Oh Well, Maybe Next Year

Each family has its sayings right?  Here's a little sampler from mine:

Oh dear,
bread and beer,
if I were dead,
I wouldn't be here.

Home again,
home again,
jiggety jig.

Oh well, maybe next year.

There's a certain fatalism that runs through them- even the "home again" meme is easily read as sneering.  I see Olga from The Three Sisters: she comes home from a long day headmistressing, envisions her beloved Moscow, then opens the door on the family house in the sticks.  Wooden-faced and in a Russian accent: "home again, home again, jiggety jig"- and she crosses the threshold as if she's wearing shackles under her skirts.

Okay, obviously she'd be saying it in actual Russian, but the readership of this blog is primarily Anglophone.  Hence- just the accent.  Unless she says it in French, which was still actually the lingua franca of the time: "chez moi, chez moi... dancety, dance..."

Je n'ai pas apprendé le mot pour "jig" en école.  Mais, je souvien le mot "fenêtre!"... je ne sounvien pas le mot pour "ceiling."  C'est "le mur sur la chambre."

Why say in one word what you can explain with five?  That's the guiding principle in all of my writing.

Ma vie, ce que d'un demi-horreur...

Apologies for going down the rabbit hole of theatrical literary reference, it is an occupational hazard.  In scene studies of The Three Sisters, I always ended up playing Irina, on the verge of crumbling to pieces due to lack of intellectual stimulation...or early onset Alzheimer's.  Where was I?

Fatalism that tracks back through the maternal branches of my family tree.  Such a dour topic, why on earth did you remind me?  Fools, I love you.  Visit me in the Island Nursing Home when my time comes.

Yesterday I spent a lovely day, with lovely people, on a lovely boat, in a lovely wind, in the lovely sun:

Oh Maine, bread and champagne,
If I were dead,
It'd be a shame.

And yet...

Today I woke with a student-carried cold sent to plague staff, and on the brink of swapping out a show I truly adore, "The Illusion," for a shorter, smaller-cast play that is made of baser stuff.  In our island school the sports programs have the gravitational pull of the moon on our tiny student sea.  The theater program has the gravitational pull of a communication satellite.

The Illusion required 8 students to flesh out the cast, each requiring only a pulse.  Well, a pulse, and in one or two cases, a Y chromosome.  5 students bothered to show up for the scheduled auditions- auditions I scheduled around soccer practice.  They told me tales of other students who were interested, but who thought they'd prefer to just set up a better time to audition later.

Oh, Millenials.  I look forward to competing with you in the job market in the coming decades, when I am not financially able to retire, and you are not constitutionally able to show up when you aren't "feeling it."  Even my befuddled wanderings will show more purpose.

In the meantime it is in my damned job contract to put productions up on the damned stage.  I have an opening night date for the Fall, and I have to meet it.  I did finally get 8 students- the process of wrangling a cast ate over a week and a half of what should have been rehearsal time.  Then I got the email... "Sorry, but I don't think...."

Well, hell.  It's even in the damned script of the Illusion: "You never can tell, when you start these things, how they'll go-"

The rehearsal timer ran out for that show- a show that did actually engage the students, because the show has everything you could wish for: sword fighting, succulent complications, shifting realities, sweet-ass costumes.  Language saturated with meaning and allusion. But a show that complicated needs time, especially with student actors.

I am tilting at windmills.  Time to admit it.

Today I will meet with the remains of what would have been the Illusion's cast, and to them I will say "Oh well, maybe next year."

And for now we'll pick up a slighter show, a lighter show- flat and inelegant in comparison.

"Want, yes; but want less."

I am home again, home again.

Jiggety, jig.