* Titans and Pygmies: Living in he Interstitium

Have all the giants died at once? We seem to be living in a world of pygmies, both artistically and politically.

Perhaps Zaha Hadid is an exception: a new Frank Lloyd Wrong. But Artists? Musicians? Humanitarians?(Nelson Mandella?)World leaders?

Maybe they're just gestating: after a world exhasuted of Churchills,Eisenhowers,Schweitzers,Freuds, Darwins, Einsteins,Gandhis,Roosevelts, Horowitzs, Toscaninis,Andersons,Stravinskis, Picassos, Steins,Faulkners, Mother Teresa (no plural possible there),Salks,Fontaines and Lunts, Hopes and Crosbys,Astairs and Rogerses.

Maybe the world is just taking twenty or thirty years to grow a new crop of greats: An Age of Interstice. (Note: Jimmy Carter may be working himself into a mini-Schweitzer: Bill Gates? Maybe the Gates Foundation, but not the person. Decidedly not the person.)

Or maybe it takes a cataclysm (W.W. I) or two to produce titans?

Perhaps it will be AIDS wiping out a third of the world; or global warming turning Manhattan into an unwilling Venice with a gondola grid of 125 canals? Or terrorism?

Thornton Wilder had it wrong in The Skin of Our Teeth: a great glacier was slowly moving toward New Jersey in his 1942 play. Actually only half wrong: in 2010 (next week) it is a great MELTED glacier that is moving slowly toward New Jersey. NOW.

I'm surprised the GWP's (Global Warming Poeple) now known as the CCP's (Climate Change People) haven't latched on to that Wilder play as a premonitory clarion call to action.

With the liberties taken in theatre, I'll bet somebody could turn The Skin of Our Teeth into a Global Warming Soap Opera: Tom Cruise as Mr. Antrobus and Madonna as Sabina.

Why not you?

It's "a new world to make! ---think it over."
(Sabina, The Skin of Our Teeth, Act II)