Reading: José Saramagao, Baltazar and Blimunda

Moving: walked a lot

Garden: none of that either

Watching: Bill Viola

26 November 2002: Frick and Metamorphoses

RDC went to the gym while I got Metamorphoses tickets. When I started talking to the woman behind me in line, it was because I was pretty punchy and it's hard to turn a book's pages with gloves on, not immediately because I had an ulterior motive. But by 9:55 when I had made Friends For Life with Lisa and Kathleen, who were there together and needed only their own two tickets, I called Kymm quicklike at work. Kymm? At work by 10? But there she was, and she could go. So I walked off with three tickets, wheee! And RDC has brought his diastolic down by 25 points in a month of steady exercise.

The Frick had two Vermeers, some Gainsborough and that other portraitist who bores me silly, a few by George Sisley who reminds me of my grandmother's style, Rembrandt and Renoir and Monet and Cezanne and what a fantastic private collection. Mr. Hage brought us there in tenth grade, to the Frick and the U.N. and St. Patrick's Cathedral, all tied in to Modern European history.

After the Whitney looked scary, we didn't go ten blocks north back au Pain Quotidien but found another café on the way south. This was more stereotypically frainch because our server was rude as hell. In the actual France, we had only one rude server, on the Île de la Cité. But the host was nice--I stepped in first and backed up immediately, onto RDC's toes. She gestured for us to come in and I mimed choking in cigarette smoke. She called that there was non-smoking seating and led us through a thick haze to it. Here I ordered a salad. Yes, this surprised me too.

There was not much shopping on this trip, entirely gifts for other people. I violated another lisarule by buying a blue teddy bear for EHB. Bears should be white or black or shades of brown. (Hm. My Dickon the blue Bear's Choice was also a gift.) But this bear's blue pelt felt just right for a newborn. We finally ran Rockefeller Center to earth. It's open to streets, not avenues, which is how we missed it scarpering up and down Sixth, Fifth, and Park. The tree was up but not yet lit. We found an ornament as a hostess gift.

Metamorphoses. I thought the lobby was to the left of the box office, so we went in to the left. RDC began to be suspicious it was a musical and the penny dropped when he spotted a notice on the wall announcing that someone else was going to play Emily. We left the "Oklahoma" lobby and reentered the Metamorphoses one. I introduced RDC to Lisa and Kathleen. Lisa--the oldest, except out loud I said "earliest" because I'm experimenting with tact, Lisa I have ever met, born 1954--said I cleaned up very well--I'd staggered to the theatre in a slept-in braid that morning. I cleaned up a little too well, because there I was in blue velvet to sit in the splash zone. Kymm nipped into the theatre with about two seconds to spare, and there we were, poolside.

Metamorphoses. I haven't seen a lot of plays; at this point I doubt I'll ever see anything like it again. It was phenomenal. Mrs. Burbank told me in ninth grade that there's no story the Greeks didn't tell first, and I haven't doubted it since. They gave two possibilities for the Orpheus story, Ovid's and Rainer Maria Rilke's. This particularly struck me because Rushdie quoted "Eurydike" in The Ground Beneath Her Feet to perfect effect and I have been meaning to read it. And because of "Orpheus Descending." And because if whatever later drew me to Stephen King first drew me to the Loch Ness and UFO books, at least they in their early 000ness, Dewey-wise, led me to the D'Aulaires colorful book of myths with everything that followed. (And ha, Stephen King didn't make up the autocannibalism story in Skeleton Crew either--that's Erysichthon.)

Kymm laughed at my constant mangling of Eurydice's name, but I read The Odyssey when I was eleven, so that Penelope had three syllables. Eurydice is hard to figure out. So are Ceyx and Erysichthon. And if Penelope and abalone and anenome have four syllables, why has anecdote only three? Hmm?

Because Mrs. Burbank was right, there are no words, no better way, to express the human condition than through these stories. Love. Psyche the soul doubting Eros the love. Orpheus not able to conquer his human doubt for love. Baucis and Philemon not wanting to outlive their capacity to love. And I had no idea at all when Baucis and Philemon used up all their oil to light their house for the strangers that they were making a starlit pool, until I saw Midas reenter. Aphrodite finding a way to make Myrrha love, Electra be damned, because love cannot be denied. The choreography was amazing--the he-man who lifted Midas's daughter out and manhandled everyone was terrifically impressive. The way Myrrha's father lifted her in such a hymen-bursting lift and all of their lovemaking movement. Alcyon and Ceyx becoming birds. The way it sweeps you from laughter to tears without being the least hokey or twee or precious or manipulative--because these are our founding stories, or at least mine. The entr'act nods to Pandora and Narcissus. Using Pomona to frame Myrrha. Phaëton at his psychologist.

Metamorphoses. This is the review I wish I could write. Here's Tamar's first take and Melissa's and Kymm's.

I dreaded that RDC would hate it. He likes Stoppard and "Stranger Than Paradise" and finds Renoir and Monet offensively boring. But he liked it a lot, perhaps not as much as I did, but a lot.