Salvy: Getting Real

I really did feel excited and proud when Salvy would poop. He'd do frantic circles--wherever he was standing--and then out would pop those tiny, well-sculpted dumplings. They'd start hard and get progressively softer, and they were oddly warm through the poop bag. Like all other things, poop bags had found a way to become high-class and pricy in Park Slope; they were made scented and with long, long necks, so that the actual poop would dangle far from your fingers and far from your nose. (No one tells you this when you're puppy-shopping.) On occasion, Salvy's stomach would mandate shocking indoor poops--and these were often liquid and part of a rapid-fire series, and at least once they were bloody. On a particularly horrifying night, waste seemed to exit simultaneously from both Salvy's mouth and his butt; partly-digested kibble mingled with a brown, marshy stew; little islands of cleanliness, spaced far apart, were all that remained of the kitchen floor. Salvy was like Regan in "The Exorcist"; he just extruded, and extruded, and extruded substances. And, weirdly, he was fully impassive as soon as the episode ended; it was as if he'd just spent an evening in front of the TV. He was perhaps just a bit sleepier than normal, but you'd need a trained eye to notice.

A language grew up around Salvy's poop and pee. It involved Marc and me speaking in crazed, high-pitched voices, like Mickey from Disney-on-Ice. "Salvy!" we'd say. "Let's go POOPie! Let's go PEEpie!" Then the consonants would slur together: "LesgoPEEEpie! LesssguhPEEpie!" Marc would return from Salvy's morning walks and report the number of poops, beaming. Salvy seemed uninterested in his waste, except on certain rare occasions when he'd try to eat it, but generally that happened when he wasn't quite settled in his right mind. He did take a liking to our toilet; he'd walk right up to you while you were using it, as if attempting fellatio; and he'd sit and wait and sigh, because humans were far less efficient and graceful than little dogs.

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Can we talk a bit about the title song from Sondheim's "Company"? Sondheim didn't want to write it; Hal Prince insisted. (Sondheim identifies Hal as the cynical half of this pairing; it was Hal, for example, who insisted on the Marxist set elements of the original "Sweeney Todd." Sondheim says he himself is a romantic, inclined toward the sentimental. Who would have thought? But what do you get when you have Sondheim without Hal Prince? You get "Sunday in the Park" and "Passion." Sondheim also bristles when people link him with the repressed intellectual in the song "Anyone Can Whistle." The implication is that, despite the media narrative, Sondheim is actually a warm-blooded man, overwhelmed by feelings. I believe this story.) There is one obvious facet of the song "Company": its repetitiveness. Form underlines content: The obsessive, relentless, rote quality of the writing underlines the rote quality of Robert's life, "free" of emotional attachments. Here's another thing I love in this song. It suggests that a name--and variations on a name--are worthy material for an entire verse, if not more. And so: "Bobby! Bobby Baby! Bobby Bubi! Robby! Robert Darling! Angel! Bob-o! " We get a portrait of the friends through this exuberant act of name-calling, but we also get a symbol of Sondheim's own creativity. Look! he seems to say. Look at all the spins on "Robert" that are available to an attentive mind! What a world we live in! 

And then I love that much of the song is just entrees to conversation; it's the stuff that a normal song would skip over, to get to the meat of a confrontation. (There often is very little meat in Robert's life; a fair amount of his socializing is going through the motions; and this is implied by the scraps of shallow conversation, as well.) "We had something we wanted to say." "Drop by on your way home." "Stop by anytime." "Why don't we all go to the beach next weekend?" "The kids were asking..." "Time we got together, is Wednesday all right?" "We've been thinking of you." Form underlines content, again: Notice that Robert never--not once in this song--reciprocates. He never extends an invitation of his own. And so his socializing feels like dotting i's and crossing t's--keeping people appeased. He seems like an exhausted clown--and this idea of exhaustion, and an idea of hollowness, will come to the forefront in "Side by Side by Side." Notice the onslaught of two-word phrases Robert does provide, in an echo of Taylor Swift's writing style for "Blank Space." "Thoughts shared, souls bared, private names. Deep talks, long walks, telephone calls. Late nights, quick bites, party games. Phone rings, door chimes. No strings, good times. Room hums, just chums." (The "no strings" and the "just chums"--these seem defensive. "Marry me--a little. Love me--just enough.") The clipped nature of Robert's non-sentences points to something clipped, atrophied in Robert's soul.

Then--can we talk about how the song shifts? Something sinister happens to the friends. In fact, they do *not* just want a no-strings chat. There are allegations, recriminations. "Bobby, dear, it's none of our business..." "Bobby, you've been looking peculiar..." "I shouldn't say this, but..." "Did I do something wrong?" "Where have you been? How have you been?" "What's happened to you?" Such rich subtext! Particularly in the pregnant sentence: "I shouldn't say this, but..." Fascinating! Also, the hypocrisy inherent in: "It's none of our business....." When I listened to this song in high school, I simply heard daffy people making chirping noises. But there's such care in this number--and it's not among the famous numbers. It's not one you'll hear from Frank Sinatra. I love that Sondheim set a task for himself--create as many rapid-fire rhymes as possible, and refuse, consistently, to provide a rhyme for the title of the song--and something stunning grew out of that. (I also love that this works for "Legally Blonde." "That's fine with me! Just let me be--legally blonde.") Well, that's all for now. Ask me about the unsettled critics who saw the first "Company"! Ask me about why Sondheim included the extended word "looooooove"--! And about the role Mary Rogers played in the drafting! Are you crazy about this show, as I am? O Brave New World, that has such people in't!