Silence Day Four

Each school day morning we drive three children from three families the short distance to their school. One of the children is the daughter of a couple that speaks very little English. The child herself is bilingual and even though she is sometimes called upon as interpreter we try hard to communicate directly with her mother who brings her to our house five days a week. Her mother is a delightful and very funny woman and it would be very amusing to watch us trying to understand each other with her shards of English and my wife’s schoolgirl Spanish and my smattering of Spanish words. Somehow we have managed to become great friends, we’ve been out to dinner with them, we get each other’s jokes. It isn’t that much more difficult communicating with these friends without speech. It reminds me a little of when I was hitchhiking through Europe and trying to tell French and Italian and German drivers where I was headed. Some things can be easily understood: the very first person who ever picked me up was a man who propositioned me with a mixture of French and fingers and whom I politely declined, choosing to be dropped in the rain next to a public toilet in which I spent the night. One of the difficult aspects of our friendship with the smattering of English/smattering of Spanish friends is that they feel some debt is owed to us because we own a car and they don’t and they seem to feel that we are doing them some great favour. This results in their sweeping leaves up around our yard as some sort of recompense and generally trying to clean up. It so happens that my mother spent much of her working life cleaning and serving and I am very sensitive to this. I find myself wanting to say – Stop, you are not my employees, you are my friends, you owe me nothing. I do in fact say “!Para”, Spanish for “stop” and this seems to have little effect. I now have no voice and when the daughter started to sweep leaves this morning I simply walked over, grabbed the broom and threw it down the length of the yard. Sometimes the inability to speak is quite liberating.

The instinct for speech is very strong. Even encountering the dog I can feel myself about to greet her and banter with her. She can no longer hear anything other than a shrill whistle and is blind in one eye and I find myself approaching her without her being aware. Despite her advanced age and her near deafness and blindness she still loves to walk. She runs, well, totters about, like a deranged puppy with motor function difficulties and will stagger around the neighbourhood for as much as an hour, sniffing everything, finding out who has passed by recently, smelling the trail of a skunk or that annoying inbred midget dog from across the way. Mostly she is searching for two things: food that has been cast aside and cat feces. Dogs love to eat cat feces. This trait in our dog has become quite pronounced. Perhaps it’s the equivalent of soft food for old people. Along the way we encounter other dogs and their owners (sorry, guardians) some of whom have been watching me walk the dog with my daughter for more than ten years since we first moved to this area, some encountering us for the first time. They are always astonished that Daisy the Dog is still alive or mystified by how that creature manages forward motion. Those who do not know Daisy ask how old she is. The answer to this now entails reaching into my pocket and pulling out my notepad, finding the page on which is written, “I have had throat surgery and cannot speak” and using my fingers to indicate eighteen years. Then I have to point to the dog in case they think I am barred from speaking for eighteen years rather than indicating the dog’s age. All this could be avoided if I were a rude person. If I were the sort of person who considers small talk beneath him. I sometimes wish this were the case but I am a polite person in a superficial sort of way and I end up in conversations with people I barely know whose obsessions and concerns are understandable but not of the least interest to me. At least for now I can avoid conversation with the woman who is in the awful process of getting her child into school and addressed the subject with me, assuming that I would be of help, having a child in school myself. She is not to know that I find that particular subject less interesting than my dog’s bowel movements and, again, I show good manners by engaging her. It turns out that she knows of my daughter’s school and has been there to take a look. She does not think she will send her child there, she says. I imagine that this statement is intended to draw me into a defense of the school, some attempt to convince her that where my child goes is better than where she might otherwise send her child. In reality I could not care less. My failure to jump to the defense of my daughter’s school elicits, unbidden, the reason she does not feel the school is right for her family. There is not enough shade. I will repeat that for those who are staring at the page wondering what the woman actually said, rather than the silly words that I have clearly put in her mouth. She said, there is not enough shade. Yes, there is someone in this world, probably not alone in her worry, whose major criterion for the choice of her child’s school is that it should have sufficient shade. My first thought might have been something along the lines of, I wish I could develop a growth of some sort on my vocal chords so I never have to engage in this sort of conversation again. In fact I believe it was more in the vein of, Daisy’s feces looked good and solid today, that’s encouraging. That my thoughts were not on this woman’s concerns for her child’s risk of skin cancer probably registered with her and we parted, mutually bemused I expect, she by my unconcern, I by the ever increasing amazement that overwhelms me whenever I am forced to talk to people about their children.

Silence Day Three

I rarely remember my dreams but last night, though the details are unclear, I spent my time dreaming that I was speaking and then being brought up short by the realization that I shouldn’t. I wonder if I was making noises in my sleep to match my dreams. I went to the movies last night (Moneyball, very good) and as I left I accidentally clipped the heel of the man in front of me and automatically said, or sort of aspirated, “oops, sorry”. First of all a dread descended that I had just ruined my voice by that simple utterance and all this surgery and silence was for nothing. Then I began to wonder why the clipping of a stranger’s heel elicited sound while dealing with my daughter’s moods or the necessities of daily life do not. We seem to be programmed as a species to be more concerned with what strangers think of us than what our family and friends think of us. Is it that we fear the stranger might turn on us while our families generally realize that the clipping of a heel is simply ineptitude or accident? Presumably the family, knowing they are stuck with us and we with them, let such things pass and we generally know the limits of patience of those closest to us. The stranger, however, may be volatile, perhaps he has had a very bad day and might decide that my clipping of his heel is the last straw and all the frustrations of his day will come bursting forth in an attack on the heel clipper. He might be particularly angered by a clipper of heels who blithely continues on without a word or, worse, a possibly lunatic clipper who is gesticulating meaninglessly, trying to communicate through signs and gestures in the middle of the entrance lobby of a large movie theatre while hundreds watch the strange pantomime, an embarrassing farce for all concerned. Far more likely that we utter apologies left and right because we know that it helps grease the wheels of our days and costs us little. Apologies within families are delicate negotiations, upon them depends the fragile balance that is required to keep the whole strange edifice standing, or at least no more than tottering.

I have noticed that people start whispering sometimes when I indicate that I cannot speak. I went into the convenience store over the road from our house and let the owner know I am not speaking and he seemed apologetic and started to whisper. He accompanied this whispering with a sort of cringe, a bowing of the body and a slight shuffling as though he was in thrall to my reduced condition. I could not work out if this was because he feared a loud voice might shatter something in me or worsen my condition even though it is in no way connected to my ears. His is not an unusual reaction though a little emphatic perhaps. Those who know me usually laugh. Someone as opinionated as I ought to be the butt of jokes at a time like this. I caught a snippet of Sacha Cohen’s movie “Borat” the other night and remembered my reaction to it which the snippet confirmed. Americans, or more specifically people in the United States, are unfailingly polite to strangers or to those they do not know well. Familiarity breeds mockery. The man in the store knows me and my family as the buyers of bottles of wine and beer, occasional junk food and emergency toilet paper and he does not speak much English. The people at my local coffee shop, those behind the counter and the drinkers, know me and my daughter as voluble and garrulous and sarcastic and react accordingly. All are sympathetic, of course, but sympathy can come in the form of quiet glee at my condition, an opinionated man free with his theories and notions brought low by a small growth that might have been designed specifically to humble him.

As I drove home this evening I saw a billboard for the local television news and I realized that if I had a voice and another person in the car I would venture the question: Why does anyone watch local television news? It is beyond awful. I mean Maury Povich is awful, a lot of the Disney Channel is awful, the E channel is awful but Povich, Disney and E are awful in a thrilling, truly exploitative way. Maybe not Disney. You should know that I think Jerry Springer is a genius, by the way. Local news, though. Who still watches it? Millions, I presume, who want to know how the latest supermarket opening went, how the junior high basketball team fared in Nowhere Suburbia. I can sort of understand why someone might watch the weather forecast in Chicago or Denver where they actually have weather, but why would you care about the weather forecast in southern California? I can give it to you now. Warm and sunny. Besides you can get the weather forecast any time you please on the internet without the dancing bear and the smug commentary from surgically enhanced nincompoops who think Johnny Carson was the height of western culture. Don’t get me wrong, he was very good was Johnny Carson, but you know what I mean. The reason that local news has prodded me into ranting opinion is that while not talking I notice things more. Self help books seem to advise that we should all notice the world around us more, take time to look and listen. I have lots of looking and listening time and it’s not a great improver of life. It’s mostly billboards advertising local news. Mind you self help books also advise letting go of your anger and that’s the last thing you want to do. Greatest force for change in the world. Maybe it will force me to campaign to get rid of billboards with people who have had plastic surgery.

Silence Day Two

In this silence I communicate mostly by notes. I carry a pad and pen. Here are some of the scribbling from my first full day of not speaking:

Bathroom

Steroid tomorrow or today?

I have to eat.

Spit does not hurt so much.

Surgery was very successful and I will feel well.

You need sleep.

I have often played charades and quite well.

Another cop. His friend.

Alice did it.

Tazer.

I sent her to bed.

Uli.

Confusing.

More pills than an old man.

3.30 a.m.

I moved the seat. Try it.

If they enclose the dog will you go?

We rarely remember much of what we say, I know I don’t, and now the reason is clear. It’s usually not worth taking up brain capacity for the odd little things we seem to care about. That might be the great lesson of these ten days: a good deal of what we say is just space filler. There is the Pinter view of conversation as pure power negotiation, the need to dominate or gain concession. So far silence is not getting me closer to dictatorship even within my own family. I am now much closer to ape than I was two days ago. I have banged the dining room table with my fists several times to express the common emotions of the average parent, raging fury and incoherent rage. We men are always being told by the women in our lives and in our reading material that we do not express our emotions enough. After all these millennia of coupling and parting, of raising children, of grappling together and apart with life the truth of the matter is that men are either happy or enraged and women do not like that. Men are binary creatures and any attempt to make us anything else is futile. Now that I am silent I can indulge my binariness and ingest Vicodin, take my steroids and my antibiotics and smash my fists on the table. Fathers have the great advantage over mothers of not worrying that their children like them. Or perhaps that’s just me. Mothers so want their children to like them while fathers want to do enough to get them a few moments of peace and quiet regardless of what their children feel about them. Much like the binary nature of men this is something that cannot be changed. This is not some startling insight that has come through silent contemplation. I have noticed this element of family life from its very beginning and now have nothing but time to spend writing it down. I should write that child rearing book I have been threatening so long wherein parents can learn the value of more television, the stupidity of homework and general parental amnesia. For some reason most parents have forgotten how dreadful much of childhood was – and I had a relatively happy childhood. I never ask my daughter how school was. I know it was tedious beyond description. It was, is and will be forever dreary. I ask my daughter if school was just as boring today as everyday and occasionally she surprises me by telling me, no, it was quite good today. Her favorite part of the day is always recess. So was it for us, so will it be for our grandchildren. All you out there spending hundreds of thousands on that fancy school, don’t kid yourselves. The paint job is nicer but it’s all a grind.

I began this odyssey to speechlessness with a diagnosis (almost certainly accurate) of acid reflux damaging my vocal chords and was put on a radical anti-acid diet. No alcohol, no coffee, no tea, no dairy, no tomatoes, no herbs or spices of any kind, no red meat. An endless lists of No. There came a point where my weight loss was so great it exceeded that of cancer patients (I kid you not). While I have been on this diet many friends have asked me if I feel better. No, I do not. I am not more energetic, I am not calmer, I am not more relaxed or more inclined to exercise. I am hungry. Get thinner, by all means, if that’s important but do not buy into the notions the experts sell that it will make your life exponentially more anything. Washing up is not more interesting when you weigh less, neither is making your child’s lunch or attending back to school night, the dog is still ancient and deaf and blind and falls over when you walk her, the things that annoy you about other people and the things that you love and adore about them are no different. You really are just hungrier.

Silence Day One

I am sitting in imposed silence. I wish I were sitting in imposing silence. Perhaps following some quietly but ferociously delivered command to my daughter who weeps and wails but nevertheless does as she is told, not because of the ferocity of my delivery but because of the bottomless depths implied by my silence. No, my silence is imposed by a surgeon who today removed a cyst from my vocal chords. The saga of the temporary dying of my voice is not the point of this exercise but suffice to say that an actor losing his voice is a deeply disturbing experience, particularly when said actor has no other skills in the world than those that allow him to stride a stage, interrupt light between sun and camera and talk into a microphone. More particularly so when this individual has had, for some considerable time, the great blessing to have earned his living acting rather than doing the awful things which once put food on the table and coffee in the cup. Some consider office temp work the very lowest rung and I have done a lot of temping and it is a sucker of the soul but I have worked the night shift in a razor blade factory, changed light bulbs forty hours a week and cleaned Greek toilets, the last of which gained me the grand sum of a bed for the night in a youth hostel. If you think the Greeks’ inability to pay their debts is their biggest problem you might want to test (or avoid) the quality of their plumbing. This surgical silence will last for ten days and I have decided to make a daily record of what it is like, firstly, to be someone who speaks both for a living and at great length in his normal life and, secondly, to negotiate life in one of the world’s largest and busiest cities without a voice. I should also mention navigating the ins and outs of spouse and ten year old child. My wife has already commented that I must be terrible at charades. This is a deeply humiliating opinion to offer to an actor. It does not help that my handwriting is not the most legible. Somewhere in all of this I have to go and have dental work done and I suppose I should be grateful at not having to respond to the dentist’s chit chat with the usual incoherent grunting while she has a suction pump and a tooth prong in my mouth. I imagine dentists do not call any of their tools tooth prongs but I am only an ill informed former temp worker and bog cleaner.

Today has been a half day of silence since I did not emerge from surgery and anesthesia until the early afternoon. I awoke with a very sore neck, more specifically a sore cervical spine. In order to get a scalpel – apparently a very tiny scalpel – down my throat my head had to be kept at an extreme backward angle in order to make my trachea into something resembling a straight line. Unfortunately, many years ago, I had a bone graft in two dislocated cervical vertebrae and my head really doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore. However, necessity and all that. The tip of my tongue was numb apparently from a topical anesthetic. Presumably used to ameliorate the pressure from some sort of clamp that held my tongue as far out from my mouth as possible. Or does someone just hold it for an hour? When the painkillers wear off my throat is very sore and I find it hard to swallow. When I take the painkillers, though, the pain is minimal and I am amazed at how well all this seems to have gone so far. I won’t mention the book narration I was offered last night that was both a fascinating subject and worth several thousand dollars and which I had to turn down. I hope no one from my mortgage holder is reading this. I would have said “my bank” but the notion of a bank actually holding your mortgage for longer than the time it takes for the ink to dry on the documents or the length of time it takes to say “mortgage backed security” is laughably old fashioned. And now, silence. My high school (actually a secondary school since it was in England, let’s not let enforced silence muddy our accuracy) was odd in so very many ways and each Easter Week we entered upon a Retreat. Three days of silence which were dedicated to contemplation, prayer and reflection and even more church services than usual. I loved the Retreats. I observed the silence, I prayed fervently and at the end of it I felt renewed and full of spiritual and mental energy. Truly. I sat through meals during which the only sounds were cutlery scraping and one of the students reading from Scripture. It was the oddest experience I’d ever had and, at the same time, seemed uniquely inspiring and uplifting. I admit three days was plenty but I grew to understand the monastic impulse and it returns very strongly when life becomes fraught, the noise level within and without my house grows intolerable and I desperately need some time to write (I was not sufficiently underemployed or impoverished as an actor and decided writing would drive me into the poorhouse). Unlike those Retreats this silence is mine alone and not shared with other adolescent boys and I will report how it goes. I am hoping it will teach me to listen, a skill I failed to pick up early enough for it to make an impression. I imagine the script on which I am currently working will be a polished masterpiece ten days from now. I don’t know what will replace prayer, something I gave up long ago. I’m not really given to meditation, something of which I had my fill while lying immobilized in a hospital for two months with the aforementioned dislocated spine. Perhaps the hefty tome on European history I am reading will finally be finished. Such possibilities.

Yesterday a question was answered and normally the answered question is a reason to celebrate or at least to be relieved that Ignorance has met its match temporarily. However, in this case, the question was: What makes Art possible in the modern United States? People will suggest artists themselves, obviously, working away for little material reward. Or patrons, those with wealth enough to spare some for their passions and sometimes those passions include theatre or painting or dance. The enthusiastic public, of course, why else do we do it? I have the double privilege of knowing the answer to the question and of having been the beneficiary of that answer. I also have the terrible misfortune to have been told that what, or who, makes Art possible in this country has gone from us. She was Melissa Hines, and I know that she made Art in this country possible because we will feel the lack of her drive and her determination immediately. When I first worked in theatre it was in the administration of a wonderful place by the name of The Empty Space, a legendary spot in Seattle that did what all good theatres do: tottered on the brink of extinction while producing work to make the gods weep. Partly because I was young and drank a lot the years at the Space were among the most joyous of my life. I took tickets, I swept floors, I ran the box office and then I did something truly stupid, I decided to cross the divide and become an artist, first as a dialect coach then as an actor and finally as a playwright. In all those years the rock upon which the Space survived was Melissa Hines who was the Development Director or, as I like to think of that position, beggar-in-chief. No one could write a grant the way Melissa could; no one thought so deeply about the reason theatre mattered to a community; no one made a potential patron understand why his or her donation mattered the way Melissa did.

She was much more than a grant writer and an intellectual presence. She baked cookies for the crew on all-nighters as opening approached, she hammered scenery, she swept the lobby, she changed light bulbs that were blown, she was always the last to leave and the first there. While I was faceless in the bar across the street (oh, the Comet, how I loved you) Melissa was tapping away at the very first of what were then known as word processors, the Selectric reserved for fancy letters, not quite obsolete but headed the way of the fountain pen. I rarely saw her flustered, almost never heard an angry word from her. This may have had something to do with her drinking prodigious amounts of coffee. I mean chain drinking coffee. When it was discovered that the Empty Space spent more money on coffee than on new play development I remember thinking, well, that’s Melissa dealt with but what is everyone else drinking? I do remember once when she finally demanded that her vast array of responsibilities be acknowledged in some way. Theatre has a simple way of rewarding people: there is never any money and so a new title has to be invented. This explains the vast number of associate thises and assistant thats. The managing director of the theatre, a great friend, couldn’t believe that even Melissa Hines was complaining, surely this was the end of civilization as we knew it? I suggested that Melissa be given the title, “Melissa Hines: Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Mongol Hordes”. He put this to Melissa, she laughed and left it at that. There was, though, more than a touch of respect in my suggestion because no one I knew then or have known since has ever done as much for the likes of me as Melissa Hines. My various jobs in theatre were subsidized by the money she raised, various buildings in which I worked were rebuilt and paid for by patrons persuaded to give by her dedication and relentlessness. She eventually took over the management of the Space and, in spaces around Seattle, the theatre continued to produce very fine work and I was lucky enough to be in a couple of productions under her leadership. There were still cookies being baked, Melissa still wielded a broom on occasion despite her having the title she had wanted and fully deserved. In her spare time (ha!) she translated and adapted Moliere and saw her work produced. Now, like the Empty Space Theatre, she is gone and our world is smaller and darker and more pedestrian than it was. I shall raise a glass in the Comet Tavern when next I am in Seattle and remember that once that glass was filled with beer partly paid for by Melissa Hines.

I'm Getting an Election

A while back I posted on a website dedicated to my old secondary (high) school. There is a vast array of opinion on the site and it's populated by some very bright people. Some of the posts are extremely conservative and some quite the opposite. There were several topics that elicited opinions from conservative contributors suggesting that all the evils of the modern world could be laid at the door of liberals and liberalism. I countered with what follows and I post it here because it is election time in the US and the truly lunatic conservative fringe is winning nominations to very high office. Since some of the references are obscurely English I shall explain a couple of them for any Americans reading.

"Thatcher, Major and Tebbit" were leaders of the British Conservative party, hard right supply siders contemptuous of working people and the Irish (which isn't really relevant in this context but you have to say it, don't you?) The post to which I was responding had suggested that the "last thirty years" were a liberal hell in the UK when much of the time the government was, in fact, deeply reactionary and intensely moralisitic.

Brixton is a wonderful working class neighborhood in London with a long history of racial and cultural diversity and the very embodiment, for Conservatives, of the hrrors of modernity. I believe the first electrically lit street was in Brixton, memorialized in song by by Eddie Grant.

The last reference to "Michael ..." is Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, who ran against Thatcher and lost by a landslide. Here's a quote from him, proof that he was a man so far above the likes of Thatcher that she was not worthy to touch the hem of his garment, which was usually a very crumpled suit.

"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."

And, so, to the rant. Or faux rant, I suppose.

I've been racking my brain trying to think of a single thing the liberal leftie hippie layabouts have ever done. Couldn't think of a single one. Yes, there was that abolition of slavery but who really remembers that anymore? And full suffrage for all adults but that was fairly minor. Between those things there may have been the outlawing of child labour but now where can you get good cheap workers who can fit in a tight space? Of course some limp wristed leftie will say that some state funded surgeon who sponged off the taxpayer to get his medical degree put my spine back together through the National Health Service but as I remember it took minutes to get a bed pan at night when I really needed to go. Then there was that awful bloody mess of giving the likes of coal miners a decent wage so they could then go and spend that money on things other than necessities and so create the modern middle class and all that horrible stuff like decent restaurants, cinemas, affordable cars and television which just rots your brain and lets the bloody lefties advertise their manifesto and get votes by lying about all this stuff they supposedly helped us get. Like what? Government funded pensions? Since when did old people count? Unemployment benefits - get a job. Cheaper food, they say, by encouraging scientists to create better crops. How are we supposed to keep the Indians and the Chinese in their place if they keep surviving infancy? And I really don't want to hear another poncy pooftah platitudinous prat on the left tell me that equal rights for black people did anyone any good. Sure it created a black middle class and saved the economy of the American South, but what else did it do? It forced the police to start hiding the well deserved beatings the bloody coloureds were always begging for and now they have to do it all in secret because the bloody Japanese government went and subsidized the little yellow bastards at Panasonic and Sony and now everyone has a camera attached to their arse and even a well deserved beating of some recalcitrant negro yahoo ends up on YouTube. Yes, the last thirty bleeding years. Nothing but liberal nancy boys like Thatcher and Major and Tebbit and their bleeding heart let's all just be kind and caring and here's some money from your fellow taxpayers to start your organic commune in Brixton politics, followed by Blair and his namby pamby bombing of hundreds of thousands of Ayrab heathens who really should have felt a good shaft of cold steel up their hindu behinds. It's time we stopped people being allowed to put anything remotely related to rubber on their knobs. That's the real rot right there. Allowing people to have private lives. Yes, you can keep your governmental proboscis out of my nice middle class Tory voting domicile but if I even suspect that someone's shoving various parts up someone else's fundament I want everyone to grab a stone and throw it as hard and fast as you can because if you let that sort of thing take hold next you'll be saying that just because someone discovers that the person they met and liked when they were seventeen and up whose fundament they may well have been shoving any number of things in their perfectly acceptable man-woman hetero conjoining is now simply unbearable, well that's too bad. You're stuck pal. And don't be telling me it's a free society and you can choose whom you'll associate with and what about the kids, eh? Why do you want kids to grow up splitting their time between relatively calm households when they should be subjected to the pleasures of watching their incompatible mother and father lashing out at each other and belting each other with kitchenware? Here's where I really get upset. It's the education system. I'll give you an example. It's 2010. Subtract thirty. Now, you useless shower educated at faecal level comprehensives will never get that but I'll tell you - you just remember that just because the Catholic Church buggers little children by the thousand and denigates women and has a long history of supporting mass murdering fascists don't you forget that they subsidized my education and I now know both the Latin and Greek for Farmer - it's 1980. Yes. Thirty years ago this all started with the bloody commie Labour governemnt of Michael .... wait a minute ....

Another Dud

Whenever I see an article by or about Jonathan Miller, famous for Beyond The Fringe and his subsequent directing career, often in opera, I rush to read it. This is partly because he is a brilliant man and partly because almost everything he says about theatre is complete nonsense. The English newspaper The Independent had an article recently centered on Miller’s declaration that he had not attended a West End play in a decade. Miller went on to talk inanely about his disdain for “modern” theatre and showed his complete lack of understanding of how theatre actually gets made. Despite this I still have a soft spot for the man. How can you not love one of the Beyond The Fringers? However, it was not Miller’s diatribe that ultimately captured my attention. Throughout any article on the internet now various words are underlined and of a different color from the rest of the text. When you click on them they take you to some website or other that tries to sell you something. I have never clicked on one of these because I usually don’t have the time to read another article and I really don’t want to buy whatever they have to offer. How do I know this, you may ask. I don’t. I’m just making an assumption, rather like when scanning television channels I do not rest on the shopping channels because ... well, because. They don’t sell books on QVC. Do they? Anyway, certain words were highlighted in the Miller article, among them the names of his fellow Fringers. I rolled the mouse over Dudley Moore. (Is that similar to walking across his grave?) I was interested in what might be on offer in the web world of Dudley Moore. Those of us of a certain age have no great love for the Hollywood years of Dud’s life but are still quoting lines from his seminal work with Peter Cook. May I, just for a moment, digress? Yes, I may. Would all those people who write about artists, particularly successful artists, please stop blathering on about “unfulfilled potential” and “wasted talent”? On a bad day, hung over, with his head deep in the toilet bowl, Peter Cook was a colossus compared to the rest of us who are trying to cobble together two coherent words with which to attract the attention of even one other human being. Bloody journalists who would give their right gonad to have written three lines in a single Peter Cook sketch should just be quiet in the presence of greatness.

Digression done. I rolled over Dud. I really had no chance to ponder what might pop up relating to him because the balloon thing was there instantaneously. It announced that if I clicked on the Dudley Moore related balloon I would be taken to a site offering cheap deals for travel to and accommodation in Edinburgh, Scotland. Now, it happens that Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities in the world. Even if I had not been there recently I might, under other circumstances, have been interested in information about Edinburgh. Why, though, was it linked to Dudley Moore? I could understand if I had been reading about Rod Stewart. He has familial links to Edinburgh, though the chances of my reading articles concerning Rod Stewart are slim. I doubt he thinks much about the theatre. Let me add that while walking near Edinburgh Castle recently in the pouring rain my family and I heard a pounding bass and somewhat familiar guitar riff and were informed by a homeless man that Rod Stewart was performing at the castle. The song was “Do You Think I’m Sexy?”. Like the later work of Dudley Moore, we of a certain age prefer to ignore later Rod Stewart. I decided to investigate further (the internet sales thing, not Rod Stewart.) I rolled over the illustrious name of Alan Bennett, whose pronouncements on just about anything are a delight and an education. I wonder if he still chats with Jonathan Miller? Given that Bennett’s plays are often in the West End I imagine certain topics are off limits. Rolling over Bennett produced a balloon advertising retirement homes. I suppose, given Bennett’s age and the ages of his likely readers and ticket buyers, there might be some very tenuous link between him and the product offered.

I have been pondering these connections in idle moments of late and can find no possible reason why hotels in Edinburgh would pay good money to a website to link them to mentions of Dudley Moore in newspaper articles. I have tried imagining the meeting in which some eager young sales person is trying – and clearly succeeding – in convincing the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce to pay money to be linked to Dudley Moore. For one thing, what eager young sales person has even heard of Dudley Moore? Perhaps they are trying to capture the business of the three people still living who actually saw the original Beyond The Fringe in Edinburgh in the early sixties. Unfortunately I imagine they are all in retirement homes which they found by rolling over the name of Alan Bennett in an English newspaper.