our town

Things. First of all, it's was a frigid rainy 40 degrees tonight. It's OCTOBER. Some forecasts called for snow flurries tomorrow. It's OCTOBER. I'm half drunk now after two Guinnesses, so the blogging will be a little slurry.

Second, I watched a production of Our Town tonight with a new friend. The friend is promising, and maybe she'll take me to a bar in Uptown where people read stories set to soundscapes. Sounds pretty great. I just met her. She said she spent three days in a coma once. Our Town is a wonderful, wonderful play. It is post-modern. There are few props. A stagemaster reads directions to you, so it's a combination of story-telling and dramatization. It reminds you to be proud of small Americans, even if it also reminds you that small America is built upon a bedrock of heterosexual unions. But you know what? You can claim small American values. I say small America instead of small-town America because the latter is conceptually irritating, even if I do think that hunter-gather societies probably had easier time convincing their homogeneous populations to buy into their middlingly satisfying value systems, because I'm drunk. But I don't mean small America pejoratively. Whatever, small town American values. The older and more professionalized (read: conservative) I get the more I feel entitled to embrace those values, diligence and friendliness and chattiness what have you, as my own. Shaw came home today and told a story about a chef she met. He's a chef for Chicago's bestest restaurant. He was seventeen and a junior in high school when he walked up to the proprietor and said, Give me a job, I want to be your understudy and your chef some day. Some would call that cojones, but I would call that white male entitlement. But as I get older and more conservative I want that entitlement for myself more and more. So I feel entitled to say, I am conservative in values, because I think people should work hard and be kind to one another and give kids love. It's about love, not heterosexual marriage!

WTF am I saying, I'm drunk. The play was one of the best productions I've seen, but I haven't really seen that many. There was that fringe festival one-woman act in SF in 1998 with that Japanese woman stripping naked over the course of 60 minutes and then howling. Wow OMG. And then there was Our Town. It was essentially propless until the final scene, when it was breathtaking! And it was three blocks away from my front door.

And then my new friend and I randomly walked to a bar. There are about five people in Chicago I would call my friends. And one of those people was in this bar! Obama-boy, my friend the DNC staffer who works in Obama HQ. He was there at this hipster/dive bar with the entire new media team from the Obama campaign. It was lovely to see a friendly face. One of the team members bought me a Guinness, and I felt obliged to allow my knee to touch his momentarily. Is this how it's done? I'm dating men from now on, btw, because I find the thought of putting my face in a strange muff repellent. Sarah Palin is right, it is a choice. I sat at a table with my DNC friend and we fossils in a roomful of bright 22 and 23 year-olds wondered why these young people weren't having more More Than Words. DNC friend says both campaigns got donations of roughly 45,000 condoms from some in-kind donor, but that the condoms have sat in HQ basically unused except for throwing at people. The problem was that the volunteers had no game. One was described by DNC friend as working in the tech room, which was "fifteen guys who work in one room and they all take their shoes off and the room smells." Which is a pretty much perfect image. I also met the Chris who started (with his college roommates) Facebook, who was exactly as charming as you'd think an incredibly wealthy and successful 24 year-old spokesperson of a social networking website would be - this is a compliment. He was very, very charming. He gave me a cigarette, and we shivered and shivered and shivered.

It's nice to be tipsy and feel happy about meeting people!

But I would also like to take this opportunity to supplement the Kübler-Ross model describing the five discrete stages of grief. They are not only denial, anger, bargaining, negotiation and acceptance. There is also animus. As in, I want to call That One That One and wish syphilis upon her. But at the same time I want to feel equanimous and fair and I say I wish That One only the best in the future. But then I say, provided that future occurs far, far away. Libya. Or North Korea. You know what's so great about Our Town? It's about life and death. Ebb and flow. Up and down. Then and now. We embody contradiction! So fare well, have a nice life, I love you, I loved you, have a miserable life, and get far the fuck away from me forever!