Category Archives: Theater

Opening Night at the Theater with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

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photo by Jordhan Madec on Unsplash. Used with permission

Opening Night at the Theater
with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

There’s an air of raw excitement in the theater tonight.
The ingenues are nervous and the grand dame wants to fight.
Her makeup isn’t done right and her hairdo is a fright.
The set is way too yellow and the stage lights are too bright!

She regales them with stories of when she was at her height.
They wonder just how many great successes she will cite.
It is a frosty evening, yet they brave the cold wind’s bite 
to stand out in the alley to escape the much worse plight

of the thirtieth retelling of the star’s first opening night.
The male lead finally gets here, but, alas, high as a kite.
The orchestra begins their opus, hoping to incite
the audience to wild applause as they get their first sight

of the famous lady, surrounded by pink light
that obscures those telltale wrinkles and a costume that’s too tight.
The ingenues are all in place, ready for the fight,
waiting for the star to speak, then exit to the right.

Then all their minor lines they are ready to recite.
It will be a war of words, and they’re ready to fight.
This era, it will be their turn the audience to excite.
Will they outshine the brightest star? Yes, perhaps they might!

Prompt words today are excitement, stage, frosty, regale and yellow.

NaPoWriMo Day 28: Looking Glass Menagerie

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Looking Glass Menagerie

I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have produced
all of the parts of myself I try to reign in.
This has produced a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.

The prompt today was “to find a news article and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be “just the facts,” your poem doesn’t have to be — it doesn’t even have to be about the subject of the news article itself.”

With massive tornadoes, politician campaign funding fraud, murder and mayhem being the main stories of the day, I was hard-pressed to find any good news to write about. Finally, I chose a very long theater review in the NY Times which I picked at like a foraging chicken, picking a word here, a word there. Above is the resulting poem.

Here is a link to the NY Times article from which  I drew words : NY Times Article