Got home late last evening and snipped off my second wristband in two nights. That alone should be cause for a blog post. The fact that I'd seen Bryan Ferry at the Palace Theater, then saw some genuine theater with Linda Sue Anderson as Clara Barton at the Bryant Lake Bowl was cause for much reflection on my part.
Bryan Ferry brought me back to an early '80s Roxy Music show in Oakland and the years between wishing I was half as cool as him. Yet, for the last half of the Saturday night show, all that cool was stripped away as he positively beamed back at a truly adoring audience. I don't know if I've ever witnessed such a mutual thrill between band and crowd. (“Avalon” begins playing on Pandora as I write this.)
Linda Sue Anderson, on the other hand, sat front and center on the tiny, bleak BLB stage and took the audience on. As Clara Barton, she spoke on the atrocities committed at the most notorious of Civil War prisons and demanded we listen to her story—their story, the story of tens of thousands of unknown Union soldiers buried at Andersonville. Themselves They Made Immaculate (the play's title derives from the way southern whites presented themselves once the post-war finger-pointing began) is Barton's testimony before Congress concerning the horrors of the prison camp and the tireless search for the identities of those buried there. A Fringe Festival must (and ends with two shows next weekend). Info.
Of course these two events are hopelessly incongruous, yet both hit me where I've lived, whether it be a young rock'n'roll fan longing for the cool or an old historical fictionist wishing he could tell a story that well. Fine weekend. Have a nice week.
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