It's been some time since we had a good smoking urchin.
For several months we've had tickets to see the ballet production of Where the Wild Things Are. This is a book Juniper has long loved. Several months ago I bought on eBay a dog-eared set of plastic Wild Thing toys that had previously lived in a day care. Each was gnawed on or missing a limb; her room looks like a Wild Thing VA hospital. For several weeks we have re-introduced the book into her repertoire of bedtime tales. For days before Friday's matinee, we talked it up: "You're going to see the real Max and the real Wild Things! Just like the real Elmo we saw." All of this led to a groundswell of anticipation, where Wild Things were seen in closets and peeking from the windows of Detroit's abandoned art deco skyscrapers. "Wild Thing, dada!" she'd shout, pointing into the tops of bare trees where no behemoth of terrible roar, tooth, eye and claw could hide. And yet I have no doubt she saw them. She saw them in the abstract masses of scribbled marker and colored pencil on paper she handed me all week. By Friday morning, she was adequately prepared.
It was a general admission show, so we walked over to the Detroit Opera House an hour early to find ourselves among the first seated: front row center again. The Opera House is a former movie palace built in 1922, less oriental than the Fox, but like the Fox its gilded gargoyles and gorgons and its Tiffany mosaics seemed recently renovated. At one time there were over 150 single-screen theaters in the city of Detroit, and several dozen palatial one-screens between the central business district and midtown. There were 26,000 theater seats around Grand Circus Park alone. Some still hide behind quiet moldering facades like this. Some switched to porn to survive before being demolished. The first Detroit theater I visited with Juniper was the Michigan Theater, which with much-commented-on irony, still stands at the location where Henry Ford built his first automobile and now serves as a private parking garage, with much of its architecture still intact. I could have stood in there for hours imagining men in top hats and evening jackets escorting women in flapper dresses to their seats, the screen lit with the gaze of Valentino, or the wink of Clara Bow. But after a few minutes, Juniper demanded a snack that I didn't have, so we snuck out the same way we snuck in.
On Friday, sitting in the front row of one of the surprising number of Detroit movie palaces that have been spared the wrecking ball, I was again moved to consider how different it was to experience entertainment long ago, to get dressed up and leave your neighborhood and take a streetcar downtown, to enter the ornamental splendor with thousands of your fellow citizens and laugh together at Buster Keaton's antics or be moved to tears by the Little Tramp's final silent gaze at the flower girl. This is an experience we will never be able to replicate in our own homes with any type of technology.
As curtain time approached, the Opera House remained empty. One of the ushers told us that there was a pile-up on I-75, the main artery from the suburbs, and that many of the patrons would be late. I spent the extra time walking Juniper around the theater, pointing out the lions, birds, serpents, and other creatures she'd recognize in the plasterwork. We chose to see the performance that would be attended by many of the local schools, thinking that two-year-old Juniper's ill manners would be insignificant among the throngs of kids. When the first students arrived, about 50 black 4th-through-6th graders marched silently down the aisle with the precision of a Roman cohort. They surrounded us up front, their teacher gesturing where to sit with her hands. Juniper grew concerned that the big kids were going to try to play with one of the Wild Thing amputees she clutched in her hands, but I told her she was being silly. Then I noticed that one of the boys about six seats down from us had grown angry: his lower lip had devoured the upper, his eyebrows were rumpled. Oh he was so angry, and silent, and he thrust his hands towards his teacher like a defiant maestro, telling her exactly why he was so upset. All around him, I saw other little hands moving, the other silent conversations that were taking place. Juniper and I sat at the front of a 3,000 plus seat theater with 50 other kids and the only sound was my daughter's voice above the rustling of air.
It was a beautiful moment, it lasted only until many dozens of busloads from the northern suburbs started to fill all the remaining seats in the opera house.
Wood arrived straight from work at the same time as the hordes, and she scooped Juniper up and took her to the powder room for some motherly pampering. I waited in our prime seats; eventually the volunteer ushers prepared everyone for the show to begin. After a third usher asked me if the two seats next to me were occupied, I grew a little anxious, and almost said, "Yep, just me and my two other child molester friends---they're probably still in the little boy's room! I wonder what could be taking them so long?" When Wood finally walked Juniper down the aisle, a curtain fell over the stage covered by a 40-foot-tall face of Moishe, the one I drew pooping, his eyes glowing purple from the beams of two spotlights. When the curtain lifted, Max pranced out in his wolfsuit, and Juniper jumped into my arms with terror and unsurpassed glee. When the fear passed, she sat on her mother's lap and I was able to watch her face, and the faces of the fascinated kids beyond her as they stared at the stage and the story they all knew so well, first through the fluttering of fingers and then through words they could see on the page, now come to life.
I knew this was going to be a ballet, but I guess I just assumed it wouldn't be a ballet with all the twirling and smothered nutsacks and stuff. But yes, there was a lot of twirling and plenty of smothered nutsack. Ballet is okay, I suppose, but it's hard to twirl in a 9-foot-tall Wild Thing costume, which was fine with me and the thousands of kids who screamed (in my case, with relief) as Moishe the Wild Thing peeked his head around the curtain for the first time, and we all clapped as the other three shimmied on stage. The deaf kids around us did not clap then or when Max discovered that his supper was still hot. They raised their hands, I guess as deaf people do, wiggling their fingers at the stage.
"It could have used more of the Wild Things," I said to Wood as we walked out of the Opera House, but later I regretted saying it. If Disney had anything to do with it, it would have been all about the Wild Things, but that's not the lesson of the book. After the G-rated bacchanalia of the rumpus, in the face of as much wildness and savagery as he could ever want, Max chooses to return to a mother who would tame him. Juniper is too young to appreciate that. She was one of the youngest kids at the show, and in my zeal to get her excited about it I had convinced her that the Wild Things were real, and even in the bright light of Broadway in Detroit she was convinced that what she had seen inside the theater was real, that Max and the Wild Things, like Elmo and Cookie Monster, live behind curtains in gilded palaces where she watches them from the front row. Max teaches us is that imagination is so powerful and amazing, but ultimately you must return to what is real.
And I think I will lament the day she realizes that is true.
The one on the far right is all, "I like your buttons," to the girl newsie; the short one mutters, "don't talk to my sister, yeh creep."
Every kid in the neighborhood was out in the park last night: two preteen girls practiced pitching a baseball, two elementary-aged sisters trudged through cedar chips on roller skates, watching Juniper and her friend who's a mere two weeks younger than her surreptitiously exchanging the toys they brought with them in full denial of the fact that they were sharing. More kids showed up, all girls. The only kids missing were the internationally-famous techno DJ's daughters (they were staying with their grandmother in another part of town). At one point, every kid from the neighborhood sat on the spinning merry-go-round. And no one fell off. I attribute this to our neighborhood's lack of boys.
Dogs chased down the things their masters had thrown for them. Old ladies were out there walking, some with old husbands. New mothers pushed strollers filled with babies that might have never seen seventy-five degrees and sunny. The air was pungent with smoking mesquite and hickory and pork, while young black men hovered over the wobbling air of barbecue grills and their kids took turns driving one of those miniature motorized hummers up and down the sidewalk. Two male robins danced in midair, grasping and clawing one another, squabbling over a female. Two college-aged girls shed their sleeves and emerged from their homes for a walk in the kind of tank tops and short shorts only college-aged girls, blissfully ignorant and robust in their youth, can get away with. Juniper was wearing sandals and that dress she wore at the Utah salt flats. The fact that we could now see more of her legs ensured us that our miniature child was, indeed, growing. Even here in downtown Detroit, where some would consider it child abuse to raise a kid, our daughter was growing into her own person.
There was not a single leaf on any tree, but there were flowers that had managed to bloom in the course of a few hours, after a wet and muggy morning. The first thing I did yesterday was shave off my miserable winter beard. Wearing a ridiculous Morgan Spurlock mustache, I then took the kid and the dog out for a walk. Juniper wore her new boots for an activity she likes to call "puddle trouble." It is exactly how it sounds, but much to her consternation the dog is far better at it than she is. She picked up a frail twig and told me she had a "mighty stick." Ever since the incident with the wild dogs, she has been obsessed with mighty sticks. By the time we returned from our walk through the park later that evening to get Stroh's ice cream, after eleven hours above seventy degrees, I could already feel the stubble of my beard growing back.
All day I had a strange urge to refill our birdfeeder and start gardening.
I am not a man to grow sentimental about the weather. Ordinarily I loathe the cold because it keeps me inside and I resent the sun for making me feel guilty about missing a moment of it. San Francisco weather suited me well. But in five years, this is the first time I have seen the spring. And to see all these people together, so different but all so similarly thrilled simply with the sun on their skin, here together defying the sense of a city that has spread to everyone who doesn't live here. You will, I hope, indulge me if I enjoy it for just a moment.
Does this mean that someday people who can't dance will be able to get a microchip implanted in their butt that will fully remedy such a shortcoming? If so, that stinks, because my ability to find the beat and wiggle like this robot is one of the few things that I can do better than Dutch.
(click on that link to watch a cute robot dancing to one of Dutch's favorite Spoon songs. If you don't find yourself bopping along with the little yellow guy, then perhaps no microchip can help you.)
(Thanks to Laura from Merge Records for sending the link---Juniper and I have been watching this all morning.)
(Dutch wants to add the following: "as long as you are linking to videos, please tell everyone to go watch this one, sent to me by Laurie many months ago")
Dublin street kids, 1978.
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