Response to "Signs and Wonders"

In “Signs and Wonders,” Rebecca McClanahan successfully weaves together comedy and broken dreams, threading a sliver of silver threaded hope to fill any of the dark gaps, creating a warm, itchy blanket of words good enough for any homeless man in Central Park to cuddle up in.  I loved this piece.  It’s at once sarcastic and thoughtful, funny and heart breaking, conclusive and wondering.  As a whole, the work speaks of bloated expectations and the dreams that get crushed when those shimmery hopes turn out to be a smoggy nightmare.  NYC as a setting works perfectly; it’s the city everyone wants to know and love even if they’ve never been.  That instantly creates reliability.  Wonderful comedy speckles the piece in quips like, “the kind of children you want to touch but you can’t of course, especially in New York,” or “Maybe at my age I should take it as a compliment, that I should inspire such…peaks.”  This gritty, blunt humor works perfectly with the setting of a city like New York – both are rough and obnoxiously in your face, but totally worth the opportunity to say you had the experience.  The ending is great, too.  Inconclusive, a bit lost in a cycle of repetition: “Catch and release.”  Just like life in a fast-paced, unforgiving city like New York, you’ve got to take the missteps in life in stride, live in the good moments, peddle past the bad. In the famous and poetic words of Dory the blue tang, “Just keep swimming.” (Sorry, I don’t know any good duck quotes.)