A bad play lets you see you have a good life

The Column: 06.05.23

I had my first bratwurst of the year Friday evening, during a thunderstorm on 48^th Street and Seventh Avenue, heading for a play, rain pouring down, the Broadway marquees lit up, billboards flashing, lightning overhead, and I stopped at a hot dog stand on the sidewalk, my sweetie holding an umbrella over my head, eight bucks for the brat.

It was an impulse, triggered by my watching my Minnesota Twins on TV the night before beat the Cleveland Guardians in the bottom of the ninth and the Twins ballpark is where I always have a Kramarczuk’s brat and it was important we beat Cleveland because “Guardians” is the dumbest nickname in sports.

The New York guy sliced the brat lengthwise, flattened it under a flatiron on the grill, spritzed mustard on it and stuck it in a bun, and we walked in the downpour to the theater, and this, as it turned out, was the highlight of the evening, the Broadway bratwurst in a thunderstorm.

The play was set in the Sixties in New York and there was a great deal of shouting in it, about politics, psychotherapy, racism, economic injustice, and the actors get to emote and stride about and wave their arms and slam doors in ways that must be very satisfying for them, which New Yorkers did back in the Sixties, I guess, but I’m from the Midwest where we indicate intensity by getting very quiet. I didn’t care for it. When the lights came up for intermission, I was disappointed — I thought the play was over, but my sweetie liked it so we stayed.

Compared to the Broadway brat in the storm, it was not much pleasure, and what bothered me was the feeling that if I’d seen it in the Sixties, when I was in my twenties, I’d have liked it. But Friday was such a wonderful day that I couldn’t get into two hours of anguish.

We took a C train to Broadway and do you know what it’s like when you descend into the subway station and through the turnstiles and walk across the platform as the train slows and without breaking stride you walk aboard the train? It means that everything you did that day was perfect and perfectly timed, and actually that was true.

My love and I were reunited that day after a week apart, my injured knee felt good, and an ophthalmologist back in Minnesota had done a laser procedure on my left eye that cleared up the blurriness so I could now, for the first time in several years, read the paper and see the white baseball on TV as the Twins beat the Guardians (whoever thought up the name should be banned from baseball) in the bottom of the ninth, the game tied 6-6, when Jorge Polanco hit a double to deep right, advancing Christian Vázquez from first to third, and then Willi Castro hit a sacrifice fly to send him home and win. With my improved eyesight I could see that double fall in right. I bought the brat in celebration. The Broadway play did not make a big impression on me.

I’m 80, I remember the Sixties. I went away to college and gained independence, put myself through school, took up writing, married, had a child, and at the end of the decade, a woman at The New Yorker named Mary D. Kierstead, whose job it was to look through the slush pile of submissions from nobodies, picked a story of mine and that was enormous, like a knighthood. I got $600 for it, our rent was $80 a month. I felt lucky. I got into radio.

Walking out of the theater, I thought to myself, “I could write a better play than that,” and maybe I will. A play about an old man eating a magical brat that allows him to travel back to visit his younger self who is highly eager to succeed and the old guy tells the young man to chill out, enjoy life. “I’m you, you’re going to be okay, don’t do dumb things, be happy,” the old man says and he lists some dumb things he did. But young men don’t listen to old men and the young guy thinks he’s a lunatic. It’s a good idea. I need to come up with a title and a second act and of course songs, but I think I’m onto something.

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June 22 Lexington, MA

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