1. The Movies: can you lead a double life? The double life led by Michele Morgan in the 1951 film “The Strange Madame X” had no chance of success (in fact, if this were real, rather than cinematic, life, she would have been stopped long before the end of the film). Irene (played by Morgan) was the beautiful and highly socially active wife of a very prominent Parisian publisher; she was also the mistress of a struggling cabinet maker. She had told the her lover that she was the maid to the wife of the publisher. Leading these two lives, she managed to get pregnant (by the cabinet maker) and her husband, knowing something was up, sent her to Switzerland to have the baby (or preferably an abortion) since he did not want children, as they would ruin their social activities. She has the child (does the husband even know that?) and places her with two women who live near her lover. This makes sense to the lover (who wants to marry, but is told he must wait), as Irene needs to be on duty 24-not quite 7 at her mistress’s house. You can imagine that this does not quite work out the way she hoped. In the 2007 film, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, about the Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks) who single handedly found the funding for an escalated war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but at the same time was “good time Charlie”, leading a life filled with girls, drinks and drugs. This kind of a double life seems to work much better: look at Bill Clinton, for example, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, and Jack Kennedy. Thinking logically, this type of double living should be no more likely of success than that of Irene. But it is often successful, for long periods of time, and when uncovered does not seem to do much damage to the individual involved. You can come up with a lot of rationalizations, the most obvious being male vs. female. But this does not satisfy me. There is something more to it than that.
Oh, by the way, “Madame X” gets a C, and “Charlie Wilson” a B+.
2. The Books. I reported on Liberators, which I highly recommend. I also read the first three short stories of J. California Cooper’s The Matter is Life, which I might have enjoyed more if I were an older African American woman from the lower economic classes, but I am not.
3. Theatre. On Monday, I went to a Forum Theatre reading of “Iphigenia 2.0″ by Charles Mee. The audience was much too small, but this is another example of theater outdistancing audiences in Washington, and an example of how difficult it is to get a crowd to the H Street Playhouse, in NE. The reading went very well; there were twelve actors involved, and Hannah was the director of the reading.
Iphigenia and Antigone, the heroine of the fully performed play now running at the Forum, have much in common. They both determine to sacrifice themselves for their view of what is best for family and society. Antigone, because she wants to bury her dead brother, although he was a ne’er do well and rebel against the social order, and Iphigenia, who, although her father Agamemnon determines not to follow the wishes of his army and sacrifice his daughter to prove his solidarity with them, decides that her father should murder her and set the example he has decided against. They are both brave, headstrong, foolish and selfish young women, and well played by Katie Atkinson and Simone Zvi.
On Thursday, it was time for the Studio’s “Shining City”, a well reviewed Irish play that has either won, or been nominated for, a number of playwriting awards. I found it shallow and disappointing. One act, several scenes, 90 minutes. A inexperienced psychologist in Dublin. His patient is having problems seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife, and wonders if he will ever be normal again. He himself is beset by problems, since he has told his fiance and the mother of his child that he thinks they should break up; his fiance is aghast, since this is clearly not the result of anything she has done. He decides to have a homosexual experience for reasons unclear. He decides to go back to his fiance and move to Limerick (or so he says). His one patient is totally back to normal and brings him a Tiffany lamp as a present. His fiance appears as a ghost. This is a play? (It was saved by Ed Gero’s performance; but any play can be saved by Ed Gero).
4. Food. Kanlaya Thai Restaurant on Thursday evening before the awful Caps/Canadiens hockey game was good as usual (we had a vegetarian meal). Oyamel, the latest in the Jaleo/Zaytinya tapas empire, is, if a little pricey, excellent. We had lunch on Saturday, sharing scrambled egg and greens on a crisp corn taco, plaintains stuff with black beans, and small pieces of snapper (Veracruzana) and trout (tomatillo). Friday lunch at Sesto Senso: always good, this time a vegetable/fava bean soup, and chicken. Thursday supper at Logan Tavern: ordered their “big salad” with ahi tuna, but had to send the tuna back. Stringy and tasteless. They replaced it with salmon, which was quite good, but the experience was not the best.
5. The Museum. 
At the National Gallery yesterday, we saw the crowded Turner exhibit. 140 oils and water colors, apparently the largest collection of Turners ever assembled in the U.S. I was disappointed. I guess I don’t like Turner. There are a lot of “power of nature” paintings: wild seascapes, eerie lighting, rough landscapes. There are a lot of battle pictures, sea and land, centered on the Napoleonic Wars. There are classical history paintings, the gods, make believe classical architectural scenes. And there are many later works that are verging on impressionism. But I just don’t find any of them interesting. Turner was clearly quite prolific; he also died in his 70s owning a lot of his art work, as he apparently many paintings (of those assembled) to the Tate in London upon his death. In addition, many of his works bear great similarities to other of his works. It seemed to me like he had found a formula and stuck to it. Apparently, he was a master of technique and introduced some new styles of work into English painting. I accept this. But he didn’t do it with any great sense of, at least to me, of artistic layout. We also saw that exhibit on American snapshots, from the collection of a donor named Jackson. There were several rooms of snap shots, some as old as the late 19th century. But, when it comes right down to it, they were only snap shots.
