Full-Time Waiters
Last night as I lay waiting for sleep, and waiting, and waiting, I thought about waiting itself, and about how much of my time is spent doing it. In the last few months, I've waited for untold hours in airports from DC to LA, in ticketing lines, airport security lines, fish n chips lines, Starbuck coffee lines, rental car desk lines, shuttle bus curbsides, and then waited again on circling airplanes, on idling shuttle buses, and in traffic jammed rental cars.
At any given USA moment there are probably more people waiting than doing anything else, and we're usually waiting for more than one thing at a time: Waiting for telephone support to help you figure out why you're waiting for the twirling icon on your computer to stop so you can find out how long of a wait there is before you can e-chat with an online help person to ask them why you have to wait so long for your browser to download the waiting list for tickets to Waiting for Godot. The cell phone is such a success (not to mention the laptop computer, the iPod, and the yo-yo) because it helps mitigate the rigors of waiting, often by letting you talk with someone else who is waiting for something else somewhere else. We're all full-time waiters.
Waiting isn't necessarily a negative experience; just ask someone who is fishing. But the cityscape is rife with decidedly depressing pits actually called WAITING ROOMS. Think about it! They're actually called WAITING ROOMS! Thousands and thousands of rooms built for nothing but the nothingness of waiting!
As everyone knows, the entertainment subculture has its own version of the waiting room, called the green-room. In the folksy end of the biz, often the greenroom is a room usually used for something else. I've waited for showtime sitting in kindergarten chairs or leaning against sacks of jasmine rice. I've waited in boiler rooms and church libraries, bedrooms and broom closets, offices and stockrooms, while the audience-to-be waits in foyers or hallways or lined up outside in the rain (though, for us anyway, in fairly short lines). Now and then I've waited in actual designated green-rooms, whose walls are scribbled with notes from years of terrified giggers. That half hour before showtime can seem like a whole bad century of waiting. There is a scribble on the wall of the green-room behind the stage of the Freight and Salvage music hall in Berkeley, "When does this get any easier?" Though I'd have to agree with someone else's scrawled answer: "When you're back punching in at the factory, you won't think this was so bad after all."
I like to think that green-rooms have that name because of the skin color of agoraphobic performers like me whose hue is minty from fear. Turns out that nobody really knows why they are called green-rooms, but they have been called that for more than 300 years. There is speculation that since the stage was sometimes referred to as "the green" -- because of its originally being a green patch of grass where the actors acted, surrounded by banks of audience -- that the "green room" was a nearby enclosure in which the actors could change, etc. Some people think it's a shortening of "greeting room" because that's where you go to meet the performers. But everybody's only guessing. However the term was born, it has an appropriately sour vibe, evocative of seasickness, envy, filthy lucre, and cheese gone bad.
There are plenty of songs about waiting. The performing rights organization BMI lists 3,882 songs with the word "Waiting" in the title. A whopping 750 of them are just called "Waiting." Maybe this is all because songwriting is one thing you can do while you're waiting.
There are myriad gospel songs about waiting, like Waiting On the Lord:
Waiting on the Lord, for the promise
given;
Waiting on the Lord, to send from Heaven;
Waiting on the Lord, by our faith receiving;
Waiting in the upper room.
The upper room? Is it green? Religious songs often portray the Earth as a sort of green-room for the Real Show, the "...better home a-waiting, in the sky..."
There are old standard waiting-songs like
the one Al Jolson made famous, Waiting For the Robert E. Lee.
There's The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, and the 1851
hit, Wait For the Wagon. There are contemporary waiting
songs like Crying Waiting Hoping by Buddy Holly, Wait,
by the Beatles, Waiting For You by Gordon Lightfoot, and
Everybody's Waiting by the Indigo Girls. My all-time favorite
folk lyric image about the stupid dullness of waiting is: "Supper's
over, dinner's cookin', Ol' Dan Tucker just stands there lookin."
There are countless prison songs about waiting, prison being society's
use of waiting as punishment. These songs are often about folks
waiting for their imprisoned loved ones to be released, as in
the Fields of Athenry:
By a lonely harbour wall, she watched
the last star falling.
As the prison ship sailed out against the sky.
But she'd wait and hope and pray for her love in Botany Bay
It's so lonely round the fields of Athenry.
But they're usually from the point of view of the prisoner, waiting for either release from jail, or the end of the world, whichever comes first, as in Go Down Old Hannah (Old Hannah being the sun): "...and if you rise up in the morning, bring judgment day."
In a nonmusical but related issue, there's an intriguing bit of info about the famous absurdist play I mentioned earlier, Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett. This waiting-themed work was variously panned, banned, censored, and disliked by audiences, until it was resurrected by Herbert Blau and The Actor's Workshop and performed for 1400 inmates at the San Quentin State Prison in 1957. The prisoners -- world experts in the dynamics of waiting -- LOVED it and soon formed the world's first prison drama society.
Who knows? If the experts and the artists are right, maybe waiting isn't really a variety of nothing, but is actually more like a something in disguise.
Webliography:
Online Etymology Dictionary
www.etymonline.com/
World Wide Words
www.worldwidewords.org/
Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.org/pop
Popular Songs in American History
www.contemplator.com/america/
Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI)
www.bmi.com/