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Tuesday, August 06, 2002 Today: one of those days when I was up and out early, didn't get back to the house till mid-afternoon, and once here found my body didn't want to run around or do anything that felt even vaguely like work. Saw a half-rainbow during the drive into Montpelier this morning -– so vivid it seemed unreal. By the time I'd turned onto another road, it had become a complete rainbow, a long, low arc, shining against drifting gray clouds. Rainbows tend to be commercially overdone, I think -- sentimentalized, overused. And there's a reason for that, for the overuse, for the way they show up on all sorts of banal inspirational products: because the real things are amazing. The colors in this one were brilliant, almost luminescent, and when I began the descent into town, this phenomenon of moisture and light stretched across the entire downtown, from the small valley on the south side which follows the gentle winding of the Winooski River over to the north side and the houses that trail Rt. 12 out of the village toward the Worcester Mountains. Clouds and sun traded off until early afternoon. Since then the day has been mostly gray. Once in a while, light rain, almost mist, passing briefly through. Low, dark clouds brush the mountains as they blow across the valley from west to east. Now and then bits of blue sky peek through. As I write this, the sky to one side of the house is gray, featureless, extending over the house itself so that rain is falling outside of every window. Off to the other side, where the valley extends to the north and winds out of view, blue sky and high white clouds stretch from west to east, the clouds above the house breaking into dark tatters and trailing off. I've been hanging out with a nice woman lately (J.). Two nights ago I found myself down in central Vermont, sitting with her in lawn chairs, a couple of hundred of people ranged around us on blankets or in folding chairs, everyone's attention on a goofy, earnest, well-intentioned political screed in the guise of an outdoor theatre production. The Bread and Puppet Theater used to host a similar event every August on their land up in Glover, VT. Freaks, hippies, lefties of all stripes, Vermont families (with kids, picnic baskets, lawn chairs), and large numbers of unclassifiable weirdos came from all over for the do, which lasted Saturday through Sunday, I think, usually climaxing in a procession and performance in the wonderfully, bizarrely creative and grandiose Bread and Puppet style. Meaning comedy, darker ramblings, puppets (from small and manageable to the enormous), oversized masks, mysterious/cryptic passages, politicized allegories, music -- all tossed into a blender, then staged with energy and visual flair. The event of two evenings ago wasn't quite up to that. In a way, it's unfair for me to pass any kind of judgment on it in that I tend to have little interest in political spews these days, from any part of the political spectrum. On the other hand, I put in many years working in the theatre biz -– both acting and writing, actually making my living at it during some stretches -– so I can't help noticing production pluses/minuses. J. and I hooked up in the town of Norwich. I left my car in a parking lot, we drove to the event in her Jeep, down winding Vermont roads through beautiful country (country more genteel, less wild than my part of the state, the kind of land Frodo Baggins might feel at home in), the roads becoming progressively narrower, changing from asphalt to dirt, until we finally turned into a field being used as a parking lot. From there, we followed a grassy path that gave out onto acres of rolling land, a natural, sprawling bowl whose sides angled gently up to the enclosing pine woods -- thick stands of old, stately trees that stretched up into a blue evening sky across which feathery mares'-tails clouds drifted. [continued in next entry] rws 7:54 PM [+] |