Art Scatter

By Laura Grimes

Certain laws of buying school supplies are writ large in pink Pearl eraser and are never, ever violated. Herewith the laws:

–You will be slightly irritated with yourself for choosing to shop for school supplies at a certain store despite a bitter memory of hundreds of backpacks conspicuously blocking aisles the first week of school last year and were still supposed to be on sale two days later but had suddenly disappeared and been replaced by Halloween decorations.

–You will be slightly irritated with yourself for choosing to shop for school supplies at a certain store even though some mailing envelopes you bought there a few weeks earlier mysteriously never made it into your shopping bag.

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By Laura Grimes

Dear Mr. Scatter,

I see you have delayed your return to the Scatter front for another day. Be assured that this does not reflect poorly on your dedication as a loving father and husband, though I did have to clean out the little black skillet again, contrary to what it says on our marriage contract.

Everything is fine here. Really. Take as much time as you need.

The Large Smelly Boys have called a truce at the dining table, but only because they know that the new Lego catalog will be mine if they don’t.

We are out of leftover pizza.

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By Laura Grimes

Dear Mr. Scatter,

Everything’s fine. Really. No need to hurry home.

Both Large Smelly Boys are making noises about wanting to be an only child, but I’m sure it’s nothing.

The Large LSB has a Judy Garland film on the telly. The Small LSB does not want the Judy Garland film on the telly.

The giant moth you tried to whack with a broom and some choice words is toast. I found it on the stove. It was near the little black skillet.

Don’t worry, I cleaned it — the skillet, not the moth — even though you’re the only one who had eggs for breakfast and it’s etched in the marriage contract that scouring it is your job.

Judy Garland is throwing statues across a room and trashing it. I didn’t know she was left-handed.

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By Laura Grimes

Mr. Scatter has been hogging the blog of late. I forgive him, though. It’s not like he’s been eating bonbons. I know full well that he’s the muscle to my muse, the bacon to my trifle.

Art Scatter works to deliver a full-course meal, and I don’t mind being the pastry chef. There’s no shame in that. Funny writing comes with its own tricks and techniques, craftsmanship honed to a sharp wit.

I can’t do what Mr. Scatter does, and, I hate to tell him, but … let’s just say he suggested adding a line to one of my posts a little while back, which was a great idea in thought, but the words … well, I was at a loss how to delicately tell him that he just cast a lead weight in my lightly flowing stream.

I explained that one of the first rules of humor writing is not to reveal an obvious punchline straight off the bat. Take a joke and yank it in another direction and then yank it again. Come in sly on the side, tease it, stretch it and make people reach for it and discover it for themselves. Therein lies all the fun.

And then I stopped talking. I blinked at my current first husband a couple of times. He blinked back at me. I realized I was explaining the craft of writing … to my husband, of all people. But I was explaining a different type of writing than what he’s practiced for eons. It takes a whole different brain from a whole different angle.

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By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter’s ramble through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 75th anniversary season is closer to its end than its beginning, and it strikes us once again how much this thicket of theater interconnects. A lot of that has to do with the nature of rotating repertory, which gives audiences the chance to see the same actors in a variety of roles and a variety of plays.

Brooke Parks and Christian Barillas, for instance, who play sister and brother Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, return as sister and brother Caroline and Charles Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. Lisa McCormick, who calculates her future so carefully as the practical Charlotte Lewis in P&P, stumbles headstrong into love as the shopgirl heroine in She Loves Me. Dawn-Lyen Gardner, survivor of rape and warfare in Ruined, becomes a lucky lady-in-waiting in The Merchant of Venice. One way or another, love is in the air all over these plays. And couldn’t Merchant almost have been titled Pride and Prejudice?

Sometimes the connecting game is tougher. What could the troubling and abrasive Merchant of Venice and the little musical gem She Loves Me have in common? Not a lot, unless you consider that the source material for She Loves Me (and for the movies Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail) is the Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo, and then go a step further to remember that the Hungary of 1937, the year that Laszlo wrote his little bubble of innocence, held little truck with Jews and would as soon have done without them — a desire that was in the process of being satisfied.

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By Bob Hicks

Lanky and improbably lean-headed, with a cliffside of forehead pierced by a widow’s peak of bristling orange hair, Dan Donohue looks a little like the late-night television host Conan O’Brien — or maybe an O’Brien sired by Loki, the god of mischief.

As Hamlet in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s current production of the Danish play, Donohue wears his jester’s cap naturally, less like a disguise than a key accoutrement to an essential part of his makeup: Hamlet the Fool.

We’ve come a long way from Olivier, the quintessence of the romantically doomed heroic prince. Olivier once talked about the advantages of being not quite short and not quite tall: at about five-foot-eleven, he could shift the sense of his body big or small. Donohue is similarly poised between the comic and the dramatic, at ease in either direction and often, onstage, using elements of one to feed the other: He defies type. In the impenetrable yet irresistible question mark that is Hamlet, it’s an excellent place to begin.

There is no such thing as a definitive Hamlet. A lot of good actors have stumbled in the prince’s shoes, perhaps daunted by the familiarity of the language and previous performances, perhaps unwilling or unable to choose a Hamlet rather than reach for the Hamlet. Donohue is ready for the role. Consciously or subconsciously, he’s been preparing for Hamlet for a long time. On the Ashland stages he’s played Iago, Caliban, Mercutio, Prince Hal — all excellent prep for Hamlet. And anyone who recalls his Dvornichek in Tom Stoppard’s Coward-like farce Rough Crossing, or who sees his brief turn as the waiter in this season’s sparkling revival of the musical She Loves Me, understands his brilliance at deadpan comedy. He knows precisely who he wants his Hamlet to be, and that, combined with his potent craftsmanship and willingness at key moments to simply drop off the cliff and into the abyss, makes this one of the extremely few truly satisfying Hamlets I’ve seen. It’s a wonderful performance, and you really ought to see it.

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By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter, despite its name, is mostly about pulling things together. We examine the daunting scatter of incident that is contemporary culture — this endlessly broad turmoil of emotions, beliefs and events — and gather them together, looking for patterns, similarities, fragments of coalescence. Out of chaos, we seek structure and story. We do this for you, our readers, but also for ourselves, because story, we’ve come to believe, is how we make sense of the subterranean roil of chaos that is life.

Maybe that’s why the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has become an annual touchstone in our lives. Mr. Scatter first came to this company, many years ago, as a professional observer. He’s stuck with it, gradually becoming friend, admirer, devil’s advocate, occasional scold, and in his own small way, participant — as are all who feed the festival with their time, money and attention. Whatever its faults, the festival believes in story, and in the essential wrestling with chaos that story represents: the quest to wrest comprehension from the incomprehensible.

Ah, but how to make sense of a glorious day of theatergoing that begins with the iron filigree of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and concludes with the hellfire and brimstone of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s corrosive drama of Congolese warfare and rape? How, that is, besides the minor comparisons of stagecraft, plot, style and technique (all of which, in both productions, are admirable)? These are two peas that at first, second and even third glance do not appear to come from the same pod.

Your Honor, we call to the witness stand Aretha Franklin and Rodney Dangerfield.

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By Laura Grimes

We’re traveling, we pack of five breathing each other’s air and bumping inside each other’s heads. We eat the same food. We stop from spot to spot, sightsee, and mere snippets intermingle, weave together something anew and haul us along.

Everywhere we go we pick up words and take them with us. They lift us. They quiet us. We break bread with them. We swirl wine with them. They hang in the air among us.

Our books go from suitcase to table to car to kindle to stereo to suitcase to car to lap to bed.

Each time, bits let loose. Literary crumbs pinch and mold into a new story, unique and unashamed. It becomes our own literary travel journal. Jumbled. Weird. Scattered. And somehow cohered.

*

When The Large Smelly Boys bicker in the car, I hit play and they magically silence before the almighty audio book. Nancy Farmer, god bless her. Past summers we plowed through her The Sea of Trolls and The Land of the Silver Apples. Just to be safe, we have along her The Islands of the Blessed on iPod, CD and hard copy. Thank heavens, because we’ve used all of them. In less than a week, the hard copy was devoured by two members of the Scatter Family.

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By Bob Hicks

Ah, the adventures of the road. The brain trust at Art Scatter World Headquarters has packed up and squeezed itself temporarily into the Scattermobile, partaking of adventures large and small. We’ve ingested the oyster and the clam, descended into Devil’s Churn, gazed upon the gathered elk, spied osprey and eagle and hawk, felt the chilling spray of Hellgate Canyon as it soaked the curl from our hair. We’ve dined in the company of Jack London’s ghost at the Wolf Creek Inn. We’ve discovered disturbingly misplaced apostrophes on public signs, dangling hopefully like unacknowledged offspring at the reading of a rich man’s will.

Now we’re in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we’re settling in long enough to take in the nine plays still in repertory, having missed the already departed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Well. It’s a marathon that’s become a tradition of shared argumentation and pleasure. Mr. Scatter, Mrs. Scatter, the Learned Sister and the Large Smelly Boys experience it all, each from his or her own vantage, each with the advantages and handicaps of his or her own delights and prejudices. Late August is high season, and a good time to be doing this: The shows have hit their groove and become pretty much all that they can be.

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By Laura Grimes

When I complained to Mr. Scatter that I had only snippets, no whole stories, he said, “Do centered asterisks.”

“Wha?” I creased my brow.

“Do centered asterisks.”

Like that’s supposed to help me. I’m not sure what the heck he’s talking about.

Oh, wait, there’s one!

*

Oh, heck. Now it’s gone.

The Scatter Family is on the road. At the moment, we’re at the coast. Longtime Scatter readers know that when we’re at the coast, tradition calls for really roughing it — which means we buy a tub of cookie dough and then race to see if we can bake all the cookies before it’s time to leave. So far, our winning streak is perfect.

Some months back, we plowed through a tub of dough, blogged all about cookies and plungers, and got back home to headlines that the cookie dough had been recalled because of an e. coli outbreak. Coincidence?

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