November 10, 2004
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The Daily News
1 Tonight we have the dress rehearsal for David Tucker’s Thugs. We tried to work on things last night, but just ran out of gas. We have probably put over twenty-five plus hours in three days, and just got jittery. The set looks pretty good; thank goodness we have Thursday off. The show proper runs Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at 8 p.m., and Saturday at 3 p.m. Donaation.
2 I’m exhausted. Thank goodness for Armistice Day.
3 Yeah, I know. It’s Veteran’s Day. But it used to be Armistice Day, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the World stopped a war, and there was peace at that instant, signed between the Allies and Germany. Here is a favorite piece of mine from the great Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s epic, Breakfast of Champions. It’s really all I wish to say today. It’s just a lot of what I am feeling.
from the introduction:
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
that’s it.
peace.
h
