Monday, August 06, 2007
My Short-Lived Acting Career
My Mom's in town for two weeks! Last night we celebrated her arrival with a feast in Chinatown. Earlier in the day, I watched the 1940 film version of the Thornton Wilder play "Our Town," a slice (dissection?) of American small town life circa 1910, with an omniscient and incisive narrator/guide. The film held special interest for me since it was my one and only brush with acting, since, as a 10th grader, I played a newspaper boy with 6 lines in East Meadow High School's staging of the play. I remember so many rehearsals that the sharp dialogue was coming out of my ears. The play's message - that life is very short and unpredictable, and hard to appreciate in the moment - was not lost on me then, but at age 15 death was an intellectual concept, an idea, and life's shortness didn't begin to sink in until decades later... The film, by the way, is among William Holden's earliest appearances, as a late teenage boy. The movie poster pictured here tries to 'spice up' the elegeaic and allegorical film with the inane tag line "their love affair was the talk of the town." Misleading, misleading - the movie is the antithesis of scandal and conflict - it's about life's slow lessons and small details...
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