EAST GRAND RAPIDS: Classmates in the News

IT'S JUST A COUPLE DAYS BEFORE THANKSGIVING and right before I head home to visit my parents in East Grand Rapids, Mich., I've come across various high school classmates who have been in the news lately. It's certainly a small world.

I'M SURE THIS STORY, "Lakeshore Man Arrested During Scavenger Hunt," made it on some Odd News or Strangely Enough websites ... Via Yahoo News, I learn that one of my old classmates is working as a police officer in Fruitport Township, Mich., a few miles inland from Lake Michigan. Officer Durrell was at the police station with his partner when three men on a scavenger hunt knocked on the door. Through a series of events that involved being photographed eating doughnuts, a man was arrested for failure of paying child support.

THEN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES this morning, Noah Haidle's play, "Mr. Marmalade," was reviewed, on the cover of the Arts section no less. Mr. Haidle was on my middle school soccer team and was one of EGR's top quiz bowlers, along with yours truly. He went off to Princeton, wrote a "satirical parallel between the Kennedy family and The Orestia" (that involves a sperm bank) as an undergrad and the rest is history.

"Mr. Marmalade" stars Michael C. Hall of HBO's "Six Feet Under" and Mamie Gummer (though she plays a "New Jersey tot" she is a confirmed adult actress). I think I'd have a hard time summing up what the play's about, so go read the Times' mixed review, but this passage may give you a taste:

Mr. Haidle chooses instead to draw us a scary but ultimately hollow cartoon. His thesis: a toxic combination of neglect and exposure to the noisy dysfunction in the cultural ether could so warp a tyke's psyche that she dreams up a pal who prefers sex toys to tea parties.

That sounds interesting, but I don't imagine that it'll ever be performed on stage back in Grand Rapids. Maybe I'm wrong.

>> "A 4-Year-Old Who Needs a Divorce" [The New York Times]