There stood Billy Edwards before the bright lights, unlit cigar quivering between his fingers, clad in a white linen suit on stage at Harrison's historic Lyric Theater.
The large man smiled and grimaced while forcefully delivering line after line to a responsive audience from this Ozarks town of 13,000. We were seated alongside lifelong friends in the fourth row.
Edwards, whose day job is directing operations at his family's Edwards grocery, was ideally cast as profane Mississippi cotton tycoon Big Daddy Pollitt in Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
And while Edwards did the local Theatre Company of the Ozarks proud (as did Jules Stefanski as Maggie "The Cat" and Marrick O'Quin as her broken alcoholic husband Brick), the most relevant portion of the production for me was Big Daddy's use of the word "mendacity."
"What's that smell in this room? ... Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?" Big Daddy belted across the stage. "There ain't nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity ... it smells like death!" He'd detected familial deception all around him and it stunk to high heaven.
It's indeed a term that perfectly describes today's wholly politicized and intentionally polarized America. I saw it used twice in the paper yesterday.
The word means deception, falsehoods and outright lies. Mendacity is the biggest reason Americans have developed such distaste for politics and politicians, as well as the easily manipulated and self-discredited mainstream media today. Most of us realize that what we're continuously being fed via an unashamedly biased media are offensive deceptions and distortions of truth.
As in the play, lies pervade every character's life on stage, from Brick's brokenness to his brother's quest for greed and even to the fact Big Daddy is dying of cancer rather than simply suffering a spastic colon.
This multilayered play is fundamentally Williams' story about the very real role that mendacity plays in all our lives.
A graduate in film from UCLA with a master's degree in communications from the University of Texas, Edwards did the masterful job of a stage veteran laying out how everyone around him was constantly feeding him lies, primarily to gain what they each needed. And when the revelation of all the deception struck, he exited the stage shouting, "Liars! Liars! Liars!"
Afterwards, I reflected on the consequences for our nation now that we've made years of major decisions based on lies and deceptions rather than the often-harsh nature of truth. Have we become a society constructed upon the unstable shifting sands of mendacity because lies equate to more votes and political advantages? Sure smells like it to me. How about you, valued readers?
By the way, Big Daddy included himself among those regularly being mendacious in order to avoid facing reality. And sometimes even truths we tell ourselves become so ingrained they can seem to be lies.
If the answer is that our lives have become built on deceptions, who do we have to fault but ourselves? Would we now rather be lied to because it's less stressful and complicated than dealing with truth?
I've long said I sincerely believe evil flourishes in direct proportion to the amount truth is violated: Little lies equal smaller evil. Big lies equal big evil.
I'm not the only one to notice the connect-ion between Williams' stage message and our ongoing political process. I went searching just to see if others had observed the same thing.
And sure enough, writing in the Sept. 8 online magazine Canadian Dimension, Gary Leupp comments: "Big Daddy might have been talking about the current U.S. presidential election, which currently wraps the nation in a putrid bubble that can be smelled around the planet. To call it a democratic process would surely be mendacious."
Nobel nomination
Now that the Nobel committee has chosen to break the barrier between music and literature by awarding its prize for literature to musical artist Bob Dylan, I may have a couple of nominations for next year.
Since Dylan, long recognized for his social and philosophical songs, also has received an Academy Award among his accolades, I'm thinking Memphis group Three 6 Mafia must be equally eligible in fine literature.
You may recall this group's darn near transcendent song, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," received the 2006 Academy Award for best original song.
With lyrics the likes of: "You know it's hard out here for a pimp, when he tryin' to get this money for the rent. For the Cadillac and gas money spent, Because a whole lot of [derogatory word referring to female canines] talkin' s***" How could the Nobel folks possibly ignore this nomination, especially after the Academy Awards voters honored it?
However, if the Nobel folks should make that mistake, I have a secondary Nobel nomination for the 1958, equally elegant yet succinct social commentary set to music, called "Tequila," by the Champs.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 10/18/2016