"Good" grief

What a successful week for death.

Tuesday night, we were in the audience for a Writers Center Stage discssion with playwright Tony Kushner and director George C. Wolfe. Moderator (if he can be called that, as he did a painfully poor job of moderating the Q&A) Earl Pike got the evening off on a clumsy note by asking the creators of (among other things) Angels In America to comment on the shooting deaths of 33 people at Virgina Tech the day before.

Well, maybe not so clumsy. The man who wrote Angels is not a man who shies away from the subject of death, nor grief, and his response was, his verbal tics nothwithstanding, refreshingly direct. Yes, he said the Second Amendment should be repealed, a highly controversial suggestion which I have heard more than once in the past five days, but went to comment on the reaction in the media, the common refrains of "closure" and "getting past this" as if anyone who was there, whose family members were killed or wounded, ever will. They won't, but we live in a culture that is so hideously bad at coping with loss, we try and hopscotch over it, to jump as swiftly as possible to neat summations about loss without ever dealing with the loss itself.

Discussing his work as a director, Wolfe said that anything you try and skip during the process, you are just going to have to come back to eventually, so you might as well deal with it right away. Later he said the same thing about coping with grief. Deal with it now, because you are going to have to deal with it eventually.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual in Iraq. 33 dead? That's a good day in Baghdad.

"It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they're gone -- and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation."

That's the President, who attended a memorial in Blacksburg, Virginia the same day we saw Kushner and Wolfe speak. Bush doesn't attend soldiers' funerals. And yet, he could make that same speech every single day for the war he started.

And while we are on the subject of the President (this President, as politicans are increasingly referring to him) this President's Supreme Court have succeeded in putting a wedge into Roe v. Wade, setting the stage for a horror-host of restrictions on access to abortion.

For years Democrats have employed the euphemism a women's right to choose when what they really mean is a woman's right to choose an abortion. Only people don't like to use that word, which sucks for them because that's what we are talking about. And there shouldn't be any shame in it. Justice Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that women need to be protected from having to choose what is admittedly a grisly surgical procedure. Well, isn't that manly of him. Protection for a woman whose life is at risk and may, in a particular situation, require this procedure was not strong enough of an argument for these men who, you have to admit, I mean we knew this, would never and will never protect the right to abortion no matter what the facts are.

(Big sigh. I have been nursing a hideous cold for the last three days, and keeping up two performances a day. Forgive me, it's been a tough week.)

On a lighter note, the NY Times ran this classy memorial for Kitty Carlisle Hart who died Tuesday at the age of 96.



I read that they expected her to lip-synch someone else singing Alone for this scene from A Night at the Opera and her agent stonewalled the producers for three days until she got the chance to sing it herself. Ciao, Rosa.