I saw the Central Square Theater's production of Lloyd Suh's The Chinese Lady on Wednesday night. It is the story of Afong May, who is brought from China to the United States at age fourteen in 1834 and put on display in a forerunner of P.T. Barnum's museum and later in the Barnum museum itself. She doesn't quite understand what is happening to her, but gradually as the years go by, she realizes her situation, especially when, at age forty-four, she is about to be replaced, since, as we told, freshly arrived is a new fourteen-year-old cultural curiosity from the Far East. Americans marvel at how Afong May walks in her bound feet, how she eats her rice and shrimp with chopsticks, and how she comports herself in general -- prissily. There is of course a language barrier, but she has a translator and attendant, a Chinese man, Atung, who, as becomes clear when he delivers his monologue, is suppressing his rage at his own situation.

The production could have used better staging, although I understand the financial straits of such a small community theater. I think, too, that Sophori Ngin, who plays Afong May, should have shown more change as the years go by. The sameness may have been the result of a directorial decision, but if so, I think it was an unfortunate one. Atung, played by Jae Woo, expresses a much wider range. Through his varied mannerisms, posture, stance, voice, and gait, I saw and felt his exasperation (at the immature and gullible teenaged Afong May), his lust (for her when she becomes a woman), his anger (at the world that treats him as "irrelevant" at best), and his grief (when Afong May's departure is imminent). Woo also conjures a perfect, cringe-worthy President Andrew Jackson when Afong meets him in Washington, D.C., while she is on a multi-city tour. It's a virtuosic set piece. I wish there were more of them. As it stands, the play is worthy of our attention. I don't think I have finished thinking about it.

On my eleventh birthday, December 19, 1962, my mother was a contestant on the TV game show The Price is Right, hosted by Bill Cullen. There was a daytime version and a nighttime version. Mom was on in the daytime, so neither my father, who was at work, nor my sister and I, at school, got to see it; and, of course, TV shows were not taped back then. For so many years I had intended to go to the Museum of Radio and Television in New York to ask about viewing an archived copy. Finally, finally, I did, a few weeks ago, although the museum has since been renamed the Paley Center for Media. Unfortunately, I did not find that show in its archives, but the helpful woman at the desk gave me the contact information for David Schwartz, who is a game-show aficionado. (See The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, by Scwartz, director of the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology.) If anyone would know where that show was archived, he would, she said. Alas, yesterday, he emailed to say that the network archived only the nighttime programs. So the chance to see my mother on TV has been long lost.

When I tell people about her appearance on the show, they always ask if she won anything. The answer is no, except that she got a consolation prize of a dozen Ship N Shore blouses, which I myself eventually wore. When I was at the Paley Center, I watched one of the shows from the 1960s that they did have available, and two of the four contestants on that evening didn't win anything, either, so maybe it wasn't such an unusual outcome. I do know my mother, a competitive person (a tennis player and golfer), was a bit bummed out about it. She said she wished she had practiced beforehand. But how? She wasn't a enthusiastic shopper, much less a comparison shopper. She also said she was disappointed she didn't really get to meet Bill Cullen. For all the chumminess he expressed to his contestants, he did not interact with them except onstage.

A second question people often ask is how she got picked to be on the show in the first place. It happened because she was in the studio audience and chosen out of that pool for an audition-interview. In fact, she  chosen out of the audience on two separate occasions. The first time, she said my father was a carpenter, which was the truth. She believed that since St. Joseph had been a carpenter, this would somehow work in her favor. When she wasn't picked to be a contestant, she wondered if the rejection had had something to do with Dad being in a union. Faulty logic, to be sure, but in any case, the second time around, she said he owned a storm-window installation business, which he did, H.L. Schinto Co., which was his side job on Saturdays for many years. My Aunt Jean, who was with Mom in the audience both times, was interviewed once, but never picked as a contestant. For the record, her husband, my Uncle Cappy, had his own radio and TV repair business in Brooklyn.  Both my mother and aunt were attractive. That may have had something to do with their initial attractiveness to the game-show's staff. Who knows? What I do know is that I am sad about not having seen Mom on the show in the first place and sadder still that I won't be able to see the show now or ever. Even if she hadn't known the right price of things, she had a winning smile (she was voted wearer of the "best smile" of her high school class of 1940) and probably lost gracefully.

This was one of the best museum shows I've seen in a long time. Went on the first day of its run, October 20, as the doors opened. The paintings, the drawings, the photographs, the videos, the ephemera -- all came together so beautifully to tell the story. The artist is associated with other places, including Cape Cod, but I came away understanding his relationship with his home base so much better and, therefore, came to understand better Hopper himself and the whole body of his work, no matter what its subject. One of my favorite bits was an ephemera display: a long row of torn theater stubs; on each Jo Hopper had written the name of the show they had attended. The signage pointed out that the couple invariably took cheaper (mezzanine) seats, which helps to explain the Hopper perspective in many of his theater paintings. 

My latest piles of leaves, branches, and weeds, along with a roll of ancient, rusty chainlink, ready for the town crew to pick up, as per arrangement. But do they realize that a 70-year-old, 111-lb. woman is doing the work with hand tools (rake, clippers), nothing more? Someone walking by said his sister's goat would be a good one to help me, even with the chainlink. I said, "Bring it on."  But actually I like working alone here. I feel a sense of accomplishment after each session. In contrast to other long-term projects of mine, with this one I can easily see how far I have come (and, alas, how far I have yet to go).

Sunday afternoon, June 5. A conversation on stage at the MFA between Art Spiegelman and Hillary Chute of Northeastern University. Spiegelman was brilliant, as was the interviewer. Together they discussed and illustrated with side by side images the affinities between Spiegelman's work and Philip Guston's, as well as the similarities between the trajectories of their personal lives. The program was in conjunction with the Guston show, still on view. Not to be missed.

Thomas More, whose portrait by Holbein hangs at the current exhibition at the Morgan Library, was insufficiently loyal to Henry VIII, so he was executed. James Comey did not consider any level of loyalty to Donald Trump to be something he needed to concern himself with, so he was fired. That analogy was what occurred to me while seeing the exhibit, after having  just finished watching The Comey Rule on Netflix... Below, Holbein's Mary, Lady Guildford, 1527.  She and her husband were among Holbein's most important patrons. Note the rosary beads wound around her hand, and the rosemary tucked into her bodice.

I went to the press preview of the Guston show at the MFA. Intense, illuminating, fascinating. It is not a conventional retrospective that goes chronologically, exploring, for instance, an artist's various influences, which in Guston's case range from Giotto and de Chirico to Krazy Kat and R. Crumb. Instead, the show is organized to make clear that  while his manner of painting changes dramatically over time, his concerns are consistent, lifelong. To wit: Evil lurks in the world, and what is a mere artist to do about it? The only thing he or she can do: keep on painting. 

I guess they were practicing social distancing on the day this photo was taken...