FREE DAY REPORT

*Our Headmaster, may he live forever, gave the school a Free Day today; on a Free Day, classes don't meet, and there's no evening study hall the night before. In short, we got the day off. I decided to use it wisely.

*My first decision was to stay up late in order to finish looking over the edits for The Verb To Bird. With any luck, I'll have made all the changes by Nov. 10th--wish me luck.

*With my 8:00 class cancelled, I was free to sleep in, which I did. The dog woke me up just before 10:00 by barking at the lawn mower next door. I'm frankly a little surprised that the lawn mower didn't wake me.

*First stop: the library, to pick up the checkbook from Kelly, and to see the various costumes worn by the librarians. One was in full UVA baseball regalia (spikes included), two others in the garb of medieval noblewomen. Kelly herself wore her pale-blue flannel pajamas festooned with yellow ducks, a pair of fuzzy slippers shaped like ducks, and a pacifier.

*Quick stop at Not The Same Old Grind for coffee (Valencia Orange blend) and a bagel while I looked at the Washington Post. Today, thankfully, they weren't playing their usual radio choice, which is a particularly annoying Christian rock station. I'm all for Christians getting to sing about their religion, but why does it have to be so bland? I mean, your deity kicked over the moneylenders' tables and suffered scourging and having nails driven into His flesh; is He really going to be upset just because you used a deliberate discord, or maybe a little feedback now and then?

*Big trouble: a new store has opened outside of town: the Red Barn Book Outlet. Oh, dear. I already owned many of the titles on their shelves, including books by Jim Crace, Katharine Weber, Caroline Leavitt, John Lanchester, Orson Scott Card, and Michael Chabon, but I could easily have spent hundreds of bucks there on stuff I don't have. Every book is 60% off the cover price, hardcover or soft, and teachers and librarians get an extra 10% off. Plus, if you buy ten books, the eleventh is free. I ended up with a very restrained stack: a hardback of Scott Weidensaul's The Ghost with Trembling Wings, plus trade paperbacks of Michael White's Leonardo: The First Scientist, Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free, Terry Bisson's The Pickup Artist, Michael Chabon's Werewolves in Their Youth, Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs and Bones of the Moon, the Audubon Guide to the National Wildlife Refuges: Southeast, and two of Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World collections, When Penguins Attack! and the early-Nineties classic Tune in Tomorrow. Best of all, I found an out-of-print book I'd been coveting for nearly 15 years: Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future, which I first saw in the old Hardback Cafe & Bookstore back in Chapel Hill. I was so happy I drove to Charlottesville.

*The drive was gorgeous; I took Va. Rte. 33 from Gordonsville to Ruckersville, and the fall foliage was spectacular--golden hickories, scarlet maples, and every variant of orange there is. The oaks aren't really turning yet, and the sycamores have already gone rather brown, but I think the color is at its height right now. I'm happy to have ANY color after the drought we've had this year, but this seems like far more than we could have hoped for. Right as I hit a long straightaway outside of Barboursville, the radio started playing "The Time Warp," and I sang along at the top of my lungs. Outside of Ruckersville, I saw a little old woman in a pale grey housedress mowing her lawn. And a few houses later I saw a yard that was alreadyfull of Christmas decorations.

*Atlas Comics didn't have that many new things that I wanted--I'm still trying to find issue #2 of the second series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example--but I did snag something I've meant to own for many moons: Alan Moore & J.H. Williams III's Promethea: Book 1, a terrific science-fantasy/superhero comic with one of the all-time great supporting characters: the media darling known as Weeping Gorilla. I like Sophie and Stacia and the Five Swell Guys and all the different incarnations of Promethea herself, but you have to love a character whose raison d'etre is to mope around thinking such deep thoughts as "I hate my body," "Why do pets have to die?" "The garage thinks it's the clutch," and "Can we hear that Radiohead track just once more?"

*Lunch at the China King Buffet. It's huge, it's cheap, it's full of variety--chicken with black bean sauce, mussels in ginger sauce, bourbon chicken, lo mein, California rolls, egg rolls, General Tso's chicken, green beans, peanut chicken--but I wasn't that impressed with the quality. Not everything was hot, some things didn't seem fully cooked, and a lot of it was pretty greasy. For $5.99, maybe I shouldn't expect much, but I'd certainly hoped for more.

*Another beautiful drive back. North of Barboursville, I got behind an idiot who was carrying two unsecured plastic garbage cans in the bed of his pickup; both of them flew up and out at me. I avoided the first and bumped the second with the Volvo, but as I was traveling very slowly when it happened, any damage was suffered by the can. I frankly didn't see the point in stopping to see what damage the idiot had caused to be inflicted on his can, so I drove on. A huge flock of Canada geese was coming over the road when I got close to Somerset; I didn't even realize they were Canadas at first because they hadn't yet formed their V, but they soon assumed it and winged off toward the Blue Ridge. The sun was out now, and bright patches appeared on the mountains. Some of the maples were so red they'd become almost magenta.

*As I took the curve into Somerset, I saw a crow swooping repeatedly down on something--almost always the sign of a predator in the neighborhood. Sure enough, I saw it on a fencepost beside the road: a large Cooper's hawk, bending to tear at its prey. It was a big one, too, fully the size of the crow, slate-grey on top and barred with rust on the underside. It's the closest I've ever been to a Cooper's.

*The sun is setting now, and the west is getting purple. Time to make up candy bags and get ready for trick-or-treating. Tomorrow I'll be back to the grind, but for the moment, it's still a Free Day. Happy Halloween, everybody!
2:20 PM

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I've been doing a lot of work in the theater shop this week, trying to help our technical director get the set ready for this weekend's main stage production, and I'm feeling pleased about it. I worked tech in high school and went to college with every intention of being a drama major with a focus on technical theater, but it has been some time since I've spent much time in the shop. I've had to scrape some rust off my techie brain--last week, for example, I made a nice policeman's nightstick, but for some reason I decided to paint it with black enamel-based paint, which meant that a) it took the better part of two days to dry, and b) I've still got small flecks of black paint staining my cuticles. I'm hoping that my brain will start working again soon.

I got started in tech mostly by accident. When I arrived at Chapel Hill High School in 1978, the guidance office screwed up my schedule and gave me two English classes--too many even for me--but no math, and an elective I didn't want. By the time they straightened out the mess, the only electives available were Batik, Basket Weaving, and Technical Theater, aka Tech. I knew one person, my friend Nan, who'd done Tech and enjoyed it, so I signed up. On the first day, John Thomas, the TD, handed me a hammer.

"See that table?" he said, gesturing to a rickety table cobbled together from two-by-four and plywood. "Break it up."

"What do you mean 'Break it up'?" I said.

"Break it apart and put the lumber in the storage bin," John replied.

I was hooked. Break furniture with a hammer for academic credit? Yes!

My life changed drastically as a result of my semester in Tech. I picked up my lifelong nickname, PC, because there were too many people named Peter working in the drama department--Peter Rogers (now on the faculty at Bates College), Peter Spruyt (now successfully acting in Hollywood), Peter Merten (whereabouts unknown), and me. I learned to drive a nail, a skill with which I have earned actual money, to operate a number of power tools, to design a light plot and hang the lights for it, and to set up and run a reel-to-reel tape recorder. (If not for the computer revolution, I'd be employable today.) But most important, I met a number of my dearest friends, including several future girlfriends, my children's godparents, and most of the people who would eventually be in my wedding party. If not for that scheduling glitch, I'd be a completely different (and probably unhappier) person today.

Alas, my plans to be a techie for life were foiled by the UNC Drama Department's policy toward freshmen. Well, there was one policy I agreed with completely: all first-year students pursuing a drama degree had to take Drama 64, a lab course that ran from 1-5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays--a significant outlay of time, you'll note. The reason for this policy was simple: to impress upon the fledgling drama majors that theater was hard work. Most of my classmates were actors; they wanted the glory of appearing onstage, and they took tech because they had to. They complained all the while, but every day they confronted the fact that the glory they sought was earned on the backs of dozens of hard-working set designers, builders, lighting techs, sound engineers, and other techies.

I, of course, already knew all that; I didn't want to be an actor, though I'd performed in a number of plays by then. I wanted to spend my college career with a crescent wrench in one hand and a tape measure in the other. But UNC had a policy that frustrated me enormously: freshmen weren't allowed to touch the lights. At this point I'd been hanging lights for three years; I knew the different purposes of the different lamps; I knew how to design, cut, and install gobos (sheet-metal cutouts designed to cast silhouettes on the stage--prison bars, leafy branches, the Bat Signal, etc.); I knew how to put colored gels over the lights, and how to mix the colors to produce various effects; I knew how to hang, aim, and focus one light or an entire battery of them. I'd even designed the lighting scheme and hung all the lights (or "instruments," as we called them) for one show at CHHS, hauling each light up a thirty-foot A-frame ladder and preparing it.

But the policy was strict: freshmen weren't allowed to touch the lights. I made my case to the TD, but he refused to give me an exception. "Look," I said, pointing down to the various instruments awaiting a grad student's attention, "That's a six-inch Fresnell lamp; the concentric rings in the lens make it useful for short, soft-focus beams--usually from right above the stage. These over here are nine- and twelve-inch Likos; they cast long, tight beams, usually from the back of the house. Give me a wrench and I'll hang every one of them. You can watch me." But he wouldn't budge.

I looked at the twelve hours of lab time I was spending in the shop every week, twelve hours I could really use to keep up with my other classes, since I was taking over 18 credit hours at the time. I looked at the menial jobs I was doing: cleaning nails and staples out of scrap lumber, or spreading joint compound on canvas flats to make them look like stucco walls. I looked at the familiar, tantalizing instruments, held out of my reach by a fiat I considered arbitrary and unjust. And I quit.

I knew then that by dropping the class, I was giving up a career in theater, unless I transferred to another school. I still did a little performing in local productions, and I kept going to plays. In some ways I suppose I sublimated my theatrical yearnings by performing on my radio shift, or onstage with the various bands I joined during & just after college. But when I left the shop, I thought it was for good.

And now I'm back. Working tech is a wonderful mixture of the practical and the aesthetic. You have to measure, cut wood, drive screws, and hammer nails, tasks where success is tangible and easily recognized. At the same time, your contributions are beautiful and illusory, designed to fool the eye and draw the attention of an audience. It is simultaneously the most straightforward of blue-collar building project and the most impractical sort of castle in the air. I'm having a wonderful time visiting again. And I'm thrilled to have black paint all over my fingers again.
7:53 AM

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