Laurel Massé

The [word]smithy of my soul

Years ago, I fell under the spell of a man who spoke beautifully. It's not the only time I've done so. This may indicate a certain susceptibility men with language skills, and perhaps there is a clinical term for it. These gentlemen don't have to be living now, or ever; in fact, they can be fictional characters. One of my favorites, Lord Peter Wimsey, graces a series of detective novels written by Dorothy Sayers. These are the books I reread when I am sick in bed for a few days, as I never tire of Lord Peter's company. In this clip from one of the brilliant the BBC adaptations, with Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter, and Harriet Walter as writer Harriet Vane, we learn that "one wordsmith [is] worth three cyber-experts." Yea, verily.

 

But my current affair of the heart may be the biggest one ever. I know the news will devastate Sir Paul McCartney, but really, darling Paul, you must admit you've had your chances. I shall always feel great affection for you - in fact, I am doing a concert on your birthday, dedicated to you and your tunes. But you've been supplanted in my affection by a kinsman of yours, an rather older man, William Shakespeare. You must have felt it coming, yes? ever since you released that tune with the mandolin.

Here's Edward Petherbridge again, this time giving us Shakespeare's Sonnet 57 ("Being your slave, what should I do...").

 

'Nuff said.

 

 

Fools on every hill

I'm currently enjoying actor Harriet Walter's book, Other People's Shoes: Thoughts on Acting, in which she writes about her acting life. It is a very conversational book, and, as I read, I feel as though I am taking tea and chatting with a wise friend. In fact, sharing a cuppa with Ms. Walter is now one of my genie-lamp wishes.

In several passages, she mentions "sod's law", the British term for what we in America call "Murphy's Law", which states that anything that can go wrong will. I love words, so because I hope to keep increasing my working vocabulary until eons after the day I die, I did some research into origins.

"Sod" is a slang term that can be defined as a pitiable, awkward, or objectionable person. No one ventures an opinion about who the original "sod" might have been. But I'm voting for Adam, in the Bible, because his very name means dirt, or earth, which is also the non-slang meaning of sod. And, it could be said that he did act like a sod, too.

In any case, I found this passage, from British stage magician Nevile Maskelyne, writing in 1908. He doesn't name it, but he does describe sod's law:

It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, worry, or what not, the fact remains.

Personally, I am not convinced that depravity lurks in inanimate things. Nor am I certain that there is any such thing as an inanimate anything. Rather, I suspect these entities are animate, but move so slowly that we can't pay attention long enough to be aware of their progress. In fact, we don't even live long enough to do so. It's all relative, isn't it? To a fly, we are ponderously slow; to a slug, we are a blur and a breeze.

Furthermore, I don't accept that such objects are necessarily depraved. In fact, I think they might be terrifically funny, and cracking jokes all the time, hoping we'll laugh. How else to explain the car keys that vanish and reappear? Or the cell phone one searches for frantically, while it is hiding in one's hand? Or my laptop, which changes the character palette for no reason - as it is doing this morning, insisting on returning to italics even after countless corrections, and arbitrarily switching to the Polish kezboard so that I find I am uging some verz odd spellings of words?

In truth, my computer's shenanigans do seem to be inching toward the doorway to Depravity, as Ms. Mac answers my "Why must you?" with "Because I can". 

In any case (aauurrrgh!), I feel lukewarm about the expression "Murphy's Law". Why does Murphy get the credit? Actually, there is an answer to that question, and it's here.

But the older usage "sod's law" seems more democratic somehow, and more polite. No matter how our lives unfold, we all get an equal chance to take our turn being the sod.

 

 

The life of the party

The gig is over. You've sung your one or two (or three!) shows on closing night, taken your curtain call, done your meet-and-greet, and you are ready to eat dinner with your fellow artists and talk about how it all went. Or you might even be ready to go home, or to your hotel room, and go to sleep.

But the rest of the world has other plans. Someone important is throwing a party for you, and they entreat you to come "for just a little while", and your agent insists you go "just to put in an appearance", and your manager urges you to "swing by" and promises you won't have to stay long. Off you go, tired and hungry, hoping there will be food, hoping there won't be too much of a crowd, hoping you can be in bed before 2 AM.

Can you guess what happens when you walk through the door?

If you are a performer, you don't have to guess, because you already know. If you aren't, here are Noel Coward and Judy Garland explaining it all much better than I can.

 

Ready, steady, go

Last week, Christopher Cartmill, actor, teacher, and friend, sent out an invitation on Facebook for someone to play Polonius at The Hamlet Rave!, an event wrapped around an uncut reading of the play at NYU's Gallatin Center.

Two years ago I would noticed and said nothing, because two years ago I never would have imagined I could do such a thing. No, that's not it, exactly. I could have imagined it, but I couldn't have believed it. Even a year ago, I didn't know Shakespeare's sweet-tasting words would ever be in my mouth, had no idea that I would ever accept the invitation to read Polonius after I'd already done Cordelia.

Last week, however, I said "I will". Actually, I said, "Ooh ooh, choose me pleeeeease", or something equally mature. Being involved in the Rave was an unlooked-for, rich, exciting experience. This dive into what some call the most influential play ever written lit up areas of my brain that were waiting for just such a thing, and I am still a-buzz. For the last few days, I have been thinking about what happens, and what has happened, when I've said yes. So, when I came across this passage in the last pages of Rob Bell's Love Wins, it caught my attention as if it was highlighted in flourescent yellow:

Time does not repeat itself. Neither does life. While we continually find grace waiting to pick us up off the ground after we have fallen, there are realities to our choices. While we may get other opportunities, we won't get the one right in front of us again. That specific moment will pass and we will not see it again. It comes, it's here, it goes, and then it's gone. [It's] vitally important we take our choices here and now as seriously as we possibly can because they matter more than we can begin to imagine.

"Seriously" does not always include "thoughtfully and carefully", however. While I recognize the value of deliberation, the big experiences that have most changed my life for the better resulted from impulsively saying yes first, and panicking later. Sometimes the panic was ppropriate - I don't thave a flawless record of "said yes, was right". But every good yes has led to another, like pawprints in snow. Saying yes to teaching at Ashokan comes most easily to mind as an example. So much joy has entered my life because of it! That joy teaches me in an ongoing seminar on living, so that I knew enough to say yes to teaching at The International Cabaret Conference at Yale, which is where I met fellow-teacher George Hall, who used to run the Central School of Drama in London, and who introduced me to his former student, actor/director Bram Lewis, who asked me to read the part of the Street Singer in The Madwoman of Chaillot. I thought, well, it's a singer. How hard can it be?, and said yes. Which is how I got involved with the Project Rushmore Theatre Company, and played Cordelia in King Lear, which is what gave me the cheek to think "why not Polonius?" and say "choose me!" to Christopher...

...whom I'd met because I'd said yes to organist Harry Huff when he asked me to improvise from the choir loft at a Good Friday service (ten years ago? more?) at Calvary Episcopal Church. Guess who was the reader that day: Christopher Cartmill. How I met Harry is another series of tracks, involving a religious order, a meeting in Albany, and Union Seminary.

Reading Polonius at The Hamlet Rave became a possibility over a decade ago? Perhaps. Did I know that? Nope. Not till I started thinking about it a few days ago.

Perhaps all our lives are etched with a map we can only see in retrospect, if ever. I owe the form my career has taken - and if not the form, certainly the initial routing -  to a February blizzard in 1972. All I did was hail a cab. Tim Hauser was the driver. Who could have imagined, on that snowy evening, what would come of a single, simple conversation?

As Hamlet said:  The readiness is all.

 

 

 

Outrageous fortune

Due to an unpredictable, long, looping series of coincidences which I will relate in a future post, I am reading the part of Polonius tonight at Christopher Cartmill and Natalia Razak's event, The Hamlet Rave, down at NYU. So, I am speaking the speeches here at home, and painting my nails "Bloody Curtain Red".

This will be a uncut reading, which means it will be deliciously long. And there wil be other things going on at the same time - puppets, music, video, Skype performances, live commentary - that one might not think to associate with the "melancholy Dane".

There's a Facebook page for the event, and a notice on the University's website.

More on't anon. For now...

                                                  "Help me, Obi-Wan. You are my only hope..."

 

 

Sweet sixteen

Still under the weather here.

Nevertheless... I still know a fine performance when I see one: Dame Judi Dench, performing in a 2002 RIchard Rodgers Centenary concert fundraiser in Drury Lane, London.

 

Turn me on, I'm a radio

I have always loved radio. Born a generation earlier, I'd have made my career - or at least part of it - singing and acting in front of the microphones of some powerful station. Instead, like many children of my age, I heard the radio stories from my parents, who had known those days well. My dad, especially, reminisced so vividly about The Shadow and Fibber McGee and Molly that I sometimes have to remind myself that I never heard the programs first-hand. Film is indeed magical, and television can be (sometimes), but there is something about sitting in the dark just hearing a story and letting the pictures rise from within one's mind that cannot be equalled. We hear, in the womb, before we see...

Here, in three segments, is a tale of Sherlock Holmes, "The FInal Problem", broadcast in December 1954. It stars Sir Ralph RIchardson as Dr. Watson, Sir John Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes, and Orson Welles as Professor Moriarty.

Listen. Close your eyes. And see.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then they said...

I have been reading a lot - a lot - while I recover from this whatever-this-Thing-is that I suspect is the fruit of air travel. The least I can do is share a bit (of the reading, not the Thing). Any book I finish reading is not necessarily related to the next one I start; I'm just shortening the stack next to the bed, with the occasional stroll through the news on my laptop.

 

Randy Newman, in The NY Times, on breaking into the music business now:

Who would want to break into it? It’s like a bank that’s already been robbed.

 

Alan Alda, in Growing Up Laughing, by Marlo Thomas:

I think it's good for [actors] to laugh together... because then they'll be vulnerable and opened up to each other. You can't stay guarded while you're laughing. You can't be in your own world when you're on stage.

 

Bella Abzug:

Real equality is going to come not when a female Einstein is recognized as quickly as a male Einstein, but when a female schlemiel is promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.

 

Marlo Thomas, in Growing Up Laughing:

No one ever tells you that grief is physical.

 

Dame Judi Dench, in her new memoir, And Furthermore:

[In] the economy of presenting a character...I think what you leave out is more important than what you put in.

 

Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women:

Jo read till her eyes gave out.

 

Believe me, it can happen. Of course, I have the perfect cure for that: cold teabag compresses... and maybe a tiny tiny very wee piece of chocolate (no, not on my eyes).

 

 

The other Dr. John (Sir Doctor John)

 
Still ailing. Perhaps Sir John Gielgud's voice will have healing powers. Here are the first two of eight pieces of a lovely program about his career. I trust you can carry on without me to view the other six.

 

 

 

Lying low

I am sick at home today, drinking ginger tea and feeling utterly wilted by the attack of some bug I probably picked up in my travels. Were I of weaker stuff, I could be described as feeling sorry for myself. But La Massé would never do that, would she?

You need not answer that question.

Instead of whimpering all the time, I am reading John Miller's biography of Judi Dench, Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice. Dame Judi is the actress I would most like to meet, though not today, as I can't get out of bed. Youtube is it for now. Here are two brief interview segments, followed by Sondheim's Send in the Clowns. 

Sondheim himself is reported to have said that nobody has ever sung it better, and I agree. Many have lovelier singing voices, but no one tells the truth as searingly.

 

 

 

 

 

Please send up prayers for my speedy recovery, and thanks in advance.