COMEDY IS in the timing, and interesting stories only happen to people who can tell them. Fiction is the art of lying until the lie is so complete it hits a larger truth. Standing alone on the stage of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, John Ridley gave a one-man demonstration of how he shapes life into art.
Comic repetition, dramatic expectations, a combination of self-deprecating humor, braggadocio, accomplishment, and tribulations.
Sometimes, when I hear an author speak about the big issues–art, society, economics, love–I wonder what we’re meant to take away from it. The reward of comedy is obvious. You either laugh or you don’t. Hearing a good story should be rewarding in a similar way: You’re drawn into the language and the narrative. But listening to a talk about life and the practice of art, in an audience already committed enough to art to pay $20 a ticket, has a more ambiguous goal.
Maybe the goal is to listen for sentences that say perfectly what we already feel: “Art stands as an eternal question mark at the end of money’s confident rhetoric.” Or, “Not all dark places need light,” and “I don’t want to write printed television.” That was Jeanette Winterson, speaking in the last Arts & Lectures presentation.
Or, maybe the goal is to witness cleverness. Andre Codrescui was clever, presenting his talk as an epic poem of Portland, the “city with a plan,” and the state of the local art scene. He was charming and smart, and swift in wrapping up the ramble of Q & A afterward.
Michael Lerner, author of Spirit Matters, who spoke at the City Club as part of his book tour, would remind me that I’m looking at readings with a corporate mentality: What’s the bottom line, the pay-off for my participation?
The other morning I woke up with Dylan Thomas in mind. “In my craft or sullen art/ exercised in the still night/ when only the moon rages.” I found Dylan Thomas on the web. I found his own voice, reading, “And the lovers lie abed/ With all their griefs in their arms/ I labor by singing light.” Dylan Thomas, dead so long ago at 39, read poetry from the computer while I ate a bowl of Shredded Wheat, and it was magic.
John Ridley published his first book, Stray Dogs, in ’97. Now, three years later, it’s his turn to stand alone on a nearly empty stage and offer a huge audience some part of himself. This is what Dylan Thomas would call the “strut and trade of charms upon the ivory stages.” It’s the potentially terrifying success in the writing dream. What is it we expect an author to do, other than read from the most current work?
Ridley used ordinary events and language to tell a compressed, circuitous life story, revolving around a series of big dreams: to be the greatest comedian in the world, to be a track star, to win an Olympic gold medal, and to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel at some point in his mid-50s. He told of being initially inspired by catching only the very end of Double Indemnity: a woman shoots her lover, then says she loves him. The man says he loves her too, but not that much, and he shoots her. They clutch each other. All is lost. Without the rest of the movie, Ridley saw in the ending a Shakespearean level of passion, fate, and frustration. This, he says, was the moment he was captivated by narrative.
Now, still in his 30s, Ridley is the author of the story that became the movie Three Kings. He cranks out the written work. He’s not a track star. He cashed in on stand-up comedy years ago in favor of writing sitcoms. His failed aspirations became the structure of his talk, balanced by his obvious success, and everything was presented as parallel to the big dates in recent history–the death of JFK, the start of the Gulf War, the L.A. riots. Ridley told the very particular story of how he made it, which in truth doesn’t much help other would-be writers. Everyone has a different route, though as they say about getting to Carnegie Hall, the bottom line is still “practice, practice, practice.”
But what Ridley offered was enough of a plot, his own life story, to hang a character on, one of the bottom-line rules of writing a short story. His presentation was a well-written essay, a memoir arranged around the writing life. On one hand it was pure entertainment. On the other, it was the luxury of an opportunity to learn by example.