A Study in Contrast
Note World Series Cap
Dunkirk NY – Last night I attended a basketball game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Philadelphia 76ers. Two of my department colleagues and I had bought tickets early in the semester in the hopes of seeing LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neill play on the same team together. Shaq was unfortunately out with a shoulder injury, but LeBron was his usual outstanding self. It was a decent enough game.
More striking that the game, however, was the sensory overload of everything that went on around the game. In fact, it could be said that the entire event was really one huge piece of entertainment where a basketball game broke out every once in a while.
It was the first time I’ve experienced an indoor Jumbotron. Yikes. The thing is large, and assaults the eyes with non-stop images. The LED ring around the entire arena is always animated. Spotlights and mirror balls. The Scream Team and the Cav Girls. The Wheelchair Cavaliers at halftime. The kid traveling teams. All manner of dance routines. Jumbotron interviews. And at the beginning of the game, the unbelievably dramatic introduction of the players, complete with flames spewing from the Jumbotron (video taken with phone). Both my colleagues and I sat in stark amazement, wondering how we could ever get anything like this in our shows, knowing that we couldn’t. We can’t compete with that (can we, JT?). When you realize that 20,000 people in that arena get exposed to this on a regular basis, and that’s what they expect entertainment to be, you really despair of live language-based theatre ever making a real comeback with the general public. The sensory overload is off the charts.
So I had to counteract that today with a scooter ride on an unusually lovely late November afternoon. My ride took me down to Long Point State Park on the east side
Long Point State Park
of Chautauqua Lake. My foot is still hurting from last Monday’s accident and causing me to limp slightly, so I was unable to hike any trails. Rather, I sat by the lake, remembered it was the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and thought to myself that it all began to go downhill from that moment. Kennedy’s administration remains for me a time where the arts were still on center stage in the American public, and the NEA was formed out of that spirit of culture. So much has been lost since then. The silence of the ride after the assault by decibel of the basketball game provided a welcome relief and proved to be a soul-calming experience.
I’ve been having trouble with words of late, because it has seemed to me that words no longer can contain or explain many of the thoughts and feelings I have swimming about in my brain, and I seem to be unable to convey myself adequately to students with my words. The contrast of last night and today put that in some focus. From the overload of images, sound and sensation to the quiet of the woods, the soft lapping of the lake on the shore, the rush and slight chill of the wind around and through the body as I move down the road, words themselves seem to play a very small role in all that. I am thankful for that – no need to explain anything to anybody. -twl
