Ionesco’s play about the disintegration of order and the reconciliation with death was very slightly altered by the Cameri to be a portrait of Bibi as a leader who refuses to die after the had caused the deconstruction of his kingdom.  Last month someone got up from the audience to protest this treason, but our audience was very positive.  Although I didn’t stay for the reception because I thought I  had left my glasses at Orit’s and I was terrified that I might have lost them on the street somewhere, I could feel the positive vibrations about the play throughout.

My glasses turned up.  Left them wrapped up in the shawl I was going to wear in the air conditioning.

But I had a feeling that my uneasiness might have been caused by something else.  And then I remembered an unpublished poem of mine on the subject:

Commencement, 1966

 

 New York Times:  ROCHESTER, April 14–Students and faculty at the University of Rochester have begun a drive to prevent former Vice President Richard M. Nixon from receiving an honorary degree when he delivers the university’s commencement address.

 

 

So Parish is asleep on the couch

and Steve is dancing with Friar’s wife-to-be

and me I am on the side taking pictures,

and feeling out of place, I head for home.

 

But dissatisfied and incomplete I go out again

to a party from my Shakespeare seminar

in a bar on Genesee Street

(In the apartment above that same bar

Mark and Gary and I used to read

Ionesco together and drink Leibfraumilch

and I had no idea the two of them

were beginning to fall in love.)

 

And it is a dreamy mid-summer’s eve

and I wind up kissing John Glossup

who would probably rather be kissing

Jennifer who he would soon marry

but she had already finished the year before

and we were a week away from graduation

and she was already teaching in Toronto.

 

And suddenly when Richard Nixon is speaking

at the ceremony we were not permitted to avoid

and my chair is tied to the graduate’s next to me

and my diploma is locked on the stage

pending acquiescence, it hits me

 

that the world I thought I knew would end not

with the all’s well that ends well of Shakespeare,

but the absurdist nonsense

of the play where nothing is resolved

and chairs fly off the stage, The Bald Soprano.