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In Bacchus We Trust pt II

I did what I like to think anyone in my position would’ve done and had my kids perform The Comedie before an audience of their peers, their parents, and my boss. I had no idea how the glob would do all that it said (if it would at all), or if anyone would be able to see it. I worked up a weak story about the glob being a mail-ordered prop in case it made its appearance before the crowd. I told my kids to plan for anything and work with it. I set up the donation bowl by the door, went outside, had a drink, read the foreword aloud, and then took my seat inside at the back of the house.
The lights went up and the show went on. For the entire performance, the crowd was dead, and the show suffered for it. No laughs, no Mhms, no nothing. I’d begun composing my pep speech for after the performance. Yet when the curtain closed on the chorus, the crowd, like one giant amoeba, stood together and cheered like it was the New Year. I’d never seen anything like that in a Podunk theater crowd. The whoops and hollers stayed just as excited for all the bows. Then, when the cast went backstage and the curtain closed again, the cheers died away.
The parents and a good number of the kids in attendance gushed over the show to me. That was all par for the course. The curtain could have caught on fire, or an actress could’ve broken a leg. They just like seeing people they know on a stage. What caught me off guard was my boss shaking my hand and asking me specifics about the district competition. “Now what exactly happens there?”—all that. I motioned at the trophies in the back and talked about how it’d be an honor to bring home another one for our school. He liked that idea a whole hell of a lot. When the crowd left, I went to collect the donations. The bowl was spilling over with twenty and fifty-dollar bills.
We did five more performances, each to larger crowds, and each with larger reactions. The money for the trip was raised by the fourth performance. The kids were proud. My boss gave us the go-ahead for the trip. I decided we’d be doing The Comedie for the competition. Why break the habit?
So cut ahead to the competition. All the high school theater troupes in the district huddled in an eight hundred-seat auditorium. Gale Shudders was making her rounds before the first play of the day, smiling that fake smile of hers, telling everyone to Break a Leg in the same empty way an acquaintance tells you Happy Birthday. According to the program of events, Columbus would be going on right after us. I couldn’t help but imagine what Gale’s smile would look like when she’d hear that she lost for once. I didn’t even care if my kids came in first. So long as we put a dent in Gale’s armor, I could go home happy.
The competition had all the usual fare: a couple quirky comedies, an adaptation of a short story, a smattering of “let’s change the world” plays. It’s surprisingly easy to sneak a flask into a theater. Near mid-afternoon, a stage manager gave us the high sign to go backstage and prepare. You could feel the buzz between all the kids as they unloaded their set pieces and props from the storage spot offstage. The competition allows a troupe forty-five minutes for their entire presentation, including assembling the set, performing the piece, bows, and disassembling the set. The students had to do it on their own. I took that time to pace in the hallway backstage. I could hear the Columbus kids in their dressing rooms, chatting away, unaware of their impending doom.
Gale came out of one of the rooms.
“Hey, Jim” she said almost convincingly.
“Hey, Gale.”
“The Comedie of… Am-fik-toh-nees?”
“Yeah it was just—sittin’ on the shelf in the back a the room.”
“I’ve n—and it’s anonymous?”
“As far as I can tell.”
There was a silence between us.
“So your kids gonna win this thing?” She made a go get ’em gesture on “win”.
“Never know. They’ve got nothin’ but cheers back home.”
“Oh.” Translated: “Have they now?”
I had a good buzz. Fuck her. I told her about my ritual of saying “a corny li’l ‘actor’s prayer’ I found online.”
“Wull say it for me, love to hear it.” She was just humoring me now.
I took the foreword out of my pocket and cleared my throat. I took special care in reading the thing this time, pretending I had any idea of what I was saying. I felt I’d gotten it right for the first time.
Gale laughed as though she found the thing drolly amusing.
“Izzat Greek?”
“Yeah—”
“Mine’s in Latin.”
A quick pause.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah” and she pulled out a sheet of paper and read off a short Latin passage.
“It’s kind of like my mantra—”
“I, I know what it is, Jim. Has yours reappeared to you yet?”
Honesty is the best policy.
“No.”
“Ah. So it’s a new thing? It’ll reappear. It has to sniff you out first. Did it tell you its name?”
“Weh—uh, no. Uh not yet.”
“Mine says it’s Dionysus himself!” She laughed.
I wasn’t a bit sure what was happening, and Gale could tell. She said:
“I’m sure it’s told you all about—the Lenaea Festival, blah blah blah.” I nodded. “This is just what they do. They—you’re gonna hear all about this, believe me. They have been with us since, ya know, since—time began, somethin’ crazy. Dionysus told me that he thinks of us as children. Not in a condescending way, but it’s because he’s just so much older. Whatever. They like watching us, and they like all the things we do. They’re not evil or anything. They’re just there.”
“What the hell…”
“I asked the same thing, more or less, and Dionysus said that there’s this ‘Grand ol’ Scheme’ we’re a part of, and that life as we know it is this, uh, ‘cosmic whisper’, something like that. Basically: do what you want, it’s inconsequential. Is what I got from it.”
“And you just use it to, for the, for the competition? So you can win?”
“Yeah” she shrugged. She sounded like a mother confessing the truth about Santa Claus.
“How is it, uh… How did you get the—Dionysus to do his, his ‘thing’ with another play?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mine said it could only uh, affect an audience if we were doing The Comedie of Amphiktyones. Yours lets you do any play?”
“Yeah. You know, that’s probably a lie. They also lie. I don’t why, but they’ll fib and they won’t mention it again. One time, Dionysus told me that within an hour, I would be dead. I called my husband and told him I loved him. Chatted for a bit. An hour went by, two, three. Nothin’ happened. It was weird.”
“The fuck?”
“I don’t know. But it keeps showing back up, and the uh, the ratio of lies to truths is pretty good. I trust him, in a general sense.”
Neither of us said anything for a while. Eventually I checked the time and knew the show was nearly over.
“’Bout that time, I said.”
“I’m sure they loved it,” she said with a plaster smile.
“I’m gonna meet ’em at the door. Break a leg, Gale.”
“May the best god win!” she called out to the hall. What a cunt.
I pressed my ear to the stage door and heard the final lines of the play. There was a moment of silence, and then raucous applause. I thought To hell with competition, I love my kids.

In Bacchus We Trust

Okay, the week before school started, my boss came to my classroom to talk about the budget. He was arguing that he couldn’t OK the class trip to the District Thespian Competition, because he had to wait and see if my drama kids could work up enough money for that (his words) three-day field trip. I didn’t argue anything. I just sat in my chair, nodded, and made affirming sounds through my nose until he said something about looking forward to the school year and left. At some point he threw in a “gonna be a great year, Jim” for good measure.
I’d been expecting that talk for some time. There are worse things to worry about in the scheme of things. One time my flask fell out of my jacket during a pep rally. Nothing came of it, so I guess no one noticed, but for the rest of that year, any time my boss wanted to talk, my adrenal would shit itself.
So anyway: classes started, and I let my kids know that the public school system had forsaken them, that they’d likely be selling candy to their peers to raise money, and that righteous anger is a good thing. With twenty-two kids in the class, each with one box containing forty pieces of candy at one dollar apiece, each student would have to sell Christ, I don’t even fucking know. Before the end of the day, I nixed the candy idea. When I was in school, we raised money by performing plays. That’s why we were in the class. Call me an old fashioned gal, but I thought it’d be inappropriate to do anything else.
In the back of the room sat the school’s prestigious dramatic library: an ancient five-tiered bookshelf, found in some colonial Puritan’s home by the looks of it. I skimmed over the shelves. At the top were the mainstays: Damn Yankees (kitsch), Little Shop of Horrors (overdone), The Music Man (ew). The middle was crammed with dime a dozen, hyuck-hyuck scripts, mostly fairytale parodies. The bottom shelves were nothing but Marlow, Goethe, Bill Shakespeare—all those guys. I was hard pressed to find a show. When you do popular modern plays, audiences have an expectation of how songs ought to be done, how characters ought to be played. The prestige hurts more than it helps. None of the hokey scripts caught my attention. Acting is getting an audience to believe a collective lie, and cutesy plays about Hansel and Gretel set in suburban Arizona don’t exactly make the task any easier. And the accepted classics just ooze pretension at the high school level. Though Gale Shudders of Columbus High did a one-act version of Orpheus and Eurydice set in space a few years back. I haven’t been able to look her in the eye since. What’s more, the show claimed first place that year, something Columbus High’s Drama Department was well known for doing.
There was a time when my school brought home trophies. This was years before I showed up. Sitting on top of the bookshelf were the plastic idols themselves: tokens from the mid-’80s through to the early 2000s. I was going through the bookshelf during my planning period one day when I stopped to admire the trophies. I told myself “It Just Takes Dedication.”
I stood on a chair to get a good look at the trophies. Engraved on the base of each of them were the year, the various student performers’ last names, and the title of the pieces that had been judged. I noticed that the same play was on almost all of the trophies: The Comedie of Amphiktyones. I’d never heard of that—could much less pronounce it. I figured maybe it was some sort of tradition from way back.
I saw that the tallest trophy, first place ’94 (it was also the most recent first place), was set on top of an old, brown booklet, which I took in my hand. The title was faded on the front, but the spine had spindly, handwritten letters. It was The Comedie of Amphiktyones. “I’ll be damned.” I decided to read the play. Worst-case scenario: I end up choosing another play.
My free period was practically over, so I read the play at home that night, scotch in hand. It was an anonymous translation. “From the original Greek”. Good start, no royalty check. The play itself was OK. A foreword, To the God, still in Greek; overwrought dialogue; hubris out the ass; and Dionysus himself as the deus in the machina. Nothing that hadn’t been done before in other better plays. Still, for whatever reason, it was The Comedie that kept popping back into my mind any time I went perusing other scripts.
Back then, I was all about making schedules, and the time was coming for me to choose a show for the fundraiser. It was too late for me to write an original piece. Also, the last of my plays the kids performed was skewered by the judges (one of whom was Roy Weiss, who just can’t get over things in the past, so really it’s no surprise it bombed). I thought for a bit about the class, about how athletes are exalted and artistes patted on the head, about the whole damn totem pole of attention. If my kids had to earn their keep, they’d do it with the same material that other kids in their position had.
One night after a few drinks, I tore into the play. I outlined the structure but couldn’t figure out the tone we should aim for. Tone is that all-important element that dictates how seriously an audience will take your piece. Every high school that does a Greek piece invariably dresses the kids up in white togas and shiny ribbon. No thank you. But what, if not bed sheets and sandals? Then I remembered the foreword, To the God. After much googling, I’d sort of translated the piece, and found a linguistic guide for the Greek. By this point I was pretty warm, and decided to give the original foreword a try. I stammered the words out, and wasn’t entirely sure if I’d gotten them right. Then a chunk of my ceiling collapsed onto the carpet in front of me, and I spilled watered-down scotch all over my lap.
I stared at the plaster on the floor for a bit, then at the hole in my ceiling. About the time I decided it was alright to move, a lime colored glob fell out of the hole and onto the plaster. It looked about as solid as Jell-O, and I could see through it. I went for my phone, which was in my pocket. Then the blob formed into a kind of squat popsicle shape, about as tall as a barstool. It sprouted fucken tentacles, and I forgot how to move for a few minutes.
All of a sudden this wave of warm air hit me. This is hard to relate, but thoughts were coming to me. I’ll say I was gaining knowledge, but it felt like I’d already known this stuff. I suddenly knew that this thing was the god of the play’s foreword, and that the reading of the text was what summoned it from some place outside of this reality (whatever the hell that means). It had last been summoned at the Lenaea Festival over two thousand years ago, and was bound, per the invocation (the foreword, I guess), to delight our audiences during every performance of The Comedie we gave. Should we perform the play in a contest, like the Lenaea, we would be guaranteed a victory. If we performed for royalty, we’d be honored like nobles. I thought I was gonna throw up. I blinked, or my attention shifted, something, and the glob was gone.