining flowers
in short order. The caterpillars may be over an inch long before they are noticed.
To the geranium care-giver, it seems that they dropped out of the sky.
Affected plants look perfectly normal, except that few or no flowers
emerge from the buds. If you look closely, you may see frass (that's caterpillar
poop) on the leaves directly below the flower buds. (Tobacco budworms also attack
petunias, but then they are easier to spot at an earlier stage.) The best defense
is vigilance: Pick off visible caterpillars every day, and squish invaded buds. You
can also try B.t. (Bacillus thuringiensis). In case you are not familiar with
it, this is a naturally occurring bacterium that is sold as a wettable powder (brand
names are Dipel and Thuricide), which you mix up fresh each time in water and apply
in pump sprayer. B.t. makes a toxin that interferes with the digestive tract of caterpillars
that consume it. They stop eating, they stop growing and then they die.
B.t. is most effective when caterpillars are small. I spray geranium
buds at close range, to saturate them and force some fluid into the buds. Although
it is relatively harmless to mammals, B.t. will kill all moth or butterfly larvae
that ingest it. It also kills larvae of some other insects, including beetles. To
avoid killing desirable and harmless creatures, use as little a possible and don't
use it "just in case." Spray it only where you have seen the caterpillars
feeding, and don't spray it all over the plant unless the leaves are being eaten,
too.
Back to Top
Worm in the Bud
Who to blame for flowers
that never open.
by Tom
Dishman
I attended a professional development conference at the urging
of my supervisor, who once concluded a job evaluation with the recommendation for
me to "get a life."
You're familiar with the sort: Re-energize your career through
workshops and seminars. Get up to gigahertz-speed on the latest technology. Make
important new contacts from the industry. Sing "Louie Louie" with them
while crammed in a cab searching for seedy bars.
Besides the important reasons outlined above, I decided to register
because of one particular session entitled "Igniting Personal Change."
Based on the description, I saw the opportunity to heed my boss's advice and get
a new life by purging myself of the old one. I envisioned heaving my psychic baggage
onto a raging bonfire and burning it all to vapors in a Mesquite-smoked night of
the soul.
It turned out to be less raging bonfire and more new-age Duraflame
log. The session consisted entirely of writing lists. Reasons we registered for the
conference. Events that shaped our lives. Fruits that matched our personality. Epithets
to be inscribed upon our tombstone ("He ate well and demanded Di-Gel").
I was drifting. Restless. Bored. Hungry. I made a few lists of
my own: Entrées named after cities. Ideas for the Maude Kerns Jell-O art show.
Surprise dips for my first fondue party.
Finally, it was time for our last list, the "action steps"
we would take to ignite personal change -- the sparks that would fan the flames within
and explode in a new personal volcanism, spewing the hot lava of our improved, conflagrant
lives upon the lapels of everyone we would meet.
The facilitator asked if anyone was "courageous enough to
share." At first, a shroud of sheepishness silenced the room. Then, one by one,
they arose. Courageous, brave, fearless people, standing tall, with shoulders erect,
to recite the most stupefying, torpor-inducing litanies of self-delusion: Working
harder. Meeting quotas. Training pets.
A smoldering river of feel-good magma engulfed me. I steeled myself
for a realization: If they could do it, I could do it. I set to work on action steps
of my own.
"Way to go!" the facilitator cheered. "But that
enthusiasm and spirit you're showing now will get flattened by the ton of e-mails
waiting for you back at the office. So take your list and stick it in this envelope,"
she instructed. "Address it to yourself. I'll mail it back to you when you least
expect it, as a reminder to take charge!"
That was a few months ago. The list arrived today, wedged between
bills and credit card offers. Truth is, the facilitator was right. I had forgotten
about it, although I didn't forget the words to "Louie Louie" that night
in the cab. But I've found courage enough to share, and I share the list with you
now:
Tom's Action Steps of Personal Change
1. Know Your Limitations and introduce them at cocktail parties.
2. Greet Each Person You Meet With a Compliment. Add extra
points if you can do it without lying.
3. When Life Hands You Lemons use one slice of each. Put
them in baggies. Place in a corner of the refrigerator until they putrefy. Throw
them away.
4. Raise the Bar. Push the box. Think outside the envelope.
5. Give Up Trying To Control Your Life. And attempt to control
others.
6. Take Responsibility. Except where you can clearly place
blame.
7. Wear a Dickey.
8. Write for Ten Minutes Every Day. Just write put the pen
to the paper and don't stop keep writing dammit not even for punctuation or spelling
let the ideas flow even if they are useless meager scraps of ideas that only prove
the fact that it's all over you're completely dried up not an ounce left of inspiration
anywhere in your pathetic shriveled little raisin of a Time's Up!
9. Share Your Feelings. Then run before someone shares theirs
with you.
10. Don't Criticize Others. Until you've taken Action Steps
in their shoes.
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