Seeing "Selected Shorts"

When I first moved to the San Jose in 2000, I didn’t know a soul. Driven by ambition, hubris, curiosity and the desire to get out of the socio-political and heat environment of Texas, I went as far to the West as I could. I remember driving up from the Central Valley through the apricots, peaches, and garlic of Gilroy. The wide tree-filled manors of Monte Sereno and the brown hills of South San Jose served as pillars marking the entrance to the Valley of Heart’s Delight. It was magical and the smell of produce and the richness of Earth’s breast has never left me. I’m sure it’s all Kohl’s-anchored strip centers and Targets now.

In those days, I was eager to start working and making my splash in the tech world. There was still enough wheeze left in the coughing engine of “the New Economy” that I was hoping for one last shot at the optionaire dream of wealth and fancy. All that would be undone within 18 months, but knowing the sordid future coming due does nothing to undermine the joy of dreaming the dream. But in those early days, along in my tiny room, on Saturday night I had a ritual:

I would walk to the fast food options up the street and bring home my dinner. I’d listen to KQED’s programing of “The World,” “This American Life, “Selected Shorts,” “The BBC World Service” and then go to bed and sleep in late on Sunday. Often, in those nights, it would be me, my computer, stacks of CD’s loading Linux, or me working on programming projects. It seems small and lonely now, and it was, surely. But it was also where I started finding out who I was professionally. I can’t shun it.

To this day, I can still hear the introduction patter from program director Isaiah Sheffer: “Recorded at Symphony Space in New York.” How many dozens of times did I hear that over the years?

How funny it is, then, that I’ve now lived a few blocks away from where “Selected Shorts” was recorded all those years ago. For a couple’s night out, I got us tickets during Christmas to see a recording of “Selected Shorts” this past Wednesday.

The Show

As it happens the host is Hugo and Nebula award-winning author NK Jemisin whose “Broken Earth” and “City” series are favorites around our house (especially Lauren).

The opening short, “When the Yogurt Took Over” by John Scalzi was read to hilarious effect by Jin Ha whose voice for the sentient yogurt as laugh out loud brilliant and suggests he may have a voice for doing kids’ cartoons. John Scalzi is also a wonderful scifi writer (and Twitter, now Mastodon) writer as well. His book “Old Man’s War” (in which Earth’s elderly are give new bodies to fight the unknown horrors at the edge of space because their age and experience is an advantage) is one of my favorite action-packed scifi books.

“Me and My Algo” by Alexandra Chang was performed (appropriately) by Catherine Cohen with a sort of Gen-Z sort of terminally online gushing couched in the language and habits of Instagram and entitlement. It was an angel food cake of mooney-eyed innocence with a nasty little rock at the center reflecting what humans are when they’re served too well.

Jin Ha returned to deliver “On the Sudden Increase of Changeling Stock: A Report” by Daniel Lavery in which a fairy (and Ha adopted wings and ears for this reading) offers a boardroom language-couched synopsis about the economic impact of the fact that human babes no longer die or get lost in the woods à la Grimm or are as easily swapped out for the benefit of fairy’s interests. It sublimely united the banality of evil quarterly filing language with the fairy and strange world of Holy Roman Empire Germanic tales.

But the binary stars of this show were “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin and Jemisin’s response to it: “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” as performed by “Teagle F. Bougere.”

“…Omelas” was performed by the dreamy and wonderfully accented British thespian Hugh Dancy. His acting talent was on display as he pivoted, danced, posed, and imagined the brilliant words of Le Guin. Helping this delivery is the fact that the story is written in second person. It’s a wonderful short story with a twist, and I refuse to spoil something so sublime (even if it’s a nasty bit of the sublime). But the story asks us to ask: what would we tolerate, what injustice would we forebear, if the result was a city - which Le Guin describes splendidly with her gifts for scene-setting: children, cakes, horse-races, a festival day, guilt-free, unconscious beauty - in which everyone was happy? And who would leave that city, Omelas, and why?

“The Ones Who Stay and Fight” was a wonderful homage to “…Omelas” in that Jemisin adopted the same 2^nd person narration style, and the description of a festival day with a twist, and even had some Le Guin easter eggs (some attendees are described as being “Gethen,” in reference to work The Left Hand of Darkness). In it, she imagines a counterpoint to Omelas that has a different relationship to injustice and the taint of the knowledge of injustice. The line that echoes to this day is: “One does not fight the flood without getting wet.” The reader, Bougere was supreme. Adopting an avuncular tour guide full of wonder character for the reading, when the twists came (and they came) his character changed. From avuncular to revolutionary to incensed to trickster and back. His range was amazing. I’d love to see him elsewhere on stage.

Afterward we walked home. It was a great night.