Having just returned from a week-long vacation to southern Utah, I feel like I ought to make some sort of note about what happened whilst away. After all, I had a fantastic experience in California and I wrote about that. But I'm hesitant to do so, for two reasons.
Number One
I was saddened by the fact that, of the four plays I saw at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this year, I only saw two written by the Bard himself. Both of those were...not the best I've seen. By a long stretch, actually. The two non-Shakespeare plays, Shakespeare in Love and the gut-busting Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (Abridged) were superlative. The former was what you get in the film, minus the full-fledged nudity, with a bit more development of Kit Marlowe as a character that paid off well at the end. The latter was a love letter to Shakespeare in the most irreverent way possible, doing a mashup of "early drafts" of all his plays and characters, ending the first act with a water-gun fight against the unarmed audience, and ending the play itself with a deus ex machina of William Shakespeare himself. It was crude, fast-paced, and hilarious. There was even one joke that only I got (judging by the reaction of the crowd), so that was fun, too.
Sadly, while I enjoyed Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It (particularly the latter play, as I got to sit next to my son, dressed in Elizabethan-era costumes, for his first evening play in the Englestad Theater), the plays themselves were plagued by sparse sets, too much "stand and deliver" speeches, and three-hour play times. While I don't necessarily mind sitting through three hours of Shakespeare, those other two detriments were sad. Part of the joy of going to a Utah Shakespeare Festival is that one gets to see the creativity and talent of the set designers and crews as they transform the same space, day by day, night by night, as they rotate through different plays. While minimalist sets and interpretations have their place, the entirety of the trip was minimalist in that sense. (When, during the second half of As You Like It, some small changes were added to the set to mimic the Forest of Arden, the change felt disproportionate.) Having a slight misstep like that at the end of my summer is saddening.
Number Two
Today is the day of Charlottesville, Virginia's protest/counterprotest mob. The details, of course, will continue to unfold as the day goes on and the understanding of what happened becomes clearer. Why it happened, however, is not unclear at all, and its subtexts, arguments, causes, and motivations are patent.
I returned home from Europe on the day of the president's inauguration, and I don't know if I've had a day since that hasn't had a twinge of worry go through my guts. I'm almost finished with It, and I haven't found it particularly scary. Grotesque, perverse on occasion, and somewhat bizarre from place to place, but never scary. The descriptions of the killer clown, Pennywise, don't trigger long-buried anxiety in me. The different forms It takes don't make it hard to sleep at night. I've turned to horror fiction, perhaps in part, because I get genuine fear when I look at the news. A glance at the headlines does more to rob me of sleep at night than does the so-called "Master of Horror".
The thing that really hurts me is knowing how many of my neighbors, family members, coworkers, and friends either voted for him, or failed to vote against him, valuing their minute values against the greater value of not voting for fascism. I took it for granted that America had learned a lesson from the Second World War, and coming to grips with me assuming that has been the hardest part of this entire thing.
Summer Bummer
So the summer is over. We did some great things as a family: We explored Saint George, seeing the dinosaur tracks museum, getting lost in the wilderness for a little bit, swimming, attending a children's museum (twice, the boys loved it so much), watching a bunch of plays, dressing up, and generally generating fantastic memories as a family. And yet, overshadowing it all, is not just the chaos of America's position in the world, but the knowledge that many I know have abetted the problems...it's making my bizarre worldview of personal pessimism (things will probably not work out for me) and general optimism (things will probably be okay) tremble. Of all the transcendental signifiers that I've had challenged in my life, this one is the core that I never thought I'd see shaken.
Yet here we are.
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This is a footnote without anchor, which feels apt, to a certain degree. I want to say that I began this essay deliberately using an apophasis, which ended up becoming quite protracted by the end. If you noticed, I think that's pretty cool. If not, that's okay, too.