lies like truth

Some children’s stories aren’t just written for children. They’re for adults too. From Aesop’s Fables to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to the Dr. Seuss classic, Oh, The Places You’ll Go! kids books are packed with important life lessons for grown-ups.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella The Little Prince is no exception. Inspired by the author’s career as an aviator, the book tells the story of a an airplane pilot who meets The Little Prince, an intense young man with a crown of golden hair, after his plane crashes in the Sahara Desert. The two become friends. From spending time with the Prince and hearing the boy’s stories, the aviator learns to value what’s important in life – and that adults have a lot to learn from children. The book has made a profound impression on many adults in the 65 years since it was published. James Dean could recite entire passages from the book. Morrissey is seen reading a copy in the “Suedehead” video. Saint-Exupéry’s narrative has even become the subject of three operas – an artform that isn’t exactly known for attracting minors.

Composer Rachel Portman and librettist Nicholas Wright’s playful, family-friendly opera adaptation of The Little Prince recently arrived at U.C. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall under the auspices of San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances. The production has enjoyed a great deal of popularity to date, having received its premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 2003 and subsequent productions in New York (New York City Opera), Tulsa, Milwaukee and Boston, among other cities.

This retelling of Saint-Exupery’s story is not hugely memorable from a musical perspective. Portman is best known as a composer of scores for such movies as The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, The Joy Luck Club and Emma (for which she won an Academy Award in 1997). Her music for The Little Prince sounds in many ways like a fillm score — it plays a supporting role rather than takes center stage. Portman’s music includes one strikingly humorous, short aria for the tenor playing the role of The Vain Man (Thomas Glenn in the case of this production). The scoring is sometimes playful. At one point, Portman employs the sound of a typewriter’s clack-clacking keys. At another, a character on stage plays a kazoo (a whimsical glance back to Mozart’s The Magic Flute perhaps?) The composer also spins fine, gauzelike textures for strings and gives the winds some lovely, mournful solos.

But though pleasant on the ear, the music otherwise more or less slides by unnoticed.

What makes this Little Prince such a wonderful experience, however, is the collaboration between all the artists involved. Portman’s music blends seamlessly with Wright’s cheeky libretto, written in rhyming couplets. Director Francesca Zambello’s staging is nothing short of magical, making use of the entire breadth, height and depth of the stage and plenty of trapdoors. Designer Maria Bjornson’s storybook desert setting with its cartoonlike dunes provides a simple yet striking canvas upon which Rick Fisher’s lights powerfully evoke the rising and setting Sahara sun.

Best of all, the cast — which features a chorus of 24 children and a 12-year old boy in the role of the Little Prince — sings with sensitivity and passion without once veering into saccharine terrain.

No wonder this opera has received so many stagings over the past five years: It brings out the inner child in anyone who goes.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about what happens to people when they stop being children to their parents and unwittingly become parents to their parents. For some people coping with a father or mother suddenly falling ill or having trouble facing retirement, this reversal of roles happens more-or-less overnight. For others, it’s a gradual process, a transformation that happens over years of evolution.

A new drama by Stephen Adly Guirgis currently playing at New York’s Public Theater brilliantly examines what happens when a couple of siblings go from being dependent on their mother to finding that she’s dependent on them.

Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and starring Ellen Burstyn, Guirgis’ The Little Flower of East Orange delves into the psychological and emotional problems that come with the territory of dealing with elderly parents who need constant mothering and fathering.

The play focuses on the relationship between writer-junkie Danny (a pognantly disheveled Michael Shannon) and his relationship with his mother, Therese Marie (played by a bed-ridden Burstyn.) The two characters never fully understand each other though they come close. I rarely cry at the theatre, but the final showdown between Danny and his mother pretty much did me in. Guirgis does many things very well, but his ability to make characters seem utterly dependent upon one another and simultaneously completely at odds is probably his greatest strength.

The Little Flower is not as strong a piece as Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train in terms of what the play reveals about society. It’s also a lot less funny. But this new play is in some ways much more personal.

Today I listened to the film director Mike Leigh give four interviews. Or, to be more precise, I listened to him give three interviews. By the time I got to the fourth, I had to abort mission. I felt overwhelmed.

Leigh is in San Francisco to receive the director’s award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and stir up some buzz for his latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky which comes out in the in the U.S. later this year. I took the occasion of his visit to pitch my editor at The Believer Magazine the idea of doing an interview with Leigh. The editor gave the idea her blessing, and I was lucky enough to be granted an interview with the great British auteur.

Reading and listening to other Q&A’s with an interview subject is, at least for me, an important part of the research process for a journalistic profile.

In my opinion, you can never overdose on research. There’s always more to learn about an interview subject; more ways to think about their lives and work in order to come up with insightful and hopefully slightly unusual questions and conversation points for a meeting. As such, I had done a fair bit of reading. I’d re-watched some of Leigh’s films. I spent an entire morning on YouTube scouting for Leigh-related video clips. The process was entirely pleasurable. But never have I felt so keenly aware of the problems inherent in the business of interview subjects being forced to regurgitate the same material over and over again for the sake of the media.

My actual interview with Leigh went as well as I could have hoped for considering the fact that I spent the morning wondering what on earth I could find to ask a hero of mine who’d given countless press interviews during a career spanning more than three decades. Thankfully, Leigh was in a gregarious mood and even complimented me on the fact that I managed to ask him a few questions that he’d never heard before. When the Festival press officer came in to the interview room to tell Leigh that our time was up, he even told her to go away and come back in 10 minutes so that we could continue our conversation. Yet as fun as our conversation was, I experienced complete Mike Leigh overkill by the time I got home.

It all started with the interview with Leigh I caught on the radio as I was driving into San Francisco from my home in Oakland to meet the director. Michael Krasny, the host of KQED 88.5FM’s Forum program, interviewed Leigh for about half an hour, asking him a range of fairly run-of-the-mill questions about his films and taking calls from listeners. Next came my meeting. Then, in the evening, I went to hear Leigh in conversation with David D’Arcy of Screen International at The Castro movie theatre. D’Arcy asked some of the same questions that Krasny and I had asked. Then there were more (mostly uninspired) audience questions. When I drove home, I turned on the radio again, and happened to catch the start of the re-run of Krasny’s interview with Leigh from the morning. It was too much. I turned it off.

Clearly I have no stamina for these things. Remarkably, Leigh managed to sound engaging and interested through all of these interviews — and that’s to say nothing of the several additional journalists he met with today whose conversations I wasn’t party to. Leigh’s been answering the same questions for years now, and yet he still seems to relish going into the details of how he works and the state of filmmaking in general. Even when people ask dumb questions, he generally manages to turn them around and give something back that’s intelligible and often witty.

I can’t quite decide if Leigh is the most tolerant, generous and patient filmmaker in the world, whether he’s a sucker for punishment, or whether he simply likes the sound of his own voice. Perhaps a desire to share his joy of filmmaking with audiences and readers supercedes the jetlag, the silly questions and the endless repetition. I doubt I’ll forget today, at any rate. 

I was wrong: After all, perhaps there is such a thing as too much research.

For the last few days, I’ve been wearing a necklace fashioned from an antique dominoe. I picked the trinket up in a store in Sonoma a few months ago, but have hardly worn it until now. I’m wearing the necklace in response to an arresting article that appeared in last Wednesday’s New York Times by Marc Lacey about how the game of dominoes has come to dominate the lives of many poor Haitians. What’s striking are the strange and tragi-comic stakes for which the game is played. Writes Lacey:

The beauty of dominoes is that it requires not even a single gourde, Haiti’s currency, to compete. That is not to say, however, that there is no price to pay.

Dominoes are played in two-person teams or with each player competing individually. Clothespins are merely one of many techniques Haitians employ to punish those who lose four games in a row.

Some approaches focus less on pain and more on ridicule, like forcing a losing player to wear an empty sugar sack over his head or a brightly colored oversized hat. Other losers might have powder wiped on their faces, turning their brown skin white, or be forced to wear a heavy coat so they suffer in the heat.

The particular method of suffering depends on the rules at a particular table that day, which vary widely across the country.

Losers are sometimes made to salute any person who approaches the table.

Or to drink a glass of water every time they lose a game, with no bathroom breaks.

Or to fetch any domino that another player tosses away from the table, even if it happens to land in a sewage ditch.

On any given day, the players say, anyone can end up a loser.

The potent relationship between suffering and play embodied by the Haitian approach to dominoes has been explored in the work of many artists. It’s there in the death-rattle antics of Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame for instance. Watching Mike Leigh’s 1993 film, Naked, yesterday returning to the Bay Area from New York on the plane also brought Lacey’s article to mind through Leigh’s constant blurring of the line between courtship rituals and violence.

In one of the most devastating scenes of the film, the main character, Johnny, flirts with an older woman but ultimately rejects her out of disgust at her dependence on drink to dull pain.

Like the dominoes players in Haiti inflicting physical forfeits on themsleves and each other in the pursuit of “leisure,” so pain goes hand-in-hand with pleasure. Or, to be more accurate, both life and art suggest that feeling pain in life, though undesired, is better than feeling nothing at all.

David Mamet’s brassy Broadway comedy about a president facing a tough reelection season, November, was more or less been savaged by the New York critics when it opened in January. Ben Brantley called it “glib and jaunty” and “an easy laugh machine” in his review for The New York Times; “the play rings false,” wrote Jeremy McCarter in New York magazine. The play may not be as intelligent as Mamet’s screenplay for Wag the Dog in terms of its satire on political spin, many of the jokes are cheap, and the plot may be as far-fetched as the outcome of the 2000 U.S. elections. But the production, which I witnessed over the weekend during a trip to New York, has merits nonetheless.

Chief among these is probably one of the most brilliantly conceived and beautifully constructed stage props I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about the antique globe that stands inconspicuously in a corner of set for half of the play, before suddenly taking on a new and unexpected life as a fetishistic kind of mini-bar. “I understand the world,” says President Charles “Chuck” Smith (played at caffeinated pitch by Nathan Lane), taking the top of his globe-shaped drinks cooler off like it’s the lid of a giant banqueting dish and casually reaching for a bottle of ice-cold beer. The prop is only used once during the course of the play, but Mamet’s entire satire is right there inside that bit of office furniture along with those Budweisers.

November also has some interesting things to say about the relationship between performance and politics, a subject close to my heart right now.

One of the play’s core themes is the political machine’s foregrounding of superficial form over substantive content. As such, news of major and pressing world events such as the war in Iraq and the possibility of an invasion by Iran are quickly superceded by, among other nonsensical issues, the President’s desire to exhort as much money as he can out of a representative of the National Association of Turkey By-Products Manufacturers in order to fund his presidential library.

Mamet further pokes fun at Smith’s obsession with empty gesture by making the character refer in a ham-fisted way to cue cards containing personal information about all the people the president meets. The idea behind the cards is to convey the (false) impression that the President knows and cares about the little details of his subjects’ lives. Elsewhere, and on a related note, one of the most memorable scenes occurs when Smith’s right-hand-man, Archer Brown (a slick Dylan Baker) hands the President a list of “off-the-cuff remarks” to memorize and insert into the next day’s business. The oxymoron inherent in rehearsing something that is supposed to be improvisatory tells us a lot about the extent to which politicians’ behavior can be likened to a carefully-manicured garden lawn — and just how easy it is for weeds to grow there nonetheless.

There’s no subtlety to November. The farce is as broad as Lane’s maniacal chipmunk grin. Yet that’s the point. Lane may spend more of his time on stage mugging than acting, but there’s a nugget of truth to his pretty awful performance. The entire play is a study in bad acting after all. It perfectly reflects just how bad the acting can be in The Whitehouse.

When Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die,” he probably had the plays of Samuel Beckett in the back of his mind.

These words came flooding back to me last night after I experienced a preview performance of Beckett’s Endgame at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

Director Andrei Belgrader’s production features an all-star cast: the movie actor John Turturro as Hamm, The Sopranos regular Max Casella as Clov, revered stage actor Alvin Epstein (who, among other things, originated the role of Lucky in the American premiere of Waiting for Godot) as Nag, and Broadway legend Elaine Stritch as Nell. Even though the production had some vivid moments, it lacked one element crucial to the successful staging of Beckett’s full-length plays: humor.

My heart nearly broke during the poignant exchanges between Nag and Nell. Epstein and Stritch cut such frail figures. They act their parts like sighs. There is also a note of terrible sweetness in their eulogizing about the past.

Casella and Turturro are at their best when angry at each other. Casella’s fury is particularly engrossing. He seems utterly worn down and at the very end of his rope with his life as a reluctant caregiver. Clov’s moments of vengeful mischief against Hamm are similarly powerful. I had always assumed that when Clov tells Hamm “there are no more painkillers” he’s telling the truth. But Casella made me think that he was playing another practical joke on his awful boss. Standing, twisted on stage with a small round jar in his hands and a glint of malice in his eye, Casella suggests that he might be telling a lie.

But — at least in preview — the 75-minute production drags and ultimately fails to help me connect with the tragedy at its heart, probably because Belgrader doesn’t seem all that interested in exploring the play’s vital streak of vaudeville comedy. The last production of Endgame I witnessed, by Cutting Ball in San Francisco, played up the slapstick elements. This made the audience painfully aware of the cosmic joke that underpins human life as viewed through a Beckettian lens. I only cracked a couple of half-hearted smiles at BAM last night, whereas belly laughs were required.

Performers have all kinds of techniques for dealing with pre-performance nerves. Some do yoga, others meditate, a third groupp swigs Jack Daniels. Writers have their own issues to deal with like writer’s block, but it’s only infrequently, generally speaking, that we have to get up and perform in public.

There’s quite a lot of performance going on in this writer’s life right now between various interviews, presentations and facing the prospect of singing my first solo vocal recital in a couple of weeks time.

A dear friend of mine in New York who’s on the voice faculty of the Drama department at Yale had a couple of interesting ideas for dealing with nerves if you have to sing in public. This stuff probably won’t come as news to anyone who’s a performer, but just might be helpful to those among us who write for a living and suddenly find themselves forced to belt out the “Star Spangled Banner” or “O Mi Bambino Caro” before a live audience.

1. Butterflies are natural. Just let them dance about in your stomach. Concentrate on keeping them there. Try not to let them loose into your upper chest or neck.

2. Focus your attention on the narrative or emotional content of the song you are singing. Focusing intently on the “given circumstances” of what you are singing generally overrides nerves.

Both useful pieces of advice. Can’t wait to try them out.

I’m hard-pressed to find a more engrossing and accurate metaphor for the current state of play between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama than the World Wrestling Entertainment spoof wrestling match between the two Senators that’s been making the rounds on YouTube for the last couple of days.

Performers dressed as the two contendors for the Democratic nomination — Obama embellished with a pair of large protruding ears and Clinton with a puffy wig — duke it out in the ring in front of cheering crowds. Bill Clinton is on hand to give his wife support, which seems a little unfair to Obama who has no second and must face his opponent alone.

At the end of the short fight, neither Senator has won. Instead, an archetypal, spandex-short-wearing wrestler — huge, tattooed, and oiled — stomps into the ring and destroys the two politicians.

The champion wrestler isn’t outfitted with John McCain’s weak chin. That would be going too far. But you don’t need the man to look like the Republican Presidential nominee to read between the lines and see what will happen to the Democratic cause if Obama and Clinton continue to spat.

The clip is pure theatre. Wrestling is the most theatrical of all sports and the WWE fight between Clinton and Obama only serves to make its links with politics even more explicit.

My editor at SF Weekly didn’t approve of the second version of a review I wrote about a production of  Ellen McLaughlin’s The Trojan Women at Aurora Theatre. He decided to go with the first version, which appears in the paper today, on the grounds that my re-written essay, with its London-focused introduction and conclusion “lacks relevance to a San Fran audience” and “seemed forced and tacked on.”

For the published version, follow this link. (Scroll way down the page to find the “stage” section.)

I think I like the new version better though, so I thought I’d post it here:

Recently, the London authorities announced the names of six artists shortlisted for the chance to create a new work of art for one of the city’s key landmarks, Trafalgar Square. With its central location, grand fountains and imposing statue of Admiral
Nelson atop a 151-foot column flanked by four stately-looking bronze lions, the
Square pays tribute to one of the U.K.’s most decisive military victories – the
Battle of Trafalgar of 1805. One of the finalists in the competition, Jeremy
Deller, is causing controversy for his proposal to put a real car wrecked in
the Iraq War on a plinth in the Square. Entitled “The
Spoils of War (Memorial for an Unknown Civilian)” Deller’s piece of public art,
if selected, would doubtless give all of London pause for thought for its
sobering message about the monstrous effects of conflict on civilians.

Playwright Ellen McLaughlin
similarly hopes to force people leading comfortable
lives in the U.S. to pay attention to the plight of citizens caught up in war
with The Trojan Women, her contemporary
adaptation of a famous anti-war play of the same name written by Ancient Greek
playwright Euripides in 415 B.C. Like Euripides play before her,
McLaughlin’s haunting, hour-long drama takes place directly after the fall of
the city of Troy to the Greek army following a decade of fighting prompted by
the Trojan prince Paris’ kidnapping of the beautiful Spartan queen, Helen. With
all of Troy’s male population either dead or vanished, the city’s women gather
infront of their smoldering city at the play’s opening to commiserate the
unhappy fate that awaits them as slaves or concubines to the Greeks.

Euripides wrote his drama to express his feelings of revulsion at his country’s aggressive 416 B.C. campaign against the neutral island state of Melos.
McLaughlin originally penned hers in the mid-1990s in response to the plight of
refugees displaced by the Balkan conflict. Aurora Theatre’s modern-dress, Farsi
and Croatian-peppered professional world premiere production (which is based on
McLaughlin’s rewrite of her play for Fordham University in 2003) aims to be
more universal. Directed by Barbara Oliver and set in what looks like a
timeless, placeless wasteland, the play’s message might equally apply to recent
or current conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan or Tibet. The eternality of Aurora’s approach underscores a truism about the nature of wars – how they wreak havoc on civilizations no matter when or where they occur. But specificity rather than universality may be what’s needed to transform The Trojan Women from
being yet another – albeit affecting — anti-war play to an impactful
theatrical event.

McLaughlin’s drama distinguishes itself from other works in the anti-war play cannon through its penetrating exploration of the rage and desperation of the victimized Trojans. The characters’ helpless anger comes across acutely in the scene where they physically attack Helen, the woman whom they view as the perpetrator of their suffering. In a bold departure from Euripides’ text, the chorus throws itself at the Spartan woman, intent on literally ripping the beauty that caused
so much ill from her body and face. But despite being brought to her knees,
Helen remains bold. Bloody and bruised with her arms tied to a yoke around her
neck like a sacrificial beast, the character, played with swaggering pride by
actor Nora el Samahy, ought to look like the image of defeat. But el Samahy
manages to convey dignity even in her sorry-looking state. Though McLaughlin’s
decision to give the chorus a physical outlet for its anger against Helen seems
gratuitous, it deftly reveals the women’s impotent rage.

Profoundly
moving performances from the other actors further forces Euripides’ ancient
tale to resonate across millennia. As portrayed with understated resilience by
Carla Spindt, Troy’s fallen queen, Hecuba, tries to set an example of strength
to her people. Yet she appears exhausted and almost resigned to her fate. As
Hecuba’s mad daughter Cassandra, Sarah Nealis bristles with nervous energy and
lucid-hysterical defiance. “These are the men you fear?” she says, with incredulity. “Pity them!” Hecuba’s daughter-in-law, Andromache, meanwhile, quickly becomes the real focus of our pity. The moment when the Greeks force Cassandra to surrender her son Astyanax so that they might put him to death is the most sickening of the play, owing largely to Emilie Talbot’s feeling yet unsentimental performance as Cassandra.

Despite the eternal relevance of the story, the savage lyricism of McLaughlin’s writing and the power of Aurora’s production, it’s unnervingly easy to disengage oneself from the events on stage soon after the play ends. The idea that the
story could take place at any time and in any place somehow makes them seem
remote to an audience living in cushy Northern California in 2008. John
Iacovelli’s striking set design ought to provide a direct connection between
the plight of the Trojan victims and contemporary Bay Area audiences. What
appears to be a cluster of massive rusty square metal pipes reminiscent of a
sewage plant or a ventilation system in a dilapidated factory, is apparently a
reproduction of the Vaillancourt Fountain – a 1971 water sculpture which
occupies a space near The Ferry Building at the end of Market Street. The
trouble is, short of a strong familiarity with this piece of public art, it’s
pretty difficult to decipher the play’s local setting. I’m not suggesting that
the Aurora Theatre should hang a sign saying “This way to the Ferry Building”
above the stage, but a program note would be useful. (I only found out about
the play’s locale when I read about it in one of the local dailies after seeing
the show.) By being clearer that the events in The Trojan Women are supposed to unfold neither in some ancient mythical city nor on a random sewage farm, but right here in San Francisco right now, the Aurora Theatre could well make the cruelties of war seem all the more immediate to its audiences.

Immediacy can be problematic, though. Back in London, British art pundits are excited about Deller’s Trafalgar Square sculpture plans. Some consider “The Spoils of War” to be the best of the six short-listed works. But the impact of putting an Iraqi civilian’s crushed car up on a plinth in one of the most highly trafficked spots of a country that’s been responsible for the deaths of so many Iraqis over the past few years, may be too much for Britain’s patriotic soul to bare. As a result, Deller’s work is unlikely to be realized.
“A real destroyed car, from a real war, in the middle of London on a public
square that commemorates a famous naval victory?” wrote art journalist Jonathan
Jones in The Guardian recently. “Come on, it’s not likely.”

If Euripides was able to get away with staging The Trojan Women in his home country (and win a major prize at the most renowned Greek drama festival for the play to boot), then Deller’s statue ought to see the light of day. The question is, will London’s gatekeepers prove themselves to be as open-minded as the Ancient Athenians?

P.S.I’ll be running around on the East Coast for five days and may not have the opportunity to post. Back at my desk on Tuesday morning…

Today I was approached by a local theatre company asking if I’d help with its upcoming fundraiser. The company is planning on auctioning off an evening at the theatre…with me. The idea is that I will go to see a play with three of the highest bidders and then the four of us will head out for post-show drinks to discuss what just transpired on stage.

I must admit that I’m very flattered to have been asked to do this and it sounds like a fun way to spend an evening. But I’m a little flummoxed by the proposal. For who in their right mind would part with their hard-earned cash for the chance to spend an evening at the theatre with the critic of an alternative weekly in San Francisco? It’s hard enough on occasion to get friends to join me to see shows for free. Still, I’m game, though I doubt I’ll start a bidding war.

A few days ago, after years of trying, I finally got to sample my first ever deep-fried Twinkie (DFT). I won’t go as far as to say that it was a religious experience, but it was otherworldly — a bit like experiencing unusual performance art, which is why the DFT deserves a mention here.

Before I go on, I should probably take a moment to explain what a DFT is. It looks like a battered, deep-fried hot dog on a stick, but it’s really a battered, deep-fried vanilla-cream-centered sponge finger cake on a stick. The regular, un-tampered-with Twinkies can be found at any American convenience store or gas station. They’re tasty, and, need I say it, exceedingly trashy. The Surgeon General should probably insist that each pack be sold with a health warning on it, like cigarettes. But a marvelous transformation takes place when the confection is dipped in fish batter, frozen overnight and immersed in a vat of canola oil.

I heard about the deep-friend Twinkie stand at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk long long before I first visited the quaint Pacific town on the Northern California coast. Vegan and raw food afficionados I know in San Francisco spoke in almost hallowed terms about the stand — how sampling its wares regularly converted people who would normally choose starvation over nibbling a Twinkie (or indeed any Hostess product) into DFT addicts.

When I went to Santa Cruz for the first time in 2003, I made a beeline for the Boardwalk, only to find the stand shut. I had to make do with some kettle corn. It was stale. I was disappointed. The same thing happened the second, third and fourth time I made the pilgrimage to Santa Cruz. Each time I got to the stand, even on a busy weekend in high summer, it was boarded up. One time, the cause was a malfuntioning fryer. Another time, I simply got there too late and business was done for the day. I started to think that the Boardwalk Gods were having a joke at my expense, perhaps because I was too chicken to go on any of the surrounding fairground rides.

Finally, a few days ago, while on a business trip to Santa Cruz, I managed to get to the Boardwalk when the stand was actually open. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. As I approached the stand, I half expected the guy at the counter to tell me that he’d had a rush on DFTs and was all out for the day. But he just took my order. I paid $3 for my DFT and wasted no time to taste what I had been waiting for all these years.

I was not disappointed. Food writer Melissa Clark did a pretty good job nof describing the DFT experience in The New York Times in May 2002:

“Something magical occurs when the pastry hits the hot oil. The creamy white vegetable shortening filling liquefies, impregnating the sponge cake with its luscious vanilla flavor. . . The cake itself softens and warms, nearly melting, contrasting with the crisp, deep-fried crust in a buttery and suave way. The piece de resistance, however, is a ruby-hued berry sauce, adding a tart sophistication to all that airy sugary goodness.”

Wanting to take a purist approach to my first DFT, I didn’t try any sauce with mine. Next time, I may give the chocolate syrup a whirl. But the effect of the confection was almost immediate on my system. I don’t know if I was feeling the effects of a sugar, fat and chemical high, but Santa Cruz seemed even sunnier and more colorful than usual that afternoon.

I’ve been to Mission Dolores in San Francisco several times over the past seven years to play the oboe in orchestral concerts, but never once have I taken the time to look around and think about the building. The Franciscan base, officially known as Misión San Francisco de Asís, was founded June 29, 1776 under the direction of Father Junipero Serra (1713-1784). This makes it the oldest original intact Mission in California and the oldest building in San Francisco. Serra established a chain of 21 missions up and down the California coast from San Diego to Sonoma.

Yesterday, while researching an article about a series of Mexican Baroque era choral music to be given by the all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer up and down the so-called Camino Real in May, the Mission’s curator, Andy Galvan, took me on an interesting tour of the old church building. (I’d never been inside it before; the 19th century basilica next door is much bigger and therefore hosts most concerts and other major public events.) The modest adobe Old Mission building reveals more about the relationship between the Spanish missionaries and the native population than meets the untrained eye. For that reason, it was great to have a guide on my inaugural visit.

Galvan himself has a fascinating past: his great-great-great-great grandfather, a Bay Miwok Indian, was baptized at Mission Dolores. His great-great-great grandparents are buried in the Mission Dolores graveyard, with its life-size statue of Serra pensively looking downwards at the earth.

The inside of the church is European Baroque in style. The ornate, faux-marble revedos is original. It dates back to 1797. Pillars and statuettes of Franciscan friars decorate the walls. A stone font lurks in a shady alcove. There’s a raised wooden balcony at the back.

Only by looking upwards do you get a sense of the legacy of the Indians who built the church and learned and sang about the Catholic faith in it. The ceiling provides the one concession to native Ohlone art with its bright green, red, ocher and white Chevron arrow-shaped design. It’s a stunning contrast to the rest of the church’s interior (see image above.)

Similarly, only when you look more closely at one of the statues in the church do you really get a sense of the essential contradiction at the heart of the missionaries’ enterprise in California. Of all the beatific-looking figureheads that adorn the church walls, a Franciscan friar stands out for wearing a soldier’s armor over his religious robes and carrying a cross in one hand and a sword in the other. The statue is arresting because it so clearly tells you what founding missions in California was all about — spreading the gospel no matter the human cost. Religion and violence are united in this effigy with simple visual immediacy.

As I walked out into the churchyard into the Spring sun, all I could think about was how history repeats itself. But just as hundreds of people walk past the statue everyday without noticing the contradictions it embodies, very few seem to pay attention to the cyclical impulses that drive world events.

Later that day, when I went to Aurora Theatre in Berkeley to see Ellen McLaughlin’s savagely poetic world premiere adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, the image of the statue in the church came rushing back into my mind. McLaughlin’s anti-war play recycles an ancient and eternal message about the destruction of war. Yet people make the same mistakes over and over again.