Mood For the Day
Today's Mood on Mon, 31 Aug 1998
The stage was almost bare; the crew had all but finished striking the set. Two papier-maiche tree stumps sat before the disconnected side of a house, which was turned at an angle to allow the audience a view of both sides. Three people were also strewn about the stage, as disconsolate and delightfully melancholy as the lonely props: Lenny and Erika were stage right and center stage, respectively, while he stood upstage between them.
"Where you going tonight?" Erika asked Lenny. Lenny was the producer and director: in an environment full of unpleasant behaviour masking self-conscious incompetence he was one of the few teachers who helped the students instead of hiding behind them. He really had more to worry about than his career, for one, and for two he just found it easier (well, more effective) to accomplish things through hard work than through lazy manipulation.
It was difficult to discern the expression on his face. "I've plenty to worry about before then", he answered her politely. "But I think I'll hit the streets and look for sober cops to harass." Lenny loved to harass the police; since he became sober, nobody had yet had occasion to detain him seriously. Not after that one time down South, anyway.
Cops seemed to like to harass Lenny, though, regardless of anything. Lenny just looked like he was up to no good: his eyes were usually bloodshot and sunken in. No one but him and his neighbors knew if it were due to obsessive work or senseless drug use. Most people believed both.
Erika, on the other hand, looked like an offensively harmless teenager. She had her causes and she stood for them, but as she was in a more or less perpetual state of protest the message often got lost for the medium. She was always dedicated, though, to whatever it was that week.
And then there was Mark.
"You know where Chris's is?" Erika asked Lenny for like the fifth time. He didn't ordinarily stomach such repetition (such inefficiency) but he was far too tired to teach. There were only five hours left to midnight and the party was still raging upstairs: that is to say, in the rafters. The stage crew had taken their vials upstairs and were having the remains of a terrific party. They had finished with their work, though: the only reason the props were even still on stage was because Lenny and Erika were there. Erika had been the stage manager, and Lenny's stage managers tended to like finish their jobs personally. They usually had quite a bit invested in the productions.
Lenny nodded affirmation and sighed quietly. He did join the party later in the evening -- right after the blonde dancer had finished up with her first two guys. She had done the first one well and had warmed the second over slightly, and was ready for her third by the time Lenny showed up. It was, by that time, fairly late in the party, and the only ones still awake were the ones whom no chemicals could kill, but who were likely to be up all night.
Lenny had been wandering the streets that evening, as planned, remembering: remembering the whining of the actors when they first arrived on the set, remembering the inordinate amount of coffee flowing keeping his body too wired for his mind ever to accept, remembering the wild, earnest classes just this side of the ungodly sleep-depraved hallunications, and remembering, finally, the colossal effort that everyone had put into something far greater and yet no different than they themselves.
He saw all this in his mind as he saw the leaves of the trees turn toward autumn once again. Each leaf fluttered like a tiny actor on a stage on the other side of a theater and no leaves had yet fallen -- it was only late August -- but they were all about to decorate the ground in the chromatic carpet of a delightful dream.
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