2002-07-29 2:23 p.m.
the actor's life for me, hi diddle hee-hee

It's been a little while.

What a whirlwind of a weekend...

Friday night, I went with my coworker Jade to see a world music/bellydancing show in a community garden in the East Village. Now, I could write off going to bellydancing for one simple reason: I'm a man...good bellydancers are dead sexy, especially with the finger cymbals.

What amazed me at the show was that it wasn't just drumming, as Jade had implied... her teacher works out of a shop that sells tribal instruments from around the world, and I got to hear Turkish, Moroccan, and Iranian instruments, most of which predate Western musical systems. Most of them are set up to use quarter-tones, which aren't even acknowledged in classical scales... That floors me (especially after taking an AP music theory class in high school), that, in a culture's choices of what's "beautiful" and what isn't, they cut out half of the sounds (as far as I know) that existing aboriginal instruments could make.

This wasn't sitar or guitar-resembling instruments...the one she played resembled a fiddle, though she said that ideally, you don't move the bow along the instrument, but move the instrument on a peg, shifting it to different angles to meet the bow.

The whole crowd took off to a greek taverna for food afterwards...even my coworker David, who's a 50-something, balding shut-in (or so he appears, though I'm fast realizing he isn't...keep reading), came along and kept up with the conversation of a very hectic group of people. We talked about food, the Greek isles (a girl there gave me great travel advice: avoid the tourist traps, go in August when the festivals are on, don't go when there's an election in progress), and left stuffed.

Saturday was a different story. I went to see my future (as of this coming Saturday) playwriting teacher's show...he adapted two of the three short stories in a night of staged readings.

And, of course, I bumped into yet another person from high school, an actor I was in "Bye Bye Birdie" with in the 10th grade.

The second of the two adaptations, though, was really superb. Maybe it was the quality of the acting, the magic of a staged reading that came together over everyone's expectations into a very sweet evening...but it was what I referred to as "upbeat Ibsen," a story, a la "It's a Wonderful Life," a little trickster-figure time-travel parable about three married couples who all come to the realization that they should've married someone else. Everyone has the chance to test the theory at the original moment each made his/her choice...

It was sentimental, no doubt, but still, the craftmanship made me feel that I was in very good hands for my workshop. Something a lot of playwrights forget in adapting works is a love for the material...and everyone shared it in this show.

I was invited out with the cast and crew (along with the aforementioned David), and it was like coming home, despite it being a different home.

Theater creates community, however ephemeral and artificial, like little else. You get to know people in short measure because you know that's all the time you have. People wonder why Hollywood actors sleep with/get involved with each other so much...it's because it's all they have time for. They get in, have fun, realize it won't last or just move on to another project and another costar. (I can't say it's a way to live, in my eyes, but I can understand it.)

I spoke with one of the actors, a Teutonic-looking gent, about redemption as a theme in the arts, right after comparing neighborhoods in Brooklyn. My teacher-to-be and I talked about playwriting methods, laughed about movies, and pretty much closed the bar. David (who I found out this weekend is a composer and pianist) spent the evening talking to one of the actresses and her boyfriend, who was another composer, about musical trends.

When I lived in Atlanta, I convinced myself that I couldn't live with theater as a lifestyle because of its transient nature. But now I live in New York, where transience is a way of life. We live in a hub, a terminus for a lot of people, and while the actor's life unsettled me for most of college � which had a fair amount to do with the imposed time limit of our degrees � this time, as I dipped my toes into that pool, it brought me a sense of peace, reminding me that that sense of community is always there, everywhere, whenever one can relax enough to enjoy it for the moment that it is.