Maybe There is Hope

Why?  Because baseball continues to reflect and give voice to the American Dream.  Work hard, have talent, succeed, in spite of ethnicity or humble beginnings.  It stands as a bulwark against the tide of dystopian xenophobia promoted by no less than the President of the United States.  It is rule based and while it has succumbed to instant replay challenges, pitch clocks, and exotic statistical metrics, it has essentially changed to remain the same.

There used to be a similar familiarity about the checks and balances of our three branches of government, comforting as a citizen, but we now have a disrupter in the White House, someone who has no sense of history, a disdain for culture, and who measures everything in clicks, sound bites, and winning and losing.  And now he is set to ignore an equal branch of government, Congress, and apparently Republicans there are willing to be accomplices, their sacred vow “to affirm support for the Constitution” relegated to mere hollow words.  If baseball was played this way, players might as well refuse to return to the dugout after strike three is called, saying the people want to see hitting, so let’s make it 4 or 5 strikes before one is called out.  Just tweet it and it shall be.

The recent political developments would normally envelop my blog with multiple entries, as well as more on gun control because of the recent tragic Colorado school shooting, However,with the publication of my book, Waiting for Someone to Explain It, I vowed it would serve as a cathartic statement on such topics, thus allowing my writing life to return to some kind of new normalcy as well.

“As American as apple pie” frequently gets conflated with baseball.  The baseball of my youth was mostly all white players with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in the National League in 1947 and Larry Doby the American League a few months later.  As an adult I once sat next to Roy Campanella  (who came up to the Dodgers the year after Robinson) at a luncheon; it was sometime in the 1980s.  He was in a wheel chair because of the automobile accident that ended his playing years.  We briefly talked about the old days, not about race, but about baseball.  He was interested in my childhood dreams of pitching but of course I tried to turn the discussion to him, but he was reticent in that regard, I think there was an inherent sadness about missing his buddies, and his last years in baseball. After Jackie Robinson he was the second black player inducted into the Hall of Fame.  I remember his humanity and putting up with me and my questions.

I think of him from time to time especially as the landscape of American baseball changes to reflect our immigrant heritage.  It is truly an international sport and it is no more apparent than here in the United States.  One wonders, if baseball could change and still be the great sport of yesteryear, why not America?  Isn’t that what it means to “make America great?”

And it is nowhere more apparent than in the Miami Marlins’ farm system.  As the Marlins’ CEO (and one of my favorite Yankees of my adult life) Derek Jeter said: "We want Miami to be the destination for top international talent.  This organization should reflect the diversity of the South Florida community."  And indeed it does.

Although we’ve already seen a few Jupiter Hammerheads’ games this season, the Marlins’ Class A+ team in Jupiter, this was the first opportunity to write about one and although Wednesday night’s game involved dropping a 5-1 decision to the St. Lucie Mets, it was notable in other ways.

The first thing that caught my eye after the singing of the National Anthem was the image of the American flag in the background with the Hammerhead’s pitcher, Edward Cabrera, standing in the foreground waiting for the sign.  

He joins the ranks of players from the Dominican Republic, boasting probably more professional baseball players per capita than any place on earth.  We’ve truly, rightfully assimilated the best of the best on the field.  We just need to do so as a nation of citizens.

I was looking forward to seeing him pitch; a highly touted, skinny 6’4” ballplayer who can routinely throw in the high 90s.  His young, 21 year-old body still has time to fill out and will make him even more formidable.   During his last start he had struck out 13 and now has more than 20 scoreless innings to go along with his 1.50 ERA.  While he pitched well for 2 innings (scoreless, and 2 K’s), apparently he had a fingernail problem and had to leave the game.  But one sees how he gets his speed from his whip like delivery.  Edward Cabrera is a player to watch for MLB action, or at least moving up a notch in the minors this year.

He was replaced by Daniel Castano, a lefty who caught my fancy, my being a lefty with baseball dreams which never went beyond my teenage years.  When the Miami Marlins traded away Marcell Ozuna, they got three highly ranked minor leaguers and sort of as an afterthought the left-handed pitcher Castano was thrown in.  He’s labored in the minors but has good control.  His low base on ball to strike out ratio is an attribute of a more mature pitcher.

In five innings he allowed five hits and four runs, although two were unearned, and he struck out five. His ERA is still around 4.00, but his mechanics were powerful, mustering up speed and good breaking stuff.  He was at the low end of the draft (picked in the 19^th round) and he is one of the “old guys” on the team at the age of 25.  He’s listed at 6’4” but seems smaller as at 230 lbs he is stocky.  Somehow I think this guy has some chance of making the majors.  Here he is in action:

But that is not the end of the multicultural story.  The shortstop Jose Devers, only 19 years old, is another Dominican.  Disappointingly, my New York Yankees traded him to the Marlins.  He is now one of the high ranking shortstops in the minors, hitting around .370.  If the name sounds familiar, he’s the cousin of Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers.  How cool would that have been if the NYY held on to him for the Sox / NYY rivalry?  During Wednesday night’s game he went 2 for 4. 

Also on the team is the highly touted 22 year old Cuban Victor Victor Mesa who the Marlins signed for about $5 million, along with his 17-year-old brother, Victor Mesa, Jr. for $1 million. To my knowledge, the latter is yet to play minor league ball, but his older brother looks like he has the right stuff.  They’re sons of the famous Cuban baseball player – you guessed the name, Victor Mesa.  Here’s Victor Victor at bat:

Finally that game was the first rehab assignment for one of the Marlin’s regulars, Garrett Cooper, who unfortunately made a bush league error playing left field and seemed to have difficulty getting back into the grove, but the last I looked he was batting over .500 so I can only assume he’ll be joining the parent club soon.

It was one of those special Florida nights, a cool breeze and on the field the kind of multiculturalism which is to be embraced, not feared.

Palm Beach Dramaworks to Stage John Guare’s Surreal Comedy, ‘The House of Blue Leaves’

It is a testimony to the importance and endurance of John Guare as a major American playwright that this Obie Award-winning play, The House of Blue Leaves, was written in the late 1960s and that his most recent play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, is currently running Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater.  In between those years he’s written many award winning plays, a musical, and screenplays.  Guare received the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award and the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In effect, Palm Beach Dramaworks concludes its 2018/2019 season with an emphatic exclamation point, The House of Blue Leaves opening on May 17 and continuing through June 2^nd.

The action takes place in October 1965 during the first visit by a reigning Pope to the United States. Millions are lining up along his parade route from Queens to New York City to greet him.  Among the throngs will be zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy, a wannabe Hollywood songwriter with big dreams and no discernible talent, in the hope that a papal blessing will whisk him away from Queens, leaving his mentally ill wife, Bananas, behind and into a new life in Los Angeles with his girlfriend, Bunny Flingus.

With the Vietnam War constantly in the background, and the hilarity of virtually every character vying to view the Pope, or receiving a blessing from the Pope or maneuvering for a brief moment of fame, The House of Blue Leaves is a black comedy, with farce and reality in stark, sudden juxtaposition.  Guare, who also wrote the entertainingly bad songs “composed” by Artie, has said that The House of Blue Leaves is about “humiliation and the cruelties people inflict on each other.”  In spite of the underlying seriousness of the play, we should be prepared for dialed up laughter.

Director J. Barry Lewis opined that “my challenge is to bring the script to life by finding the comedy through the characters.  It is a narrative story and while a farce to an extent, it is not at the same break neck speed.  It is more of a comedy in a field of the absurd.  This type of theatre is complex so we generally sought out knowledgeable local actors, ones we’ve mostly worked with before, so we could quickly ramp up. Our audience is going to have fun seeing so many familiar actors in some unusual roles.”

He went on to add, “And don’t underestimate the importance of the New York City scene, and the Vietnam era of the play.  There is a constant state of anxiety and high expectations of the Pope’s visit. It captures the American Dream of hope.  The central theme of the hollowness of seeking celebrity status is omnipresent.”  

In that regard, its relevancy to today is uncanny, celebrity worship, anxiety about our political situation, and hope for its resolution.

Vanessa Morosco, Bruce Linser, Elena Maria Garcia

Photo by Tim Stepien

Bruce Linser, well known to the PBD audience as a director and the manager of PBD’s Dramaworkshop plays zookeeper / woefully-mediocre-songwriter-seeking-fame-and-fortune, Artie Shaughnessy.  I asked him what it feels like to be on the stage again and without hesitation he said “it’s good being back on the stage and it’s a forceful reminder as to how difficult it is to be a really good actor. I love playing Artie.  Guare was very mindful that comedy could undermine the character development. He’s a fascinating and heartbreaking character and I hope to bring those attributes forth so the audience will feel for him.”

Linser comes to the stage with an extensive musical performance background so he’s very comfortable playing this frustrated songwriter and performing his grade B songs.  As he added “Artie’s musical abilities and works are good enough to pass as songs but bad enough to be funny.”

The two female leads have names in the play which sound like they were made-up by sitcom writer, Artie’s girlfriend Bunny Flingus (played by Vanessa Morosco) and Artie’s wife Bananas Shaughnessy (played by Elena Maria Garcia, her PBD debut).

Bunny is the downstairs neighbor who is pushing Artie to move to California in pursuit of the celebrity status they both so desperately want.  Vanessa Morosco said “I love playing the role of Bunny as she’s excitingly unpredictable and is subject to fantasies. I also love this play, which has an incredible place in the canon of American plays, with Guare entreating the close attention of the audience as characters routinely break the fourth wall to argue their case or to express their private thoughts.”

Poor Bananas, for whom Artie is seeking an institution to take her off his hands, and release him into the dreams he has for himself and Bunny.  But Bananas has moments of lucidity and insight as well as drastic mood changes.  It is a challenging part, and has been Elena Maria Garcia’s “dream role.”  Why?  As she explained, “I feel a very close relationship to this play as I wrote my thesis on it when I studied drama.  And the character of Bananas particularly fascinated me as I was drawn by her innocence as well as being in the center of a hurricane of action around her.”

The play has hilarious subplots and therefore in addition to the three leads there is an extensive cast, featuring, in alphabetical order, Irene Adjan, Jim Ballard, Austin Carroll, Elizabeth Dimon, Margery Lowe, and Krystal Millie Valdes (PBD debut).  Rounding out the cast are Timothy Bowman (PBD debut) and Pierre Tannous.  Scenic design is by Victor Becker, costume design is by Brian O’Keefe, lighting design is by Kirk Bookman, and sound design is by Steve Shapiro.

It promises to be a fun filled and thought provoking production at The Don & Ann Brown Theatre on Clematis Street beginning May 17 through June 2.

Update: May 18 Review of the play at this link:  http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2019/05/dramaworks-scores-comic-and.html

‘Waiting for Someone to Explain It’ Now Published

Having written this blog for some dozen years, by the end of last year I felt it was time to make it less of “a job” and more focused on things I enjoy rather than those I obsess over.  That meant less political and current affairs commenting (although I’ll never say never to those subjects in the future).  The present political and economic landscape invites day to day commentary, but I’ve decided to resist it to preserve my sanity.  It is truly a case of existential dread and exhaustion.

Nonetheless, I also decided to mostly exit those subjects by making a declarative statement in the form of a book based on the extensive entries from the past.  Therefore, Waiting for Someone to Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense (North Palm Beach, Lacunae Musing, 2019),348 Pages, $13.95 is now available in paperback from Amazon and their extensive distribution network. 

The irony of selecting Amazon KDP as my publishing platform hasn’t been lost on me as when I was a publisher I dealt with Amazon in its infancy and now it deals with me in my dotage. 

It is also ironic that it should be published the same week as the Mueller Report which to some extent provides some of the answers I’ve been “waiting for.”  Yet Trump is as much a symptom as a cause. The book reveals the deep roots of our cultural civil war and the intransigence of political polarization, and one person’s quest to come to terms with them. 

It argues that we’ve become inured to the outrageous and accommodative of the absurd.  It points to a deep vein of anti-intellectualism in this country, questioning the veracity of climate change, championing the “right” to open carry weapons, and leading to the worship of false idols: 24 x 7 streaming entertainment.  We’ve become a nation needing immediate gratification, no matter what the societal consequences of borrowing against the future or becoming somnambulists in front of liquid crystal display screens.

Who could have imagined the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States?  As his candidacy ramped up, so did my commentary, all encapsulated in “Waiting.”

The book documents the election of such an unsuitable candidate, who has proved to be worse than feared, a “crazy maker” a gas-lighter of reality, a believer in his own mendacity.  These issues populate the entries.  As Eric Hoffer said in his classic The True Believer (1951), “We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.”  During the period I sought out other expert journalists, psychologists, bloggers, economists, and even novelists in an attempt to understand.

The publicity release at the end of this entry explains the title and more about the rationale.  It is not simply a collection of entries from the blog.  There is a narrative tying things together and the entries themselves have been edited to minimize redundancies and present them better in print. 

As an ex-publisher it’s also been a labor of love, to write a book, even participate in its design, bringing me back to my start in publishing in 1964 as a production assistant.  So much has changed since then in the industry.  For me, the publication was as much about the journey. I think of it as an act of professional closure as well as a cry for the kind of democracy our forefathers envisioned.