Gabe's First Earthquake

We had a 5.6 earthquake last night. It happened about 8 p.m., just as Gabe was nestling into bed while Erika read him bedtime stories. We've had them before, of course, but this one was stronger than usual. It was centered just to the east of San Jose. Our landlord called me up about 10 seconds after it was over to ask how the building was doing.

"This lets you know my priorities, Michael," he said. "I called you before I called my wife."

He was calling from Santa Clara, which is right next to San Jose.

To me it was business as usual, but soon I heard weepy sounds from the Gabe's room, and Erika informing me that my son was a little freaked out.

So I went in, lay down next to him and told him the story of my first earthquake, which occurred in 1971, when I was also 4. I was sharing the back bedroom with Marcy. There was a picnic basket hanging from a hook on the door immediately opposite my bed, and as the room swayed, the basket swayed with it, looking in the pre-dawn darkness like a monster. So I freaked and jumped into bed with Marcy, who also freaked because she didn't know at first what had jumped into bed with her.

Gabe thought the story was funny, and gradually he allowed himself to be reassured, although he was nervous about going to sleep for awhile.

Nervous as he was, Gabe still held up better than some of our tenants. One woman, from Turkey, was out in the street, too nervous to go back into the building, because of bad memories of Turkish earthquakes. Another woman from Mexico was having a complete meltdown. I tried to reassure her as best I could, all the while thinking, heck this was only a 5.6. How are these people going to react when the big one hits?

People Watching at the Library

When I try to work in a public library I am reminded of my friend Eric’s description of a restless night spent attempting to sleep in an albergue on the Camino de Santiago in the company of two dozen sonorous, farting pilgrims. The presence of other people detracts from the experience.

Any noise out of place tends to distract, whether it comes from giggling children, chatty librarians, or the stumpy woman who flung herself into an empty chair at my table and started writing furiously all while audibly breathing through her mouth as if she were engaged in a waking snore.

That chair was later occupied by an old man who felt the need to clear his throat every 10 seconds while he read the newspaper.

The other day, a group of fourth-grade boys converged on a table in the reference section and were loudly giggling at something. I shushed them, and one of them impishly put his finger to his lip to shush me back. All this not 20 feet away from the librarian, who, of course, did nothing.

What has changed in the past 30 years? When I was a child, I remember a severe-looking woman of indeterminate age, with straight, mousy brown hair parted precisely in the middle, who was not shy about shushing people. When we went to the library on field trips, we learned that the first rule was to be quiet. Today, the first rule seems to be to express yourself, no matter how annoying it may be to other people.

Speaking of the library, here’s a poem I wrote awhile back about an old man I saw one day:

I have seen toupees in my time:
Stiff hair hats perched on chrome-domed racks,
Lifeless pelts that not even the cat would drag in
A robin’s nest of gray-brown twigs,
A catcher’s mitt,
An immoveable line,
A tectonic plate
Beneath which slips a leathered forehead
With every furrowing of the brow.

Today I saw a crusty mask,
A lived-in face, yes, dignified and wary
With bloodhound jowls and basset eyes
Staring rheumily through plate glass specs
Beneath a wondrous wig of bounteous brown
Tastefully wisped, Kennedyesque,
A mop-topped codger clinging forcefully to borrowed youth
Challenging,
Daring me to smile.

Noodle eater takes trespassing plea

As a former headline writer myself, I'm a sucker for a good headline, and this one stopped me in my tracks today while we were taking a family walk.

The first paragraph explains it all:

"A woman accused of cooking noodles inside a stranger’s Millbrae home after being drawn there by its “aura” earlier this summer pleaded no contest to a single misdemeanor count of trespassing and was immediately sentenced to probation and time served."

15-Minute Paella?

Just caught a segment on Rachel Ray (most annoying voice on TV) where she was showing how to cook a 15-minute paella. She threw in some familiar ingredients (chorizo, shrimp, chicken, saffron), then added turmeric (some people seem to think it is more important for paella to be yellow than to taste good), then ended with ... COUSCOUS! Couscous? I shudder just contemplating this atrocity. There are no words to express how I'm feeling right now.

Gangsta style

You know that scene in Mary Poppins, when Dick Van Dyke starts dancing with the penguins? Needing to become more penguin-like, at one point he sort of hitches down his pants so that the crotch is around his knees and starts waddling.

Well, today as I was walking to the library I found myself behind a hip, urban gangsta type, wearing an oversize green tracksuit with a low-slung waist and the crotch hugging his knees. Thus encumbered, his walk was more of a rolling waddle.

So here’s the question: if you were a hip, urban gansta, would you go out of your way to look like a green, plush penguin?

Mamet's Three Magic Questions

I was skimming through a book by David Mamet called Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business and I found the following nugget on page 85:

"The filmed drama (as any drama) is a succession of scenes. Each scene must end so that the hero is thwarted in pursuit of his goal – so that he . . . is forced to go on to the next scene to get what he wants. . . . To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions:
1. Who wants what from whom?
2. What happens if they don't get it?
3. Why now?"

Now, I'm not a huge fan of Mamet as a filmmaker; I find his pacing dreary and the acting wooden and way too mannered. He has, however, written some great scripts.

Regardless of his merits (or lack) as a filmmaker, what really interests me is the applicability of the "three magic questions" to the study and teaching of theater. Does this work as a good way to approach dramatic tension in Golden Age plays?

Tractor Tipping

To understand this story it helps to know who Frank is. And to know that, you have to be familiar with the movie Cars. In Cars, Lightening McQueen, a famous racecar, is sentenced to rebuild a road in the small desert town of Radiator Springs after he accidentally destroys said road while fleeing the police (it’s all a big misunderstanding, but as often happens in drama, without that misunderstanding there would be no plot, so go with it). Lightening learns to love the other cars in the town, and in particular becomes great friends with a battered old tow truck named Mater.

Mater is a bit of a hillbilly, and takes Lightening out one night to do some tractor tipping (i.e. cow tipping). He warns Lightening to look out for Frank. Soon enough Lightening and Mater are being chased across a moonlit field by Frank: an angry, rampaging combine (bull).

Gabriel adores this movie. He obsessively collects all the characters (he has not one, but four Lightenings, one for each of the various paint jobs the character sports in the film) and is constantly recreating scenes. We cannot go on a simple family walk without Gabe scraping his foot through the dirt (imitating Lightening accidentally ripping up the road in Radiator Springs) or bellowing out full-throated roars (imitating Frank). And when Gabe gets in his Cars zone, it’s next to impossible to get his attention or shift his focus. Just ask Erika, who more than once has located Gabriel in the grocery store by listening to the calls of “Mac! Mac!” (imitating Lightening’s frantic search for his big rig transport when he first finds himself alone in the desert) from two aisles over.

Fast forward to today. Gabe and I went for a walk down by the Bay. I was envisioning a Mayberry moment (whistling while we walk by the bay, skimming stones). What I got was drag, drag, dust cloud, dust cloud.

“Will you stop dragging your foot like that, PLEASE!?” I fumed at one point.

“Why?” Gabe asked.

“Because sometimes it’s nice just to walk together,” I replied. “You don’t always have to pretend to be Lightening.”

Gabe did not seem convinced, but he tried walking in the plants for awhile, to appease me, I guess. On our way back to the car he started looking back furtively.

“Hurry,” he said, “Frank’s coming.” This went on for the next hundred yards or so to our car; furtive glance, “Frank’s coming, hurry.” At one point he let slip that “I’m pretending that those people are Frank.”

I looked back. Frank turned out to be an African American family of four. And my kid’s been dashing away and nervously glancing at them for the past hundred yards. As we climbed into our car and drove away, I thought I saw the father giving me a LOOK. I just bowed my head and moaned.