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possibly-incontinent memoir enthusiasts
Saturday, February 14 2009
Every year Gretchen and I make each other something special for St. Valentine's Day. Usually she makes me something out of Sculpy (usually a tiny framed mirror with hearts or pizza slices around the glass), though this year and last year she toasted the Sculpy a little too long. This year I made Gretchen a simple heart-shaped block of wood I'd cut from the dead tree I recently felled. I sanded the chunky heart-shaped block to a high sheen and then coated it with something to keep it from drying out too quickly and cracking (which even very dry wood from outdoors tends to do when it comes indoors).
For most of the day, Gretchen was an attendee at Woodstock's Memoir Festival, which caters to the older navel-gazer demographic (navel-geezers, if you will). She came home late this afternoon saying she'd run into one of her old friends from Oberlin and that this woman's husband, Bob Brader, would be doing a one-man theatric performance tonight and that we were going. "One-man theatric performance," I didn't like the sound of that. But it was St. Valentine's Day and I had to do something with the wife, so off we went. First, though, we had a recession-appropriate romantic dinner in the dining room of the Catskill Pizza Company, where we ordered a large of their vegan pies. We also got an order of fries and mystery microbrews from their eclectic beer closet. Our meal overlapped the end of family dinner time and the beginning of the part of the evening when mobs of hungry teenage boys descend. (There is a fifteen minute dead zone between these two dining peaks, and during this lull we were the only customers in the restaurant.) Gretchen quietly remarked at how uncivilized the teenagers were as they devoured their pizza, all of them greedily serving themselves. I reminded her that none of them had yet been domesticated by long-term relationships with the gender that knows better.
The Bob Brader performance was over at the Center for Photography in central Woodstock. There was a good turnout and I think Gretchen might have been the youngest person there.
Bob Brader mostly sat behind a table for his performance of Spitting In The Face Of The Devil, an 85 minute haunted house tour of his difficult childhood. It started with the near-present, the obituary of his father, a former marine and driver of armored cars. Brader's reaction to the death of his father was almost emotionless, and a clue to why that might be came with the term he used for his father during the rest of the show: "the Devil." We were introduced to his father's evil slowly, for example: the discouragements and put-downs when Bob wanted to perform in his school's talent show. Then there were the merciless beatings his father doled out for bed wetting. There were stories of how the Devil tortured cats when he was younger, and of how he took away Bob's dogs and released them into strange neighborhoods while Bob was at school. Later we learn (spoiler alert) that the Devil is a pederast who had been fucking Bob's friends, most of them as preteens. He'd also raped his wife's ten year old brother. As Brader told these harrowing stories, he'd often insert bits of dialogue done as convincing impressions of the people involved. And when he assumed the form of his evil father, his face would go cold and emotionless and he'd adopt the bullying intonations of a tough-guy sadist, and the room would go silent in the face of the Devil. It was amazing. I hadn't expected to appreciate the show at all, but I found myself enjoying it as much as I do a good episode of This American Life. Indeed, with a few musical interludes, segments of Spitting In The Face Of The Devil would be perfect for the This American Life format.
The only problem with the performance was a consequence of the venue, not the performer. In the last ten minutes of the show, someone nearby began picking his teeth or something because the whole atmosphere of the room started smelling of paint-peeling halitosis, the kind that develops between the roots of your teeth when you fail to floss. And when that fragrance departed in the last five minutes of the show, it was replaced (believe it or not) by an even worse smell: one that suggested someone nearby had shit his adult diaper. The odor was definitely worse than that of a simple liver-failure fart, because the odor came on quickly and, once present, didn't abate at all. These are the risks of spending 85 minutes in a room full of possibly-incontinent memoir enthusiasts.
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