One of the items on my checklist for the break was to clean up some of the piles of useless crap in the basement and generally make room for more crap. My goal is to end up with marginally less stuff than when the gift-exchanging season began, and I think I’m gonna make it.
My company had a toys for tots box in the lobby, so the bag of leftover toys and party favors that I bought as cast and crew gifts for Goodnight Desdemona eight years ago finally got disposed of. There were a couple of nice (albeit vintage) items in there, like a Wishbone as Romeo and Juliet play set. I also let go of the plastic shopping bags from the Hy-Vee supermark chain that a friend of Leta’s (Clive? Colin?) brought back from Iowa to use as props for Independence. Somehow I was convinced that we were going to revive the show and that the bags would be needed.
I sifted through three boxes overflowing with theater memorabilia, possibly reusable props and costume pieces (you never know when a pair of those geezer sunglasses that look useful only to Geordi will come in handy), desk toys, and miscellaneous junk and reduced the storage footprint to two boxes. I filled a small container with trash, but my super-secret plan is to bring a box of the white elephants to the office and leave it in the break room with a “free to a good home” sign on it. Somebody will want the Harry Potter toothbrush and the transistor radio in the shape of a cartoon pig.
I pulled out one boxful of novels from the shelf to be donated to the library. Leta got first dibs and scored herself paperbacks of Rose Macaulay and Cold Comfort Farm. Except for the Anne Rice, perhaps, no used bookstore will take what’s left. There’s also a couple of books that I in turn bought from a library table to be used as props when I played the psychiatrist in Nuts. One of the titles is rather alarming: a translation from the Russian of a 1959 monograph by G. Y. Malis on mental illness. Chapter Two is titled, “The Effect of the Blood of Patients with Schizophrenia on the Development of the Larvae of Rana temporaria.”
The job that took the longest, surprisingly, was wading through seven years of Interview to clip the passing “what’s up with Laurie Anderson this month?” story or Robin Tunney profile and to pulp the rest. There’s nothing better for re-establishing perspective than to flip through a 90s-era Rose McGowan piece and then drop it into the recycle bin.