A Girl...

Caught in the Act

The play was the thing. Don't I look relaxed?

The woman I was sitting next to saw me taking a picture of Simon, his bottle of wine, and his hillbilly mason jar, and offered to take a shot of us both, to which I politely declined and Simon enthusiastically accepted. "Oh, I do this all over the world!" the woman said, and because I thought that meant she was a professional photographer, I handed her my expensive camera and didn't even make her put the strap around her neck as an extra-safe anti-dropping precaution. It wasn't until after she took the above picture in all its uncentered magnificence (and thought she took another, mistaking the flash popping up for the click of the shutter) that she told us that the "this" she does "all over the world" is take crappy pictures of strangers with their cameras. She once took a family portrait of tourists outside the Taj Mahal with her own camera and promised to send them a copy of the print, but since she couldn't understand the address they wrote down, she just taped a copy of the photo to the envelope and put it in the mail. Because in a country with a population of one billion, the postmaster general knows everyone by sight and can hop on his little bike and make a speedy delivery right to their doorstep.

Anyway, the woman didn't drop my camera, she took a decent enough picture, and she didn't do anything weird and distracting during the play, unlike the woman in front of us, who READ A BOOK until it got too dark to see (i.e., midway through Act III). Since I'm the kind of person who can't pay attention to the action on t.v. if there's closed captioning, subtitles, or a news crawl (and when my mom read to me as a kid, I often had to remind myself to look at the pretty pictures too instead of just the words), I spent some time struggling over whether to grab that woman's book and throw it far, far away or grab the book and read it starting at page i.

The play was fun (Merchant of Venice done Eurotrash style, with Portia in the manner of Paris Hilton), but the best parts were eating our burritos during the pre-play discussion in the eucalyptus grove and among the old folks (what is it with senior citizens and live theater?), partaking of the complimentary wine tasting (the only chance I get to drink anything but red), and wrapping up in a big fleece blanket for the last three acts.

Aside from the enjoyment that comes of getting out to do something outside the ordinary routine for a change, I always find that a fresh activity or a fresh venue or fresh company has the ability to make Simon and I fresh to each other in many ways. (Not fresh fresh, but just "new," I guess.) Whenever Simon tells a poignant story or a silly joke, he either prefaces it with "Stop me if you've heard this one" or follows it with "It won't be so entertaining after you've heard it fifty times." Yes, he tells the same stories over and over, and yes, I'll probably get sick of hearing them some day, but then again, maybe I won't. I've seen or read Merchant of Venice probably five or six times in the last ten years, and I'm not yet sick of it, partly because each production is different--fresh venue, fresh actors, fresh interpretation--but also because it's just a damn good play that can withstand countless readings and viewings. (Go ahead, make the connection; I've all but spelled it out for you.) But even better than hearing the same old thing in merely new circumstances is letting those new circumstances themselves inspire untold stories, unheard jokes, and unexplored topics. Before the play, I told Simon about the summers I spent with my mom and grandma at the Utah Shakespearean Festival while I was a teeanger; during intermission we talked about the unique power of character actors on stage and screen; on the drive home we talked about justice and revenge and mercy and race relations in fifteenth-century Italy and late-Elizabethan England; when we got home, I pulled out Volume I of Isaac Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare and marvelled at the supposition that Shakespeare based the invented name "Shylock" on the Hebrew word shalak, for the cormorant, a notoriously greedy, gluttonous, and "unclean" bird. We never would have talked about any of that had we stayed home and folded socks or gone to Costco to buy a barrel of powdered Gatorade.

When the woman told us about taking the picture outside the Taj Mahal, my response was that yes, when a family is standing outside the Taj Mahal without a camera, it's practically one's duty as a good citizen of the world to capture that moment on film and at least make an attempt to see that the family gets the print so they have evidence of the time spent there. "But the California Shakespeare Theatre isn't the Taj Mahal," I said. "We don't really need a picture of us here."

"Well," she said. "When you look at a picture of yourselves with some gravel in the background, you'll know where you were, and you can remember this night." And I guess she's right. Because what made the evening great wasn't the place or the activity or the photo ops, but the time away from work craziness, the time outside in the cool night air of the East Bay hills, the time spent telling new stories and making new jokes and picking up on new shades of meaning that were there all along but went unnoticed until now. I never before realized the connection between Shylock's sadness and his anger, and I never before realized that Simon knew a joke about a foul-mouthed parrot.