Word: masking
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Today, Reed is 40 years old and--in the wake of a brilliant but erratic solo career--has just released what may be his most powerful musical statement. The Blue Mask is the work of a mature artist; the hostility and bitterness of the past that came to the fore on the successful Sally Can't Dance have given way to passion and love with an every-present undercurrent of anger. Max's may be dead and the Underground buried, but with The Blue Mask, Reed displays at 40 the vigor of a forever-young rocker...
...wall the fathers built between the lovers' houses, "they built it ages ago... last month"--in the end, it reaffirms a sort of worldly-wise romanticism. In one of the funniest numbers of the play, El Gallo shows Luisa the splendors of the world, and gives her a mask to wear whenever a fire or assault mars the picture. Such sarcastic images continually surface whenever the play's world-view seems a little too rosy...
...more than a white mask facing a black one. I see two pictures of the soul and spirit--if you will have it straight. In our flesh-and-blood existence I think we are pictures of something. So I see a picture, and a picture. Race has no bearing on it. I see Spofford Mitchell and Sally Sathers, two separatenesses, two separate and ignorant intelligences. One is staring at the other with terror, and the man is filled with a staggering passion to break through, in the only way he can conceive of breaking through--a sexual crash into release...
...FIRST STEP to joining this social elite, apparently, is to emulate the fellow who made it into the Exclusive Social Club and adopt the so-called "Molloy's Class Mask." The key to becoming so facially favored apparently, is to spend hours before a mirror aping the book's clearly-labeled diagrams, which show an upper-class executive type holding his head up, and an average slouch, well, slouching. This modern Pygmalion proceeds to offer up a self-graded speech test that seems to miss some of the subtleties of poor speech--one is downgraded for pronouncing "boil" "berle...
Sabom does not think so. As evidence, he cites patients who had extremely sharp autoscopic memories. They were often able to describe the minutiae of their own cardiopulmonary resuscitation: readings on a monitor, the color of an oxygen mask, the number of electric shocks administered, the exact position of doctors around the table and what they talked about (in one case, golf). These memories, Sabom found, conformed precisely with doctors' accounts. Was it possible that some chronic cardiac patients were simply familiar enough with CPR procedures (from experience and television) to fantasize accurately about what took place? Sabom...