Bill Cosby performed at URI Family Weekend

Saturday night VJ, Emily & I, along with 5,000 of our close friends had the pleasure of listening and laughing at a live performance performance by Bill Cosby at the Ryan Center. I've been a Bill Cosby fan since I was a kid. I use to enjoy his records, "200 mph", stories about "my brother Russel... Awe man you broke the bed", "Dad & the BELT, Noah, and many others." We loved his show Thursday nights on NBC. He held the sell out crowd fascinated for over two hours entertaining, enlightening, and dispensing personal wisdom through humorous obervations on fatherhood and families which made ordinary life seem magical. Young and old, kids and parents alike felt like he was speaking to them.

He invited a fellow graduate of Central High school in Philadelphia to join him on stage where they sang thier Alma Mater.

He finished the show with his classic dentist routine.

The dentist drills some more and you hear him make a mistake. [He makes motions
and sound of a dentist drill slipping] And to cover it up, they all say the same thing: "Okay, rinse." After rinsing in a dentist's office, you're gonna spit into this miniature toilet bowl. You have no bottom lip so you let it all fall out and say, "Thank God for gravity." Now you want to sit back, but you can't because hanging from your bottom lip is a long line and you can't get it off your bottom lip. Oh, if you wanna be gross, you can grab it and throw it over there. But you try to be smooth about it. And there's breaking over here and there's breaking over there. You try to blow it off. Just vibrating. So you figure, maybe if you sit back, it will snap in half. So you sit back. Now you have a line from the bowl to your bottom lip. The dentist looks at it and says, "Oh, look, a rainbow!"

By the end I was laughing so hard, tears were rolling down my cheeks. I haven't had that good a laugh in a long time.

"Our Town," Thornton Wilder: A great playwrite, but a lousy navigator

I had the great pleasure of taking in Trinity Repertory Company's production of "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder last night. This timeless American classic in three acts is fresh and relevant as though it was written yesterday. I had seen "Our Town" performed once before, over 20 years ago at the Summer Theater in Ogunguit Maine.

The play begins with the Stage Manager narrating.

The name of the town is Grover's Corners, New Hampshire-just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes. The first Act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901.

I read that the fictional town of Grover's Corners was modelled on Peterborough, or perhaps another small New Hampshire town, so I mapped the location. To my surprise the position is off the coast of Cape Anne in Sandy Bay near Rockport, MA at the approximate location of Dodge Rock. I would like to think that anticipating the success of "Our Town," Wilder intentionally selected this nearby offshore location to preclude future comparisons of Grover's Corners with a real place.




Despite this minor geographical detail, both the script and Trinity's production deliver simple, but compelling messages about the human condition.



Our Town helps the audience focus on the deeper meaning of life which often slips by unnoticed among the rush of mundane everyday tasks like making breakfast, getting children off to school, and choir practice.

Now there are some things we all know , but we don't take 'em out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they loose hold of the earth... and the ambitions they had...and the pleasures they had...and the things they suffered...and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth-that's the way I put it,-weaned away.

And they stay here while the earth part of 'em burns away, burns out; and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what's goin' on in Grover's Corners.

Some of the things they're going to say maybe'll hurt your feelings-but that's the way it is: mother'n daughter...husband 'n wife...enemy'n enemy...money 'n miser...all those terribly important things grow pale around here.

Babies are born, a couple falls in love, marries, some grow old.

Emily's final scene is a reminder to celebrate and savor life today and every day.

"Oh Mama, just look at me one minute as if you really saw me.


I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another." She goes on, speaking so only the Stage Manager can hear: "I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed."

Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975. "Our Town" won the Pulitzer prize for Drama in 1938.

I recommend you see it if you get a chance. Playing now through March 4, 2007
Regards,
Chuck

Quotes from "Our Town" were taken from Twelve American Plays, 1920-1960 Edited by Richard Corbin & Miriam Balf, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY 1969

Here is Trinity's Video Clip about the play.
Our Town at TRC