Roses Supposes

Friday night I decided to go to a presentation of Balinese dance. It was down Massachusetts avenue at one subway stop from Harvard square. I decided to walk down there and then take the subway back so that I would at least have used my pass at some point. The streets got dirtier and the population more mixed as I was walking, even though most of the shops along Mass Ave. were fancy furniture shops. I had brought my book along, thinking that I could sit and read in the theatre or wherever I got dinner for awhile. However, I found a Taqueria fairly quickly and sat there for a bit, but not enough to burn off all the time I had between 5 and 8. So I started walking. It took a bit, including a call to Erik on Googgle to find the place b/c the sign was rather hidden in a deep recessed doorway between two shops and I had memorized the name and location on the map, not the number.Anyway, after I found it and discovered there would be no place to sit and wait. I thought I’d find a coffee shop or something to wait in. I was still really full from dinner, so more food or coffee didn’t sound very good. I went into a market and discovered Ruth Hill, the librarian whose files I’ve been using, and her husband sitting there in the front coffee shop. I was walking with purpose and the general, don’t meet others eyes mentality I have. I saw Dr. Hill and met her eyes and smiled, but she looked away. I thought she had recognized me but hadn’t wanted to say hi or anything. So I immediately backed away from the enthusiastic greeting that was on my tongue and slunk off into the market. I wandered around the aisles of the market self-talking myself into going back and saying a polite hello and then going over to the performance. After all, I’d been reading about the adventures of Merze Tate all week, and all the people, white, black, Asian, European, that she had met on her journeys, and how she had had basically no fear in those encounters.

So I went back, but they were talking to someone else. So I sort of awkwardly hung out by the free papers waiting for the other person, a small white man with coke-bottle thick glasses, to leave. I finally got bored with that and he wasn’t leaving, so I walked over. At that moment, he seemed to be talking to Ruth (I will call her that to distinguish her from her husband, though I wouldn’t do so to her face), so I came up on her husband’s side. Before I could say hello or introduce myself, he asked me, “Do you like Shakespeare?” I said, well yes. He said, “How much?” I said, “Well, I saw the Tempest last Friday.” That seemed good enough to him. He asked, “Do you want to see my 5 minute interpretation of Shakespeare? I’ve had people tell me I’m the best interpreter of Shakespeare in the world. I can do it, you know. This man (indicating small white man), he loves Shakespeare too, but not as much as me. Do you want the Blues or Romeo and Juliet?” Somewhere in there, Ruth had seen me and greeted me with some warmth and asked how the research was going. It seemed like she had not seen and/or not registered me when previously I had seen her and was now happy I’d bumped into them.

Let me stop a moment and describe their attire. Brother Blue (that’s the name of her husband), had on a blue flannel shirt open over an under shirt. He had a huge blue butterfly pendant on his upper chest and a butterfly pin on his black beret. She had a patchwork beret and a embroidered jacket and a small butterfly pendant. All in all, quite a bit more color than my normal outfits, even when I have one of my wild shirts on.

Ruth indicated that they were going to the dance show and I said, oh I was planning to go that too. Then Blue gave his 5 minutes of blues Shakespeare, “This is Brother Blue at midnight during Mardi Gras on the streets of New Orleans. I call on Willie (here he shouts to the heavens–Willieeeee). Some people call him William Shakespeare, but I call him Willie because he’s my homeboy and I knew him when he was alive. He don’t look like me, but he knew my soul” something like that. And then launched into the loose details of King Lear. Afterwards, he said again how he loved Shakespeare and that he kept it and the Bible under his pillow.

Ruth attempted to round him up and he kept talking all the while. At one point he said something like, Do you know why I like you? And I decided to speak up rather than just smiling like I had been doing, and I said No, I don’t. And he said, “Oh, come on, you know you’re beautiful.” I’ve never had a stranger call me beautiful before….and Brother Blue is so out there, so immediate in his responses, and so evidently true in his immediacy, that I believed him and it was rather shocking. At any rate, I was immediately drawn to his riffs on Shakespeare and his discussions about the beauty of the Shakespeare language. I couldn’t quite contribute very much, although I nodded and agreed. He was hard of hearing, so even if he had wanted to hear, it was hard to say much. I should mention that they look to be in their seventies or eighties.

So we were walking in the street towards the theater and at one point, he asked if I liked him (I think that was it) and I nodded and he said, well you should see me with my clothes on. I didn’t know how to take that. I think I blushed and swooped off to the side to avoid some people. He kept riffing off that line for the next hour or so, as the best line of the night. I tried to pretend at first I hadn’t heard the remark, because I had no idea what to do with it, but then he kept on with it so I just kept smiling. I smiled a lot throughout the night. Perhaps that line doesn’t seem sexual, but as he kept playing with it, it seemed to become so.

At the top of the long stairs, Ruth and Blue bought their tickets and went off to one side. I bought my ticket and then came up to them. I caught the tail end of Ruth castigating Blue for embarrassing her. They really had a beautiful relationship, even with all her no-nonsense approach and all his playfulness. She kept him in line and he oozed poetry everywhere he went. He asked her if he embarrassed her, and she said sometimes. I thought that was very honest.

So we went into the theater and I sat next to her with him on the other side. I tried to talk to her a bit, although he would interrupt with an idea whenever it came to him. He was already planning a one-man show in that space and would bring it up repeatedly throughout the evening. He seemed to keep waiting for someone to say, that sounds fabulous, you gotta do it. A couple times he even complained that no one was every enthusiastic about his ideas. That may be because Ruth doesn’t really get excited, but it may also be because he launches them at people who aren’t ready for them. But I felt a kinship, because I always want people to get as excited as I do about things, but they rarely do. And if they don’t, I back down from the idea right away. I’m trying to learn to be stronger and believe in my own ideas, with or without other people’s enthusiasm.

Before the dance started, and while Ruth was in the restroom, I asked what Blue had taught at the university mentioned in the program (where both dancers had gotten MAs). He had taught storytelling workshops. He believes stories are life affirming and teach us about how humans are all in the process of reincarnation, like the butterfly (hence his large pendant). We are grubby, belly crawlers before we enter the chrysalises, but we instinctually know something of the transcendence that awaits us afterwards. Art is exploring those instincts.

The Balinese dancers were quite interesting, more interesting than enjoyable I’d say. The woman was quite constrained. The first two dances she danced in almost a pencil skirt with a long train coming off the front that went between her legs and kept getting in the way. So most of her movements were small movements of the torso, arms, head, and especially fingers and eyes. It was a very delicate dance. Her face was like a complete mask, with a shallow smile on it. In one dance, she allowed her face to fall into sadness, and I fell more akin to her after that. The smile was too shallow and made me feel like I was watching a courtesan/slave or something. The man was under a mask. The first dance was mostly him walking around shaking his fingers. The other dances got better, but that first one was pretty tedious. His best was when he danced as an old man. It was remarkably accurate to the aching of the joints and the inherent dignity of the old. The last dance, she took a male role and had a looser skirt. That allowed more movement.

I did however, feel like I was in the midst of the cosmopolitanism that I’ve been thinking about for a year. The man was named Pablo, and I would guess Spanish. The woman was Megumi and hadn’t known about Bali until Pablo introduced it to her in Cambridge. I would guess she was Chinese. Also, all the people who came up to Blue before and after his performance knew him from some kind of religious work he had done–whether Sufi, Jewish, or Christian.

After the dance, and before, many people came up to Blue and Ruth who knew them. It was quite fun to be with people who were so popular. It is nice to see a town with people who know the place and whose people know them. It feels more like entering a community, instead of just being an outsider tourist. Blue gave a spontaneous poem to the dancer that had him, as the scruffy beast, falling in love with her, the blue lady, having wet dreams and seeking for a lady to (I forget the exact euphemism, but the message was clear). Ruth had to tug him out of the theater again. They offered to share their taxi with me, so I stuck with them. I enjoyed it though, because they were so friendly, and the place (outside, not the theater) was a bit overrun by the boisterous young, which tend to make me nervous at night.

In the line for the taxi, someone ran up to Blue and Ruth to ask if they knew where a certain woman storyteller had ended up. We ended up getting into a long conversation with her and the man she was with. It was so interesting to see the different ways that white people interacted with Ruth and Blue. Slightly uncomfortable, indulgent smiles, yet really admiring what he was doing–but then maybe that’s just me projecting my own reaction onto others. This woman was a poet/storyteller who ran poetry writing workshops in the prisons. Blue asked her about her work and whether black guys reacted to her differently than the white guys (she said, well yes of course, because she is a double other. They were a lot more respectful). He also asked if any had fallen in love with her. She said well, yes, one, and it taught her a lot about how careful she needs to be because she is teaching them to open up such wellsprings of emotion. Then Blue asked her for a poem right then and there and she gave quite a nice one. Quite deep. Blue was obviously very touched and gave a spontaneous poem back. Said she was a like a burning ember in a fireplace, just sitting there waiting to blaze into a huge fire. This after having asked her if she had ever been deeply in love and her having said no, not since 19. Then he found out that the man that was with her was an English teacher at Harvard and he said he should invite him (Blue) to his class. And then we came full circle back to Shakespeare. I got to hear his 5 minutes of Romeo and Juliet.

One of the stranger parts to his 5 minutes of Shakespeare was that he would beat out a rhythm with his hands and on his legs, but it didn’t seem quite right to me. I didn’t know whether I wasn’t getting the syncopated beat or whether age had gotten to his sense of rhythm.

Well, we finally got in the taxi and he started talking about the woman and man we had just left and how much he liked them and how different they were–she so down to earth, he so (forget the exact term…) but how real they were. And every so often he would have to assure me that he liked me too. He said he thought I got him, and that not many people did. I said, “well, that’s because I’m a performer at hear too.” Upon reflection, I’m not sure that’s what I should have said–perhaps more than a performer he is a lover of words and emotion, and expresses that love through his body. Yes, he performs, but that is not the center of his being–his passion is and that overflows into performance. Oh well, I do tend to say the wrong things, but perhaps it was not taken badly.

And they dropped me off at my door and didn’t want any money because it was on their way. As I waved goodbye they both seemed genuinely glad that I had run into them.

So I have been exposed to sci-fi tropes and one of the most compelling, to me, are the scenes of the perfect world separate inextricably from the imperfect. The most recent manifestation of this that I can think of is Serenity with the inside planets living “beautiful” ordered lives and the outside planets living “free” dangerous lives. I find this a compelling idea because it seems so incredibly sad that the “beautiful” people have closed their eyes to the suffering they cannot see. And compelling because I think my world does that same thing much of the time. Which brings me to my recent trip to Haaaaavard (I am there now). The campus buildings and surrounding areas are amazingly beautiful. Every time I turn a corner, I find another historic plaque mentioning names I know (and don’t know) who stood on that site hundreds of years ago. For someone who grew up in the mostly new and shining West, but loves history, this is quite charming. My favorite coffee shop at the moment is inside the house of the blacksmith who inspired one of Longfellow’s poems. The upstairs has murals on the walls, fireplaces, and colonial-looking tables and chairs.

About 3 blocks from where I’m staying is the heart of Harvard Square, where there is the metro stop, a corner of the Harvard campus, the vast network of the “Coop” (Borders and campus bookstore/clothing together), and many posh shops. And a large number of homeless people, with their bags and their persistent requests. Some of them are fairly well dressed on the order of homeless people. But it has really startled me. There is nothing else in Harvard Square that I normally association with the number of homeless people–little graffiti, little litter, streets cleaned, etc. And just three blocks away at Radcliffe, or inside the Harvard yard, there are no homeless people.

So why do I bring this up? First, because it has made me consistently uncomfortable as I have walked down there. Not unsafe, necessarily, but very aware of the amount of money I carry in my bag and purse in the form of electronics. This was not helped by the sign in one shop announcing how very prevalent pickpocketing is in Harvard Square. And aware of my inability to interact with them. Just look away and walk faster. I don’t tend to meet them as humans, nor do I have an answer for their plight. Though I am usually unsure of what to do with myself when I confront a stranger. Does one make eye contact and smile? Or just look straight ahead and keep walking?

But at any rate, I guess my discomfort stems from the sci-fi dichotomy set up in the beginning of the post. Ann Arbor has mostly decided to redirect homeless people to shelters and to make panhandling illegal. Clearly, from the strong police presence, Cambridge has not made that decision. They are letting very rich and very poor co-exist. So, the “beautiful” ordered world has been infiltrated by the “free” dangerous world–just what the sci-fi movies preach is desired and what I go along with them and believe. And yet I am uncomfortable.