May 24, 2021: Muted -

A few weeks ago, the very first morning I was street-legal vaccinated, I went to the Portland Art Museum, because I could. I had reserved my slot weeks earlier: timed entry, limited admission, masks required. 

It was nearly empty; I saw one other patron, and the occasional security guard. During most of my visit, I was alone in each gallery, and it felt dreamlike.

(….So, I was in the Art Museum, but all by myself, except sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of a guard, or I’d hear footsteps in the distance ….)

There were no special exhibits yet, just the permanent collection, and I visited my favorite pieces as if they were old acquaintances. I’ve always loved Milton Avery’s painting, Bathers, Coney Island, 1934. I love the big, blobby bodies, and the black water, and the muted colors, almost a sepia beach scene. My own East Coast ancestors were based in Brookline, a neighborhood of Boston, but I’m fairly sure they were much like the Coney Island crew. Hello, ancestral types!

I also got up close to a few paintings I’ve only seen from afar before, and I read labels with more attention. Look at the bizarre perspective in this piece, which magically works just fine from across the room.  Look at how the Native American collection labels say the pieces were given in exchange, not purchased. Look at that quilt made out of circuit boards. So cool.

The whole thing got me thinking about The Arts, and I’m still thinking about them, incoherently, which is maybe why the thoughts are lasting so long. Literary arts, visual arts, performing arts – contrasts and overlaps. Hmmm.

Back when I choreographed high school musicals, I would make a point of thanking the cast near the end of the run, and telling them that without them, I could not be a choreographer. I would be like a painter who never made a painting. They were my medium. They allowed me to do what I loved to do, and I was so grateful. 

I suppose the can’t-choreograph-without-dancers assertion is debatable – I could have choreographed gumby figures and shot stop-motion films of them. But then, I would have been a filmmaker. Or something. Is it still a performing art if you have no audience? What does “no audience” even mean? Live audiences are one thing, and audiences distant in time and space are another, witness much COVID stuff.

See, incoherent! You can be a poet alone in your room, or a composer, or a painter, or a singer. An actor?

Speaking of singing, my choir gathered yesterday for a hymn sing in the church courtyard: gray day, windy, masks, six feet apart in folding chairs on the grass, everyone facing the same direction. Fortunately, the high school sopranos were behind me, so I could hear them. I couldn’t hear the people in the rows in front of me.

One of my friends wrote afterward, “tears of joy,” when I’d just told someone else it was bittersweet. I think “tears of joy” and “bittersweet” might be the same thing. Maybe “tears of joy” is higher on the joy end of the scale. Another friend had told me, some weeks ago, that she was having choir nightmares – she couldn’t find the choir room, couldn’t find her music, when she did find the choir room, no one was there, when she finally located the group, there wasn’t a chair with her name on it….  It sounded like perfectly reasonable anxiety to me.

It was good to see everyone who came, and to sing together. It was loud and very damp inside my mask. I am not in a choir to hear my own voice, and it was a big dose of my own voice. Everybody around me felt rusty both singing and sight-reading. The hymnals had a layer of dust on them. I got choked up. It was both no big deal and very emotional.

I went to lunch with a choir buddy afterward – her first street-legal date. We sat outside, wind and drizzle but under cover and with a heat lamp. We were out of practice – oops, no water, no spoons, hang on, I’ll be right back. The drizzly outside lunch was like the hymn sing, was like the first museum visit – reminiscent of before, but slightly muted. I think things are going to be like this for a transitional while. They are going to be a little bit dreamlike.