S S I O N
[The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]
The Board of Directors raised eyebrows to the rafters that
spring when they announced that the Pittsburgh Summer Opera Season would consist entirely of anti-semitic operas. The Be- nedrum Center for the Performing Arts, it was said at the press conference held the first day Cyn and I sixty-nined, was the first American opera company to host such a season, perhaps the first opera company in the entire non-fascist world.
This assertion wasn’t strictly true. Just before I embarked upon this terrifying and sexy summer, a senior at Mather Col- lege was pounding out a thesis for his degree in anthropology which studied a small high-minded group of bigots who stopped patronizing the opera, ballet and symphony in Jackson, Mississippi, because they felt the aesthetic morals were getting soft on Communism, Catholicism and interracial marriage. This was back in maybe 1950. Withdrawing all donations, these fine upstanding folk formed the Concerned League of Art and Na- ture and it doesn’t take a Talmudic scholar to figure out that’s
C-L-A-N. Clan like Ku Klux except with a C because these folks thought it was more subtle that way. They also thought it was more subtle to put on one season of original operas, music and theatrical presentations with titles like Symphony of the Nigger Problem and The Interbreeding Daughter . They put them on in a church with costumes sewn by the wives/sopranos.
The Mather senior, like all Mather seniors, was given a special carrel in Wigglesworth Library—everyone called it The Wig— in which to analyze this sour little sip from the melting pot. Every night he’d go to the carrel and work on the thesis for a couple of hours, then let his printer spew the draft as he went out, leaned against the brass statue of Michael Wigglesworth and smoked cigarettes with other thesisers. When there were two more butts at the feet of the Puritan he’d go back and proof- read. Then he’d type his mistakes back into the little screens that made the corridor of carrels an eerie aquarium blue. And then, before he left, he’d rip the draft in half and stack the little half-sheets of paper next to the pay phones, so people could jot down numbers on the back of “Cornel East said in his Matters of Race [check this!] that the Klan’s interest in gaining credi- bility through the annals of high culture is an interesting con- trast to more earthy forms of self-recognition in urban black communities, such as [find out what that album is that Andrew listens to].”
If you were breathing heavily in the little telephone cubicle, if you were exhaling in strict time, if you were panting on the phone, these little draft fragments would curl up and skim around like leaves in a breeze. The blank side would flicker with the typed side. You wouldn’t think that you could read it, there as it flickered. You wouldn’t think enough of it could catch your
eye, and you wouldn’t think there was room for it in your head, because most of your brain would be consumed by the voice on the phone. Cyn was telling me everything she would do to me if I came to her room right then, instead of writing my paper. She thought I was in the main lobby of The Wig, where a row of pay phones was always busy; she thought she was exciting me somewhere where I had to play it cool. I let her think that, let her excite herself exciting me. But I didn’t have to play it cool. The aquarium was closed—the anthros must have been out smoking near the statue of Michael Wigglesworth in front of the library—so I could listen to her with my legs spread, touching myself through a pair of denim shorts I’d wear con- stantly when Cyn and I worked together at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh a month later. I could listen to her as the half-sheets of someone’s thesis draft, thoughtfully stacked for jotting down phone numbers, curled and drifted
[The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]
The Board of Directors raised eyebrows to the rafters that
spring when they announced that the Pittsburgh Summer Opera Season would consist entirely of anti-semitic operas. The Be- nedrum Center for the Performing Arts, it was said at the press conference held the first day Cyn and I sixty-nined, was the first American opera company to host such a season, perhaps the first opera company in the entire non-fascist world.
This assertion wasn’t strictly true. Just before I embarked upon this terrifying and sexy summer, a senior at Mather Col- lege was pounding out a thesis for his degree in anthropology which studied a small high-minded group of bigots who stopped patronizing the opera, ballet and symphony in Jackson, Mississippi, because they felt the aesthetic morals were getting soft on Communism, Catholicism and interracial marriage. This was back in maybe 1950. Withdrawing all donations, these fine upstanding folk formed the Concerned League of Art and Na- ture and it doesn’t take a Talmudic scholar to figure out that’s
C-L-A-N. Clan like Ku Klux except with a C because these folks thought it was more subtle that way. They also thought it was more subtle to put on one season of original operas, music and theatrical presentations with titles like Symphony of the Nigger Problem and The Interbreeding Daughter . They put them on in a church with costumes sewn by the wives/sopranos.
The Mather senior, like all Mather seniors, was given a special carrel in Wigglesworth Library—everyone called it The Wig— in which to analyze this sour little sip from the melting pot. Every night he’d go to the carrel and work on the thesis for a couple of hours, then let his printer spew the draft as he went out, leaned against the brass statue of Michael Wigglesworth and smoked cigarettes with other thesisers. When there were two more butts at the feet of the Puritan he’d go back and proof- read. Then he’d type his mistakes back into the little screens that made the corridor of carrels an eerie aquarium blue. And then, before he left, he’d rip the draft in half and stack the little half-sheets of paper next to the pay phones, so people could jot down numbers on the back of “Cornel East said in his Matters of Race [check this!] that the Klan’s interest in gaining credi- bility through the annals of high culture is an interesting con- trast to more earthy forms of self-recognition in urban black communities, such as [find out what that album is that Andrew listens to].”
If you were breathing heavily in the little telephone cubicle, if you were exhaling in strict time, if you were panting on the phone, these little draft fragments would curl up and skim around like leaves in a breeze. The blank side would flicker with the typed side. You wouldn’t think that you could read it, there as it flickered. You wouldn’t think enough of it could catch your
eye, and you wouldn’t think there was room for it in your head, because most of your brain would be consumed by the voice on the phone. Cyn was telling me everything she would do to me if I came to her room right then, instead of writing my paper. She thought I was in the main lobby of The Wig, where a row of pay phones was always busy; she thought she was exciting me somewhere where I had to play it cool. I let her think that, let her excite herself exciting me. But I didn’t have to play it cool. The aquarium was closed—the anthros must have been out smoking near the statue of Michael Wigglesworth in front of the library—so I could listen to her with my legs spread, touching myself through a pair of denim shorts I’d wear con- stantly when Cyn and I worked together at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh a month later. I could listen to her as the half-sheets of someone’s thesis draft, thoughtfully stacked for jotting down phone numbers, curled and drifted
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