Liars and Saints

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Hadestown

"Hadestown" succeeds because of its ending. Writers struggle with endings. If you see the crazy new film "Verity," you'll notice that it doesn't even have a conclusion! It's as if the storyteller just tossed her pen out the window and shrugged. But "Hadestown" has a surprising, effective, layered finale. We revisit lines from the first ten minutes of the show. Once again, we're told that Orpheus can see how the world *could* be -- "in spite of the way that it is." The sentence has acquired a new punchiness, because we've just seen "the way that it is." People die, people lose faith. That's the way the world is. "It's a sad song -- but we're gonna sing it again." Often, and particularly on Broadway, producers feel a need to pander -- an ending needs to be "happy" if it's going to be palatable. By contrast, Hermes looks directly at the audience and names what has happened in *his* ...

Family Counseling

"To me, autism can be a superpower. What does it mean in your case? It means your child is sensitive, and he doesn't have time for bullshit. How can that be a bad thing?" The family counselor is remarkably professional. She always apologizes for being late -- though she is never actually late. She dresses in neutral tones. She has a way of radiating positive energy -- if it's an act, it's a very persuasive act. In her view, my daughter is headed for the Presidency of the United States. That would be great -- also, no one else actually has this suggestion for my daughter. The "plan" seems to come from nowhere. I say, "I just want to know that my son can eventually date, meet someone, be paired off." The counselor shrugs. "Maybe, and maybe not. Who says there is just one way to be happy?" We meet once per week. I send a weekly agenda. The agenda sounds like a "found object" poem -- the counselor says it could be printed on t...

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is activated by the idea of triangles. Several of her best songs feature threeway battles. I'm thinking of "Daddy, I Love Him," "Love Story," "Fifteen," "You Belong With Me," "Betty," "Illicit Affairs." "Babe." "Getaway Car." Someone cheats, or someone has an overbearing parent. Someone uses the promise of a bad relationship as an excuse to get out of an *extant* bad relationship. So I can appreciate "Patient Zero." It's a way of rewriting "Fifteen." What I admire in "Patient Zero" is how the two women try to negotiate the terms of *their* connection. "It's not a bad time at all...." "It's not for me to say...." These bits of throat-clearing are more interesting than the sexual drama in the song. By contrast, Taylor Swift has not figured out a way to write about bliss. It's not within her range. But she keeps trying. As othe...

The Vanishing Family

Frontotemporal dementia is a terrifying condition that tends to strike when you are in your forties. It's not Alzheimer's. With Alzheimer's, initially you lose some short-term memory while your personality remains intact. With FTD, your short-term memory is initially fine, but your personality starts to evaporate. What does it mean to lose your personality? You become scarily disinhibited. (You might start to have multiple affairs--or throw yourself from the window of a moving train.) You lose an awareness of yourself; though you are clearly failing at your job, you believe you're doing fine. You cannot connect with other people. In one story, a woman becomes annoyed with her teen son's loud soup-slurping behavior, so she locks him out of the house, in the cold, for several hours. A doctor with FTD once performed a C-section. "I did that so well," he said, "I deserve to carve my initials into the mother's flesh." And the nurses watched--horr...

The Best Barnes and Noble

The best Barnes and Noble is just north of Grand Central; it's at Fifth Avenue and 46th. It has a functional bathroom, it has proximity to Broadway, and it has a well-organized flow of traffic by the cash register. (If you go up to the Upper East Side, it's *chaos* at *that* particular cash register.) I strongly recommend getting yourself a cup of tea and sitting with an unpurchased copy of "Changing My Mind," by Julian Barnes. No one will care if you don't spend money on that book. The stockholders within Barnes and Noble are *not* suffering. The book is a short account of how Julian Barnes once disliked the works of E.M. Forster--until he grew older and changed his mind. He realized that Forster was sort of saucy and naughty. (Barnes had missed this fact for several years.) For whatever reason, I think this essay is charming. Barnes especially likes "Where Angels Fear to Tread." There was one unfortunate scene from my own life at the midtown Barnes an...

Picture Books

A spooky story beloved by my family is "The Night It Rained," by Alvin Schwartz. It's immediately unnerving. A man is driving in the night when he spots an underdressed boy in the rain. He offers a sweater to the boy (Jim), and Jim becomes a passenger in the car. The man drives Jim home and says, "I'll just stop by tomorrow for the sweater." But the next day, the man meets Jim's mother, who is confused. "My son is not alive," she says. "He died last year." The narrator then visits Jim's tombstone--and the borrowed sweater is draped over the lettering. I love this story because it demands that the reader make inferences. We can imagine that the man visits Jim's house during daylight hours because he is concerned about possible neglect (and the sweater is a helpful thing to pretend to focus on). We might also guess that Jim is spotted walking on the road because this is the region where the *living* Jim was once struck by a ca...