Sunday Concerts

On a clear and relatively warm Jan. Sunday in SF, I let myself get swept up in the Whirlwind--3 events this afternoon. Two half concerts sandwiched by a party.

The SF Symphony performed Aaron Copland's music from the movie version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Slow, majestic in its simplicity, quintessentially American and so Copland.

I recall reading the play on a car trip with my parents driving back from Washington DC to New York, in one of the world's worst cars--our Chevrolet Chevette. I must have been in Junior High School. My inexplicable weeping as I finished the play disturbed my mother until I explained the reason. I was a "sensitive" child, after all. I still find the play quite moving, though at this point overdone. And who can forget Robby Benson in a made for TV version?

Alas, my 70's paperback of the play is missing, which is a real loss. I love the yellowing pages of those volumes and how they fall apart as the cheap glue that had held them together dries into dust. I just cracked the spine (literally of the 21st edition of another Bantam paperback edition with three of Wilder's play in it) to reread the ending. Ah, ah the stage manager...... who of course has the last word:

"Yes it's clearing up. there are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strains' so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest...."

Damn, he gets away with it.

Now you too have a good night.