speak softly….

Readers of this blog, friends and family members know how much I love the library, where, as my friend M. likes to say, “the angels are.”  On the weekend, the Husband and the Girl will rib me about going back to the “office” when we pull into the lot on a Sunday.  Last week, I told the Girl that we didn’t need to visualize a parking space on busy Sunday afternoons anymore, I’d been assigned a spot.  For a moment, she believed me.

Yesterday, I pulled up to the library ready for a day of writing and reading only to see the lot full of film crew vehicles:  semis, trailers, even a crane towering above the library’s three stories.  I barked some sort of complaint to myself about the annoyance, then gathered my things to forge on.  By the front door, it became clear that the crew had in fact moved in to the library, setting up lights and cameras and directors’ chairs in the large, central reading room.  I had a book to renew and two books on hold waiting for me at the circulation desk but when I approached, it was equally evident that the entire library staff had been replaced by actors–none of whom could help me with my books on hold or my renewals–and that I had walked into a scene by stepping up to the circulation desk in the first place.

“It’s a show called H—,” one of the “real” librarians informed me, once I’d given up at the circulation desk and headed past the reference desk to my usual spot.  “It’s about a gym teacher who moonlights as a male prostitute to make ends meet.”

Another friend insists that the library has strayed so far from its defined course that he can barely handle waiting in line behind someone wanting to check out DVD’s.  “The library,” he told me yesterday, “is for finding books no longer in print, preferably by using a card catalog.”  We lamented the ways in which the library has come to be abused, although part of me realizes that the library is probably the rightful inheritor of the Greek Agora.  It’s the perfect meeting place–for coffee and the exchange of ideas–and if books have now become a bit of library lagniappe, then so be it.  I’ll always come first for the books, even if in some cities others are now coming to the library to order and pick up their groceries.   Honestly, I’ve never met a librarian I didn’t like, or who didn’t have truly wacky and creative ideas for how best to use resources, and reach out.

And yet, the film shoot yesterday had even some librarians shaking their heads.  “I’d like to know which character–the gym teacher or the prostitute–is using the library in this scene?” I asked one of them.  She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders.  “I have no idea.”  A friend later suggested it was perhaps the gym teacher, researching kinesiology.  That answer did not account for the actor’s fancy suit and tie.  Apparently, the show itself was a bit confused over their presence in the library, despite the obvious effort that went into bringing the actors into its realm.   In the scene I watched them shoot (and reshoot, and reshoot), the dialogue went a little like this:

GYM TEACHER/PROSTITUTE:  “Why are we meeting in a library anyway?”

GYM TEACHER/PROSTITUTE FEMALE COUNTERPART: “Because she WANTED to meet here.”

LIBRARY PATRONS LOUDLY SSSHHH HER.

My friend who works the courtyard espresso bar at the library decided that the ironies were so layered, we could not possibly untangle them.  But consider this:  a show that sends a message that because you can’t earn enough money as a gym teacher, you have to make ends meet by becoming a prostitute, finds its way to the library for a film shoot, which, as several librarians mentioned yesterday, brought “good money” into the library system, so strapped for cash it is now closing every branch but one on Sundays.  Perhaps my friend is right, perhaps those ironies ought not to be untangled.

Meanwhile, look for my back in the upcoming episode.  I’m the one in the very worn brown corduroy jacket, trying to get an actor’s attention at the circulation desk.