Alternatetakes2

~ arts journal~ Lewis J Whittington

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Daily Archives: December 20, 2008

unscripted

20 Saturday Dec 2008

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The opposite of death is desire

Tennessee Williams was a Virgo and it has often been speculated that Blance Dubois, the vainglorious doomed heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire was a female version of the playwright, or at least represented his emotional life.

He made Blanche a Virgo and sharing her sign, I have all had the thought that we really are all Blanches. The difference among us is how we play her. Williams seems to written the blueprint to our souls which we instinctively want to share with the world, but soon come to understand that bared souls are something to toy with. Williams stated in an interview that he viewed Stanley and Blanche representing human impulses in all of us.

Virgos also are astrologically driven to stay pure, so they don’t handle guilt well. They must eventually confess their sins. The avoidance of this takes them down paths that they wouldn’t have lovingly chosen. And we have the added cosmic distinction of not have a sighted planet.

Blanche’s sister Stella tells Stanley, her husband, that a brutal world changed Blanche that ‘no one was more loving…..’ Blanche is so sensitive and tender she falls in love with a gay man in pursuit of a empathetic companion.

Her shock at the discovery that he wasn’t just a poet but a sexually active homosexual causes her to lash out, so her lover kills himself. Blanche cannot handle the guilt of this and starts to escape in liquor, fantasies and sex.

She logically handles her romantic fantasies by embracing poetry, literature and music and tries to make her life as a high school English teacher. Her libido is more stoked by romanticism and after the death of her mother, her grief is acted out by avoidance. Her seductions and hunt for sex to forget tragedy throws her into a mid-life heat. Williams wrote this decades before it was culturally understood that many women hit their sexual peaks at Blanche’s age.

She usually ‘takes her victims to the Tranantula Arms’ she defiantly tells her hapless suitor Mitch. The opposite of sex is desire- this classic Williams line speaks to a psychological mystery of heightened libido during the grief period when a spouse dies.

After my husband Jack died I would watch that scene over and over again. My inner Blanche was totally unleashed. It is a psychodrama that unfolds often at the death of a spouse often arouses the libido. Unless, like Blanche, you are led offstage to an unstable future in a state facility for poor, traumatized relatives, one must work it out alone.

20 Saturday Dec 2008

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Ouija world

A time sketch faintly summoned
For someone else’s dream
lyric its memory
from the pulse of escape
Sound trapped inside reason of
Cursèd motive
Recalled in sepia yet
Of such vibrant emotion
The figures rewound out of the room.

Sometimes fragments of music
Fade in and out
Sometimes collapsing blood cells
Are heard
Sometimes touch is felt
Digging graves are words.

Shadows of the planets dance
An echo implodes
In the rooms of the dead
Without notice
The lace poised in foredrop
Grasp the unknown.

Rarer still
The overture of dying and death
Rarer than ever soundproof grief
Cascading unrest
Forever indiscreet.

Forever forgotten
A soul’s gaze
forever
Its battlement crumbling on
The concert of the days

The dismissal heralded by
Trumpets as
Your heart
your rooms
Your halls

I turned away the
Flowers in your gardens from
The glare that opened
Your gates to let me float out.

Still the scent of lilac
Led me out of the path.

20 Saturday Dec 2008

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potd by Jan Carroll


fall exit

sombra

They didn’t cut

20 Saturday Dec 2008

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‘A Chorus Line’ taps into the ’I really need this job’ mood of the country right now. 1n 1975, Michael Bennett’s workshops with out of work and struggling Broadway dancers resulted in one of Broadway’s biggest hits. He brought show gypsies up front and the allegory of everyone working their asses off just to get a chance to work their asses off resonates now more than ever.

scene backstage:

Hanging out with Nate D & Michael C before the show in the Forrest alley. After the show, one of them thought we were just having an intermission drink. Anita was also seen loitering with intent.

All poems by Lewis Whittington unless otherwise noted

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