Punch List

One thing about opening a show or having an event, is that it will happen, barring an act of god. I remember one time, during a snow emergency, that we opened a day late, but only because I didn't want to hike 17 miles on foot through 12 inches of new snow over a crust of ice. I'm not sure why people rise to the occasion, but by the end of the day yesterday, I was dead on my feet. I'm too old for this game. Mare est in turba, the sea is in turmoil, I can only do so much. The grackles play their show. The flush, when they vacate a tree, is tangible. Loops meaning nothing.  Birds, for god's sake, what could they possibly mean? We moved the police station to the fire station because of black mold. Check. Imagined health risk. Black mold can't be good. The opening went well. Maggie Taylor, the artist, was a sweetheart, the auction netted maybe 5 grand, admission another 4, wine maybe 1500, bar maybe another 500. Not bad for Portsmouth. I had fun pouring wine, chatting. I didn't wear the hat, Sharee wanted to wear it, and bless her heart. I wore my Smithsonian ball-cap. Crazy busy, opening bottles and pouring. The art crowd are drinkers, even at 8 bucks a glass, 34 bottles in two hours (and a lot of people drank beer, or the drink for the occasion, a Pink Flamingo, which is citrus vodka, triple sec, and cranberry juice). I sample all the wines, 3 white and 3 red, liked the Shiraz quite a bit, a big wine, like the zins I prefer. Sipped Maker's Mark on a few cubes for the rest of the evening, weak drinks, I stayed sober for the drive home. 14 deer on the last 2 mile section of Mackletree. Weaving between statues. If you've never done theater, or installed a show, it's probably pretty hard to imagine what opening day is like. Or maybe not, it's like having that first Thanksgiving family feed at your house, 16 relatives and you're an in-law. Like that. A list of similar events could follow. I suppose we all have them. But it is actually what I do for a living. Serving the wine, I didn't have to mingle, people came to me. I spun a line of talk. I only do this once or twice a year, so I create a fiction on the fly, a story that sounds correct, and people tend to believe me, because I'm sitting on a stool, wearing a ball cap. Go figure. I scored heavily with the board tonight, because they were drinking a little and I was serving, and I came off as a really dedicated employee, which I am, and could talk on any subject. My chit-chat tutorial was helpful. Mostly, no one listens. Doesn't matter what you say. The rules of the game are established by the playing field. And then. And then, the rules of engagement change. Went to sleep on the sofa before could SEND. Weary. Back to town this morning, laundry, soup and a Scottish ale at the pub, then opened the museum so I could re-hang the front wall which we had un-hung so we could hang the art work for auction. But first I had to pick up hundreds of little wooden skewers on which much of the finger food last night was served. At public functions people just drop these on the floor. There was a nice remoulade, for dipping. Beef tenderloin chunks, large shrimp, fried ravioli; excellent food prepared by Ann(e?) Jewitt, a board member (Asa's) wife. Also today, I was finding shrimp tails everywhere. I was hoping for enough left-over shrimp to make a bisque, but no such luck. The beef was all gone too. Olives left, so I snacked on those, while I policed corners and crevices. My first museum condom, in the projection booth for the theater. A good choice of location, because the theater was deeply dark, and we had almost blocked access by temporarily storing the shipping crates (oversized, a logistic nightmare) for "Alice" on that upper landing before you start down the awkward carpeted steps through the steeply tiered seats, down to the stage. That landing probably has a specific name, most things do, but I don't know it. We had, however, left a narrow path, because we needed to access the theater lights, which are controlled from the projection room. A perfect tryst location, whether scouted ahead of time, or just accidentally discovered. Guessing from scant evidence, I'd say sitting position, involving a pedestal. Making sense with words is sometimes a strange process. The tangents. Writing just that line, involved getting another drink and rolling several cigarettes, thinking about strange places I had made love. One, I'll share with you, I was a Senior at Janitor College, and we were a pretty good venue for road shows, the best for hundreds of miles in all directions. And there was grant money available, Bringing Art To The Far North, so we hosted a lot of events. That summer we booked a British Sitting-Room Comedy; the ingenue was a hot young thing, and I'm a fool for accents; I've been told that if I mention her name I'll be shot, so let's call her Jane. We hit it off. She'd never had the opportunity to completely release. There was a sofa on the set. After I set the ghost light, we would fuck until dawn. I digress. Hard not to. What life is. What's thrown in your face. I really wasn't going anyplace. Fucking condom, man, diverted me completely from where I thought I wanted to go. The way life is. She died early in the third act, and had time that we could, if she did her curtain calls quickly, regroup in a burrow we had wallowed under a hedge near one of the rear exits from the theater, and fuck our brains out while the patrons were leaving the building. Hard not to remember. The smell of bacon in the morning. I fried some shredded potatoes in the last of the bacon fat, fried a perfect egg, nuked an extra scone I'd scored this morning, slathered it with butter. A great dinner. Who's keeping time? Who cares what time of day it is?