No Tent
A few years ago I got mixed up with our local high school, and the result of that mixup is still falling out. The facts are modest enough. Menlo Park's high school has a parent foundation, and the latter wanted a PR person. Part-time, nonprofit, just the sort of thing for someone fed up with the corporate world and thinking about retirement. What does retirement have to do with anything? Good question. It was a question I should have asked then.
There's a difference between a job and work. The latter is something one can learn about in elementary physics. It's an essential part of the world and is reducible to an equation. A job is an arbitrary concept, a form into which human beings fit well or poorly. In my case, the job initially fit rather well. That was until the campus announced plans to build a civic theater, a facility it would share with the community of Menlo Park. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the theater quickly captured my entire attention. Soon, it was all I really wanted to do. I put up with the rest of the high school publicizing only to get the theater project blazing. Why?
Somehow, this had to do with growing up in the desert wilds. I have no regrets that my childhood transpired in an Upper Sonoran pass between two spectacular mountain ranges, right at the edge of ecological zones, chapparal creeping up the mountain slopes, succumbing to distant but visible pines at one end, a few scraggly cactus at the other. Hot sandy winds pitted the window glass all summer, a colder version blowing down from the snowy slopes in the winter. And culture, at least of the urban, artsy kind, always remote.
Of course, there were the parents' phonograph records. In an era when 'phonograph' was still a familiar word and had the aura of the not-yet-invented 'technology,' they were downright nifty, the 78-rpm platters. Die Walküre, urged the center label of one set. For a kid a learning to read, it was clear that someone wanted a guy named Walker dead. Why he had to die was irrelevant. The music blasted out all over the place, dramatic, wild and windswept as the surrounding mountains...but confined to a stage. A booklet that dropped out of the center of the folio of hard plastic records showed what a stage was.
Stages were hard to come by. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave its annual concert in Palm Springs, they held forth in the Polo Grounds. My family sat on hard wooden benches and stared at the orchestra in its canvas shell across the grass. This wasn't a stage, but one got the idea. Since stages were just an idea for much of my childhood, they were all the more pleasing in my adulthood. Building one in Menlo Park seemed a wonderful idea. And in my late 50s, somehow life had carried me along too far to put up with less than wonderful ideas.
When the husband-and-wife directors of the chamber music season at New York's Lincoln Center set up summer shop in Menlo Park, the news seemed as exotic as my parents' old 78s. When the two sat down in the high school with a planning committee for the new theater, well, it was like watching a concert across a polo field. David Finckel, cellist with the Emerson Quartet, walked in with his wife Wu Han, having just gotten off a plane, and leaned his cello case against a wall. The couple started in on acoustics. How you needed height. You needed an acoustic engineer to create a shape. But, no, expensive hardwoods weren't required. If you knew what you were doing, even concrete blocks could hold musical sounds.
Soon, there was an architectural competition. Firms from all over the country submitted bids, and in the end, five got to submit designs. The models went up for display, and I went all out for press coverage. The suburban weekly ran a two-page spread, complete with color photos, showing the architectural miniatures. The public came in for a reception. For a desert kid, this was big time stuff.
I quickly lost interest in the rest of the job. A new principal arrived, and she had no interest in the theater. I had lunch one day with the school district's assistant superintendent, the point man for the new building. Could I work for him, just publicizing the new theater? No, he said, there simply wasn't any money.
At which point, my spirit knew what to do...but my conditioned mind did not. I should have quit. Quit the job, that is, and begun the work. I grew to hate the principal. She openly wearied of talk of the new theater, all but drummed her fingers on her desk when I mentioned the topic. The chemistry, as we say in California, was bad.
The school foundation job wasn't paying all that well, and I could have scraped by on my private pension. But somehow my sense of duty, or my slavery to conventional wisdom, could not let me take a chance, do the real work...and worry about the income later. That is to say, I should have gone to work, unpaid, for the theater. And maybe in time some foundation or donor or magic spirit would have materialized with some money. Or maybe not. In the end, I hated the job, the high school parents were not terribly pleased with me. And it all ended badly.
But it all came to life again over the weekend. The Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center officially opened, and since the local suburban weekly refused to cover the event, I volunteered and wrote an article. I got a byline, no money, and endless delight. I even got to refer to the new building as a theater. It's an unfortunate Americanism, this performing arts center phrase. Definitely name inflation for a 500-seat house.
The local chamber series Music@Menlo performed in their usual dazzling way. Musicians included Anthony McGill, clarinetist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who played at Barack Obama's inauguration. Pretty damned far from cactus and an orchestra in a polo field tent, if you ask me. More important, writing the article and being involved in the weekend's opening was what I wanted to do. It takes a lifetime to figure out what you want to do. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one ever knows how long a lifetime is.
There's a difference between a job and work. The latter is something one can learn about in elementary physics. It's an essential part of the world and is reducible to an equation. A job is an arbitrary concept, a form into which human beings fit well or poorly. In my case, the job initially fit rather well. That was until the campus announced plans to build a civic theater, a facility it would share with the community of Menlo Park. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the theater quickly captured my entire attention. Soon, it was all I really wanted to do. I put up with the rest of the high school publicizing only to get the theater project blazing. Why?
Somehow, this had to do with growing up in the desert wilds. I have no regrets that my childhood transpired in an Upper Sonoran pass between two spectacular mountain ranges, right at the edge of ecological zones, chapparal creeping up the mountain slopes, succumbing to distant but visible pines at one end, a few scraggly cactus at the other. Hot sandy winds pitted the window glass all summer, a colder version blowing down from the snowy slopes in the winter. And culture, at least of the urban, artsy kind, always remote.
Of course, there were the parents' phonograph records. In an era when 'phonograph' was still a familiar word and had the aura of the not-yet-invented 'technology,' they were downright nifty, the 78-rpm platters. Die Walküre, urged the center label of one set. For a kid a learning to read, it was clear that someone wanted a guy named Walker dead. Why he had to die was irrelevant. The music blasted out all over the place, dramatic, wild and windswept as the surrounding mountains...but confined to a stage. A booklet that dropped out of the center of the folio of hard plastic records showed what a stage was.
Stages were hard to come by. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave its annual concert in Palm Springs, they held forth in the Polo Grounds. My family sat on hard wooden benches and stared at the orchestra in its canvas shell across the grass. This wasn't a stage, but one got the idea. Since stages were just an idea for much of my childhood, they were all the more pleasing in my adulthood. Building one in Menlo Park seemed a wonderful idea. And in my late 50s, somehow life had carried me along too far to put up with less than wonderful ideas.
When the husband-and-wife directors of the chamber music season at New York's Lincoln Center set up summer shop in Menlo Park, the news seemed as exotic as my parents' old 78s. When the two sat down in the high school with a planning committee for the new theater, well, it was like watching a concert across a polo field. David Finckel, cellist with the Emerson Quartet, walked in with his wife Wu Han, having just gotten off a plane, and leaned his cello case against a wall. The couple started in on acoustics. How you needed height. You needed an acoustic engineer to create a shape. But, no, expensive hardwoods weren't required. If you knew what you were doing, even concrete blocks could hold musical sounds.
Soon, there was an architectural competition. Firms from all over the country submitted bids, and in the end, five got to submit designs. The models went up for display, and I went all out for press coverage. The suburban weekly ran a two-page spread, complete with color photos, showing the architectural miniatures. The public came in for a reception. For a desert kid, this was big time stuff.
I quickly lost interest in the rest of the job. A new principal arrived, and she had no interest in the theater. I had lunch one day with the school district's assistant superintendent, the point man for the new building. Could I work for him, just publicizing the new theater? No, he said, there simply wasn't any money.
At which point, my spirit knew what to do...but my conditioned mind did not. I should have quit. Quit the job, that is, and begun the work. I grew to hate the principal. She openly wearied of talk of the new theater, all but drummed her fingers on her desk when I mentioned the topic. The chemistry, as we say in California, was bad.
The school foundation job wasn't paying all that well, and I could have scraped by on my private pension. But somehow my sense of duty, or my slavery to conventional wisdom, could not let me take a chance, do the real work...and worry about the income later. That is to say, I should have gone to work, unpaid, for the theater. And maybe in time some foundation or donor or magic spirit would have materialized with some money. Or maybe not. In the end, I hated the job, the high school parents were not terribly pleased with me. And it all ended badly.
But it all came to life again over the weekend. The Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center officially opened, and since the local suburban weekly refused to cover the event, I volunteered and wrote an article. I got a byline, no money, and endless delight. I even got to refer to the new building as a theater. It's an unfortunate Americanism, this performing arts center phrase. Definitely name inflation for a 500-seat house.
The local chamber series Music@Menlo performed in their usual dazzling way. Musicians included Anthony McGill, clarinetist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who played at Barack Obama's inauguration. Pretty damned far from cactus and an orchestra in a polo field tent, if you ask me. More important, writing the article and being involved in the weekend's opening was what I wanted to do. It takes a lifetime to figure out what you want to do. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one ever knows how long a lifetime is.
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