On Shanley, Showalter and Rainy Days
On Saturday the Ms won and I was invited to speak and I was one of the lucky few who got to see the first time staged reading of six new one act plays and a full length by one of America’s leading playwrights and on Saturday it rained in sunny southern cal, always a bonus for this Seattle native—in my ode to Karen Carpenter may I say that rainy days and Saturdays always bring me up…. Saturday was a good good day.
But then the Ms lost today. Lost to Showalter and the Mets. Shades of ‘95 (but not really). They brought the tying run to the plate in the top of the ninth—ain’t no small thing as they were down by 3. I marvel again at how—even though I continue to work on detachment from results, and engagement with ‘what is’—invested I remain with the fate of these 25 men and the game they play. Baseball is indeed a metaphor for so many things. Yesterday at a meeting at the close of my pitch I extolled the virtues of baseball as metaphor for the program. The program doesn’t promise you a homerun, or even a hit for that matter. You may strike out, pop-up…get hit by a pitch. It doesn’t promise the house with the two-car garage or the picket fence (or whatever the GenX equivalent of those might be)…rather, the program promises you only one thing: a turn at the plate. That’s all. Any maybe that cements my attachment to these 25 young men ‘fighting for their lives’ on the field of play—they are showing up, taking a turn… in one inning striking out and in another, flying high, and once in awhile? Achieving the impossible. Think Dewayne Wise catch in the ninth inning of Buehrle’s perfect game. Exquisite.
And the Ms getting the tying run to the plate but then not getting it done in the top of the ninth is my shadow for today—a day that I spent contemplating those things that might have been but weren’t…having seen Shanley’s gorgeous one acts last night and being in the audience not on stage, sitting next to my friend not my partner, the shadow of my Saturday in which I contemplate the incomplete, unfinished moment in my stomach that is somehow made better knowing the season is not yet over and I’m still at the top of my division.
