John,
     This is powerful material. As grammarians and English teachers, we 
could spend much more time on the power of crafted speech, which is 
pretty much all a dramatist has to work with. It's certainly highly 
elliptical.
     To me, the "it"'s that show up early turn out (retroactively) to be 
pronouns, standing in for "how to live in the desert." Then in Austin's 
second speech, we get existential "there"'s. I'm not quite sure about 
"it" in "it was different." In context, I would be tempted to say it's a 
pronoun reference to "life" or "the emotional feel of life," but 
existential I think would be the usual analysis. The next "it" in "it's 
the fifties" would seem to me to stand in for "the present time" or "the 
times when I come down here." "I keep coming down here thinking that I 
am still living in the fifties."
     I was a little confused by "there never was [something here for 
me]" followed by "When we were kids it was different," though a speaker 
in a play can certainly change his/her mind in mid-speech. It seems like 
a contradiction.
     Nice passage.

Craig

On 10/28/2010 8:27 PM, John Chorazy wrote:
> Good evening... Thanks to all for the wealth of information regarding 
> my question. Even the differing impressions offer good dialogue and 
> shed insight, and for that I'm appreciative.
> I'll include herein some context for the sentence models, but I rather 
> liked your notions based on the bare models alone first. Though 
> certainly we understand exactly what Austin means here because of 
> context, my close reading attempted to unpack Shepard's specific use 
> of language in this section. The play between "there," "it," "that," 
> and "here" is fascinating as a subject of its own; "It" as a much 
> larger symbol than impersonal pronoun, "there" and "here" as 
> geographical landmarks imbued with meaning, sense of place and/or 
> disclocation, etc...  Thanks again.
>
> LEE: It’s not somethin’ you learn out of a Boy Scout Handbook!
>
> AUSTIN: Well how do you learn it then! How’re you supposed to learn it!
>
> LEE: (/stands/) What’re you, crazy or somethin’? You went to college. 
> Here, you are down here, rollin’ in bucks. Floatin’ up and down in 
> elevators. And you wanna’ learn how to live on the desert!
>
> AUSTIN: I do, Lee. I really do. There’s nothin’ down here for me. 
> There never was. When we were kids here it was different. There was a 
> life here then. But now—I keep coming’ down here thinkin’ it’s the 
> fifties or somethin’. I keep finding myself getting off the freeway at 
> familiar landmarks that turn out to be unfamiliar. On the way to 
> appointments. Wandering down streets I thought I recognized that turn 
> out to be replicas of streets I remember. Streets I misremember. 
> Streets I can’t tell if I lived on or saw in a postcard. Fields that 
> don’t even exist anymore.
>
> LEE: There’s no point cryin’ about that now.
>
> Sincerely,
> John
>
>
>
>
> John Chorazy
> English III Academy, Honors, and Academic
> Pequannock Township High School
>
> Nulla dies sine linea.
>
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