January 9, 2011
My holiday wanderings this year took me to two wildly different, but strangely, similar places: EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, and a performance of Candide by the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, DC.
The crowds drawn by these entertainment venues could not have been less similar. The average age of the audience for Candide had to be somewhere in the vicinity of 45, while EPCOT drew the stroller set. At Candide you could spot people in mink coats. At EPCOT — where it was about 20 degrees — hoodies and Gryffindor scarves (no doubt purchased the day before at Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter) abounded.
And yet, EPCOT and Candide are both fundamentally about the subject of optimism.
This hit me during the EPCOT ride called “Spaceship Earth.” With a title like that I braced myself for a lecture about climate change that would make me feel bad about the my puny recycling efforts (not to mention my SUV). But no. Instead, I got a vision of a better future (complete with campy animatronic puppets), which reminded me of the vision of the future we used to get back in the early 1960s.
What happened to those visions of the future? Today, when I turn on Discovery Channel, or History Channel, or any of the other channels that purport to be about education, I get Mayan prophecies of doom, The Rapture, and apocalyptic visions of the world after people have become extinct. There are whole sub-genres of fiction that devote themselves to scary and depressing visions of the future. Star Trek is so passé.
This brings me, in a strange and circuitous route, to Candide, Voltaire’s wickedly satiric look at all of man’s institutions. He could have written something preachy and frightening, but instead he wrote a funny, funny story about an innocent making his way in a world where everything bad that can happen, does happen. And in Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant adaptation for the stage (with help from Stephen Sondheim and Dorothy Parker, to name just a few), the play ends with Candide sadder, wiser, but still trying to do the best he can in a world that isn’t “the best of all possible worlds.” Instead, Candide comes to realize that it’s the only world we have and we need to work to improve it. Bernstein’s adaptation of the eighteenth century book was first produced in 1957 — three years after Disneyland opened.
So why is it that today in 2011, when we’re living in the modern world predicted for us back in 1957, that we’re so depressed? Think about what we have: Kids in America don’t die of polio or a host of other diseases, hunger in America is no longer a problem (obesity is), we communicate instantaneously, we can travel anywhere in a matter of hours, we can hold a library of words and music in the palms of our hands, women and minorities have the right vote. All-in-all, life is better today than it was 100 years ago. Heck, it’s better than it was in 1957. Yes, many of the people in the rest of the world don’t enjoy a life like that. And we sure do have a lot of problems that still need solving. We always will have problems. But we’re on a continuum of improvement. History doesn’t lie.
Why have we given up on the future? Why does a vision of the future that doesn’t involve human extinction surprise me?
I can’t answer that question. I’m an optimistic person, who writes books about optimistic people. I like to think that we have the capacity to make the world a better place. I believe that humanity has the capacity to rise above hatred and war, although I know sometimes the evidence of that is hard to find. Still, I believe that now is the best time to be alive.
And as for Yellowstone exploding and sending us all back into the stone age — well there isn’t much I can do about that, so why obess about it?
I guess that makes me like Candide . . . and Walt Disney.
August 8, 2010
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the grocery store. . . I made a wrong turn and ended up standing in the yarn section of my local craft store.
Now let me be clear, my mother taught me how to knit when I about ten or twelve, but I didn’t really take to it. For one thing, Mom had amazing talents with knitting needles. She knit snowflake sweaters, and cable sweaters, and even a Ramsay plaid mohair afghan once. I could not compete. For another, I had sweaty hands as a child and you just can’t knit with sweaty hands.
So, instead, I let Aunt Annie teach me how to embroider. I could embroider rings around Mom. Eventually I even bested Aunt Annie in that department, but I could never match her skill at tatting. (I still have some of her tatted lace, waiting to be put on a grand child’s dress.) But I digress.
Why was I standing there reading a Debbie Macomber book filled with knitting instructions?
Several reasons: 1) My critique partners are yarn harlots. And they have been trying to suck me in for a long, long time. 2) I hate grocery shopping, and 3) I needed a vacation . . . bad.
For the last several months I’ve done nothing on my weekends but stare into a computer screen wrestling with manuscripts, new webpages, and day-job demands. This weekend I hauled home a boat load of work-related things to do, in addition to a box filled with copy edits. I really needed to get the grocery shopping done and get back to the computer. I had a whole weekend planned — and it was all work.
But I just couldn’t do it.
So instead, ended up fingering yarn at the craft store. And the yarn won.
I bought some of it, and I started a project. I spent most of yesterday knitting while listening to the entire season of Morgan Freeman’s ‘Through the Wormhole.” In the process I discovered a few things:
1) Knitting is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget how. I haven’t knitted since I was a teenager.
2) My hands are not nearly as sweaty as they used to me. So maybe there are some positives to being post menopausal, and
3) You can justify all kinds of procrastination when you’re actually making something.
So, here’s a photo of what I accomplished yesterday. This is the back of a basic V-neck sweater:
And yes those are watermelon earrings in the photo — a gift from Heidi Hamburg who is tickled by the fact that Last Chance has a water tower painted like a watermelon. I didn’t have the heart to crop them out of the photo.
It was really fun, yesterday, to get away from the computer and practice an art that is ancient. It really relaxed me. And I was surprised by how connected I felt to Mom, who passed away in 1997.
I’ll be posting my progress on this project from time-to-time. That way I might actually finish it. I was notorious as a youngster for starting knitting projects and never finishing them. Although I did ultimately finish the obligatory stripped scarf (Met’s colors), and the basic crew neck sweater (knit with really chunky yarn on ginormous needles.)
So, okay, CPs, you can snort and giggle and whatnot, but you finally sucked me in. You and the burning need for a vacation from the computer screen.
July 29, 2010
I’m here along with almost 2,000 other devotees, writers, editors, and publishers of romantic fiction. It’s exhilarating and exhausting.
Highlights of Day One:
At the airport shuttle kiosk, when I purchased my ticket to the Dolphin Hotel, the young lady looked up and asked, “Are you one of those romance authors?” And I got to say yes. And then I handed her one of my little excerpts. I was walking on air.
