Prophets and Money-Management

[Yes, I love puns. Sorry.] My main concerns today can best be expressed in two questions:

1. Is it EVER a good idea to loan family members money?
2. What will I say about Old Testament and Modern Prophets on Saturday morning to a Church group?

First, those of you who know me know that I am usually pretty cryptic (or just plain disdainful) about my youth. I make no secret that my father ran the family into the ground financially and emotionally with a series of bad decisions and bad behaviors. Into that authority-void, I stepped as a 15-year-old with a part-time job and a solvent bank account. I worked. I paid a lot of the bills. I tried to be the parent. And, when I got the chance to go to college (on scholarship and a lot of loans), I jumped at the chance and essentially ran away from home to get an education.

I have been running ever since.

Today, my brother, whom I love and worry about, has teleported me back 25 years, by asking me for a loan. His need is real, but my eagerness to remain untethered financially to the family I stopped saving years ago is strong. Can this turn out well? Someone will come out of this resenting someone for something. I hope I am wrong about that. I will probably take a leap of faith and loan him some money.

Second, what can I say to my Church's Men's Group about Prophets three days before the Presidential election? What should I say? What should I NOT say?

Prophets of the Hebrew Bible appear, on the surface, as wholly depressing and grouchy. No doubt. But I have found that they are often trying to slap a sleeping populace out of their stupor and their slavery to whatever idols they have recently created for themselves, and hope to make said populace reassert their relationships with God and each other. Community (big 'C') does not work if we stare nightly only at TV. I believe that our Golden Calf is really a flat-screen made by LG or Samsung. In an analogy I repeat often, if aliens landed on an abandoned planet (perhaps after a surprisingly inclusive Rapture), they would reconstruct our belief structure as the worship of TV and indoor plumbing. The glass/plastic god and the porcelain god.

Are there prophets around us today? Has God gone silent, or are we the numbed and zombie-like masses who can't understand the calls when we hear them? Facebook.com, of which I am a new member, is neither a Face nor a Book.

Question of the day: where are the voices, the original and troubling voices that challenge you and me to get up off the sofa and DO SOMETHING? Prophets are, by my definition, those who tell us truths we don't want to hear. Phrased another way, they do what some sermons used to do for me, which is 'convict' me; they cut into me and make me uncomfortable in my action and inaction. Some prophets speak with conviction, total self-confidence and persuasiveness. Their prophetic voice is only measurable by the discomfort they inspire and the awakening they can sometimes facilitate.

But we have to decide to wake up and not hit the cultural 'snooze' buttons (you pick yours from the myriad choices that modern society has dreamed up). Dreamed up. Interesting that we even talk about actions of our modern culture as if happening in a dream-state. To quote a Kate Bush song from Hounds of Love: "Wake Up! Look who's here to see you."

Collected Thoughts in October 2008

A lot since the last entry... my Augustana College 20th Reunion, the Spooky Trail, but first the promised theatre reviews:

1. The Constant Wife by Somerset Maugham (performed at the Boulevard Theatre, Milwaukee).

Basically a study of marriage dynamics, this play struck me as extremely 'period.' I feel this way usually when there are confrontations and assertions in the text of the play that probably made sense in some other context but are hard to follow in the current day and age. Plot? Man cheats on wife with wife's best friend. Everyone knows except the constant wife (named Constance !?!?!). Constance is finally confronted, only to reveal that she has known all along and had avoided acting like she knew so she could go on with a comfortable existence, since she had resigned herself to the transformation of her marriage from passionate to predictable. All of these twists and turns, complicated by the return of a man who loved Constance before her marriage, leave plenty of space for monologues on the role of women and men and honesty and love and passion and,... well, I think you get it. I liked all of the actors and the tones they struck, but I lost my program, so I can't (and won't) go through each one. In the end, a good performance of a mediocre text.

2. State of the Union by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theatre, Milwaukee).

Politically pertinent plays performed playfully. The setting is reversed from this historical moment: in 1948, the Republicans are desperate to find someone to help them break the Democratic streak in the White House. They happen upon a charismatic businessman whom they convince to make some preliminary speeches, to test the waters. In front of this backdrop, we encounter the man, his outspoken wife, the cogs in the political machine, his mistress who happens to own a newspaper, and a wide variety of business and labor types.

Lindsay and Crouse, most famous for writing the story for Sound of Music, give us a mostly-subtle love story rather than just bashing us with politics. The Rep actors did an excellent job selling the characters and giving them 'arc' or transformation throughout the action. Those who hate come to tolerate, those who ignore come to notice, those who have lost love manage to find it again. This play, which won a Pulitzer, was made into a film (starring Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Angela Lansbury). I am anxious to see what Frank Capra did with the text and the characters. I hope he did as good a job as the Rep did.

3. Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare (performed by Milwaukee Shakespeare at the Broadway Theatre Center, Milwaukee).

To start at the end, what I really like are 'talk-backs.' I love it when the actors (and perhaps the director) come out after a performance and answer audience questions. Not every question is lit-crit-worthy, but many press the actors to verbalize their (character's?) motivations and their experiences. If I were Emperor of Things, I would make it a rule that every run of every play had to do these more often. This performance happened to have a talk-back, so it automatically starts with a B+. Hey, I'm emperor.

Anyway, this rendition of the play has the novel update of being recast as a 'reality show' in which the King of Navarre and his 3 friends are followed around by a Greek Chorus/Comic Relief group sporting TV cameras and microphones. No text is added to the Shakespeare, though some of the non-main-arc sections are heavily deleted. The result is a loud, hilarious, mostly-accessible version of the play. The disconnect between the Shakespearean language and the TV monitors evaporated for me almost immediately [ah, a victory for my high school English teacher's mantra of 'willing suspension of disbelief']. When the play-within-the-play leaked over into American Idol, I was temporarily irritated, but they recovered nicely. A difficult play was rendered cleverly accessible.

4. I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright (performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre at the Stiemke Theatre, Milwaukee).

Doug Wright irritates me. I read Quills, and, frankly, didn't like the play. So I went into this production with a chip on my shoulder, prepared to declare my ticket money wasted.

It wasn't.

Doug Wright still irritates me, because he has forced me to reassess, to change my original evaluation - which means, to quote that venerable philosopher, Fonzie, that I was wrrr..., I was wrrrrrr..., I may have been premature in my negative evaluation. This play was excellent, partially because of the real-feeling writing and partially because of Michael Gotch's absolutely virtuoso performance of this one-man play (with over 30 different characters). I was blown away.

Plot: Doug Wright writes himself into this play about how he negotiates the writing of a play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an openly gay transvestite who survived Nazi Germany and the Soviet period of Eastern Germany.

Whoa. Yeah, I know. Amazing. Wright chronicles his evolution from naive admirer to horrified spectator to mature author in relation to the life she led. Life is not as clean and clear as characters and action often appear in plays. Wright's injecting himself as a character can look a bit narcissistic, but this allows for the two layers of action (Charlotte's navigating her life and Wright navigating his research and realizations). Really well-written and well-acted. I am glad that I am forced to give Doug Wright another chance.

More on the other stuff later. Drop me a note or a comment.