Punch Bowl

I am impatient, distracted, and any number of uncomfortable things. I’m drinking a little and walking a lot and perusing my emotions over things that may or may not happen soon. I am playing the piano alone at noon, winter-dry skin slipping over glossy keys, pretty walnut wood pock-marked from over fifteen years of my fingernails gouging the soft panel above the black keys. Angry, desperate, betrayed, hopeful... however intensely I feel, I play that spinet harder than it was designed to endure, and I am only sad that I can't reward its loyalty, because each stroke still resonates with the heartwarming mellowness I first knew when I fell in love with it. A tuning here, a polish there. I wish I could reward all the objects that sustain me these days. A trusty vehicle, a faithful camera, my favorite paintbrush whose bristles splay awkwardly from years of thumping just-right foliage onto canvas, useful like an overused toothbrush. Nothing gets into the cracks of forty-year-old linoleum like a retired and reincarnated Oral-B.

I've tried to appease anyone who might occasionally revisit my blog by posting photos. Sometimes it's just too hard to share what I have to say, assuming anybody would care to read it. And yet, here you are, and now you know that I love all aspects of lemons, despise raw tomatoes, and sleep on my face, still and silent and cold as a corpse. Isn't blogging a wonderful thing?

I saw The Phantom of the Opera last Sunday night, a nearly private showing at the single-screen Strand Theatre on Main Street, all faded opulence and home-town charm. And I loved it, Phantom, as I always love it in any way, shape, or form. I love a melody that soars, a dischordant strain that pauses in agony and then sails, reborn harmonious, into the atmosphere, and Phantom has plenty of that. I don't even mind if, after that, it fades; music is loveliest by far when there is contrast, surely the true source of its power. The cast was fine; I'm no critic. I'm just glad they didn't mess with it, try to make it more film-friendly. They just made a movie of the elaborate, almost kitschy musical, and it's nice enough for me. Maybe I admire Andrew Lloyd Weber's consistency in the face of popular opinion, almost as much as I admire Tim Burton's. And I guess I like a little 'dark' once in a while, or maybe more often that not. Phantom is the right kind of time-out fairytale, that get-me-out-of-now 'dark,' the breath of fresh air I need after days of being naturally sunny and positive (but not in that annoying way, I'm just happy). But still, any day of the week I can be caught humming Christine's wistful aria Think of Me, or the quietly regretful song she sings to a long-dead father. There's nothing like 'too late' to get the tear ducts working.