an english dictionary - p

people: something imperfect

The Great Gatsby is a piece of amazing American art.  After watching and seeing so much European expertise, I had begun to forget that even my stout young country could fork out the good stuff too.  

Gatz is a theatrical experiment eight hours long where the cast reads/acts out the entire novel word-for-word for the audience.  I kept thinking the entire time that it's a mind-blowing way to read a book.  

The play starts in the office of a normal guy whose computer isn't working.  To pass the time he starts reading aloud F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece.  Little by little the office workers around him start to join in and before I knew it, I was imagining parties in New York apartments, summer meals outside, and fast cars.

My first encounter with Gatsby was last September.  I had just gotten back from my 18-month stretch of trying to help people change their own lives.  My eyes more open to the world's tendency to mess up and the cold reality of the difficult imperfections of myself and everybody else, Nick Carraway's story was a transcendent experience.  

Everybody's got a skeleton in their closet.  Everybody's got something to hide deep down somewhere.  And those who think they don't are kidding themselves or being dishonest.

Listening to the entire book being read in one day reminded me of how books can transport me to a place and transform me into a person.  Prose is power because it has little restriction.  As the actor read the story he painted a world.  

Something that plays and movies could never do is describe.   In a play, a person can say it and in a film the camera can show it, but in a book, the teller illuminates the imagination.

That is what was so beautiful about the performance I saw.  It was a playing of the imagination and an illusion brought to life.  

Lesson learned: books are meant to be read.

Fun at Kew Gardens with my friend Brooke