Warming the oven
Almost Thanksgiving. Harvest festivals are busting out all over. The weather is sparkling cold, and fall studies and projects show results. Step dancers compete at Williams, and in Lenox teenagers play Shakespearean at the ages his characters really are.
I once sat on on a rehearsal for the Fall Festival of Plays at Shakespeare & Company. High school actors from sixteen schools or more gatherd in one gymnasium to practice fight choreography. They lept, somersaulted, caught each other in trust falls, and told me breathlessly how long they had waited to be there. The energy in that room was terrific.
The casts had come through late nights together and tech runs together. It's easier when you're 18, but sometimes still lack of sleep will bring on a kind of glee, espcially one that comes from work — or people — worth sweating for. Like getting up at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to put the 29-pound turkey in the oven, so it will cook before dinner.
Thanksgiving is its own holiday. Large, warm and brief. It gets overshadowed too often by the manic days of December, but I would rather enjoy it on its own. There's plenty going on.
This weekend in North Adams, in a Mill City production at Western Heritage Gateway State Park, The Little Prince looks for a way into space. He leaves his pilot in the Sahara with a promise of warmth in the empty landscape: "It will be as though I had given you, in place of stars, crowds of laughing sleigh bells."
On Monday afternoon at 4, Sandra Thomas, the executive director of Images Cinema, will talk about the independent film movement and its effect on Hollywood.
And on Tuesday, the Colonial will show "Casablanca." I'm told that in the '60s, one of the independent cinemas in Cambridge, Mass. used to show Bogie every year during final exams. The students would come with bottles of champagne and raise a toast.