Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Bog Face: dispatch from Omaha:

Dodge street has changed a lot. When I was twenty-one - before I even knew of such people as FW or Blade or Herbert or Aaron or Mark B or Jay Rice - I had to drive up and down Dodge in a pickup truck day after day. In the back of the truck I was carrying Shylock from the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival's production of The Merchant of Venice . He rode in the back so he could go over his lines and also, I suspect, so he could dream up increasingly grander gestures for his final exit from the Trial Scene. By the end of the run he would start to leave, stop. Turn. Shake his fist. Stop. Turn. Spit at Portia. Start to leave. Stop. Tear off the cross they had forced around his neck. Bellow. And so on. More and more each night. At least this is how I remember it. Then he would go back to Creighton and make himself a bowl of spaghetti.

3:21 AM