A three stooges move from before there were Three Stooges.
Nose tweaking seemingly is always a comedy bit of violence.
Has there ever been a serious nose tweak?
It’s just funny.

It would be VERY hard to just pluck off someone’s beard – unless, of course, it were a false one. Many Santa Clauses’ beards are pluck off-able. Many a comedy old man or vaudeville wise man, these could all be easily plucked. One quick tug or lifting the wires that curve round the ears and beard can be yours.

But an actual beard that grows on a man’s face, from a man’s face? It would either take tremendous force or great patience, one hair at a time. And even then, the beard would seem to be plucked OUT, not off.

It might be shaved off but the strength of hair follicles are such that removing it with one pluck, isn’t physically possible.
Given the theatrical tradition of false beards (see also, Bottom’s excitement about choosing his beard for Pyramus and Thisbe) perhaps it’s a theatrical move, this plucking off of beards and blowing it in one’s face.

Gratefully, I’ve never had my pate broken. Across or lengthwise. I have an unbroken pate for which I am grateful.

I just finished a book, though, in which the protagonist fell down a flight of stairs, (in heels, during the performance of a number from A Chorus Line) and split open her pate. She ends up with a bunch of stitches and eventually a scar.
It’s a testament to the writing of this passage that I feel as though it happened to me, that when searching my memory for possible melon splitting, I thought of this passage.

I stumbled on this book while at the library in search of a book I could read on the subway. I’d never heard of the author or the story but it sounded interesting and fit my criteria of being both a paperback and not terribly heavy to carry around. Sometimes this strategy can yield some real clunkers but this time I stumbled upon a real jewel. The narrator of the story is the daughter to an heiress (chocolate – of the money in the title.) It is dark and shocking and full of pathos. Told in the first person, there are dozens of things that, if observed from the outside, would have been inexplicable but there’s a way that this first person perspective illuminates a mysterious corner of human behavior.

And it’s somehow funny too. It’s like horrifyingly funny or funnily horrifying. The character’s childhood is painful to observe and her teen years almost more so but the author frames it all with such skill that the pain is part of the pleasure of the book. Which is, by the way, one of the themes that emerges.

If you ever had a friend who self harmed or ended up in bizarrely unhealthy relationships, this book might help you understand the link in the chain to this sort of behavior.

I felt like I was looking through a window at something very real but I really shouldn’t be seeing but somehow couldn’t look away from.

Despite a lifetime of effort, years of trying to be nice to everyone, there are still those who might, in fact, call me villain. I first realized that “nice” wouldn’t save me in 1997. We were on tour, all bundled up together, across the country. I liked this boy. And also hated him. He was surly and aggressive. And the nicer I was to him, the less he liked me, the more aggressive he became. I tried all my old tricks on him but none of them worked. He liked me best when I didn’t take his shit but dealt it right back. And I was baffled.

It wasn’t until later in my life, when I quit trying so hard to be innocuous and began to focus on being true that I really began to make enemies. I’ve left lots of broken relationships in my wake – people who would not friend me on Facebook or say hello, if they ran into me on a train. I don’t know if they’d call me a villain. In fact, I wonder which of these would.

At a previous point in my life, I would have answered this question with a definitive “yes.” I was afraid of so many things, especially confrontations. Coward. Definitely.
But I’ve been called brave so many times in recent years that I’ve had to reconsider what cowardice might mean for me. Or bravery. People call me brave when I tell the truth. They call me brave when I write about uncomfortable things. They call me brave when I risk security and money to do something that is important to me.
I don’t feel particularly brave when I do these things. I feel terrified. But as has been said many times before – it’s the feeling the fear and doing it anyway thing.
Am I a coward? Very possibly. But it wouldn’t bother me much if I were. Maybe it’s not being afraid to be a coward that sometimes makes me brave.

Silence can be a hard habit to break.
There are places and times and rooms in which it is my tendency to say nothing or very little and when I return to those places, once again I find a stream of not much emerge from my mouth. And I, like Hamlet here, can berate myself for the headache that emerges from clenching my jaw, my door to speech. Then the headache gets worse. I would say that the locking of the jaw is a result of holding back words but it’s more like it holds back the thought of words, it’s a silencing so deep I don’t even know what I would say if asked to speak.

Thus we see the power of an emotional truth. Or rather, the imagined power of emotional truth. The truth of the truth is that we witness glimpses of it all the time. We might see it out of the corner of our eyes, happening to someone on the street or in the café at the table next to you. You can see it in Hospice homes and hospitals. You might spot it on the subway.

It is rare that we see someone who could drown a stage with tears. And if we did, we usually turn away. Naked emotion, the real stuff, is sometimes too much to bear. It’s easier to watch on a stage where we can tell ourselves it’s just a performance and we have the distance of the fiction, the stage, the costumes that can help us keep watching. I have seen people do shows about things that really happened to them and they do not drown the stage with tears usually. Nor do they amaze the faculties of eyes and ears. Usually they just make everyone uncomfortable. We need a veil of fiction if we’re going to feel it for ourselves.

In the early days, this was one of the big attractions to acting. As someone who kept my emotions as close to my chest as I could, I would watch actors let loose and express things I could only imagine, or had only felt the suggestion of.

When I started acting, I often worried about what would happen if I had to play a really angry person. I fully believed that I didn’t get angry, that I didn’t know how to act authentically angry because it wasn’t in me. I got angry onstage long before I felt comfortable enough to express it in my life. Art was my practice in life. And life was my practice in art.

And here we have it: both the power of theatre and the power of empathy in one simple idea.
What is anyone to anyone, really?
Why should we cry over the story of the woman who lost her child in the storm? Who is she to us or us to her that we should weep for her?
Why should we be moved by any story full of strangers?
And in truth, sometimes it is easier to weep for Hecuba than someone close to us. Hecuba’s loss is so vivid, so singularly focused.
And when the Player weeps for Hecuba, so do we then echo that feeling of sadness, that empathetic impulse radiates out.
Sometimes I wonder if theatre is just a spectacularly complex empathy delivery system.

A world of loss.
Her husband killed,
her sons lost over and over again in battles,
until there were none.
Her daughters raped and/or taken prisoner.
Her grandson, too, the horrors of what has been/must be done with her grandson.
For Hecuba, there is little consolation.
Life? Exile. Servitude. A world of loss behind her.