The Best Night Out

Civic Center Music Hall

I grew up in small town Oklahoma. As a teen, we lived in a college town on the northern edge of Oklahoma City, it was still a small town and quite separate from The City, but....

The college afforded us access to things other small towns lacked. We could swim in the college indoor pool year round. We could use the college library in addition to our school library and the local public library. Plays were performed by the drama department. There were recitals and concerts, poetry readings, and art shows. We had a veritable smorgasbord of the arts by college students, instructors, and invited professionals. Consequently, I developed a taste for that kind of entertainment.

Now in the time of Covid-19, here I am living within easy access to a big city, complete with all these things from multiple colleges and universities plus the Denver Museum of Art, Colorado Symphony, and Colorado Ballet. Let me just say, Colorado Ballet is an excellent company and Denver has an excellent ballet audience.

We have travelling Broadway shows, and big-name concerts at top venues. Red Rocks Amphitheater is almost within sight of my house -- if you take away a couple of ridges and lots of trees.

But not right now. The doors are closed. The halls are silent. The lights are out.

So I'm remembering the best night out I ever had -- keeping in mind, I've had many best nights out.

This one, though, came when I was living in a different small town in Oklahoma. Guthrie, Oklahoma to be exact. A perfectly fine small town. Actually, as small towns go, it wasn't quite that small. It was and is the County Seat which means it had more than its fair share of lawyers and doctors. It had a daily newspaper, plenty of restaurants specializing in good, hearty food -- one that could actually qualify as fancy (and expensive.) A movie theater, a drive-in movie theater, and umpteen history museums (Guthrie was the Territorial Capital of Oklahoma.) The Masonic Temple sits on a hill overlooking the city. It has a very fine pipe organ and the nicest Ladies' Room I've ever been in complete with a baby grand piano in it's sitting room. The only Ladies' I've ever been in with a sitting room.

But you know, sometimes you just need to get out of your day-to-day life in your safe but too familiar small town. You need to see people you don't know.

A fellow single mother and I drove out of Guthrie to The City. Her daughter and my son were with their respective fathers so we had no immediate responsibilities.

First there was dinner at a restaurant fancy enough to have semi-private booths, cloth table cloths, and cloth napkins. Then we sat with hundreds of people we did not know at Civic Center Music Hall watching the Oklahoma City Ballet. Oklahoma City has the best ballet audience! They actually feel free and know when to applaud instead of waiting until the end of a performance.

From there we went to a jazz club for more good music and a drink or two, some good conversation and maybe a bit of flirtation.

The club closed, but we weren't ready to go home yet. Or at least not all the way home. So to the Hill Top Cafe in Guthrie. The Hill Top was one of those tiny 24-hour places with stools at the counter facing the grill, some booths around the outside walls and two long communal tables down the middle of the floor. It caught folks when the bars and clubs closed and, because it was just down the road from the VFW Hall, it caught all those folks, too, after they had danced and drank their Saturday night away. In The Hill Top at that hour, we could see any hair style, any clothing style, any age group over 21.

And even some people we knew. People who had also broken away from their mundane small-town life for whatever their style of best night out might be.

Finally, as the sun came up, she dropped me at my house. There is just something wonderful about ending your best night out, safe in your own small town at the hour you most often got up.

John Irving's In One Person -- A Rumination

I finished reading John Irving’s In One Person last Friday. I hurried up and read the last 40 or so pages and then it was done. And I was sad that it was done.

Since I took up writing seriously, I discover that I read like a writer. Much more analytically. I pay attention to the construction of a novel, the introduction of characters, the weaving of the different characters’ story lines into the overall fabric of the novel, and the movement of the main character through his own story arch. I watch as he is touched here and there, sometimes it’s a gentle nudge, sometimes a heave from a volcanic force.

John Irving writes from a writer’s point of view. Deus ex machine is oft maligned by writing teachers and editors as a writer’s escape from “having written himself into a corner.” Irving does it without writing himself into any corner. He quotes Shakespeare and talks about wrestling and small-town stereotypes. It’s all done with a wink and a nod and makes me laugh at the jokes like I’m an insider.

Much of In One Person is set in an all-boys prep school in a small town in Vermont. “we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.)” Billy’s grandfather and his grandfather’s friend like to deer hunt on cross country skis at night.

Of course, I know this will have significance later in the story, whether for good or ill I don’t know. But at this entry it’s funny. Complete with a disapproving game ranger who has no law with which to stop the activity.

I laugh. Because I love Shakespeare and lived in a small town in far southeast Arkansas with people not unlike those small-town Vermonters. Where deer hunting is an important foundation of the culture and young people hunt deer out behind the McDonald’s before school.

I have been told that I do not write reviews because I do not write about what the book is about. It seems to me that the book, if it’s a good book, will do that. It doesn’t need my help.

But in this case I can let John Irving tell you himself. “In One Person is about a young bisexual man who falls in love with an older transgender woman.” And I will add that Billy Abbot is the first person narrator of this story. Irving goes on to say “Billy learns – in part, from being bisexual – our genders and orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter.”

In a video on his website, Irving says “To really and truly be tolerant of everyone’s sexual identity, it’s not easy. This is a story about that.”

“Billy is not me,” Irving says. “He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager. Most of us don’t ever act on our earliest sexual imaginings. In fact, most of us would rather forget them – not me. I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings – to be honest about what we felt like doing.”

I have often said that what I like about John Irving is that he does perversion and tragedy with such good humor. I will have to use a different word. Perversion carries too negative a connotation.

I am not alone in this shift of perspective. “From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones – the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell – who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs.” -- Esquire