two events, slightly intertwined

On Friday night we attended a play that made me squirm - one of those family depictions that left me feeling like I had tacks pointing upward on my seat. The play was Independence by Lee Blessing and concerned a mother and her three daughters.

The mom has a history of mental illness and the daughters feel that she cannot be left to live alone. The mom has fond memories of a close-knit family that never was. She lives in the past and can never accept that her daughters have grown past the stage where they were cute and loving. When the whole family gathers in one place, she is overjoyed, despite the emotional destructiveness that results.

The oldest daughter is a lesbian who has moved to the big city and become a successful college professor. The middle daughter is the "good girl," the one who feels most strongly that she can never leave her mother so that she can pursue her own life. The mother seems particularly bent on consuming her emotionally. Oh, this middle daughter has become pregnant by a seeming thoughtless cad. And the youngest daughter is in her late teens, has already given up a baby for adoption (at her oldest sister's insistence), works in a bar, is angry at the world, and is planning to get the hell out of dodge as soon as she graduates from high school.

Lots of revelations, breakdowns, attacks, more breakdowns, all swirling around this highly manipulative mother who seems to sink deeper into her illness as the play progresses. Robert felt that the ending was redemptive. I was initially depressed by it, but in looking at it from his point of view, can see his point. Still, I would rather sit on tacks than see the play again.


Last night's event was way more cheerful. We went to see David Wilcox perform. He's a singer/songwriter/storyteller, very comfortable on stage, very good at putting his audience at ease. He says that he writes songs to discover the ending, that if he already knows the ending when he starts, it's hardly worth it.

He had very tough beginnings - his father was chronically depressed and frequently hospitalized. One snippet we heard "Where's Dad? Oh, he's in the hospital. Can we visit him? Uh, that's not a great idea." and so on. But from all this came a brutal honesty, an opened-up approach to life.

One of his songs was about a soothsayer who had worked for a medium but found crystal balls too slow. So he started divining peoples' lives by working at a Minimart and analyzing the five items that each customer would place on the counter. He sang about the love he has for his son, a love that has taken him deeper than he ever thought it possible to go. He sang of breakups and get-togethers, of his own emotional landscape, of his guitar. In fact, he told a great story of coming to a better place in his life by diving into his guitar playing.

And running through the evening was a lot of good humor and some really twisted rhymes.

I came away with two words: redemption and resilience.

We make connections in odd ways. The music of last night somehow helped me see more of the redemption in the story from the night before. There is hope. There is light.