2026.08.04
His passion and love of theater, his graciousness in talking about others, his own times of poverty and wealth and how despised the former and unapologetically leaned into enjoying the latter... a very good read.
Children are not creatures of justice--they lay blame and praise about them as their needs demand.
Yet life often imitates very bad plays or movies with a minimum of effort and a disquieting ease.
It is hard to describe or to explain concisely the overwhelming and suffocating boredom that is the essence of being poor. A great deal has been written about the barren drudgery of poverty; but I do not recall that the numbing effect of its boredom has been much written or talked about. Yet boredom is the keynote of poverty--of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with--for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine.
I think there is such a moment--a moment when we see our parents plain, not when they are grown old and are a symbol of ancestry to be honored or tolerated and when we can no longer know what they were like, but a moment when we see them suddenly for the first time as people. It is a fleeting moment and it passes, to be quickly replaced with the usual façade of filial devotion--that coin of the realm that passes for affection between the generations--but when this moment occurs, it seems to cut through a lifelong incrustation of love and hate, and for however brief a time it lasts, we see our parents as the fallible human beings they are and for a little while we hold them blameless.
I looked back at the lighted canyon [of Times Square], its daytime ugliness softened into something approaching beauty by the magic of the October twilight deepening around it. The knowledge that I was going to be part of it at last brought me perilously close to that wonderful mixture of emotions that makes one want to laugh and to cry at the same time. It is a mistake to dismiss such a moment as maudlin. To do so is to rob oneself of one of the few innocent pleasures the theatre offers. I enjoyed that last lingering look unabashed by its sentimentality and unashamed of its bathos. I deserved that moment, it seemed to me, and I allowed myself to enjoy it to the full.
There were even times when I grew hungry enough to forget about the heat and to see mirages of food heaped in front of me, for Mr. Kaufman's delicate appetite, slim enough in the winter, seemed to all but disappear with the first robin. With warm weather, long before the first heat wave enveloped the city, a salad and a not too lavish plate of thinly sliced cold meat became the unvarying menu of each day's main meal, and when on a coolish day lamb chops occasionally appeared, my old struggle not to grab and stuff was like a man wrestling with his faith.
Max Siegel had apparently emerged from the womb liking the world and everything in it, and he liked everything we had done to the play.
Some of the world's pleasantest reading is contained in a good hotel menu.
A play can be blackmailed by its scenery more often than anyone connected with it is likely to realize.
Blumineck, aka David the Arrow Bard, is amazing.
He has a series of videos where he does the craziest archery stunts and acrobatics, and explores the use of real and fantasy historical weapons. I just love that he's not a snob about the fake stuff - he might says "ok, so this probably wouldn't actually work so well", but it looks cool, so it's ok.