Tea, Sympathy, Shame, Princess Di

Eleven years ago I played the Deborah Kerr part in a mostly cross-dressed, gender-bending San Francisco community theater production of Tea and Sympathy.* We did a two week run at Luna Sea, and on closing night, someone came backstage at intermission and breathlessly informed us that Princess Di had just been killed in a car accident. The accident happened just after midnight on the 31st in Paris, so we would have been hearing about it around 9 pm on the 30th, a Saturday night.

Was the news a shock? Can I blame the death of Princess Di on the fact that I went back out on stage and promptly forgot a section of my lines in the second half, desperately improvising for a few minutes, and slightly muddling up the blocking? I've had shame about messing up closing night for a long time, and although I haven't watched the film since then, when I saw this morning that today marks the anniversary of Di's crash, I promptly looked up the famous last scene on Youtube. It made me cry.





In the play, she's actually up in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, and as she utters the famous "Years from now-- when you talk about this--" line, she's unbuttoning her blouse rather scandalously.

* From the original script:
"Tea and Sympathy is the story of a lonely and misunderstood youth who, because he has artistic sensibilities and has played women's parts in amateur theatricals, is wrongly suspected of homosexual tendencies. Although the master in whose house he rooms is one of his chief persecutors, the wife of the teacher is kind and understanding as well as beautiful. The play is pretty specific about the physical aspects of the resulting relationship, but it handles it with taste, delicacy and considerable skill."

Sarah Vowell on Obama, Pell Grants, and education

Sarah Vowell: Bringing Pell Grants to my Eyes.

"But I would like to point out that my perfectly ordinary education, received in public schools and a land grant university, is not merely the foundation on which I make a living. My education made my life. In a sometimes ugly world, my schooling opened a trap door to a bottomless pit of beauty — to Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the old movies and old masters that have been my constant companions in my unalienable pursuit of happiness."

BBC News: Hurt feelings worse than pain

BBC News: Hurt feelings 'worse than pain'

Fascinating stuff:

Researcher Zhansheng Chen, from Purdue University in Indiana, said that it was much harder to "re-live" physical pain than to recall social pain.

He said the evolution of a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, which processes complex thinking, perception and language, might be responsible.

He said: "It certainly improved the ability of human beings to create and adapt, to function in and with groups, communities and cultures, and to respond to pain associated with social interactions.

"However, the cerebral cortex may also have had an unintended effect of allowing humans to relive, re-experience and suffer from social pain."

Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte