The lovely Nina and I went to the Cherry Lane Theatre this afternoon to see a one-woman performance by Deb Margolin called ‘8 Stops‘. Nina and I knew Deb many years ago — as it happens, she is a good friend of this website’s erstwhile comment-thread gadfly ‘The One Eyed Man’, and it was he who introduced us to her, so long ago — but we had not seen her for more than thirty years. Since then she has established a long career in the theater, won an Obie, and joined the faculty of Yale University.
Her show was a wise and moving meditation on sickness and health, youth and age, and joy and loss.
I found Deb’s show particularly moving because I have felt, increasingly, for many years now the presence of a great pool of pulverizing grief just below the surface of life (although by some unknowable grace, there is also a random admixture of incandescent joy there as well.) It seems to me sometimes like walking on old, deep snow: you move along briskly, just going about your business, but sometimes you put a little too much weight in one spot and you break through, and are in up to your thigh.
Deb understands this very, very well, and manages to expose and confront this appalling truth while being funny at the same time. That is no small thing.