Volunteer Explorer

This week’s staged reading at Coach House was called “Butter in a Lordly Dish.” Aside from the incredibly obscure biblical reference in the title, the story was quite entertaining. It ran only about thirty minutes, and more than half of that was set up for a wonderfully murderous payoff. We first meet two Cockney house servants gossiping about murderers in the news. The focus of their conversation is whether a man convicted not long ago of killing several young women was really the reprobate murderer he was made out to be by his lawyer. Next we meet the lady of the house they serve in, who is visited by a female friend. Their conversation reveals that the lady’s husband has, at the very least, a roving eye, if not a multitude of affairs. Her friend clearly disapproves of both the implied infidelity and the lady’s long-suffering attitude toward it, especially in light of her two children. The husband enters, and his pomposity is surpassed only by the lady friend’s verbal barbs at h...

I volunteered at Coach House Theater Friday evening. A few months ago, I interviewed JT Buck, the artistic director who is steering the theater through its ninetieth year after almost shutting down due to lack of both funding and effective leadership. He’s an awesome guy, but he has undertaken a mammoth task. Consequently, volunteers who show up and have half a brain are greatly appreciated. It’s an odd coincidence, but I recently rewatched a movie from the turn of the 21 st century whose main character reminds me strongly of JT—that is, if the character were gay, but that’s a minor point. The film is “The Tao of Steve,” the character is Dex, and the actor is Donal Logue. If you’ve seen it, you know that the character and plot echo the story of Don Giovanni: a man woos women by way of a Taoist-esque philosophy that includes, among others, a tenet of becoming desireless. Dex is remarkably successful in this endeavor, despite the extra weight he gained after graduating college. The...

I am not the kind of person who necessarily links music to specific moments in my life. I don’t have a “soundtrack for seventh grade” or anything like that. I like music, of course, but it was never the most important thing to me, even when I was a teenager. And the older I get, the more I find that I prefer silence, especially when I’m working or reading. The one exception for me is in the car. No matter how short the drive, I turn on the radio. I love finding a good, fast, funky song, cranking the volume and singing along as loud as I dare in close traffic. I took a random bunch of CDs when I left the house, mostly because my internet would not be hooked up until a week after I moved into my apartment. Old-fashioned media on a late-90s-era boom-box entertained me for that long January week. I saw the nine-disc set of “Traveling Music” my husband had compiled for road trips years ago among the loose CDs in a travel case, but I pointedly avoided listening to them. I am not sure wh...

One of my favorite places within the framework of Highland Square is Mount Peace Cemetery. It’s a ten-minute walk from my apartment, and I can lose upwards of an hour wandering its roughly one square mile. In January and March, I walked through the cemetery thinking about endings, death, loss. It was a place where I could be sad without seeming out of place. I watched the trees bud and the grass grow lush under a slowly warming sun. At the beginning of September, with all the trees and shrubs in their fecundity grasping at the dregs of summer, I walk here thinking about life, about all the lives these stone markers represent. Who were Gladys and Gerald Sullivan? Where are their children? Who was Chester A. Hoff, dead in 1939 at age 50? Why is there no spouse next to him? I mine these graves for stories now, for character names and ideas. The death I saw in winter seems fully alive in the flush of summer, teeming with possibility. Here is Edward and Elizabeth Me...