surplus

There are no pictures because there are none on the internet, but it was super gorgeous: ZviDance's ZOOM

2010-04-08T15:32:00.005-04:00

I don't know a ton about dance. I know what I like, but then I'm like that person who always orders pad thai when they go for Thai food... I guess, to keep the analogy alive, unless they're presented with some free coconut curry, but only if the curry looks really good. ZviDance is my pad thai. I saw them perform at Jacob's Pillow a few years ago when I was in MA with a friend's family, and fell in love with their style. I still remember the undulating duets, especially the men together, lifting and leaning body weight against one another. It was gorgeous, and strong. One of those things where it's like, "Whatever you guys do, if I can, I will see it."

And, largely, I have. A show at the 92nd St Y a couple of years ago; last summer's installation at Governors Island. The Gov's Island piece was less choreography than I would've liked, more movement and wrapping gauze around trees, but it was still cool. And last night I got to see the world premiere of their new piece: Zoom.

This is another concepty piece, integrating projections and audience participation - photos and text messages ("keep your cell phones out!") - but it was still full of dance. Athletic, graceful, beautiful dance.

The audience participation aspects - texting in photos of the dancers, texting conversation with a dancer lying on the floor at a laptop, audience members (other audience members) being called on their cells to come down to the stage to take a picture of or with a dancer - tied with some of the dance gestures to give the sense of some sort of commentary on our communications culture - our dependence on our gadgets, the computer interface of our relationships, the saturation and inundation, etc. The participation was fun, if not exactly integrated with the dancing. (A lot of the texts the computer-using dancer got were requests for more dancing. Some of which - "Can we see more of the kicky thing?" were delightfully honored by some other dancers across the back of the stage.) But the commentary... So really, our society is oversaturated with cell phones and text messaging and internet chat? Huh. I am not opposed to political theatre, nor that sort of commentary in a dance piece, but in this case it was like, Okay, fine, but can you get back to the kicky things?

And oh, the kicky things. And the lifty things. And the falling and flying and dancing was so, so good. There's something so kinetic about the ZviDance style. Strong, beautiful dancers (with a gorgeous, diverse range of body types, heights, and sizes) and a choreography that just fills my heart with the joy of movement.

I like them a lot.

ZviDance is at Dance Theatre Workshop until April 10, aka Saturday. For $20 ($16 for students and seniors!) it's totally worth it to see some gorgeous, awesome dance, and maybe get your text message projected on the big screen.

Well, Holy Crap

2010-03-11T14:15:00.003-05:00

Um, I apparently have a column at The Awl. It's about vegetables, obvs, and the farmers market and food politics and stuff. So, there's that.

I Am Frustrated By This Play, But Maybe Moreso By The Critical Response

2010-02-22T09:57:00.007-05:00

When I was in college, I took a dramaturgy class that hinged on the idea of "dramatic action." It's what happens over the course of a play, what changes. There's a moment of revelation in which the protagonist learns something about himself or the world, and then he, like, stabs his eyes out, in the case of Oedipus. Or something like that.

So. I will give ten bucks to anyone who can tell me the dramatic action of the second act of Bruce Norris' new play, Clybourne Park. Other than "Jeremy Shamos' character gets angry," or "People go from being passive aggressive to a little more blatantly aggressive." Tell me what happens. Tell me how someone changes. Because I saw an hour of bickering, and it is frustrating the hell out of me. (I am serious that I want to hear your answer to this question.)

Part of what's so frustrating is the fawning reviews, lauding the play's sharp, damning insight. I mean, it's damning, yes. It says, "These characters are assholes." But the only thing worse that being stuck in a fruitless, circular argument with a bunch of assholes is being made to watch one such argument for an hour, and that is not something that reveals to me a bloody thing.

I should back up. There were many wonderful things about this production. The first act, though maybe not any more active, was at least moving and engaging and a story I haven't heard before. Frank Wood (giving a full-on genius performance of subtle anguish) and Christina Kirk are 1950s homeowners who, it turns out, have sold their home in a white Chicago neighborhood to a black family. The community is outraged, but they hold their ground. The juxtaposition of 1950s repression and the historical perspective on shifting neighborhood demographics is absorbing (especially to someone like me, a white kid living in a Dominican neighborhood that was an Irish enclave 40 years ago). Relationships and pretty facades shift and slip, and tensions flare. Anchored by Frank Wood's bitter, heartbroken father, and sparked by Jeremy Shamos' brilliantly high-strung community representative, this act may be more about revelation than action, but it makes compelling theatre nonetheless.

Act two, though, brings us into the modern day, after the Clybourne Park neighborhood has slipped into urban blight and begun its resurgence. The house of the first act is decrepit and graffitied, and a white couple, played by Shamos and Annie Parisse (who, as Shamos' deaf wife in the first act, was pretty fantastic), have bought the property to demolish the decaying structure and replace it with a new construction. They're meeting with representatives of the community to address concerns about the new house's size in the historic neighborhood.

And so the black community members, represented by a white lawyer, and the white family represented by another white lawyer, bicker and passive-aggressively dance around issues of history and community and heritage, and when someone finally breaks and says, "This is about race!" everyone looks at him like he's crazy. They go from trying to be polite to abandoning that idea, but still nothing actually gets said, no real feelings or fears or desires are expressed. And then there's some shouting and the play is over.

Part of the problem is that these characters are flat mouthpieces for Norris' speeches and screeds. They make small talk about European travel or word origins or ice cream, and then someone has a few paragraphs about a Theme Of The Play, and some people react or get offended or whatever.

I've had a huge problem with Bruce Norris' earlier plays in that the white, well-meaning liberals are all idiots and assholes, and there are always one or two wise black people - never American - who see through the hypocrisy and call it what it is. At least in this play, everyone's an asshole, and no one gets a free pass. But the problem with these passive-aggressive hypocrites is that an hour-long argument between passive-aggressive hypocrites is really painful to watch. Norris is probably trying to hold a mirror up to his audience's well-meaning liberal hypocrisy - "Oh my god! I dance around racial issues, too!" - but the characters are so two-dimensionally awful that the audience - especially the older, more monied theatre-going audience that doesn't have to worry about being priced out to traditionally minority neighborhoods like, oh, me and all of my friends - that it becomes not, "Oh my god, we do the same thing!" but rather, "Oh my god, look at those awful people!"

I don't imagine that my experience as an agent of gentrification is universal, but anyone as blithe as the white couple of this play's second is just blind to the world, and a jerk. This play didn't tell me anything about race or neighborhoods or tradition or community. It told me that Bruce Norris thinks that people are selfish, self-deluded, and terrible listeners. Reviews are calling this play witty and insightful. What insights, exactly, has anyone gleaned? That gentrification is complicated? That people have trouble talking about race?

And also, on the topic of wit: I am calling for a moratorium on Whole Foods as symbol for yuppie gentrification. That's not a funny punch-line any more, and also, it's just a fucking supermarket.

Smudge (only about three weeks late - thanks for nothing, Haiti! sheesh.)

2010-01-29T14:25:00.004-05:00

I can't help but wonder what the pregnant woman one seat over me thought of Smudge, Rachel Axler's strange, dark comedy that I saw at Women's Project a few weeks ago. Smudge is very much a pregnant woman's worst manic fears brought to life, and whether the pregnant audience member was enthralled or repulsed, I'm fairly sure this play gave her a stronger feeling than it did me.

The world in Smudge is at once pedestrianly ours and yet also lyrically, absurdly something else. Cassie Beck and Greg Keller give fantastic performances as Colby and Nicholas, the new parents of a baby so grotesquely deformed - save one beautiful, Caribbean-blue eye - that she's more a "smudge" than a tiny person. This is a dark, dark script, and they deftly bring out its grim humor. Greg Keller does brilliant, pathetic things with a stuffed carrot. Cassie Beck, a leading interpreter of Adam Bock's hypernaturalism (seriously, I think she moved here from California for a production of his), knows how to find the balance of wry comedy and pathos beneath and in between the lines. Playing opposite a glowing, blinking mass of tubes pouring out of the bassinet that houses the smudge, she compellingly runs through a manic cycle of disgust, despair, and joy in the face of this disaster that she's supposed to love.

But this play still seems to lack a grounding in, if not the real world, then a world that operates on any rules that make this scenario plausible. The newborn's deformities - a spiked tail, no arms, the singular arresting eye - call to mind a fairy tale monster, but no one seems to notice that this very unreal baby has been born into what seems to be our own real world. I don't know if I'm more distracted by the baby's poetic unrealism or the fact that a real baby so disfigured wouldn't be so easily sent home with her hapless parents.

I suppose Nicholas' complete denial of the baby's problems could be a coping mechanism, for example, but when there's zero acknowledgment between characters of the reality that the audience is seeing, there's no solid ground to start from even before things start to slip. When the monster-baby communicates with its mother via a feeding tube light show, we're left not only wondering whether it's real or in Colby's head, but whether the play knows this, either. I don't want a play to give me all the answers, but to at least give me a sense that they exist.

Let's Try to Resume

2010-01-25T10:22:00.002-05:00

Hi people. I'm slowly emerging from under the five-hundred-calls-a-day-shaped anvil that fell on me at work a week and a half ago. I know there are several horrible layers of irony to be complaining about a rough work situation that's brought on by something like the earthquake in Haiti, but I'm not so much complaining, just filling you in. So that's what's been going on.

I've been using my tumblr as a sort of note taking thing throughout these weird couple of weeks. All of those jottings are, in reverse chronological order because that's how tumblr rolls, here. Things like this:

Haiti doesn’t need me. The mountains need me. The hills need me. The children need me. I’m not interested in Port au Prince. Port au Prince has enough. I’m saying what’s going on in the mountains. I’m saying when you have 200,000 people in the mountains and 17 doctors. I’m an intelligent man. I can add.

— This was the call of the day that was difficult and sad in a way that kept me on the line for ten minutes. It ended with the older gentleman, a trauma surgeon, telling me, “God bless you,” which I never otherwise would’ve responded to with, “You, too,” but that’s where this call left me.

There is also this photo, which got me and some other people in my office through some rough days.

This is a week or so old, but it's pretty much how all this feels, how weird it is to experience a thing like this, from this perspective.

And in completely unrelated tumblr linking, I went to The Top of the Rock on Saturday night, and here is some of what that was like. Basically: great.

Things seem to be starting to calm down at work. I may not be back to my receptionisty life of leisure for a while, but I can think clearly enough to type, so that's a start.

One of the Strangest Ways to Be Affected By Something Like This

2010-01-14T22:11:00.003-05:00

Well, I guess what happens when you're a receptionist at an international aide organization and there's a massive fucking earthquake in Haiti is that suddenly your job becomes INSANE. In a few weeks I want to grab a drink with, like, the receptionist for the International Red Cross, because this is such a weird, fractioned way to experience a thing like this. I want to write about it, so badly, but the very fact that it's happening means there's no time. But I jotted down some notebooky things here.

Also, on Haiti, in another way-- the conventional wisdom that you should give money rather than supplies is, unless you have a spare helicopter in Miami, true. The aide organizations on the ground know what they're doing, and have infrastructure and experience and know how to spend your money. That's the best way you can help.

Texts From Tonight, Someone Saw Ragtime Edition

2010-01-09T22:47:00.003-05:00

(917): excuse me while i cry like a baby
(646): Get on your feet and clap! And love America!

FTH.

2010-01-07T16:42:00.002-05:00

So I had a stomach bug yesterday, which has mostly resolved itself into a little left-over fever and some trepidation about eating anything scarier than toasted white bread, but yesterday it was pretty bad, and I left work early. Somehow the A Train was packed in the middle of the afternoon, and I spent the first half of the stretch between 59th Street and 125th debating asking someone who was sitting for their seat. I wasn't going to pass out or anything, but standing was pretty miserable. I weighed this against my sort of unreasonable embarrassment about doing this, but I eventually settled on the nice-looking middle-aged Hispanic man sitting right in front of where I was standing. I leaned down to him and tapped his shoulder, and said quietly, "Excuse me, I'm not feeling well - could I sit down?" He looked at me apologetically - I'd pegged him right as a nice guy - and apologized in Spanish, "No Ingles." I smiled understandingly and stood back up. I haven't spoken Spanish in any real way in about eight years, but even as I resigned myself to another fifteen minutes of standing on the swaying, lurching fucking subway I started rifling through my brain. Me duele....? But then it came to me and I leaned over again. "Estoy enferma - puedo sentir?" I don't know how precise that was, but he knew exactly what I was saying, and I got to sit down - I may have even thrown in a "Muchas gracias" as I did, while also blushing pretty strongly, I could feel - and when he got off he gave me a little wave through the subway car window. Spanish may not do me shit with my Dominican super, but goddamn am I glad that I remember what I do.

I Didn't Think I Liked Chick Peas. I Was Wrong.

2010-01-06T10:02:00.001-05:00

My New Year's Eve was a chill, lovely event which thank god did not involve being anywhere near Times Square. (I am not going to let this drop. It is a TERRIBLE IDEA.) It did, however, involved me being in the netherlands of Brooklyn as the designated cooker for a group that featured about zero decision-making impulses. All I had to go on was a request for chick peas and the fact that the only food-buying places (we're talking 9pm New Year's Eve, the not-so-gentrified part of Sunset Park) were a handful of bodegas. But I was unafraid - I've seen plenty of bodegas in Harlem and Upper Manhattan that actually have a selection of produce - and oddly inspired. Probably inspired by the few things I knew I could get in a bodega, like cilantro. (And, unless you have the genetic deficiency that makes it taste like soap, isn't cilantro just the best flavor in the world? There was also that time a few weeks ago that I thought I saw "cilantro chick pea soup" on a menu. Turns out I'd forgotten how to read, and it was a salad, but it was still super tasty.) This was like a super-ghetto Top Chef challenge, or Iron Chef Brooklyn, but it ended up being one of the most delicious things I've ever made, and I didn't even think I liked chick peas! Other than in hummus. Hummus is awesome. Make it yourself. But also, make this:

Chick Pea Bodega Thing
(all quantities approximate, other than discreet things like "one can")
2 small red onions (or 1 medium, or whatever), diced
a little olive oil - maybe a tablespoon? two?
1 can of chick peas, drained and rinsed
a bunch of cilantro, chopped
one avocado, diced
some kosher salt
hot paprika
cumin
pepper
one or two limes
little tortillas (optional)

1. Sautee the onions, slowly, in some olive oil and with a little salt. If you're feeling patient, go real slow and carmelize them. If you're in a rush or like things this way, cook them hot and get them a little crispy.
2. Once the onions are just about done, add the chick peas and a little more salt. Keep cooking until those are just about cooked. Add a few sprinkles of hot paprika, cumin, and black pepper, until things taste really good. (Don't be afraid of the cumin.)
3. Once everything's cooked, turn off the heat and stir in the cilantro and avocado, and the juice of the lime(s). Taste again for maybe a little more seasoning, just to be sure. Serve as is, over rice maybe, or wrapped up in hot little tortillas.
4. (optional, but not really) Spend the rest of New Year's talking about how amazing that thing you made with those bodega chick peas was. So amazing!

On the Intentional Lack of a "Top Plays of 2009" Post In These Parts

2010-01-04T13:58:00.004-05:00

I saw a lot of plays last year, a lot of theatre. About 50 things, total. And looking over that list, the things that I loved are:

a stand-up comedian's solo show
a one-man clown memoir
a meta meta rock musical adaptation/deconstruction of an ancient epic tale
a three-play cycle of British farce
a one-man multimedia/puppet fantasia
a bombastic Broadway musical
and one new play.

I realized something about a month ago. I was sitting in a lovely off-Broadway theatre, watching lovely actors on a gorgeous set, hearing pretty words and watching the characters go through their personal strife. And it hit me: I am sick to death of plays. Granted, I thought this was a pretty bad one - though lots of smart folks and also a major critic at the paper of record thought it was totally awesome - but just plays in general. Blah blah blah blah blah. Middle-class white people talking about their problems, having babies and getting divorced and dying and falling in love and talking about it for two hours.

Tell me please why that needs to be on a stage? Sure, these may be stories you need to tell, something you think worth sharing with the world, but why can't I pay $12 to see it at the movies, or Netflix the damned thing? Explain to me how it is worthwhile for a few dozen people to work their asses off for a handful of months to make this fleeting thing last for six weeks, tops, and for me to sit in a dark, quiet room with a hundred or two other people, and how it is special or important for us to be sharing that experience and watching what is happening on stage, in that same room as all of us? What the hell is theatrical about any of that?

What makes the theatre I loved this year stand out is that it was important - sometimes magical - for it to actually be theatre, happening in the audience's space and time. In Alvin Sputnik, Tim Watts transformed a gloved hand and a little light-up buoy into an expressive, lovable creature. In Circle Mirror Transformation, Annie Baker's awkward, longing characters lay in a circle and counted to ten, and it was full of weight and mystery and humor. The Norman Conquests made the best use I've ever seen of a theatre in the round, making a Broadway theatre intimate and communal, creating a sort of laughter amplification chamber that turned those plays into a remarkable experience. And in Beowulf, my mind nearly exploded when a woman stepped on stage with a bright red boot and basically turned the play on its head.

It's been about two months since I've left my theatre job, and I think the bit of distance I've gotten has just made me want to get farther away. We pour so much effort into trying to right (and defend) this deeply sick system, but maybe the system is doing exactly what it's supposed to - making theatre for the people who want to see it. Sure, I think a lot of that theatre is totally lame, but lots of people - people with more money than I have for tickets and subscriptions - seem to think it's all perfectly fine.

I still love theatre and am still excited to see it, but I'm sick of (metaphorically) loving Los Campesinos! and bemoaning Celine Dion's ability to sell out stadiums. I'm going to see the theatre I want to see, work on exciting projects that come along, and enjoy my little receptionisting life in the meanwhile.

That First Trick Works, and Is SO COOL

2009-12-20T21:07:00.001-05:00

The Most Amazing Things the Internet Has Ever Wrought, For About 0.05% Of the Population

2009-12-17T09:32:00.005-05:00

Not to post the same thing here and on twitter and on tumblr, but this is a special occasion.

would it kill you to rotate, little .gif?

Lea Salonga.

Singing "Poker Face."

Really, really well.

Mind = blown. Heart = full.

Theatre nerds, you're welcome.

VERY IMPORTANT YOUTUBE FINDS!!!!!

2009-12-15T20:35:00.003-05:00

OMG, guys.

You may remember, as many unsuccessful google searchers see, that long ago I posted this, re: my inability to find the "Are You a Wasteroo?" cartoon from Sesame Street on YouTube.

Travesty NO MORE.

(Wasteroon? Sure, whatever.)

And ALSO. A picture of a baby beluga led me to THIS unembedable gem. Raffi, A Young Children's Concert, part 1.

And yes, there are more parts. ALL the parts. I don't know about you, but I grew up with this video, and watching it again is completely awesome. "Down By the Bay," "Baby Beluga," and copious crowd shots of beautiful 1980s people, little kids nestling with parents and blankies and singing when the spirit says sing.

A Second Chance and, Like, a Fifth Chance or Something

2009-12-03T14:24:00.007-05:00

You slackers are lucky. Normally, theatre is fleeting - it's not like a movie you can watch on DVD, a book you can reread, a record you can reset the needle on and play again on your turntable. Sure, you can go see a production again, but when a show closes, that's it. So if you missed a wonderful play like Circle Mirror Transformation or a hilarious, joyful pirate puppet rock musical like Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and missed them again when they extended or, in the case of Jollyship, then played a couple of concerts, normally it'd be like, Tough shit, you lazy bum. Way to miss out on some really awesome stuff.

Except now both of these shows are coming back, so even though you're a complete failure of a human being, you have a chance to redeem yourself!

Berating you like this is the way to convince you that these shows will enrich your life and fill your heart, right?

Circle Mirror Transformation is coming back to Playwrights Horizons for another month or so of performances. I really can't reccommend this play highly enough - it's a compelling, hilarious, really moving little play with five brilliant performances. Seriously, do not miss it.

And Jollyship the Whiz-Bang. What can I say that I haven't already said? Is it the funniest piece of theatre I've ever seen in my life? Maybe. Does it fill my heart with rock music, awesome puppets, dirty pirate humor, and a surprising amount of heart? Absolutely. And it's back for ONE NIGHT ONLY, January 11, as part of the Under the Radar Festival. If you haven't seen Jollyship, GO. If you have seen it, you probably love it madly, and will be going again. Do not be scared off by the pirates, or the puppets, or the "musical." It's amazing.

Jollyship tickets are $15 (plus a couple bucks of service charge, alas), and are available here. Tickets for Circle Mirror Transformation can be gotten here - they're $50, which, if you aren't broke, is completely worth it, but I'll keep my ears open for discounts.

yeeeeeaaaaaahh

New York: Do Something

2009-12-02T16:53:00.003-05:00

First of all: What the FUCK, New York State Senate?? Seriously?!

Second of all: With one exception - Toby Ann Stavinsky - every State Senator in Queens voted against gay marriage.

Third of all: Do something. Some of these neighborhood/Senator corrolations may be a little off - Allison just walked by, and I was like, is your Senator George Onorato? And she said no, though she lives in Astoria - so check, but please, Queens, or anyone else, call and e-mail your Senator. Even if it's to say Thanks for standing up for civil rights. Please keep fighting.

But especially for these folks, because what the fuck?:

If you live in Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside, or Sunnyside in Queens, call and e-mail your Senator:

George Onorato
onorato@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-3486
718 545-9706

If you live in Jackson Heights, Corona, or East Elmhurst in Queens, and e-mail your Senator:

Hiram Monserrate
monserra@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-2529
718 205-3881

If you live in Middle Village, the west side of Forest Hill Gardens, Ridgewood, Woodhaven, or Ozone Park in Queens, call and e-mail your Senator:

Joseph Addabbo, Jr.
addabbo@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-2322
718 738-1111

If you live in Kew Gardens, the east side of Forest Hills Gardens, Jamaica, Richmond Hill, or Laurelton in Queens, call and e-mail your Senator:

Shirley Huntley
shuntley@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-3531
718 523-3069

If you live in Parkchester, Hunts Point, Castle Hill, or Melrose in the Bronx, call and e-mail your Senator:

Ruben Diaz, Sr.
diaz@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-2511
718 991-3161

If you live in Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Midwood, Mill Basin, or Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, call and e-mail your Senator:

Carl Kruger
kruger@senate.state.ny.us
518 455-2460
718 743-8610

(stolen wholesale from Chris)

On How It's Not My Fault, And Thanks For Nothing, Blogger - You Suck.

2009-12-01T17:28:00.003-05:00

Okay, yes, I know, I did not NaBloPoMo, to turn that into a verb, yesterday. But I have a good reason! Not my fault, once my leaving things to the last second is discounted! I got home last night all ready to reluctantly blog some half-assed junk, and discovered that my (neighbor's) wireless was down. But, lucky for me, I now have an iPhone, right? I already knew that Blogger doesn't have an actual iPhone application, but no worry, I took the phone's little web browser to blogger.com, to work it that way. Put in some sort of title, and went to click in the body field of the editor and-- nothing. Tried again. Nope. Apparently you cannot in any way access Blogger from an iPhone.

And so because of that I forgot the very important, lucid, entertaining, thought-provoking thing I was going to write.

Thanks, Blogger, for ruining EVERYTHING.

2009-11-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

(via)

Thanksgiving TV, Deferred

2009-11-28T12:26:00.003-05:00

Thanksgiving is without a doubt my favorite holiday. The actual dinner, of course, the gathering of family and eating of delicious food - and yes, shut up, there is plenty for a vegetarian to eat, the turkey is like the least exciting part - but so much more than that. When my sister and I were little, my dad used to take us to the Thanksgiving Day Parade - my memories are as vivid of the Egg McMuffin breakfasts and rationed hot chocolate (for the sake of little kid bladders) as they are of the parade itself. I remember a lot of freezing morning, a little rain, and the last time, when I was about twelve and pretty much too old for it, leaving the dripping rain parade half way, to read a newspaper I found in a Starbucks until my dad and Marissa came and met me.

So yeah, I was that sort of kid.

But I still love the parade, and have spent the last few Thanksgiving mornings with the parade on the TV in my little bedroom at my mom's house, listening from the kitchen as I cook, standing in the doorway to watch the awful performances of Broadway shows. The TV-watching gets more serious when the dog show comes on after the parade - I could just straight-up watch that forever.

This year, though, plans got jacked and I would be meeting Marissa at Thanksgiving dinner at our cousin's house on the Upper East Side, before heading back with her to mom's for the weekend. Which meant I'd be at my own place Thursday morning.

And I don't have a working TV.

Crisis! Crisis! Crisis!

But, uh, yeah, I actually live in New York City. Where the parade is. And so that's where I was.

It's much less of a production when you're a grownup, and it's 50 degrees and sunny. Quite a fun thing.

But that still left the awful Broadway show performances and the entire dog show unwatched! Lucky for me, my sister's a champ and has DVR, and I'd be spending all day Friday at my mom's house, so that's what led to me watching (fast forwarding through) the parade yesterday afternoon, and watching the dog show now, on Saturday.

And thanks be to god, my beloved Brussels Griffon, which I first found through the dog show a few years ago, is in the rotation! I don't think one had made it to the televised competition for the last couple of years, and damn if I don't love those little Chewbacca dogs. I love the whole dog show, though. Where I made it through the three hours of parade in 30 minutes of fast forwarding and cringing (and loving Sutton Foster and Daniel Breaker, Shrek be damned), I wish I had time to watch the entire dog show. It's a seriously enjoyable program, and if you have a few hours to kill early next Thanksgiving afternoon, I recommend you give it a shot.

Except - see I'm watching it as I'm typing this - apparently they left the Brussels Griffon's judging moments to be skipped over during the commercial break. Assholes.

Black Friday

2009-11-27T15:13:00.002-05:00

In all the to-do of the parade, family dinner, and then heading back to my mom's little house in the big woods yesterday, I missed a day of NaBloPoMo blogging. And Isaac would probably yell at me about the following-the-letter-but-not-the-spirit-of-NaBloPoMo-ness of this post, but you know what? Writing is writing, and I've got Thanksgiving II to get to upstairs. Something real tomorrow, probably. Go be thankful for another day. I'll see you then.

Some Good Places to Get Food

2009-11-25T19:46:00.002-05:00

In my new flush life as a part-time receptionist, I've been finding myself eating out a bit more. It's fun! And I think I've been very lucky, because although I'm still a little... abstemious about my goings out, and I've still got a decent little list of places I want to share with you. So!

Bar Tano - I texted Kate (and a couple other much less helpful friends) for suggestions for a place to eat near The Bell House, where I was seeing Throw Me the Statue and Bishop Allen last Saturday night. (Brooklyn!) Kate didn't know anywhere, but she was with two Park Slopers and their unanimous recommendation turned out to be fantastic.

Bar Tano has a chic Brooklyn feel - dim lighting, a bit of the Restoration Hardware about the decor - and it not only looks but tastes fancier than it costs. I got a spinach salad with dried figs, which was your usual spinach salad, but my fig and goat cheese bruschetta was out of this world amazing. My dinner companion got a penne something that he said was good - I think the quote was "This penne is really good." - but I can't vouch, because it had some sort of meaty thing in it.

Also, folks from both bands were at the restaurant. And still, the prices were super reasonable. Delicious. Perfect. (The concert was also great, and for all that the sound setup at The Bell House might be less than ideal, I love how the width of the room makes it so easy to be close to the stage. Because I am sixteen, and that matters to me.)

Milon - Continuing the Kate theme here, her birthday was Sunday (happy belated blog-wishing of birthday cheer, Kate!), and she, James, and I met up for dinner at Milon, on 1st Ave. I've walked past this... complex before, four Indian restaurants nestled into one barely double-decker storefront, exploding with colored and flashing lights. Sure enough, when you enter Milon (upstairs, on your left), the low ceiling is hung with colored fairy lights, chili pepper lights, and just about anything that sparkles, glitters, or glows. It's a cramped, seizure-inducing place, and isn't that also part of its charm. I think there was loud Indian music throughout, but I was fading in and out there for a bit.

But the food! The food is also delicious! And cheap! I got Kobi Alu Motor: potatoes, cauliflower, and peas with basmati rice in a curry saute with almonds, coconut, and raisins. It was perfect - not weirdly sweet, but with the coconut and raisin flavors working nicely with and against the curry and potato business. And it made for great leftovers (with some cottage cheese, because I am weird). We also had samosas, naan, soup - all sorts of deliciousness. And it worked out to, like, twelve bucks a person. I've heard that the upstairs right-hand place - Panna II - is even better, and I would be willing to test that out, but Milon left absolutely nothing wanting.

Canaan Sushi - I just got carry-out from this place on my way home from work, and not only do they have an epic vegetarian roll selection, but I got home to find that my meal came with dessert! A little styrofoam container of sliced orange, just a lovely surprise. Thank you, Canaan Sushi.

Ragtime

2009-11-24T16:20:00.007-05:00

It's been two weeks since I saw the show, so now seems like the perfect time to blog about the Ragtime revival on Broadway, right?

Perfect.

I had a conversation with a coworker yesterday - this place is lousy with theatre refugees - about the production. He enumerated a list of flaws: staging, design, script, score, performance - and I agreed with almost each one. But still, and I am not a sucker for Les Miz bombasticity, it won me the hell over.

I have a deep sentimental attachment to this show. The summer after my sophomore year of high school I was in a teen summer theatre production of Oliver! Surely one of the worst shows I was ever in, but it was an amazing summer, an immersion in the world of teen theatre nerdery that brought me amazing friends and new hights of geekdom. That was the summer I learned all the lyrics to Rent, but even more important, it was the summer I learned every word and note of Ragtime.

I spent too many nights that summer driving around our town in my friend Mike's Rav4, him, me, and Liisa singing along with this CD. I remember most vividly the trio early in the first act, where Liisa sang Mother because she has the most gorgeous voice ever, Mike sang Father, and I sang Tateh either because I couldn't really sing or I was the Jew, or both. So there was that early attachment, there.

I've also realized that for all that going to an ethnically diverse high school left me feeling rather culturally bereft (and racist! ha), I feel a strong connection to the Jewish immigrants who settled on the Lower East Side. The same street names that place my grandmother's stories are dropped into the lyrics of Ragtime, and the song where the Jewish, Italian, and Haitian immigrants sing in counterpoint and then, of course, unison, gets me exactly where it wants me.

I've had two actual moments of patriotic feeling in my life. The first was a couple of months ago, reading Sarah Vowell's newest book, The Wordy Shipmates. Something about how the Puritans who laid the foundation for this country were a bunch of bookish nerds - the way she put it just made me love them, feel a kinship despite the fact that my own ancestors were doing god knows what in a field in the Poland at the time. And the second was sitting in the audience of this revival of Ragtime. I don't even remember when, but I'm sure it had something to do with the diverse portrait of this country, the portrait drawn of a moment of turmoil and change - "It was the music of something beginning, an era exploding, a century spinning. In riches and rags and in rhythm and rhyme," etc. It's cheesy, its overblown, but it's also kind of beautiful and true.

And I do think that for all its overly sweeping music and how close to the saccharine it pulls E.L. Doctorow's really disturbing novel in the course of compression and adaptation, this is a really great show. The lyrics are fantastic, and for the most part the stories are woven together very effectively. Yes, Tateh turns into a total douche in the second act. Yes, the actor's left with a lot of responsibility to make Coalhouse make sense. Yes, it seems really easy for actresses to make Sarah really lame. But - and some people would call this a weakness, but I call it a choice! - the story here is the bigger picture. This country is being turned upside-down and inside-out, and a hundred years later, it's a story we should know.

Which is not to say that the individual characters don't have compelling stories - they do! In this production, especially, I think Mother and Father come through especially clearly and honestly. No one can sing the shit out a song like Marin Mazzie, but Christiane Knoll made Mother funny in a way that I never would've imagined, but that really, really worked.

And this revival is, for the most part, a gorgeous production. Yes, the multi-levelled set, steel girders and all, is something I was sick of in college, when it was overdone there, but this is a beautiful, imposing iteration, and there's a set change in the second act that may have made me gasp. I think I may have also let out some sort of little sound at the insane gorgeousness of Santo Loquasto's costumes. (One black and white print in particular, on an Atlantic City dress, made my heart hurt.)

I mean, yes, every time a soaring ballad ended with the lights bumping to white backlighting on someone standing downstage center - or, at least, each time after the first two instances - I wanted to stab a lighting designer in the eye. And, also, whoever decided that the way to trim the revival's score was to cut an entire verse from one of the show's best songs - "The Night That Goldman Spoke in Union Square" - and then to cut the best little bit of lyrical reprise/inversion, which happens to involve the same characters who lost a verse in the first act, that person should get their dramaturgical license revoked.

Yes, too many characters stride purposefully downstage to sing out to us emphatically. Some of the acting felt a little not-ready-for-primetime. Harry Houdini really needed some sort of shirt. But I don't care. This show has the like-it-or-not soul-stirring grandiosity of Les Miz, but then it also doesn't suck! Which is a huge improvement over the Les Miz formula. It tells interesting stories, with gorgeous, artful lyrics set to interesting and catchy-as-all-hell music.

And, you know what? Bottom line this production is just more than the sum of its parts. It's gorgeous and moving and fun and completely fucking awesome. Like Isaac (who said something like this once, but whose blog's search function is for shit, so I can't link to that specific post), I ate it up like a banana split, as long as the banana split is made with lactose-free ice cream, or this is an imaginary metaphor world where I can eat dairy. (Score!)

And I saw it with Liisa, my best friend from that first summer of driving around the suburbs at night singing this show, which was maybe the best part of the whole thing.

(all photos courtesy of. thanks!)

I'm Getting Really, Really Sick of NaBloPoMo

2009-11-23T23:40:00.002-05:00

I mean, I should probably get back into the habit of writing this stuff during the day, at work, when I'm chained to a desk for five hours with a phone that rings maybe every 20 minutes. But gchat and refreshing twitter incessantly is just too exciting. So instead it's 11:41 and I already was asleep on the subway, and I just want to go back to bed. Waah.

So that, obviously, already can't you tell?, makes for awesome blogging. A post a day for a month.

I will just say that Saturday night I had dinner at Bar Tano in Park Slope, and it was awesome. The fig and goat cheese bruschetta - damn. So there's some actual content for you. Bar Tano. Yum.

Mostly Pictures, Some of Them Twee

2009-11-22T22:03:00.003-05:00

Mostly because it's a pain to follow tumblrs with an rss feed, but then also because reblogging the lovely things, such as tweeness and pictures of animals, that other people post on tumblr is fun, and, hey, never enough internet in your life: jaimealyse.tumblr.com.

Quickly, Now

2009-11-21T16:21:00.001-05:00

If we thought yesterday's post was NaBloPoMo perfunctory, well... I just got home from my cousin's bar mitzvah (to which I wore oxford flats with my dress, which was an amazing decision), and I'm just turning around to head out to Brooklyn to see Throw Me the Statue and Bishop Allen. So I'm gonna go do that. Have a great Saturday.

A Work of Someone Else's Genius

2009-11-20T23:53:00.003-05:00

Whooooaboy, who almost missed blogging today? But NaBloPoMo lives on! I've only got six minutes left, and can't write anything half-decent in that time. But I read something today that made me think I may never write anything worthwhile ever in my life, so, hey! Because if there are things this good, what hope do I have? Go read Tom Scocca's Macaroni and Cheese recipe at The Awl, and despair.

No Fitting Tribute

2009-11-19T14:11:00.006-05:00

(photo via. more gorgeous ones here.)

Sad news today, as Jeanne-Claude, orange-haired collaborator with Christo on The Gates and numerous other staggering, beautiful artworks, has died.

I only know their work through The Gates, an installation of seven thousand saffron-curtained doorways in Central Park a few winters ago. This was when I lived on the Upper East Side and worked Saturdays at the Met, and I remember watching the installation's progress through my across-the-park busrides, first markers then weights then the frames and then, in one overnight push, the orange curtains that transformed the park into a magical place. I took a detour through the park one Saturday walking home from work, and I'm not going to even try to describe what it was like. It was wonderful.

I've seen pictures of others of Jeanne Claude and Christo's projects, and I love them all. Big, environmental projects that change city landmarks into something transcendent. Huge swaths of fabric wrapped around stone bridges, islands nestled in flamingo pink. There was always something exuberant about it, a transformational joy, the bigness of the project, the simplicity of the idea and the power of its execution. I wish I had gotten to see more of their work, but I feel very lucky to have walked through what I did.

two of the best things ever, together. it was great.

China Is Really, Really Big

2009-11-18T16:18:00.008-05:00

When I was little we had a giant picture book called People or something. [Pause for internet search... here it is!] I remember that I could just look at that book forever. It's full of drawings of... people. The idea being that people come in all shapes and sizes, all colors, with all different sorts of eyes and noses and ways of dressing. (There may have been something about eating in there, too... Either there or my beloved Usborne encyclopedia, something about people eating dog.) Sure, it's total hippie propaganda, but the drawings were great, and something about that deep variety captivated my little imagination, like Where's Waldo of the whole world. Even just thinking about it now I want to lay belly-down on my bedroom floor and just look and look and look. So many details. Ahhh.

And I'm thinking of that now because I got some of that feeling back looking at these amazing pictures that I found via The Awl. It's a photo gallery of the 56 "officially recognized nationalities" of China, and I think it's pretty awesome. (I remember now that I had a similar I-could-look-at-this-for-a-long-time reaction to the photos of families with what they eat in a week.) A few thoughts:

Is it not as cold as I thought it is in Mongolia, or are those shirtless guys just total badasses?
What amazing conversation are the Ethnic Manchu having?
I like the realism the Ethnic Tujia put into their staging.
I bet the Ethnic Kirgiz and the Ethnic Kazak have a frilly-stuff rivalry.
I am for some probably racist reason always fascinated by Russian-looking people who are Chinese, and vice versa.

Hope I didn't just exotify anyone too badly. These pictures are awesome.

A Low Point of NaBloPoMo

2009-11-17T22:49:00.001-05:00

I saw a sleepy play tonight, but it gave me some time to think about how much I love Governors Island. I also had a tasty dinner beforehand, but honestly, rather than look up the link for the restaurant, I'm gonna fall asleep half-dressed on my bed now, and hopefully the fact that the radio's on and I'm still in my jeans will stop me from sleeping that way, in jeans and a bathrobe on top of my covers, all the way till like 5am. I have a habit of doing that, and it's really bad for my brain.

Unnecessary Sass For a Good Cause

2009-11-16T17:52:00.007-05:00

I would not normally be condoning the growth of a mustache on a perfectly nice face. Brooklyn is bad enough as it is. But I'm a sucker for a good cause, and for a friend under the misconception that this blog has any influence, so.

Nick, former tie fighter, is again participating in a ridiculous sartorial project, if facial hair counts as sartorial, but this time there are the added highs and lows of, respectively, it's-for-a-good-cause and it-means-he's-growing-a-mustache.

I should probably stop all this sass about mustaches, as Nick has sported one before. Multiple times. Of his own free will. And also Morgan Spurlock might be reading.

I'll let Nick, or a quote from his blog, do the explaining:

M4K has chapters all over the country to raise money for various children's group. Over the past few years in New York, M4K has been donating money to New York schools in need through DonorsChoose.org, a web site that allows you to pick what schools and projects your money will go towards. Theatre and literature played a huge role in my life, so most of the projects I'm raising money for are related to giving needy kids to have some of the opportunities that I had growing up.

Simply put: me + mustache = you being aware + your fat wallet + DonorsChoose.org = slightly less fat wallet + kids getting a chance

See how easy that is.

Here is my DonorsChoose.org page. Take a look at the projects. Pick a few, donate some money. You'll feel good about it later.

Also, I give him mad respect for this: "As a Mustaches for Kids grower, I can't pull cheap shots like growing a beard for a month and shaving it into a fancy lad ornate 'stache." That's really rough.

Support Nick in his month of awkward facial hair, and help out some kids. Donate here.

Sunday Still Life

2009-11-15T16:36:00.005-05:00

(Low-Rise by Peter Root, courtesy of Tanner)

A Few Quick Things

2009-11-14T16:52:00.002-05:00

-I saw Pirate Radio last night, as I had movie plans with a 60s music-lover, and the cast looked pretty awesome. Oh, if only I had read these fateful words yesterday: "From the creator of Love Actually!" Blerg. It wasn't as bad as Love Actually, but it was a seriously troubled venture.

-I saw Ragtime FOUR DAYS AGO, and it is still stuck in my head.

-I saw Ragtime FOUR DAYS AGO, and I still haven't blogged about it. But I will. Spoiler alert: It's awesome!

-And, in big news: Boys, men, hopeful lesbians who misinterpret my footwear -- I am officially off the market. I think I have a great life ahead of me with the ginger cayenne tea from Tweefontein Herb Farms that I bought today at the farmers market. It's love, and it's real.

(What what, perfunctory NaBloPoMo post!)

You Can't See the Bag of Doritos That Is My Left Kidney, But Otherwise, Yes

2009-11-13T14:36:00.003-05:00

[via]

"It's a full-time job, ethics." "And then you die."

2009-11-12T16:19:00.007-05:00

Tom Scocca: David Foster Wallace thought pretty hard about it.
Choire Sicha: Well he ended up fine.
Tom Scocca: From a prescriptive-ethics standpoint, he did. No more chickens are dying for him.
Choire Sicha: I would like to be an absolutist. But here I am in my clothes made by slaves and whatnot, heading out to look for something that isn't made of animals that were tortured before they became food product. So I think I'm not going to become a vegan!
Tom Scocca: Because why pretend your work is done?

-The Shadow Editors: Meat and Real Estate are both Murder

This post from The Awl - which I will call an essay because if there's one thing I learned in college it's that brilliant essays don't always look like essays (what what, John D'Agata) - is a fucking triumph. I am noticing a tendency in myself to believe what The Awl says about things I have not read/seen/known because their reviews confirm and jump off from my hunches and predictions, and because, in general, they are so goddamn smart. Like, yes, Where the Wild Things Are had a great music video of a trailer, but I was very leery, expecting all sorts of hipster nostalgia porn and poor adaptation. Then The Awl comes along and tells me, yup, pretty much right! and gives me more reasons to believe what I was foundlessly believing. (I did eventually see the movie, and found it pretty bleh, and full of very odd choices that never really worked. Wtf's with those raccoons?)

And maybe it's especially effective, this Awl-as-my-surrogate-brain thing, for these bastions of twee sentimentality, the clever, self-conscious sincerity that's too concerned with being sincere to be sincere (as Dave Eggers' Wild Things screenplay spent too much time talking wistfully about sadness to actually create anything wistfully sad) , because it's come up again, with Jonathan Safran-Foer's new book on vegetarianism.

Or at least, that's where it starts. Our IM-style conversation (essay!) between Choire Sicha and Tom Scocca, transcending form if anything ever has, starts off discussing Safran-Foer's approach of the topic, where they feel his logic or tactics fall apart, but the writers beautifully and seamlessly transition/meander to other, broader topics - real estate, Natalie Portman, food choices in NYC/elsewhere, clothing - and it's a breathtaking, engrossing read.

I like their ideas and the way they think because I am the sort of person who loves The Awl - it's a bit self-selecting - but this is a gorgeous feat of writing, structured sort of like a Margaret Drabble novel where each seeming digression is actually a step in a necessary succession of ideas that spiral away from the starting place with a beautiful, subtle logic. I only hope to ever write anything half as elegant.

The Shadow Editors: Meat and Real Estate are both Murder [The Awl]

Grover Is Surprisingly Somber, But Then, This Is Important

2009-11-11T20:54:00.004-05:00

"They see each other every day, so it's important to help each other." (sigh.)

Circle Mirror Transformation

2009-11-11T16:06:00.005-05:00

This is doubly happy news here: a fantastic show got a well-deserved extension, and that means I'm able, despite my procrastination, to blog its praises before it closes.

Circle Mirror Transformation, Annie Baker's new play at Playwrights Horizons, works an almost Pavlovian tear-duct response on me. It's not a sad crying, but a sort of cathartic reaction at the ending's beautiful perfection. When I first read this script, sitting at my desk at my old job, I stone cold bawled for a few minutes, a heart-hurting sort of crying usually reserved for the ends of novels and the last half hour of Amelie. I saw a reading a few months later, and had to give my post-reading well-wishes all teary and slightly (more) incoherent (than usual). And sure enough, when I saw this production, that moment at the end came, and the waterworks switch was flipped.

This play, though, is much more than a tearjerker. (And it's not even a tearjerker - I am a weird crier.) Annie's writing shares some of the things that made "My So-Called Life" so amazing - there's a hyper-realistic awkwardness to the language, ums and stutterings and pauses that work like an aural poetry but also gives these sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-heartrending pauses and silences. And, also like "My So-Called Life," she's an expert at capturing the beautiful melancholy of people trying desperately to connect, and getting stuck and not quite making it - or sometimes, for a fleeting moment, succeeding. (That sentiment and the fractured language are, of course, intertwined.) Also, the incredible weight of meaning that can be contained in something a seemingly innocuous moment or exchange.

None of which is to say, at all, that this isn't a comedy - a hysterical, delightful, weird, lovely comedy. The play has a sneaky power - it seems, at first, like a trifle, but then grabs your heart once your guard is down - but that's coupled with, and dependent on, a lot of humor. Like I said, I'm a weirdo for crying at this play.

Circle Mirror Transformation takes place in an adult-ed creative drama class in a Vermont community center. Through theatre games and class-break scenes, we follow the five participants through the course, obliquely gleaning information in sort of the way theatre skills can be tangentially acquired through exercises focused on developing one's listening, honesty, and vulnerability. (Those strange theatre games have a sneaky way of fissuring your defenses.) Major life changes happen outside the classroom, but we don't see them - in case you haven't noticed, the m.o. of this play is obliqueness. We see the ripples and consequences, or see the fuse being lit but not the explosion. Another playwright trying this could end up just frustrating the audience, but in the hands of Annie Baker and did-I-mention-he-also-directed-Jollyship-the-Whiz-Bang director Sam Gold, it's engaging and damn effective, and affecting.

It doesn't hurt things that the cast is uniformly fantastic. Peter Friedman and Tracee Chimo work the pauses and silences like masters, but in totally different ways - he can break your heart with a middle-distance stare, and she turns a bite of an apple into the funniest thing you've seen in your life. Everyone nails the humor, the language, and the delicate calibration of inconsequentiality and weight.

I don't know if it's irony (Alanis-style or otherwise) or just coincidence that this play about a theatre class is, of all the plays I've seen in a long time, the one I'd most recommend to people who aren't theatre people. It's just fantastic, hilarious, and heartbreaking, and makes life a little more luminous when you leave the theatre.

Circle Mirror Transformation plays through November 21st. You can get tickets and more info here.

In Lieu of Anything New, Something Old!

2009-11-10T18:21:00.004-05:00

I'm off now to midtown, to meet up with Liisa [sic] to go see the Ragtime revival. I will probably have something to say about it tonight or tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, and because this is NaBloPoMo and I haven't posted yet today, here's something I wrote about Ragtime and being fifteen and in love with theatre and new friends:

On our way from the subway, we talked about Ragtime, about being fifteen and driving around after summer theatre singing along with the CD with new theatre friends, or bringing in the sheet music to voice lessons, and having Marin Mazzie kick your ass. We said it was a good thing we were headed to hear music, because even years after my CDs got lost or broken, we were both reciting from memory - My father's at the North Pole with Admiral Peary and Eskimos. Where is your mother? Dead. Edgar... The kind of memory that's going to keep playing the CD in your head whether you like it or not, because the memory's a whole CD, a whole show, not moments or songs, and - God, almost ten years? - every word is still there.

To say I'm excited is not an understatement, but too narrow a statement. I am excited and anxious and not sure how I'll make it through without singing along, and also hoping, all my nostalgic attachments aside, that this production is good. (It's like I'm meeting up with a boy I had a crush on in ninth grade... except I don't have to worry that the conversation will be awkward. Because it's a play and I won't be talking to it.) I would like it to be really, really good. I hope I am okay without the giant descending bridge. Fingers crossed.

This Is Your Brain on Carl Sagan

2009-11-09T18:48:00.001-05:00

Carl Sagan: made space beautiful, made science romantic, is extra awesome autotuned. In honor of his birthday, I do encourage you to read Contact and Cosmos, and, more feasibly on such short notice, look at the sky tonight and think for a moment (or more) how amazing and vast it all is. It's not lonely, it's beautiful. (And pretty!) A bit more roundaboutly, but I think a lovely testament and a lovely thing to listen to anyway-- you can listen to the Radio Lab segment in which Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow, tells the stories of their falling in love and the creation of the golden record on the Voyager spacecrafts, which are the same story. You can hear it in the context of two different episodes: Space and This Is Your Brain on Love.

The Magic Kicks in at 1:38

2009-11-09T11:06:00.004-05:00

I wrote a whole post about this, five paragraphs or so, but it was a lot of blah blah blah about James making me mixes and me finding bands I love, and that's just not that interesting.

Here is what's important: This song makes me very happy, and I want to share it with you.

Waving At The Shore - Throw Me...

(Throw Me the Statue is playing The Bell House - Brooklyn, gah - in a couple of weeks, which I'm very much looking forward to. They also have a new album out, Creaturesque, which is totally awesome, as is their previous one, Moonbeams. I love them a lot.)

I'll Go Along With Whatever Jamie Oliver Says - He's Cute

2009-11-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

Not that I read it over a big takeout container of somewhat unidentifiable but delicious Korean food or anything, but this is a great article about healthy food habits and home cooking in the face of America's incredibly sick food culture. I found the link via my old stomping-(writing)-grounds, Cheap Healthy Good, and it's an interesting read. A few paragraphs in I was expecting something about four times as long as this ended up being - this is an interesting, complicated issue, and I wish the article went into more depth.

The comments are great, though, and it's a really interesting question. The reason I didn't call the problem the obesity crisis above is that America's fatness is really just a symptom of an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food. Everyone should read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and probably The End of Overeating while we're at it, but I honestly think so much of it comes down to people being disconnected from what we're eating. We don't know what's in our food, where it came from, how it was prepared, or what it does to our bodies. Make whatever choices you want, but make them from a strong position of informedness. It goes way beyond calorie numbers on menu boards. And I think that knowing your own food in your kitchen is the place to start.

The Atlantic: How Families Teach Healthy Eating

On Brighton Beach Memoirs (Try And Stop Me, Isaac Butler!)

2009-11-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

I know Isaac called for a moratorium on discussion of the failede Neil Simon project on Broadway (though I can't find the link - maybe it, like everything important, was on twitter?). But, one, he's not the boss of me, and two, Rocco has some really great, sane, thoughtful things to say. And I personally don't know what the heck's going on, so read Rocco's post here.

The Addams Family Musical, and Let Me Tell You Why

2009-11-07T09:16:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Isaac comes this picture of the Addams Family cast from Vanity Fair. Holy balls they look awesome.

Krysta Rodriguez can kill you with her eyes.

In case you are new to this obsession, I am drooling over this show *not* for Broadway superstars Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane. Oh no. And while I love Krysta Rodriguez (and damn does she look like her Wednesday Addams is gonna be amazing), the real draw here is the team behind the show - co-directors/designers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch are two of the geniuses behind the British company Improbable, makers of the best theatre stuff in the world.

New York has been graced with their work before in the form of Shockheaded Peter*, The Wolves in the Walls, and my two favorites - Satyagraha at the Met Opera, and Spirit at New York Theatre Workshop, which is probably the most amazing piece of theatre I've ever seen in my life. These guys are masterful artists. They can create staggering magic with strips of newspaper or a torn piece of bread, making theatre that's playful and surprising and delightful and can punch you hard in the gut. I can't wait to see what they do with a Broadway musical. And yes, there will be puppets. This is going to be some really legit shit.

--------
*

Is This What They Call Growing Up?

2009-11-06T11:47:00.002-05:00

I don't like the idea of the top post on my blog being a wholesale reprint of a Wikipedia article about silly cats.

I feel so old.

For the Archives

2009-11-06T11:09:00.011-05:00

Let no one say twitter isn't enriching our lives. First a friend needed some information from the OED. I go to twitter - "Anyone have an OED or subscription to the OED online? I have a quick favor. Merci." - and not two minutes later a friendly librarian student in Boston's hooking us up. Then, well, before then, and during and after, I'm kinda bored and fidgety, and twitter brings me this gem from Wikipedia: List of cats with fraudulent diplomas. Amazing. But with joy comes sadness, both mere sides of the same coin or some shit, so blazing across the top of this beautiful Wikipedia gem is this notice: This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy.

What?? No!

I mean, that is some patent bullshit. This is a legitimately edifying article. I'm half inclined to get into Wikipedia editing to save it. But that sounds like a lot of work, and I don't really need to add new realms of nerddom to my file. So, since being amazingly silly never got anything not posted on my blog, here is the possibly soon-to-be-gone Wikipedia article, in its entirety. Live on, brave friends.

this picture really weirds me out

List of cats with fraudulent diplomas

On several occasions, people who desired to expose a diploma mill have registered their pet cat as a student. Upon its speedy graduation, the cat and its diploma are displayed to the news media.

Colby Nolan

Colby Nolan is a housecat who was awarded an MBA degree in 2004 by Trinity Southern University, a Dallas, Texas-based diploma mill, sparking a fraud lawsuit by the Pennsylvania attorney general's office.^[1]

Colby Nolan belongs to a deputy attorney general. In looking to expose Trinity Southern University for fraud, some undercover agents had the then six-year-old Colby Nolan obtain a bachelor's degree in business administration for $299. On the cat's application, the agents claimed that the cat had previously taken courses at a community college, worked at a fast-food restaurant, babysat, and maintained a newspaper route. Then the school informed Colby that, due to the job experience listed on his application, he was eligible for an executive MBA for $100 more. The agents then sent for Colby's transcript, which claimed that Nolan had a 3.5 grade point average.

Jerry Pappert, Pennsylvania's attorney general, filed a lawsuit against Trinity Southern University upon learning that the cat had received the degree.^[2] In the lawsuit, Pappert also told the diploma mill, which had used e-mail spam to sell degrees, to provide restitution to anyone who had ordered a degree from them.

In December 2004 the Texas Attorney General obtained a temporary restraining order under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act against Trinity Southern and its owners, Craig B. and Alton S. Poe. The court also ordered the school's assets frozen.^[3] In March 2005 the Poes were assessed fines and were ordered not to market or promote fraudulent, substandard degree programs or to represent their university as being accredited or affiliated with legitimate universities.^[4] It was reported that the Poes also were associated with the names Wesleyan International University and Prixo Southern University.^[4] Since 2005 Trinity Southern University's website at www.trinitysouthernuniversity.org is offline.

Oliver Greenhalgh

On December 11, 1967, The Times reported that Oliver Greenhalgh had been accepted as a Fellow of the English Association of Estate Agents and Valuers, after a payment of eleven guineas Television Wales and the West who were investigating bogus professional associations. (his two references were not taken up). Oliver Greenhalgh was a cat belonging to Michael Greenhalgh, a cameraman with

Henrietta Goldacre

Ben Goldacre, a UK-based science journalist, obtained a diploma in nutrition from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants for his dead cat, Henrietta, while investigating allegations about fake qualifications.^[5]

Oreo Collins

Oreo C. Collins (born circa 2007) is a tuxedo cat who gained notoriety when she received a diploma from Jefferson High School Online in 2009, although her age was misrepresented in order to qualify.^[6] The sting was an investigative operation by the Better Business Bureau of Central Georgia, which is headed by Kelvin Collins, Oreo's owner.^[7]

George the cat

In the UK, George was registered with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP), the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists (UFH) and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association (PHPA)." Cat registered as hypnotherapist

Tobias F. Schaeffer

In 1986, Rhode Island real estate appraiser Roy Schaeffer obtained a Certified Real Estate Appraiser (CREA) designation from the National Assn. of Real Estate Appraisers (NAREA) for his cat, Tobias F (for Feline) Schaeffer. He displayed his certification above his litter box. NAREA's fraud and defamation lawsuit was dismissed after two years of legal wrangling.^[8]^[9]

Speaking of Food

2009-11-05T17:03:00.000-05:00

One addition to yesterday's Thoughts on Things Recently Eaten:

Soft-baked granola - You know what the difference is between this stuff and stale granola? Nothing. Hang it up, soft-baked granola.

I Get Sentimental About Vegetables

2009-11-05T13:48:00.005-05:00

Speaking of food, volume 7 of Spezzatino is out today, and it features an essay I wrote called "Basil Love." I am terrible with coming up with titles for my essays. (Next up I've got 2500 words on supernatural uses for garlic. Like, vampires. And, hopefully, other things? We'll see, cause it's due in a week and a half. This magazine is much less silly than my essay topics might imply, btw - I think I'm becoming the resident silly essayist.) Anyway, my piece happens to be one of the few with a pdf available on the website, so head on over and have a look, and behold how legit a thing can be made to feel with beautiful fonts and photos: Spezzatino volume 7: Basil.

Some Thoughts on Some Things Recently Eaten

2009-11-04T16:36:00.000-05:00

Brussels sprouts - Are you still under the woeful misconception that these are a gross, old-people food? I've got a secret for you: Brussels sprouts are the tastiest vegetable on earth. Seriously. There's a recipe making the rounds - more a means for preparation than a recipe proper - that yields the most delicious, melty little miniature cabbages you could imagine. They're sweet and salty and a little bit bitter, and it's really heaven in your mouth. The recipe is 101 Cookbooks' Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts, but you can skip the cheese and just let the sprouts work their magic. (It also takes about three times longer than the recipe says. They're best good and dark.) They're really the most delicious things ever, and they're in season! Now! And you can freeze them raw, apparently, and enjoy this most delicious thing ever all through the winter.

Riceworks chips - A dollar a bag at Duane Reade, I've tried every flavor I've seen (except for "sea salt" which just sounds like bullshit), and holy crap are these good. The chips are more substantial than plain corn chips - not as crumbly - but they don't have that repellant glassy thing that rice crackers have. And the flavors! Ohmygod, they're so good, all of them. And cheap! And not terrible for you! They're my new sad drug store snack of choice.

Pomegranate seeds - Is there any other fruit that scores as high on aesthetic loveliness, biological coolness (the fruit is a berry!), and delicious tastiness? Impossible. These badboys are 99 cents a piece right now at my local crappy supermarket. Sadly, since it's a crappy supermarket, there was only one decent specimen, but I took it home and although my pomegranate de-seeding skills were not up to Iron Chef levels (the whack-it-on-the-back-with-a-wooden-spoon method you may have seen televised doesn't actually work), dismantling the thing was a meditative process on par with cutting up a big head of cauliflower, except so much prettier! Jewels, the damn things. I feel so cheesy for saying the seeds look like jewels, but they do! And they are delicious, also, especially once you're over any hesitation of chomping the seeds whole. (The insides of the seeds, for some reason, taste like Passover to me.) Go buy one of these, get to know it intimately, and enjoy.

Buddha BBeeQ - I know, an actual restaurant! A rare thing in my life, it's true, to the point that in the middle of this meal I had to ask James, "Am I just not used to going to restaurants, or is this food really, really good?" And it was option B! (Glad my asceticism hasn't dulled my palate.) We ate here before hearing A.S. Byatt read at the 92nd Street Y, and I'm sad that I have no other reason to visit the far Upper East Side, because this place was fantastic. Very reasonably-priced and vegetarian-friendly, ostensibly Koren BBQ, but for the amount of tofu the place offered, I dunno. I had the Tofu and Vegetable BBeeQ Roll, a big sushi-style seaweed cone of rice, tofu, and vegetables with a sweet, light sauce. James ordered the Peanut Lime Beef and loved it - it even got my vegetarian mouth watering a bit. We also shared the Dumpling Salad, and I would've drank that mango soy dressing if I could. Like, if I'd been at home. Loved this place. If you find yourself for any reason around the East 90s, go.

A Vague Reconstruction

2009-11-03T09:35:00.001-05:00

Me: "[name of the place where I work now]"
Lady on the Phone: "Hi, I was wondering if you recycle prostheses?"
Me: "Well we don't, but--"
LotP: "Well do you know anyone who does?"
Me: "I do, let me just check my list..."
LotP: "In California? Or just New York?"
Me (flipping through binder): "I'm not sure where they are, let me just find..."
LotP: "You know, that's really sexist, not to take those."
[For the record, readers, we don't accept any in-kind medical donations.]
Me: "It's sexist? How? ... Wait, what kind of prostheses are you asking about?"
LotP: "something something breasts, something something reconstruction."
Me: "Ohhh. I thought you meant limb prostheses. ...Can you even recycle those sorts of prostheses?"
LotP: "Yes, you can."
Me: "...How?"
LotP: "something something."
Me (honestly just curious now): "So... have they been... used?"
LotP: "something something not implants, no, prostheses."
Me (seriously relieved, btw): "Ohhh. No, I'm sorry, I don't know anyone who would take those. I have someone for prosthetic limbs, but no, and that's really outside the realm of the work that we do..."
LotP: "What is the work that you do?"
Me: "Well, you can get all that info from our website."
LotP: "But I'm on the phone with you right now."
Me: "Okay, well our work--"
LotP: "But you don't really know, do you?"
Me: "No, I do know, and I can--"
LotP: "That's why you're telling me to go to the website, because you don't--"
Me: "Well, no, ma'am I--"
LotP: "something something four-year college."

AND THEN SHE HUNG UP.

But really the point is not that there are crazy people calling here, because just last week I got told to fuck off by a guy asking about a homeopathic all-purpose anti-pathogenic that combined sodium chloride and ascorbic acid - you know, salt and vitamin C - so that's not really a big deal, but that I'm really curious what the fuck she was saying about my education. You know, my ivy league fucking education.

Which now that you mention it, yes, my dad is thrilled that I'm using for work as a receptionist.

A Preamble for the Season

2009-11-02T16:39:00.005-05:00

I am not a Yankee fan.

I find myself telling myself this, telling other people this, rediscovering it in little moments of really not caring who wins and wanting to go to bed. I feel like I might be protesting too much, but it's like every National Coming Out Day when I take a good hard look at my soul and say, "Nope. Not yet."

I was raised a Mets fan, through some of their lowest times of losingness. I remember one game when I was nine or ten, my dad, sister, and I leaving the game around inning six, as the score was 10-1. We had a running joke that we were a bad-luck charm for the team, but really, now. It wasn't our fault.

Beyond a completely random crush on catcher Todd Hundley, and subsequent irrational resentment of Mike Piazza, I was a hereditary Mets fan but never really took on the mantle myself. (Is that sort of like cultural Judaism? No belief, but the trappings and habits? Dippin Dots and failure.) I mean, I liked baseball, I enjoyed going to games, I even made the junior high softball team (and lasted a week before I realized they practiced every day and most of the girls were bitches). But I was never a Mets fan proper, in my own right.

So it was with great shame and hesitation that I realized, some time late in college, that I was getting to know the Yankees alarmingly well. By junior year I was spending abundant time on James' couch, doing homework or whatever with a baseball game in the background, and things only got worse when we lived together senior year. James is an aberrant Massachussettsan, the grandson of a Brooklynite, who hates real maple syrup and the Red Sox. And so, in a few years, with the tv on and my best friend watching, through college and living together after graduation - the addition of Kate for a year as third roommate, James' sister and fellow fan, only accelerated my defection - I got to know the players and the team, part of my little tv family along with Jim and Pam and Tyra Banks, except these people I could hear about on the radio, too.

(I also started learning more about baseball, the specifics of the rules and strategies. It's an ongoing process - did you know that a fouled bunt can be a third strike? I learned this two days ago.)

My (maternal) grandmother came into her own Yankee fandom a few years ago. My mother is a sports agnostic from a Yankees family (she allowed her daughters to be raised Mets fans, for godsake), and my grandmother had been similarly disinterested until... well I don't actually know what happened, but now she, former high school English teacher and current abstract painter, fucking loves them. Hearing "A-Rod" and "Jeter" coming as words out of her mouth, with the Mid-Atlantic accent she somehow developed growing up on the Lower East Side, is endlessly odd and wonderful. She runs to the TV after a dinner at my mom's house to catch the end of the game like an excited little kid.

But here is the thing: she - like all actual fans of a team, I think - cares if the Yankees win. And I don't think that I do. I know who (most of) the players are, have a sense for (most of) their strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and stupid-ass necklaces. I love watching a game, whether I'm on my friend's couch or at the stadium (though I find it impossible to have any bloody sense of what's happening from the bleachers, and the elimination of Dippin Dots from this city's ballparks is a fucking disgrace). And yeah, winning is really exciting. But you know what else I really like watching? Just about any sport that I know - or, even better, am learning - something about.

Let me spend a season with my Mets-fan friends, or god, for my father's sake, find me a Mets fan for a boyfriend. Get me familiar with the players, take me to a game. Hideki who?

And that, folks, is the most long-winded introduction ever to just a link to an article I liked. By way of The Awl comes this lovely article about New York City and Yankee Stadium and how the two are really sort of the same thing.

Rabbit Rabbit

2009-11-01T23:26:00.002-05:00

I just realized that, as it's November 1, its the first day of NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month, wherein you post something to your blog every day for a month. I skipped it last year, and we can see how well my output's been holding up, right? The previous two years the month-long push had been a great re-energizer for me, and maybe you've noticed that I could use that sort of kick in the pants again. And I'm sure as hell not writing a novel. So here goes.

(since I can't title this post with the nonverbal gasp I let out on reading this news, let me just say:) Holy Crapballs

2009-10-27T17:05:00.005-04:00

Time Out NY brings some awesome, awesome news:

[W]e hear that the true-named Ms. Marvel will be starring in Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play at the Public Theater this March. The new show is called The Book of Grace, and Marvel has the title role.

I would assume she's playing Grace and not the Book, but this is Suzan-Lori Parks, so all bets are off.

But you know what bets are on, if I may mangle that idom? The bets that this is going to be totally fucking awesome. (It's also being directed by James Macdonald, who directed Ms. Marvel and a bunch of other brilliant people in the amazing, gorgeous, practically perfect production of Top Girls at MTC.) I think the word fierce most definitely applies. More in the gorgeous-lionness-about-to-bite-your-fucking-head-off way than other, newer, more pop-culturey connotations.

If I had a tumblr, or weren't slightly afraid of tumblrs, I would start Fuck Yeah Suzan-Lori Parks.

A Night of Many Adventures

2009-10-22T23:50:00.007-04:00

Tonight I saw the live taping of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me at Carnegie Hall. It was transcendent, and I now have a huge crush on Adam Felber. Go figure.

Tonight I am cleaning my apartment. I have a friend staying with me tomorrow night, and I was all, I'll clean before work on Friday, because new job starts at 1pm. But the thing is - and I realized the implications of this just this afternoon, because I am a dolt - new job only starts at 1pm four days a week. Fridays are full days. So we have a late-night apartment cleaning tonight. True procrastinatory style.

Tonight, just now, in cleaning my apartment, I noticed a dead roach hanging out next to the shoelaces of my winter boots by the front door. I don't know how long it's been there - I haven't worn those shoes since, you know, last winter - but isn't the whole point of cats that they eat shit like that? So that's really why I'm blogging - maybe if I don't deal with the dead roach, it will go away. (Last time I tried that, what I thought was a mouse on my kitchen ceiling turned out to - probably? - be a bat?)

But what I'm writing to tell you, really, is that tonight, before Carnegie Hall, before cleaning my apartment to the Yankees post-game on the radio, I dined at East Japanese Restaurant on 55th Street. Part of why I wanted to go was I'd just noticed they have natto rolls on the veggie sushi menu. Natto! Crazy fermented soybean breakfast of the Orient, stringy and slimy and bizarre and something I was naturally dying to try. I am, for a vegetarian with various food intolerances and whatever - fuck you, lactose - an adventurous eater. I was psyched.

I will say, and this is true, that the natto didn't make me puke. Not quite. But oh my god was it tough going there. Like, shuddering while trying to wash it down with water, slipping ginger in my mouth to cut the stringy, bitter, earthy, awful slimy taste. My dinner companion wasn't so bothered, and I'm not surprised - it wasn't a bad taste, exactly. It was just some combination of taste and texture that viscerally revolted my body. It felt personal.

But other than that and the cockroach, an awesome night. Adam Felber. Swoon.

I Am Losing My Effing Mind

2009-10-14T21:38:00.005-04:00

[Update!: Mystery solved in the comments.]

Please, please help. I have this sequence from a movie or play or book or tv show or whothefuck knows what in my head, and I have no bloody idea what it is. Google is no help, and no one I've called knows. I'm terrified it's a play I once read, which means who the hell else will know it? But maybe you will?

So this guy's been kidnapped, or is being held prisoner, actually, a sort of POW situation, and every day the guard brings in his tray of food - or slips it through a slot? - and asks him, "What color is the sky?" or something, and if he says it's blue, no food, or maybe not, but the guard is trying to wear him down to saying the sky is green. Something like that. This goes on for a while, and the guy's seeming to lose his resistance, until one day the guard turns his back and the guy's able to take the metal food tray and SMASH the guard in the back of his head, and as he's beating him with the tray he's like, "THIS is for the blue sky! THIS is for the green grass!" And then he escapes and gets back to his lady love, and I think we may get this story from him telling it to her.

Help. Please. If you know this and are a person who, like, knows my cell phone number, please text or call. This is urgent.

Backlog Catchup #2: Apex Hides the Hurt

2009-10-12T15:34:00.000-04:00

I have two questions for you. 1: Are you on twitter? 2: Are you following Colson Whitehead? Surprise sucker-punch question 3: Why the fuck not?

For a little while I was confused by his twitter. I only knew Colson Whitehead through one novel, The Intuitionist, a subtle, elegant, noirish allegory. Here is some of what I said about it as one of my top five books of 2007:

There's something elusive about this book, something like getting the story through smoke or fog. This is a book that's like remembering a dream, set in a sort-of-1950s sort-of-New-York, a little noir and a little magical, and also some racial themes if that's your sort of thing. My sort of thing is beautiful writing, captivating mystery, and confident story-telling and world-creating. Also, elevators were magical for about a week after I finished. This book is amazing.

So that is not a book that set me up to expect anything like this. Or this. Or the epic saga of this sort that's been going on. But holy god do I love it.

Part of what's helped me love it, though, other than Whitehead's deadpan commitment to sharing his tales of Segway racing with the tweeting masses, was reading another novel of his, Apex Hides the Hurt. I'd say it's another example of the power of twitter marketing, except that I got the book from the library, but I would never have sought it out were I not following Whitehead's twitter feed, where these Segway stories of precise and slippery irony are interspersed with actual real-life sharings. And I'm very glad I did.

In terms of not finding Whitehead's twitter playfulness surprising, Apex is a less somber novel than The Intuitionist - you could call it cultural satire, I suppose, and it is funny and clever. But I might not be able to live with myself if my entire review of a book is through the lense of the author's twitter style, so let's move on.

Apex Hides the Hurt is the story of a nomenclature consultant, former star of his field recently fallen into melancholic withdrawal following a mysterious hurt. He's called back into service by the council of a small town in need of his expertise. So yes, there's, though I sort of hate the phrase, social satire - Whitehead looks at aspirational strip-mall commerce with sharp perception, and his way of making me see things and ideas in new light saves us from the yuckiness that I usually associate with, yuck, social satire. But Apex is layered with real human pathos, which saves it from the dangerous superficiality of OMG, our culture is so commercialized! which is what this conceit would be from a weaker writer. Colson Whitehead is no weak writer, though, and his incisive satire is less pointed, not making fun, but more, Look, this is who we are, we should see ourselves. There is - thank god - an actual human story being told, about fear and work and love and all sorts of slightly frightening things. It is lovely, and full, and beautifully, brightly told.

It's amazing that he has time to write these beautiful books in between all the Segway races. Is there even an off-season?

Backlog Catchup #1: Aftermath at New York Theatre Workshop

2009-10-11T11:03:00.002-04:00

I saw Aftermath, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank's docu-theatre piece on Iraqi refugees, a good few weeks ago, and now I'm, unfortunately, coming to you with word about it oh, just a week before it closes. Better late than not at all, or should I have pretended to be always on top of things? Too late!

Anyway. The question that Aftermath raises for me is more about theatrical form than its content - the content is fantastic, stories (verbatim interviews) of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan. It's not a war play, per se. It's more a highlighting of stories that are the result of war, but are about these people themselves, their lives, and for me it's an aspect of the war that I hadn't encountered. It was good to learn about these things. Not, like, fun, but good.

My question(s) about the form, though... why theatre? Aside from the fact that actors are taking on these voices, there isn't really anything theatrical about it. Even other docu-theatre, like The Laramie Project or This Beautiful City theatricalizes by having actors play multiple characters (giving the layer of a troupe bringing these stories to life) or, in the case of This Beautiful City, by musicalizing some sequences. Just like I felt about My Name is Rachel Corrie, I wasn't sure how much was added by putting this on a stage. But then, if these interviews were collected in a book or magazine article, I might not have seen them.

Theoretical (okay, somewhat practical) concerns aside, Aftermath is (or was, the several weeks ago I saw it) an effective and mostly engaging piece. (Amir Arison, whom I'd known as the sweetly hesitant adultering doctor in A Very Common Procedure gives a brilliant bravado performance as a succesful dermatologist, all gold chains and cocky posturing.) I'm glad I got to hear these stories, to hear these people's words.

So, okay, this only plays for one more week, though the 18th. You can get tickets for half price ($32.50 rather than the regular $60) with code AMFBK31. Call 212-947-8844 or go here. (It's too late for this now, but you should also know that New York Theatre Workshop's Sunday evening performances are always $20. Because they are awesome.)

A Dispatch from THE MOST COMFORTABLE COUCH EVER, Stockbridge, MA

2009-10-10T09:26:00.004-04:00

Okay folks, here's the deal. I quit my job on Friday. This sounds very scary, doesn't it, as opposed to phrasing it: I got a new job, and gave my notice at the old job on Friday. Both are true. What's actually a little scary, just because it is different and I fear change, is that my new job is not in theatre. For the first time in the 5+ years since leaving college (or in the last 10 years, if we count all my theatre-work in college as actual work, which we could), my job will not be theatre-related. It is an important distinction: I am a freelance dramaturg and writer, and I'm working as a receptionist at a large charitable organization or I am a receptionist at a big charity. It's something I'm still figuring out.

As I think I mentioned somewhere in the month-and-a-half of brain-melt, my theatre job was cut down to part-time at the start of September. This sucked. Mainly because I could barely live on the full-time salary so, you know, half of that... And also it made doing my job hard. And the sudden change was disorienting, the financial instability and uncertainty in general. Fun times.

I applied for half a bajillion jobs, from theatre jobs to random-ass craigslist stuff. I did not get either of the two awesome theatre jobs I applied for - on both counts, it seems, because my four years of literary office experience overqualified me. What I am not overqualified for: a receptionist job at a large charity; training to teach for a big test prep oranization. That is what I'm doing now.

What I'm also doing: figuring out what it means to not be defined by my job. As I said to a playwright from work - I'm leaving the realm of full-time theatre employment not entirely voluntarily, but I've not been violently forced from it, either. There are aspects of my (old) job that I've madly loved - mostly working with a flock of amazing, awesome playwrights - but a lot of working in theatre had started to really wear on me. It's like we're selling people something we have to convince them they want, and half the time what we're selling isn't that awesome to begin with. (I mean this in general, not just for my soon-to-be-former place of employment.) I haven't been able to tell how much of that fatigue was about where I was working, how much was theatre in general. Have I been on a career path based on what Jaime-five-years-ago wanted, rather than Jaime-right-now? I don't know. This will probably help me figure that out.

I probably would've preferred to figure that out by trying out my job at a different organization, but oh well! So I'm taking the other option - seeing what it's like to *not* work in theatre, at least in terms of employment. I'm still going to look for freelance dramaturgy and producing projects - probably more than I had been lately, since I'll have all of my theatrical energies to devote to that - and I'm also trying out this writing thing, which I've been dabbling in, to see how real I can make that. I've got a 2500-word essay on the supernatural/vampire-fighting powers of garlic due in November, so that's a start.

What this means for this blog is that I will actually be writing here, with actual content. Theatre, foodstuffs, counting down the days to the return of Inwood kayaking... stuff like that. There are plays I've seen and books I've read during my hiatus, and I will do some sort of catch-up post shortly. After that, it's you and me kid, and the future. (How long do we give me before I start answering my own phone with my receptionisty salutation?)

Okay Bitches, I'm Back

2009-10-09T01:25:00.001-04:00

Here's something to ease us gently back into new material. Non-animal video content coming shortly. Get ready!

As the Last of My Brain Drips Slowly From My Ears

2009-09-09T18:40:00.002-04:00

Hello lovelies. In case it's not already obvious, I've fallen into another one of my spontaneous hiatuses. Hiates? This adventure of halfemployment has taken me to temping this week, where I spend eight hours a day in a windowless room putting labels on files and invoices in files. I can listen to my iPod, but maybe four episodes in a row of Jordan, Jesse, Go! isn't actually good for the brain? But anyway, my brain is melting, and I will be back soon, but not right now. Keep checking, use your rss reader, follow my adventures on twitter. Wait for me. I promise. I don't know what I promise, but whatever you want, it's yours.

Africa Dispatch VII: Nothing if not resourceful

2009-08-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

saturday night, one of the expats realized that we had trivial pursuit in the house and got really excited to organize a game. Lauren (who is american) and i, Nadia who is from France, and two Canadian expats that Lauren is friends with from another NGO got ready to play. we realized that there were no pieces. not a problem, we are resourceful. i drew pies on paper and would use highlighters to fill the pieces. then we realized, no dice. again! no problem. i wrote numbers on paper that we pulled out of a hat. and started playing only to realize that the questions -- the 1984 genius addition -- were in french. between Lauren and my broken French, Nadia's English (about as good as my French) and the Canadians' sheer willpower we played one of the slowest but funniest games of trivial pursuit in history.

i'm smelly but good. working harder here than in the other projects. and getting really ready to be home.

love to everyone. i'll try to email again tomorrow. if not, definitely wednesday.

Africa Dispatch V: Mostly beautiful things

2009-08-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, one of my best friends left theatre to go save the world. She'd been working in fundraising, and, coupled with some general job dissatisfaction, she figured, "If I'm gonna be raising money, I might as well be saving babies." And so now that's what she does, more or less. She works for an amazing charity that does work all over the world. This friend, whom we'll call Sydney Bristow (and her husband will be Vaughn, but no, she doesn't work for the CIA) so I don't get her fired or anything, works in the organization's NYC office, but is currently in Africa, having gotten the chance to spend a few weeks there visiting some of the org's sites. She's been sending email updates to family and a few friends, and I asked if I could share them with the internet. Maybe it's the malaria, but she agreed.

8/20/09

In Arua so I'll be able to email with some frequency again.
The last few days have been amazing.
I saw hippos and elephants, a lightning sotrm, the milky way and more stars than i thought imaginable. and a lightning storm that turned the sky red..
i've also learned that the two most beautiful words in the english language are "flush toilet." i've gotten good at holding a flashlight between my teeth when i pee.
my arms are two different colors from having a combo of drivers tan and farmers tan.
i love you all and miss you
it feels very far away.

i'lll write again soon

Africa Dispatch VI: The African quick step

2009-08-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

hello from rainy africa.

i should preface this story by saying that yesterday morning i was finally hit with a bout of the african quick step. [I have no idea what this is. Queries were met with a blank email. I will update when I know. -Jaime]

i went on rounds with one of the clinical officers in the hiv ward of the hospital. a clinical officer is a government nurse practitioner but they are basically doctors in a country with too few of them. while on rounds, patrick had to drain excess spinal fliud from a man with a kind of meningitis that only shows up in late stage AIDS patients. i asked if i could watch. i did and took pictures. afterwards, while i was asking patrick questions, the room went swimmy and my ears started ringing and i blacked out. next thing i remember i was outside with my head between my knees, totally mortified. patrick is petrified of me now.

i'm fine but embarrassed. and my stomach is doing much better now. i guess i still have a little of the bristow in me after all.

i'm much busier here than the other programs. the project is huge. they've got me running around like a mad lady. today i'm sitting in on a nurse training session and then spending time at a youth group for HIV positive kids. tonight, dancing with some of the expatriates.

love to everyone. i'll be home in just about a week. i've gotten pretty enmeshed here and love uganda. but i'll be glad to come home to the land of door knobs, 24 hour electricity, hot indoor showers, and my husband.

This Thing, And This Other Thing, And How They Look The Same

2009-08-27T10:57:00.010-04:00

I'm sure it's just an unfortunate confluence of timing and the venn diagram I sit at the center of*, but when I picked up my copy of Time Out, this week being the lovely Fall Preview, I looked at the cover and had a moment of Hey, wait a second.

Just yesterday, twitter brought my heart a beautiful little gift, when @RagtimeonBway09 posted a link that included this:

What, you ask, is that sexy thing that is visually engaging, aesthetically lovely, and gives a strong sense of tone and content, and energy? Why that would be the poster for the upcoming, hotly-anticipated (by-me-and-my-friend-Liisa-and-maybe-also-Moxie) revival of Ragtime. Except for the little red circle that says HOPE, I think it is hot. (I don't love the "Their Time. Our Time." tag line, but the poster hides it well.) Naturally this comes by way of SpotCo, the best theatre ad agency IN THE WORLD. (They were also behind the perfection that was the poster for the Broadway run of The Little Dog Laughed, gushed all over by me here.)

Okay and then this morning I pulled out my copy of Time Out, and this is what I saw:

Well if that doesn't look familiar! And okay, yes, they are by the same artist, and I guess this is just what he does. But did you notice what's on the upper-right corner of the Time Out cover?

How meta! I would be taking this moment to celebrate that Time Out, usual bastion of decent theatrical taste, is heralding the Ragtime revival - there are plenty of Ragtime haterz out there, and I'm compelled to do the good work - but the Fall Preview says good things about the Bye Bye Birdie revival, mainly that it's something exciting? or that people should see? So, like, David Cote's not dead to me or anything, but I can't really use this endorsement as ammunition in my pro-Ragtime, I-don't-just-love-it-for-sentimental-value crusade.

But mainly, that poster is really hot.

-----
*

Africa Dispatch IV: Greetings from the end of the earth

2009-08-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, one of my best friends left theatre to go save the world. She'd been working in fundraising, and, coupled with some general job dissatisfaction, she figured, "If I'm gonna be raising money, I might as well be saving babies." And so now that's what she does, more or less. She works for an amazing charity that does work all over the world. This friend, whom we'll call Sydney Bristow (and her husband will be Vaughn, but no, she doesn't work for the CIA) so I don't get her fired or anything, works in the organization's NYC office, but is currently in Africa, having gotten the chance to spend a few weeks there visiting some of the org's sites. She's been sending email updates to family and a few friends, and I asked if I could share them with the internet. Maybe it's the malaria, but she agreed.

8/13/09

i am in a tiny village now. and visited an even smaller one with a mobile clinic today. (think 50 people in town) i shadowed the medical team who treated malnourished children. a lot of them hugged me and held my hand. i didn´t hold anyone thought because they were naked and i didn´t want to get peed on.

yesterday i visited the pediatric and maternity wards at the hospital. it was not nearly as interesting. but still good to see.

it is peaceful and beautiful in the village. the team here is really nice. and the sunset over the mountains is breathtaking.
the shower is one of the most luxurious i´ve even experienced.

vaughn, i checked up on why i haven´t been sleeping so well after we talked. it turns out it is indeed the antimalaria meds.

miss you all. love to all.

Africa Dispatch III: Radio silent for a while

2009-08-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, one of my best friends left theatre to go save the world. She'd been working in fundraising, and, coupled with some general job dissatisfaction, she figured, "If I'm gonna be raising money, I might as well be saving babies." And so now that's what she does, more or less. She works for an amazing charity that does work all over the world. This friend, whom we'll call Sydney Bristow (and her husband will be Vaughn, but no, she doesn't work for the CIA) so I don't get her fired or anything, works in the organization's NYC office, but is currently in Africa, having gotten the chance to spend a few weeks there visiting some of the org's sites. She's been sending email updates to family and a few friends, and I asked if I could share them with the internet. Maybe it's the malaria, but she agreed.

8/11/09

i'm leaving the capital tomorrow morning and email will be spotty for a while.
i have a cell phone now though so vaughn will be able to email every few days to let you guys know hes spoken to me

today was my first emotional day. i spoke with a woman on the forefront of the aids activist community here. she is so inspiring and brave and fighting such an uphill battle. she was a founding board member of Global Fund (think Bono) and still has to run around begging favors of connections because there was a stock out of the drugs she is on and cant get treatment. and this is one of the most well connected people in the hiv community
crazy

the food here is really good
i will not be losing weight
people are really friendly too. and i've learned the word for "white girl"... mzunga. children will run up to me on the street and say "Hello mzunga" and run away giggling.

Africa Dispatch II: Change in schedule

2009-08-25T10:15:00.000-04:00

had a productive morning and spent the afternoon shopping at a local craft market; vaughn i apologize now for how much i bought

ive gotten the ability to visit a third project so im staying a few more days

ill now be home the morning of sunday the 30th

love to all

Africa Dispatch I: In Kampala safe and sound

2009-08-24T13:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, one of my best friends left theatre to go save the world. She'd been working in fundraising, and, coupled with some general job dissatisfaction, she figured, "If I'm gonna be raising money, I might as well be saving babies." And so now that's what she does, more or less. She works for an amazing charity that does work all over the world. This friend, whom we'll call Sydney Bristow (and her husband will be Vaughn, but no, she doesn't work for the CIA) so I don't get her fired or anything, works in the organization's NYC office, but is currently in Africa, having gotten the chance to spend a few weeks there visiting some of the org's sites. She's been sending email updates to family and a few friends, and I asked if I could share them with the internet. Maybe it's the malaria, but she agreed.

8/8/09

Hello

I arrived in Kampala a few hours ago and it is beautiful
Weather in the 80s and no humidity and a great breeze
The compound includes a huge villa overlooking a valley and Lake Victoria in the distance
The office, where I am typing now, is across a courtyard from the house
Ive been warned about bananas and avocados falling from the trees in the courtyard
Tomorrow morning I am checking out the market and then going swimming in the afternoon with a nice US expat who oversees our finances She belongs to a country club

This is not at all what I expected and I am not complaining Im sure it wont be this luxurious in the smaller villages though

Love to you all

Vaughn I think I may be able to call you on Monday Please please keep your phone on you

Ill write again soon and hopefully be able to add punctuation on this crazy keyboard

Podcast Daisy Chain: For Children of All Ages, Except For Children

2009-08-22T00:10:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, almost a year ago, I was listening to the podcast of This American Life. One of the stories - sorry, acts - was about a guy who dresses up as Superman. This story was told by one Luke Burbank. The piece was pretty cool, but what really struck me was the little byline Ira Glass gave at the end, something like, "Luke Burbank is currently reinventing talk radio with his show, Too Beautiful To Live." Something about that title, or that quest, stuck with me, and several weeks later I got some of that TBTL on my iPod, and the rest is history.

(By the by, if you're new to this podcast thing, you can download these all, and bajillions more, for free from iTunes, the websites directly, or probably some other sources, too. Back-episodes of This American Life cost a dollar, though.)

I blogged about my TBTL love last winter, but I'm revisiting it now as the jumping-off point for a podcast discovery chain that continued today. So This American Life led to TBTL. Then, a few months into my TBTL listening, Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris of "The Sound of Young America" (just Jesse) and "Jordan, Jesse, Go!" (both guys, obvs) were guests on TBTL. (It may have just been Jesse - I am vague on the memory and too lazy to check.) I enjoyed their thing, and filed away their podcast in my brain, as I had once done with TBTL. In similar procrastinatory fashion, I eventually, after some time, started downloading The Sound of Young America.

I actually started following Jesse on twitter first, which was a really weird way to go about things. But then I started listening to his podcast.

The Sound of Young America is basically an interview show. (I believe it also airs on some NPR stations, in case you like to roll old-school like that.) I stocked up on some back-episodes with my favorite people - Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, two of the guys from The Kids in the Hall, Mike Birbiglia, Jenna Fischer, Mike Birbiglia again - and started listening.

Jesse Thorn is a consummate interviewer, and these podcasts feel more like conversations than anything else. Whether Jesse's talking to a comedian I love or someone I've never heard of, it's interesting, engaging, and funny. I recently grabbed an old episode with Steven Johnson, in which he talks about his book, The Invention of Air. Awesome. (Awesome conversation, and the book sounds great, and I look forward to getting it from the library shortly.) Jenna Fischer describing her career up and through "The Office"? Also awesome. Mike Birbiglia saying words? Can't get enough. It's a straightforward premise, and it works perfectly. I also can't resist a show that starts with, "I'm Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart."

So then there's also "Jordan, Jesse, Go!" which might be the best podcast title ever. I don't remember what got me downloading it a couple of weeks ago - someone just probably reminded me that it exists. I've heard it described (by Jesse Thorn himself, on The Sound of Young America) as "a talk show for children of all ages... except actual children." It's Jordan and Jesse, often plus a guest (who is often a comedian), just talking about whatever. But because they are funny and smart, it's fun and interesting to listen, a great background for, say, traipsing about Harlem on a 90-degree day, if, like, the bus is taking forever, and then you accidentally get off a block early anyway? Just for example. It's very enjoyable for something like that.

It's also very guy-ish, in what for me is a really fun way. Like, I knew I was sold when the conversation somehow turned to smiting trolls with one's dick, and whether or not smiting necessarily involved fire, and then what that meant for one's dick. So that's what I was laughing about at the gym the other day, in case anyone was wondering.

And then this next podcast I knew I was in love with at: "Go fuck that boy! Fuck the shit out of that boy. Over and over and over." (Because it was about how maybe that boy was her true love! Maybe.)

Last night, on either side of grocery shopping, I listened to Jesse Thorn's The Sound of Young America interview with Dan Savage. Dan Savage whom I've recently managed to stop conflating with David Sedaris, Dan Savage whose beautiful piece on This American Life about his mother's death made me and the rest of the world sob in public, Dan Savage whom I know mostly for coining the term "santorum." (Learn about the origins of the term here!) But Dan Savage, aside from those laurels, is a famous sex advice columnist, and his conversation on TSOYA was awesome, so when I got home I loaded up with a handful of episodes of his podcast.

Can I also say that he was gifted with the most perfect name for a love/sex advice column? Dan Savage --> Savage Love. It's just not fair to the rest of the world.

And so today, especially because there was no TBTL last night because of soccer in Seattle, I listened to five episodes of the Savage Love podcast. I fear that this new thing in my ears may render me irrevocably obscene. But that probably already happened somewhere around smiting trolls with possibly flame-shooting dicks.

I would explain what makes Dan Savage a great advice-giver and podcaster - rational, sex-positive level-headedness plus the perfect balance of bluntness and compassion - but, A, I am extraordinarily late to the Dan Savage party, and would feel a little like I was telling you about this great new show, "30 Rock" (or, like, have you heard of these Decemberists?), and also he does the best possible job of that himself on The Sound of Young America. If you don't feel like jumping into this Jaime-Certified Podcast Cycle, and are even later to this party than I am, go read the Savage Love column, and get a feel for what the man does. And then forgive me if I work "sodomy" into every conversation I have this weekend. After about 200 minutes of Dan Savage in my ears, the inside of my head is a very strange place to be.

TBTL
The Sound of Young America
Jordan, Jesse, Go!
the Savage Love-cast
the Savage Love column
oh, and: This American Life

[In case you are curious, two other podcasts that I love and recommend: Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! & Filmspotting. I can't sing Wait Wait's praises - "a hilarious NPR news quiz show"? shoot me now - without sounding incredibly hate-worthy, but just trust me that it's wonderful. And Filmspotting is a great movie review & talk-about podcast, which is weird for me to say, because I see about two movies a year, but I loved listening to it anyway, which really says something, so if you actually see movies, you will probably totally fucking love it.

(Full disclosure - I know one of the Filmspotting hosts, but that is only why I started listening, not why I kept it up. He even told me to stop, because he's weird like that, but I was shamefully hooked.)

Can I work them into the podcasty web? Let's see... TBTL's Luke Burbank used to be a panelist for Wait Wait, and subbed for host Peter Sagal when he was on vacation. And since Filmspotting is on Chicago's WBEZ, they thank Torey Malatia during their credits, as does Ira Glass at the end of every This American Life, and whose name I was not even close to guessing how to correctly spell.]

A Moment With Jaime's Livejournal

2009-08-21T21:06:00.006-04:00

Twittered two hours ago: I am the picture of pending unemployment, scouring craigslist jobs in underwear & a wifebeater in an unairconditioned apt on a Friday night. I have since transitioned to boxery shorts and a sports bra. I don't feel any lovelier, any cooler, or any more employed.

I was told a few weeks ago that as of September 1st, my job would be becoming part-time. Thanks, global economic collapse! Today my co-workers were officially told, and so I'm finally free (the delay was, granted, my choice) to live-tweet the soul-killing enterprise that is the craigslist job listings.

I need a more elegant word for half-laid-off, the equivalent ease of "halfsclamation point," which is, obvs, the imaginary grammatical notation for something between a humdrum period and the embarrassingly enthusiastic exclamation point. But "half-laid-off" means what it needs to mean. Its meaning being that shit sucks right now.

So I've been spending tonight in various states of pajamaed semi-dress, in various computer perchings on my bed, listening to baseball on the radio (20-11, what the fuck?) and helping Meg get acclimated to the new cat. (Yeah, I got a new cat. More on him in a moment.) This no-AC thing, though - I am a freaking martyr for the environment. And for my bank account.

So yeah, looking for part-time work, and got a new cat. ( This is the most amazing blog post ever.) Quickly on the new guy*: Meg'd been all meow-y and needy since Stella died - did I mention I had to put her to sleep a few months ago? surprise liver failure, fun times - and I knew someone with a cat who needed a home. He's been here a week, and things are fine except when he walks over to Meg, and she hunkers down and growls while he meows at her, and then sometimes he attacks. My cat has amazing social skills.

She also apparently has the inner thermometer of a lizard, as she's sleeping pressed up against my leg right now, and I have caught her napping in sunbeams during this heat wave.

If I raised a cat this weird, god help us if/when I procreate.

Um...

Okay, right after this goes up I'm gonna blog about some podcasts, bury this awful talk of me sweatily looking for a part-time job in a sweltering, cat-filled apartment.

"Crazy cat ladies are many things—single and living in unclean cat-hair apartments littered with kitty litter, etc—but they're not dumb. They're intimidatingly smart. That's why they're single. Well, that and the cats." --Emily Gould

I should amend it thusly: "Well, that, and the cats, and the blog post above."

- - - - -
*I mean the cat. Don't freak out. At the big family BBQ last weekend, I got my annual "I want grandkids! Okay, how about a wedding! A boyfriend? What about a date?" from my dad, and my dad got his annual not-realizing-how-close-he-came-to-getting-smacked-in-the-face from me (with love).

Also, Stop Telling Us It's One of the Best-Loved Books of All Time. We Know.

2009-08-09T23:15:00.000-04:00

I still maintain that this looks like hipster nostalgia porn (and yes, I coined that term), and that's at the very least problematic, but I for serious laughed out loud, hard, at one point, and hit about a three on a scale of 1-to-dusty at another. Sigh. I feel very conflicted. Please, movie trailers, stop with the twee hand-written little card things. They make me hate you. And they always seem to come with Dave Eggers. Stop that. Keep with the laugh-out-loud bits and the impending dustiness.

@ Yahoo! Video

(via Ms. Heather)

It's Okay That I'm Home Blogging at 10:30 on a Saturday Night - I'm Getting Up Early for Kayaking Tomorrow. Except for the Thunderstorms. Fuck. Anyway

2009-08-08T22:23:00.007-04:00

Those of you following along on twitter (and why aren't you?) or facebook (oh god, I just friended my mom) are well aware of the computer saga that's plagued me the last month or so. My computer died, was resurrected by our office's brilliant, generous, adorably-accented Canadian IT Guy, and then was stone cold raptured last weekend. Gone for good. But I'm still here, waiting for Armageddon, and with a blessed week-and-a-half off from work that was starting to look damn menacing, with a lack of podcasts and email. And blogging! I've been actually blogging this week, and that was going to be cut short! The horror!

So it's really for you, dear readers, that I bought my friend's boyfriend's used Compaq laptop. (And if you each gave my $5, I could afford to pay for it!) This is a beautiful machine, and not just compared to its predecessor. Although it really is exciting to have a J key again. JJJJJJJJJ. The keyboard is just the right amount of clicky, and I can put it on my lap without risking third-degree burns or a hardware meltdown. (That's what she said.) It runs Vista, which I've heard not-great things about, but let's look again at the first two words of that sentence: It runs. Big improvement.

And as this is a friend-to-friend computer transfer, I also inherit, along with a working J key and non-exploding stuff, an iTunes library. And it is wonderful. And hilarious. A sampling:

ABBA
Amy Winehouse
Bjork (a LOT of Bjork)
Dolly Parton
Imogen Heap
six Harry Potter audiobooks
"Friends Forever" and four other songs from Saved By the Bell (wtf?)

So yes, my friend's boyfriend is, aside from apparently still waiting to find out if Harry bests Voldemort, a homosexual. AND, so yes, that also means that, even better than the fact that I now have more than one Feist song, it means MUSICAL THEATRE. Victor Garber, singing on my computer! (He doesn't do evites, but he did Sweeney Todd? I did not know that. I'm also making jokes for the, like, three of you who know "Alias." But there should be more! It's a serious awesome show.) Assassins is just so awesome. And Hedwig! Sweet Hedwig. But for me, the gem of the gem of this collection is the complete original cast recording of Urinetown. Let's take a moment to sigh for Hunter Foster.

Sigh.

Okay.

I saw Urinetown... well, back whenever it was that it was on Broadway. I did not see Hunter (whom I call by first name because I spent a year and a half working for his agent, so I've stapled his resume to his really old headshot a bajillion times, and so I take that privilege.), and the replacement was not so awesome, but the show was, and most of the original cast was still in. Well, it actually took me a while to warm to it - I wish I could've seen it a second time, because I don't think I quite got its genius in the theatre. And but so I did have the cast recording, and gave it some good solid listening time in college. (That's when I got my swooning in for Hunter Foster's voice, and general genius timing. "Yes, literally." I guess Little Shop was the first thing I saw him in? Which, fuck all you haters, I loved.)

Anyway, this is getting to be a stupid long post - hi, this is me not having really talked to another human being all day - but the point is that, after about five years, I'm reuninted with the Urinetown cast recording and, yes, it does feel so good. I'm reminded what a brilliant show it is, how much I love Hunter Foster, how much I wanted to be Spencer Kayden.

Oh my god, I now also have the demo from Gabe Kahane's Muhammed musical. SCORE.

Derek Erdman's Life of Crime

2009-08-07T09:42:00.000-04:00

I'm sure you're all still mourning the death of Rap Master Maurice, the revenge rapper who flew a little too close to the sun, whose revenge was just too glorious and pointed for this world. I know I am. I waited and waited for someone to wrong me in just the right way, so I could PayPal my seven bucks to RM Maurice for beautiful rhymed vengeance, but this is what happens - we wait and wait, and life passes us by. It is fleeting, and delicate and, for one Rap Master Maurice, now it is gone.

To ease a bit of the pain, I offer this offering from RM Maurice's, um, close friend,* Derek Erdman. I first encountered him the same place as RM Maurice, on TBTL. I've heard him tell part of this story, and though it adds something to have his voice in my ear, I'm sure the post-its carry plenty of the magic on their own. Derek Erdman was a really bad kid.

-----
*that's euphemistic for alter-ego, or inverse-alter-ego, rather than like, gay lover.

For Starters: Me, via GChat, to James, Who Is Not Even There

2009-08-06T13:32:00.013-04:00

me: in case you are wondering, the strong bad band name we always forget is BIG NIFE.
and yes, i am researching cat names.
sorry, BIGG NIFE
and there is also TARANCHULA
Sent at 1:31 PM on Thursday
WAIT WAIT IS AT CARNEGIE 10/22
James is idle.

Meanwhile, on twitter...

waitwait Any interested NYers. Wait Wait wil be at Carnegie Hall 10/22. WNYC is offering tix before they go on sale. Call: 1-888-376-9692.

jaimealyse @waitwait That is a pledge number, you trickster! (How much do I pledge for tickets?)

[Turned out to be $300. Ha. No.]

So, yes, exciting times here at headquarters. Welcoming a new cat to my home next week, and building up a solid store of Things to Look Forward to This Fall. After this past Tuesday's (amazing, brilliant, life-affirming) Los Campesinos! concert* and this coming Sunday's Cyclones game, Summer 2009's advance-planned seasonal activities are pretty much over. But there's still:

some time in September - NY Hall of Science/Lemon Ice King of Corona field trip
September 5 - friends & I hunkering down in James' apartment for the entirety of the Pride & Prejudice miniseries, which I have never seen
October 3 - Susan Werner in Madison Square Park
October 5 - A.S. Byatt at the 92nd Street Y
October 16 - Punch Brothers at Carnegie Hall
October 22 - Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me at Carnegie Hall
November 5 - Mike Birbiglia at Town Hall

I'm also re-attacking the free kayaking hours at the Inwood Canoe Club this Sunday, before heading out to Coney Island. Gotta earn those Dippin' Dots! James and Kate and I (I don't know, do I have other friends?) went a few weeks ago, and it was awesome, but it was, despite my avowed love of weightlifting, hard. And harder for me than my friends. Waah. But it's good, because I left my boat not just carrying god-knows-what I caught from the Hudson water, but also determined to use the remaining summer weekends to CONQUER THE HUDSON. And then I went to Chicago, and then last weekend it rained, but come Sunday I'm going back. They're apparently the only free canoeing in NYC that doesn't keep you inside a little pen. Just straight up the Hudson, there you go. The view is gorgeous, and, dude, you're kayaking on the open water of the Hudson. It doesn't hurt that it's free, five minutes from my apartment, and makes me feel like I can skip the gym.

-------
*Scroll down.

The Children's Book, or: AS Byatt and JM Coetzee, Mud-Wrestling

2009-08-05T12:04:00.000-04:00

When the Booker Prize longlist came out I was all, I know who's going to win. Even though I've read exactly one of the books on the list. That book being the one I think will win. And then since I'm familiar with exactly one other writer on the list, I decided his book had the next best odds, and that he, JM Coetzee, and the first author, AS Byatt, should mud-wrestle for the prize.

It's funny because they are old and serious and refined.

(Though thinking about it now, it actually seems really scary, her all florid and anti-postmodernist, him the spare post-colonialist. It's a fight i don't want to see.)

But so yes, I've read AS Byatt's The Children's Book, even though it doesn't come out in the states until this fall, because a generous sou l smuggled it back for me from England. It was a daring adventure of legally bringing a book into the country, of great risk and excitement and spy glamour.

And, says the girl who didn't have to lug an extra hardcover book through customs, incredibly worth it. I've been a Byatt fan since James and Allison had me read Possession at some point in college. Even studying Possession in a (post-)postmodern lit class [gratuitous link to my nerd/fox professor] couldn't ruin Dame Byatt for me, even if that book is kind of frighteningly anti-feminist at points. By then I'd gotten deeper into the Byatt ouevre, and was hooked. The summer before my senior year of college I read through all 2000-odd pages of Byatt's Frederica quartet, four very different books that follow our heroine from teenager to... I dunno, maybe in her 50s? But still, it was an intense, immersive month. And since then, lo those six years ago, there has been no new Byatt. I re-read The Biographer's Tale, I read some amaaaaazing short stories, I read some of her sister's equally if differently glorious writing, but nothing new from Antonia Susan. Until now.

And, lucky for us who build expectation with anticipation, The Children's Book is amazing, and well worth the wait. It's at once an epic, ambitious historical novel and an intimate character study (of, like, fifteen different characters). I can't begin to fathom the years of research that went into this novel - it has a special pleasure for nerds who like knowing stuff. Was I ever interested in Victorian pottery? No. Am I now? Yes. The liberal politics of the era are even more fascinating. And Byatt describes and colors them vividly while giving us an extended web of characters whose richness is even more amazing for the fact that we follow them for, like, thirty years.

And okay, the book is not perfect. Byatt tries a narrative thing or two that I'm not sure worked for me, but in a way that when I finished the book, once I wiped a stray tear or two away, I wanted to reread it, immediately, because it's too much of a thing to hold after just one reading. Of course, this rare copy already has a waiting list going. You know, all my Byatt nerd friends. But as soon as everyone's gotten in a first read, I'll tackle it again, for the intense pleasure of living in the story when it's brilliantly swimming along, and to get another look at the things Byatt tries that I maybe wasn't ready for the first time around. If you like: England, novels, teenagers, politics, ceramics, museums, countryside, sex, puppet theatre--

Oh my god, I forgot about the puppet theatre! AS Byatt + puppet theatre, I mean, could I not have just died happy right then and there?! And her descriptions of puppet plays are magical and mysterious. Oh, such good writing, and so wonderful to have one of my favorite writers writing about one of my favorite non-writing things. A surprising and wonderful confluence, there.

There was a point about half way through the book when, reading on my way somewhere on the A train, I almost started crying. Which is not rare or weird for me, but I almost started crying this time because I realized that, eventually, the book would be over. Ahhh, it's so good. Go read it. As soon as it's out in America. Or get someone to smuggle you a copy from overseas. Totally worth it, I promise.

Another Thing to Look Forward To, or: I Have a Crush on This Tumblr

2009-08-03T18:09:00.006-04:00

Katie Schorr is like your funny & handsome friend's pretty girlfriend, whom once you get to know you realize is funnier than your friend, and has a great tumblr, too.

I mean, she's like that. Hypothetically. She's not actually that, because that would be mean of me to say about her boyfriend, Lance, who was my first theatre friend in college.

Lance is awesomely funny, too. Katie's just maybe a better tumblrer.

And she has a show coming up! About which I am very excited. I love the glamorshot image for it, too:

katie schorr is coming to be funny and make out with you, the picture seemed to say.
or that fan is just blowing all her hair in her face.

So that's another thing.

Theatre Roundup!

2009-08-03T15:57:00.004-04:00

Dear readers, I've gotten myself into quite a conundrum. I slacked off on writing (I was out of town! Okay, for four days, but still!) and now I've got a backlog. It's pretty disparate stuff - books, theatre, travels - and I don't really want to force it all together into one post. My writing demands much more elegance than that, no? Even if I put on elbow-lenth satin gloves and a nice set of pearls, I couldn't pull it off.

Am I writing like an especially cracked-out crazy person right now, or is it just me? And if it's just me, if I just think I'm writing like an especially cracked-out crazy person right now, even if I'm not, isn't that it's own sort of psycho.

But I digress. (Hi, Jaime, welcome back.) Here are some things I am going to tell you about soon - my trip to Chicago, the wonderful book I just read (which happens to be about Chicago), and some theatre stuff. Okay, so I'll make another post for all the Chicago business, book and actual travels, and write a little about theatre here. Let's call it a round-up! That'll make it seem intentional.

Theatre Roundup!

-Rattlestick announced their upcoming season, and just like 08-09, it is hot. Highlights: a new Craig Wright play, Craig Wright being a writer whose work I love and whom I am always excited to see something new from; and Annie Baker's play, The Aliens, which she developed a bit (or wrote, I guess) in a writers group here at work. It's a gorgeous play, full of silences and strange little songs. She wrote it for two of my favorite actors, Michael Chernus and Patch Darragh, and it's going to be wonderful. Annie's got the same exquisite longing and awkwardness that made "My So-Called Life" oh, just the best thing ever. This fall Annie's got another amazing play, Circle Mirror Transformation, happening at Playwrights' Horizons (with, oh, just the best cast ever), and then The Aliens comes in the spring. Good year for that Baker kid.

-Brian Stokes Mitchell may be the only person I can imagine who could play Sky Masterson and make it not totally ass boring. Playbill has the pictures from LA here.

-Wildflower, by Lila Rose Kaplan. Another in a continuing (hopefully) series of Me Blogging About Plays By My Dear Friends On Which I Have No Perspective Or Objectivity. So I will say this: Lila's writing is sharp and sweet and surprising (like a nice Riesling?... or cheddar?), and this lovely, funny play is getting a kickass production at Second Stage Uptown. Really brilliant cast, direction, and design. Reviews have been hugely divided, mostly around the ending. Which I think is a sure sign that it's interesting and trying something, and worth seeing. It plays for another week. Tickets and info here.

-Second Stage's website is .com rather than .org, which is probably not a choice they exactly made, but god is it annoying. Mainly because I never remember that.

-Other things that are coming up that are probably going to be AWESOME: Banana Bag & Bodice's show at the Ice Factory; Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith's show at Second Stage; me learning how to spell Anna Deavere Smith's name; The Addams Family, about which I cannot overstate my excitement.

Veeeeeeeeeegan IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIce Cream

2009-07-19T09:02:00.001-04:00

Okay, I'm not vegan, though often mistaken for such, being a lactose-intolerant Pollanite vegetarian. Fair mistake. And last night, this lactose-intolerant Pollanite vegetarian found herself in the East Village, with some time to kill, a lovely summer dusk breeze, and a hankering for a milkshake. It may have been the proximity to Atlas Cafe, home to delicious vegetarian Moroccan chicken but, I have finally experienced enough times to remember, really disappointing vegan soft-serve and over-sweet under-thick shakes. I vaguely remembered sorta recently hearing about a new vegan ice cream shoppe in the neighborhood, so I pulled out the ole Nokia flip-phone for a little Google Text action. "Vegan ice cream 10003," I sent, guestimating the zip code. And back came the message:

Local Listings:
Lula's Sweet Apothecary
516 East 6th Street

Bingo. I called the accompanying number to make sure 516 wasn't at, like, Avenue D, and upon learning that it's between A and B, I set out. As I crossed Avenue A I saw a punk lesbian couple walking towards me, ice cream cones in hand. I knew I was close.

Lula's is an adorable shop(pe), earning the Apothecary name well with glass jars of confections and more mysterious artifacts on higher shelves. It's small, but folks were nonetheless occupying the counter stools, and I can't blame them, because the place is a dream. The atmosphere is lovely, a touch quaint and pretty serene despite the crowdedness that a mere 8 or so people brought on. Two folks were working behind the counter, one of whom had the air of proprietress. She offered me unlimited taste-testings (I remember Maple Nut, Coconut Fudge, Brownie Batter, Peanut Butter and Jelly, Cake Batter soft-serve... I was indecisive and excited) and jumped in with mad knowledge when the other scooper didn't really know what gluten-free meant to answer some inquisitive girls (who thought it had to do with sugar). Most of the flavors are nut-based - cashew milk for the most part, or else coconut for the coconut flavor - and a couple more are soy. All were delicious. I'm not exactly a vegan ice cream connoisseur, but I've tried my fair share, and this was definitely the best, both in could-pass-for-dairy and general deliciousness.

I walked out with a small cone of chocolate and coconut fudge, and it was absolute bliss. It's a little like when I go to a vegan restaurant and end up euphorically overwhelmed with the options - this is what it's like for other people all the time? - but so much better. Because it was ICE CREAM. Vegan ice cream. I think I'm in love.

I Am Writing This Post With an Empty Diet Dr Pepper Can On My Desk, But Also a Strong Sense of Regret in My Heart

2009-07-16T17:41:00.005-04:00

And when the guy scooped up the white chicken, fluttering and sqwaking, and put it into the metal cone, head-down, my friend cringed. And then the guy took a knife to the now-calm chicken's throat, and my friend gasped and sank lower into his seat. I patted his knee and said, "It's okay. It lived a happy chicken life. And these are the good guys."

To back up a small step, when the film took us to this farm, I sat up and smiled. When the film showed us its owner, chatting easily to the camera while gutting de-feathered chickens, my friend squirmed, but I do believe I sighed. (Michael Pollan had never told me that farmer was such a fox.)

To back up a little more: we were at Food, Inc., the An Invonvenient Truth of the food industry. I've read my Michael Pollan and my Eric Schlosser, so I mostly knew the story. But I'd never seen it, and I'm glad I did. (I'm also glad, in a selfish way, to have gone in knowing what I know, buying my vegetables where I do, happening to be an 11-year vegetarian. Those preconditions meant I left more inspired than disturbed, and that I wasn't afraid to eat when I got home.)

I would like to create a mandatory curriculum for America. It is based on the premise that you should know what is in what you eat, and where it came from and how. Ideally there would be farm trips, gardening practicals, cooking lessons. I would really like a trip to a farm, actually. Not just for hot farmers - I have mad garden envy.

But for starters, I've got a two-books-and-a-movie mini-plan: The Omnivore's Dilemma; Fast Food Nation; Food, Inc.

Nothing in these materials dictates choices or tells you what to do. There may be a few suggestions, but primarily they're informational: This is what's going on. Do with that knowledge what you will.

I read Fast Food Nation a couple of years ago. Even as an accidental 11-year vegetarian I was not entirely exempted from its illumination of the dark corners of the American diet. (Seriously, have you heard about the corn industry? Eesh.) The Omnivore's Dilemma last summer was an even greater eye-opener, tracking food's journey through four paths to the plate - industrial farming; industrial organic; small-scale organic (my beloved Polyface Farms of the aforementioned kind chicken slaughter); hunting and foraging. I'd already been a greenmarket devotee, but the book confirmed my passion and gave me facts and inspiration. And just as much as those books influenced my choices, they were fascinating and informative.

And then, last night, Food, Inc. For my friend, a bleeding-heart commie revolutionary who happened not to have read those books, the information was rather new, and hit him hard. For me, the film offered a visual component previously absent from my food system learnings. I had read about CAFOs, but now I've seen them. (I don't know what that'd've done to me if I weren't a vegetarian. But I am definitely still a vegetarian.) I've read about Monsanto's persecution of corn and soybean farmers, and the absurd and unfightable seed-saving rules and lawsuits, but now I've seen the faces of the farmers whose lives have been ruined.

On the positive side, it was practically magical to get to see Polyface Farms, to hear Joel Salatin (a fox in both crazy and hotness) speak so passionately about what he does, blue eyes blazing behind giant 1973 glasses. Polyface is the idealized small-scale, animal- and planet-friendly farm that is the star of the third part of The Omnivore's Dilemma, an agrarian utopia in the Shenandoa Valley run by this brilliant and charismatic libertarian Christian. I once met someone who'd been there, an even more passionate Pollanite than I, and it was as if... I dunno, as if he'd been on the Space Shuttle, to put it in different nerd terms. ("Is it as amazing as it seems in the book?" "Yes." "Ooh.") And on film it lived up to its promise - happy cows browsing in green fields, pigs snuffling about in the woods while Joel Salatin lounges next to them and gets passionate at the camera. He's hot, sure, but I also think he's right.

But I don't think that I or anyone else should tell people how or what to eat. What I do believe, very strongly, is that our choices about food should be informed, and for the most part are not. We don't know where our food comes from. We don't know how the animals we eat live or die. And we don't want to, most of the time, because it's (thanks, Al Gore), inconvenient. Look, knowing where Doritos come from has, alas, not stopped me from ever eating Doritos. But to say, "I don't wanna know - I like my hamburgers!" means you already know something's not right, and won't face it. So you push that doubt down, push it out of your mind. If you want to eat hamburgers, eat freaking hamburgers. Just don't lie to yourself to be able to do it.

[All photos of Polyface Farms and their animals, from various internet sources, the google search for which makes me feel like everyone's been to Polyface except me, which makes me sad.]

Meganerd Radiotime

2009-07-10T10:57:00.004-04:00

Last night I was honored to be on my beloved TBTL, proclaiming to the tens of listeners what a raging nerd I am. A little ways back (via Grant Imahara's twitter feed, for bonus nerd points) I came across this blog post, How to Meet and Woo a Nerdy Girl. I sent the link to Jen at TBTL, and she had me on the show to discuss the post and nerd identity in general, and to start every sentence with, "Yah, I mean..." You can listen here, and enjoy my post-valley girl speech tics, around which one could build a very efficient drinking game. How lovely that people so want to do this that they need a guide. We are such elusive quarry.

spoiler alert: this is how.

[Insert Myriad Avenue Q/Ragtime References Here]

2009-07-01T16:14:00.012-04:00

When I read the news that Avenue Q would be closing, I said, out loud, at my desk, at work, with other people in the office, a sad "Oh no." I realize the show has had a tremendous run, many times longer than what one would think a small-scale adult-themed off-Broadway-transfer puppet musical could sustain. I remember watching the Tonys the year it came out, and the tremendous hope that came with its win - this small, sharp, brilliant show triumphing over a bloated, overhyped, dramaturgical and aesthetic trainwreck. That June evening, anything seemed possible - the underdog had won, and we were all the underdog.

Fun fact: the friend whose apartment we were in went on to be in the Avenue Q tour, and even played Princeton on Broadway for I think three performances.

And when I went back to see him in it, I was reminded what an awesome, tight show it is. Thematically, lyrically, musically, everything's woven together in a way that makes my little dramaturg's heart flutter. I can never get over the lyrical brilliance of "For Now," the double-edged reassurance and warning. Okay, and yes, totally vulgar puppets. They are also awesome.

So, Avenue Q, I honor you, and your improbably long, well-earned run. Vineyard Theatre, ye off-Broadway home for daring shit, I honor you. Tony voters, with the hope you offered that one year and then seemed to rescind, hell, I honor you, too. The internet is for porn, everyone's a little bit racist, and everything in life is only for now. Oh, and put your finger there.

* * *

In news of Broadway arrivals, rather than departures, I have gotten the impression that I should be ashamed to be this excited about Ragtime coming back to Broadway. I will not be. My love for this musical (documented here) springs from a nostalgic ground, having spent a full summer in high school driving around with two beloved friends singing this shit. But I have looked at my love with a cool head and clear eyes, and I believe it is real. Yes, there is the nostalgic component, but I believe it to be a pretty damn awesome musical. 50 people on stage, singing out full-voiced? Awesome. The Henry Ford song? Awesome. Okay, yes, "Gliding" is boring as shit, and "I call them mooooo-ooovie books!" is ridiculous, and maybe the musical tries to be too epic, and relies too much on sweeping, stirring music, but it is waaaay better than Les Miz, don't even front.

But whoever came up with "Fireworks!" for the Playbill.com headline was trying to win, like, a Most Obscure Reference contest. May I suggest "My People Were Also Brought Here On Ships"? Because, they were.

they're right, that is totally how jews dance.
i imagine the photo just couldn't capture the bootyshaking on the other side of the stage.

Read This Book! (If You Haven't Already): In Defense of Food

2009-06-27T12:09:00.002-04:00

I don't know what I can say about In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan's follow-up to The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's an important, important book. It's a fun, fast, read. It's interesting and enjoyable. It will teach you information and give you new ways to think and see the world. I hope that it changed the way I eat and think about food. Everyone should read it. Even if you don't think you're interested. Even if you're all, Waah, I don't want to feel guilty about how I eat. The very idea that you could feel guilty about how you eat is a problem, no? Both that you're afraid some book will reveal the (not-so-)secret evil in your diet, and also that food is a fucking nexus of guilt. But also of misinformation and backwards thinking, which is the point of this book.

I guess that that's what I can say about In Defense of Food, at least for starters. I happen to be an extra special nerd for this sort of thing, but it's really a book that every single person in America ought to read. At least.

I guess I can also say that, having listened to The Omnivore's Dilemma as an audio book, there were a few times during In Defense of Food (reading on old-fashioned paper), that Pollan's writing voice was strong enough to make me hear the book, in my head, in the voice of the actor who read the audio book. Which I listened to almost a year ago. I thought that was kinda fun.

Awesomesauce: Sax & Dixon at Ars Nova

2009-06-25T11:25:00.004-04:00

Okay, so what would you think if you saw this:

This world premiere from innovative sketch fusioneers Matt Sax and John Dixon melds fast-paced comic thrills with an expansive collection of intricately interwoven characters. Caught in the wicked gravitational pull of matrimony, families collide, exes surface and even the wedding band doesn't escape unscathed, as this high-octane duo takes sketch comedy to a new frontier. Come sneak into the hotel ballroom for the kind of excitement only a couple of vows can provide.

[Emphasis de moi.] That's the blurb for Ars Nova 's show, Sax & Dixon: We Thee Wed (I should point out the names of the performers being in the title, too), which I saw last night. And I LOVED it. There was a point, either as the show was starting or the first time they mentioned a crab, that I thought that every time I ever come to Ars Nova, there will be a little part of my heart that's sad I'm not seeing Jollyship. But by the end of the show, that wistfulness was erradicated, wiped out by a hilarious, weird, surprisingly (occasionally) emotionally effecting show. (Oddly, adjectives very similar to those used to describe Jollyship. Just not "piratical.")

But it's been irking me that this brilliant, funny show has been marketed as something that it's not. You put the two names as the title, call it a sketch comedy thing, and I'm expecting... sketch comedy. I'm expecting Matt Sax and John Dixon to maybe be the main characters, the wedding story to be maybe some true-ish story. What I wasn't expecting was the much more sophisticated and exciting show that We Thee Wed actually is. In form and style it's sort of like a solo show but with two actors - they each play a dozen vivid characters without a single costume change, whirling through crowd scenes as sharply as Nilaja Sun in No Child. And the thing is hella funny, but I wouldn't call it sketch comedy - there are scenes, sure, but plays have scenes, and in storytelling and character and scope, this is really a play, or at least theatre. Definitely not an assemblage of sketches. I mean, it's one (epic, awesome) story. Maybe these guys started as a sketch duo, but just like Mike Birbiglia evolved Sleepwalk With Me into a solo show from stand-up, Sax & Dixon: We Thee Wed has come far enough from sketch to be something else entirely.

But marketing nitpicks aside - and I'm nitpicking because I think that a more accurate marketing framework could've benefitted the show, and also benefitted Ars Nova, an institution that was very excitingly branching into theatrical producing a year or two ago, and if this show is a continuation of that trend, they should shout it from the freaking mountains - I really mean to just sing this show's praises. (Though maybe they didn't want to scare off theatre-haters by calling it a play or something...) My one regret is not seeing it earlier in the run - I want to give everyone I know a chance to see it, and could probably be convinced to see it again. I saw Matt Sax do his multi-character transformational thing in Clay at LCT3, and the same elasticity is on display again here. John Dixon is less rubbery, but he works a different alchemy, still transforming somehow. The way the story is woven together is pretty brilliant, too, all coming together in a manic collision. There are three performances left - tonight, Friday, and Saturday, all at 8pm, and if you can get tickets, do. Whatever this show is, it's delightful and hilarious, a little gift of joy.

Port Authority: Now Just 99.2% As Vile As Before (Greenmarket Report)

2009-06-18T12:00:00.011-04:00

No big surprise – when I heard about the new greenmarket (It feels wrong to call an indoor market, especially in that godforsaken place, a greenmarket – let’s stick with farmers market, despite its ambiguous apostrophe situation) okay, the new farmers (/farmer’s/farmers’) market opening today in Port Authority, I was excited. What is one of my favorite things in the world? The farmers market. What did I just write a love letter to for my first piece of professional volunteer freelance writing? The farmers market. What hideous monstrosity of bad associations and general unpleasantness do I work a block away from? Port Authority. Best of both worlds!

Also, this Saturday will be the second Saturday in a row that I can’t get to Union Square for my vegetables, so it was good timing.

Unfortunately, the just-two-tables-so-far do not yet make an awesome greenmarket. Or farmers market. One table’s mostly baked goods and strawberries (and apples that are really starting to show their age), and the other, very prettily arranged table sells mad overpriced vegetables. $3 for a pound of zucchini? $3 per quarter pound of kale? I don’t think so.

Also, there are klieg lights glaring on the set-up, which are maybe an improvement over the general lighting of the terminal, but really now.

I was hoping that the presence of a farmers market could make me hate Port Authority with slightly less burning a passion. (The place’s own awful ambiance is augmented by my associations of impending and just-completed epic bus journeys through the wilds of northern New Jersey and back and forth to Providence. Also, its own awful ambiance.) If the market ever expands beyond an overpriced but pretty mise-en-scène, it might become a helpful emergency vegetable source, definitely more in line with my usual vegetable ethics than Stiles on 9th Ave – super cheap but hardly local, there. But yeah, Port Authority still makes me want to stick a knife in my eye.

I did get interviewed by a very nice lady from WFUV, though. So I guess listen for that?

Prices I remember:
zucchini - $3/lb
kale - $3/lb
nappa cabbage - either $3/head or /lb
broccoli - $3/small bunch
strawberries - $3/pint (much more in line with normal greenmarket prices)
cider donuts - $0.75 each (seems to be the standard price, not that I'm intimately familiar with greenmarket donut pricing)

Here is Something Lovely

2009-06-11T15:41:00.004-04:00

It's not like I'm inundating you with blogging at the moment or anything, so here's a website (found via, yes, Cute Overload) that's pretty wonderful. My Milk Toof.

When I was young, I placed my baby teeth under my pillow and when i woke up I'd find a shiny new quarter. But whatever happened to those little teeth? Where did they go? Would I ever see them again? Many years later, a little tooth was standing at my door. It looked familiar. It's name was ickle. Welcome home, my milk toof!

Milk teef need baths...

And apparently like the sea:

I promise the stories and photography stop it from being cloying or twee. Okay, it's twee, but it's also awesome.

Awesome Thing #1001

2009-06-03T11:58:00.004-04:00

I may or may not be late to the game on this one, but via my friend Elliot's twitter feed, I find this. A sampling:

The list goes on, not that I'm working my way through it this morning or anything, and manages to be sincere and positive without being at all sappy. It's like magic. Maybe it's because it doesn't take itself too seriously. Maybe because there's a good dose of silliness, which I always go for. And maybe it's because so many items on the growing list (or countdown, to be precise) are so freaking true. Taking off your shoes during a long car ride is awesome. Remembering what movie that guy is from feels amazing. Maybe this is what happens when a funny writer of the snark generation gets happy. Basically, it's like, The world is an awesome place. Fuck yeah.

Summerworks Comingup

2009-06-02T13:36:00.004-04:00

Clubbed Thumb's yearly Summerworks festival is one of my favorite things, especially when I don't lose track of time and entirely miss it. This year I am on my game, and just got tickets to all three shows. I recommend you do the same. It starts NEXT WEEK!

Clubbed Thumb consistently produces awesome, adventurous, heartfelt theatre (in one of the coolest venues in the city, the endangered Ohio Theatre) and this summer incubation series is not to be missed. The only play I'm already familiar with is punkplay, which I saw a reading of last year, and it's totally wonderful. (A Rhode Island spy reported that its production in Providence a year or two ago was among the best theatre this spy had ever seen.) All three plays sound awesome:

punkplay
by Gregory Moss, directed by Davis McCallum
In which two thirteen-year-old boys stuck in the 'burbs in the '80s stumble upon punk rock and it's hot and fast and angry and ALIVE like nothing they've ever seen or sniffed before.

June 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13

Precious Little

by Madeleine George, directed by Hal Brooks

In which a pregnant linguist finds unexpected comfort sitting at the cage of a strange, compelling gorilla.

June 14. 15, 16, 18, 19, 20

Telethon

by Kristin Newbom, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll

In which a group of physically disabled fundraisers convenes at Dunkin' Donuts to celebrate, detox, squabble, flirt, and become a family ... or not.

June 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27

Tickets can, and should, be gotten here.

I'm Basically Just Not Gonna Use "Gay Marriage," At Least In This Email

2009-05-29T12:59:00.003-04:00

I just sent this email to my sister, parents, and grandparents - all my relatives who live in New York State. If you have relatives in New York State, especially on Long Island or upstate (as much as I protest that my hometown is NOT upstate, because we have malls, not cows), I encourage you to do something similar.

Hi Family. I was on the website of New Yorkers for Marriage Equality to make sure my senator was supporting the Marriage Equality bill, and luckily he is (at least he has more sense about this than the MTA), but based on the map, I think your senators are either undecided or opposed. (If I'm reading the map right, Dad, your senator's undecided, and the guy from Rockland wants to vote no.) Since what has the most power to sway congresspeople is hearing from their own constituents, I hope you'll check out the website and get in touch with your senator.

I hope I don't have to try to persuade you that this is a civil rights and equality issue. (But give me the chance and I will.) I think it's hugely important, and your taking a few minutes to get in touch with your senator, and maybe a couple more minutes to pass this on to other people throughout the state, can contribute towards a major impact.

All the information is here: http://www.newyorkequality.com/ Please contact your senator and forward this on.

Love,
Jaime

(All of NYC is not necessarily safe yes votes, either. There are some opposed or undecided state senators in the boroughs.)

Drama, or: Playwrights, Don't Let Her Near Your Plays!

2009-05-27T18:30:00.004-04:00

Me: I'm the worst dramaturg ever!
Mark: It's not Star Trek!
Me: What? I haven't seen the movie, I don't know what you--
Mark: Not the movie, the whole thing. It's about The Prime Directive.
Me: Yes! The Prime Directive. Exactly. I interfered!
Mark: No, there is no Prime Directive. This isn't Star Trek!
Me: Well it should be.

Two Great Tastes That I Never Thought of Together, But Hey, Rock On

2009-05-21T14:00:00.007-04:00

As summer looms, I'm basically thinking about two things: biking on Governors Island and going to a Cyclones game. Because basically my plans for this summer are to rehash everything from last summer, trying to recapture those perfect moments. Not sure how to recreate Playing the Building, but I may just hang around the disused ferry terminal and knock some pipes with a wrench.

I rented a bike from Tread Bike Shop last Saturday for my long-planned and long-foiled-by-weather bike commute test, riding from Inwood to my office to see if it's doable, if it's worth promoting getting a bike beyond the company of dreams like learning accordion to do a punk cover of "Flinty Kind of Woman," and into the realm of actual actionable ideas. And since last summer's Governors Island trip was my first time on a bike in about ten years, I needed to see how I'd do on something more intense than a beach cruiser, on something more intense than lazy circuits of a nearly-carless island.

And basically, I am the fucking Bike Champion of New York City. I rode from Inwood, past my office, down to Union Square, AND THEN BACK. For someone so out of practice, I think that's pretty kickass. 22 miles! 18 of which would never have been possible without the amazing generosity of the good samaritan who fixed my front tire when it completely blew out. As soon as I get a bike I am getting a patch kit and learning how to use it.

The ride was gorgeous - the entire N/S length from Inwood to 14th Street is along the Hudson, through parks I never knew existed - and aside from some asshole hills under the GWB, it's almost perfectly flat. I've totally caught the bicycling bug, and can't wait to get back on. (Once my underbunnies, as they say, have recovered. I will also be buying a cushiony seat.) Sexiest badge of bicycler honor? The forearms-only sunburn. Rawr.

I have a friend who's offered to long-term lend me a bike while I save up for my own. Anyone want to do the same with an accordion?

But so now that bicycling has been brought into real life from the rarefied summer oasis of Governors Island, what does the ole GI have to offer? Well, apparently a free performance by my favorite modern dance company in the world!

I know, I didn't see that one coming, either.

As part of the River to River festival, ZviDance will be performing a piece called White at Fort Jay.

LMCC’s Sitelines dance and performance series launches the summer and the annual opening weekend of Governors Island with ZviDance’s White. Zvi Gotheiner collaborates with six dancers and the renowned composer Scott Killian, using Fort Jay’s historical significance and eerie sense of abandonment to reflect on our attempts to feel secure by arming our borders. The dancers wrap areas of the site with long white gauze strips reminiscent of bandages, slowly creating a web-like sculpture intertwining throughout the space.

Well that sounds weird and pretty cool. (Fort Jay is a totally weird space, btw. Abandoned, but at least parts of it look new enough - 1970s or something - to completely lack and nostalgic loveliness.) Basically, I love what ZviDance does, and Governors Island is the most beautiful place in/just off the coast of the city, and I am very excited. And maybe when I go I will bring my own (borrowed) bike. I'll miss the sweet beach cruisers, but a girl's gotta grow up eventually.

Speaking of This Week's New Yorker

2009-05-11T15:19:00.002-04:00

This was twittered with the preface "Malcolm Gladwell: WRONG about basketball?" but I think much more glaring is "Adam Gopnik: WRONG about razors."

Books Pls

2009-05-11T12:56:00.004-04:00

I finished Infinite Jest this weekend. It really is as awesome as they say, unless "they" are "the back of the book," in which case they're trying to pretend it's way more of a comedy than it is so as to trick you into buying a 1000-page book.

At some point in your life, when you are ready for a big commitment - both in reading time and heavy-ass-book-lugging-around - I strongly recommend you read this book. It's funny, brilliantly smart, full of a surprising amount of heart, and is a really incisive exploration of more themes and ideas than I probably realize.

It also took me - at an admittedly slow pace - almost exactly 4 1/2 months to read.

Saturday night I texted James a request to bring a book for me to borrow when we met up for a movie (Sugar - awesome) the next morning. I'm hoping to borrow the new Sarah Vowell from my sister when I see her this weekend (and I've requested it from the library just in case), but that left me with a bookless week looming, and on a libraries-closed Sunday. Finishing Infinite Jest hasn't left me needing a break from reading - I rather feel like I need to devour a book. I need 5o pages a day, something I can finish in a week, totally lose myself in, a satisfying narrative and emotional thing. Here's what I texted James:

Not fluffy, but a good fast read. Fiction. Not tragic. Eat the doc [Eat the Document] is a good level of difficulty, maybe a bit less? Indecision comes to mind, tonally. Like, not intuitionist.

(At the end there I got worried about character count, and dispensed with articles.)

James forgot or didn't have time, and so by the time we left the movie I was in a bookless panic. I was basically out of podcasts, too, and had rewatched the good two thirds of Dr. Horrible on my way to meet James (and Kate, who was there, but was not part of the failed book project). So, long story short, I spent an hour at Barnes & Noble trying to force my library-trained brain to spend $15 on a book, and then I gave up and just bought The New Yorker.

So the immediate crisis is temporarily averted, but I need some books to add to my library queue. Infinite Jest was such a consuming project that I stopped thinking about what else I wanted to read (beyond the Sarah Vowell, and AS Byatt's new book which is out in the UK but not here till October). So... what should I read? Doesn't need to be terribly new, but contemporary is good. I'm not ready for anything too ephemeral yet - think On Beaut y more than, uh, well I come to The Intuitionist again. (I love that book, but it's like reading through a fog. A gorgeous, gorgeous fog.)

Well?

And Then Three Blocks Later I Got Shat On By a Bird, I Am Not Even Kidding

2009-05-08T15:52:00.006-04:00

The most amazing thing just happened.

Taking a walk from work just now, for sunshine and iced coffee and, let's be honest, one of those caramel macchiato biscotti from Starbucks that are going to be my undoing, I set my iPod to shuffle from "recently played," a sort of self-fulfilling ouroborous of a playlist, but hey, it's almost always stuff I like.

After a nice Tilly and the Wall it came up on a song from [title of show]. I considered skipping to the next song, being more of a music mood, less of a musical mood, but hey, what the heck, it's good stuff. I also thought, "I'm walking around Hell's Kitchen - what if I walk past Susan or Heidi? I want to be able to stop them and say, 'I am listening to [title of show] right now! YOU ARE SINGING ON MY IPOD!" I'm sure they love crazy shit like that. I mean insane-crazy. So I'm being sarcastic about them loving it.

You think you know what happens next, and you are almost right.

Not two minutes pass, as I'm still not through "What Kind of Girl is She?" when who do I see and subsequently reach out for the arm of, but Larry! (Belated apologies to anyone reading this who has no idea what the fuck I'm talking about.) "Larry!" I say, brandishing an earbud. "I'm listening to [title of show] right now!" And then Larry says, "That's me!" and I'm like, "I know."

There was a little more of that, plus a little giddiness (on both our parts, I like to think), and then we went on our ways. It was TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME.

And then, well, see the title of this post.

But still!

Motherfucking House Managing, Bitches!

2009-05-04T13:47:00.005-04:00

You know what I didn't know about myself until this weekend? I really like house managing. Working a box office, checking people in, trading money for programs ("It's also your ticket.") counting out the cash box while listening to the audience and the show through the curtain, and then a peek through the door or whatever at the back of the theatre to watch my favorite part. Oddly satisfying stuff.

And a good thing, too, because between Wednesday and Sunday I house managed (to some definition of the word) five performances of three different shows. Thursday and Saturday it was the end-of-the-year performance for the high school acting lab at work, which every year is heart-filling and soul-fortifying, but this year especially. It's a magical combination - high schoolers finding their voices (both in the senses of expressing themselves and of literally standing on a stage and being brave enough to speak those words), and then, like, three boys in suits NAILING the "Single Ladies" dance. (Maybe the most joyous thing I've seen on a stage since ever.) I know some of these kids from the playwriting lab, some from previous years' performances, some not at all. At the end of the show, I love every single one of them. Being just the teeniest bit involved might be the most important thing I do with my life. (I should file that away for my impending 5-year reunion. Beats "Uh, yeah, it's cool. I get to twitter some.")

And then, not that this is a proper follow-up, but it's also exciting and awesome theatre, I've been helping out at the Brick (ohmygod so far from Inwood) with Terrible Baby's productions of The Nosemaker's Apprentice and The Colonists. And, big surprise, I know, they are great.

To review: Terrible Baby = Nick Jones, Rachel Shukert, Peter Cook. Nick Jones = evil puppet genius rockstar behind Jollyship the Whiz-Bang. Rachel & Peter = new to me, but also apparently equally awesome crazy theatre people. From the company's mission: "Terrible Baby is committed to being better than other theater companies and attracting as much press attention as possible." Fantastic.

So, The Nosemaker's Apprentice and The Colonists are Terrible Baby's inaugural productions. I house managed/watched the first performance of Nosemaker on Wednesday, and then came back Sunday to do the same for two showings of The Colonists. Rawr.

I'll start with The Colonists because it's fresher in my mind and easier to write about. It's a 45-minute dialogueless puppet show that's advertised as being about bees but is not entirely. It's very kid-friendly, though as the 7pm show was all grownups, it was introduced with, "Motherfuckin puppet show, bitches!" which is apparently something that someone Nick Jones knows has tattoed on themselves in Thai. I would volunteer to be the second person for that.

It's a really wonderful show, with the magical surprise feeling of good puppetry - lots of intense artism in the puppets and set - and the left-field head-cocking genius that made for some of Jollyship's best comedy. (There are some projected titles and narration, and they are often hilarious.) Surpisingly high-drama story, too.

The Nosemaker's Apprentice is an actual with-actors and -words play, in the vein of Terrible Baby's mission statement's "elaborate sophisticated comedy with subversive and quasi-historical inclinations." Okay, maybe we're working on an obscure definition of "sophisticated" here... But it's definitely not straightforward, so, sure, sophisticated in that sense. The play follows Gavin, a young apprentice Nosemaker, Odessey-like through medieval Europe on his quest to be the best Nosemaker in Europe, and then on the inevitable slide such hubris heralds. (This play, I should note, is written by Nick and Rachel, directed by Peter.) At first it seems like any no-budget self-produced whatever thing that you've seen a thousand times before in some East Village basement theatre with no AC but lots of beer, but the folks behind the play and on stage are way better than that, and so is the play. (The Brick also doesn't sell beer.) The writing goes there in surprising, sometimes daringly funny ways, and the cast is full of transformative comedic geniuses. Corey Sullivan and Rightor Doyle especially had me making some embarrassing sounds that I think were supposed to be laughter.

I know I'm somewhat biased because I'm somewhat involved, but, well, that's how it goes. I'm probably more biased by all the brainwashing Jollyship did on me last summer. Still haven't recovered from that. Maybe never will.

The Nosemaker's Apprentice and The Colonists play through May 24th at The Brick Theater, mere steps from the L (and G, I suppose) at Lorimer. If you want to see the show(s) for free, we're still looking for some ushers, so drop me a line. Motherfuckin puppet show, bitches!

"Hey man sorry I got all grabby"

2009-04-25T08:26:00.003-04:00

If, for example, you're spending the night, having just visited your new baby (step)nephew in l'hôpital, at your mom's house in the suburban woods, this site is a godsend. (Because otherwise you might read a book or a magazine or watch tv, perish the thought. It's not like you've been reading the same thousand-page book since Christmas.) If you are not me-last-night, I think this site is still the shit. I wouldn't recommend anything other than reading through it in its entirety.

texts from last night

But here are a few highlights:

(918): Yeah...you.wanna.hang.out.tomorrow?My.space.button.is.broken.

(707): im never drinking mad dog again and i have your belt.

(857): Alright folks.. i have made history - I just hit my 2nd PARKED car SOBER withing 6 months.. :*( wtf?!

(510): So drunk, too bad you don't want this

(706): I think I'm in Tiajuana
(404): You are not in Tijuana. I saw you an hour ago
(706): I could be

(They come with area codes.)

Try not to be too inspired. Enjoy.

Everybody Loves Norman (sorry, I couldn't resist)

2009-04-19T11:31:00.007-04:00

Y'all, meet my new boyfriend:

Ignore those two ladies. He really loves *me*.

Yesterday was an almost perfect day. Went to a gorgeous yoga studio across from the big gorgeous library for a three-person class taught by my future-yoga-teacher friend. Then from there to lunch & reading in Bryant Park, a burrito picnic in Central Park (where I saw a squirrel find half a freaking coconut, in reenactment of Ice Age), and a friend's birthday in Brooklyn. It took three trains to get home, but I didn't wait for any of them more than ten minutes.

Oh, and I also saw five hours of TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME THEATRE.

You know, it's sort of been Experimental Theatre Week* here at Surplus. Beowulf right on the heels (roughly) of Rambo Solo, and a ticket to Red Fly/Blue Bottle for tonight. I saw a much more conventional, realistic play in the interim, and was like, eh. Very eh. But then yesterday a play from 1973, which a lot of people call a sex farce - not usually thought to be the deepest kind of drama - completely rocked my face off.

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy of plays, now running in rep at Circle in the Square (now, I think, one of my favorite Broadway theatres), by Alan Ayckbourn. The plays all take place over the same weekend at the same big house - one in the dining room, one in the living room, one in the garden. Each has four scenes, some happening at the same time as scenes in other plays, some filling in the gaps. They say that the plays can stand on their own, and that's probably true to varying degrees, but they really function best, and most rewardingly, as a whole.

Oh, and what a whole it is. Or 2/3rds of a whole, as I gave away my ticket to yesterday's first play of the marathon, Table Manners, so I could be part of Miranda's first yoga class. (James saw the full marathon, with Amanda taking my ticket to the first play.) But still. Wow. I had very little idea of what to expect, whether I would even like the plays. Someone dismissively had called Ayckbourn "the British Neil Simon," though my response to that had been, "I like Neil Simon."

And goddamn do I apparently like Alan Ayckbourn. And not just him - this (these) production(s) are almost completely perfect. Transcendant. The cast is giving some of the most absolutely genius performances I've ever seen - acting-wise, not just comedically - and the direction of this ensemble is, um, flawless. From pure slapstick, commedia-type lazzi, to incredibly heartfelt moments of emotional vulnerability and pain, these plays are a perfectly complete experience. And the in-the-round staging at Circle in the Square is amazing. The theatre feels small, but it still feels like there are a lot of people in there. My special, piercing laugh was only very rarely discernable among the general roar, and when the audience frequently burst into applause at a particularly brilliant joke or delivery, it never felt like an audience overreacting. Things were really just that good. I even found myself compelled to applause - at moments in the show, at the ends of scenes - just because things were so fucking good that you had to clap. Like, Oh, look, my hands are moving. Huh.

And this cast. Oh my. Absolute geniuses. In the cast of six there's barely a weak link, but I should especially mention Jessica Hynes, who has some of the saddest emotional moments but is also a comic genius (her hand gestures alone!), and Ben Miles, with his brilliant scared forest creature darting, unfocused gaze.

And then there is my new boyfriend, Stephen Mangan, who plays Norman. Aside from the fact that he is tall and blue-eyed curly-haired, kind of Sacha Baron Cohenish in looks (or Hamish Linklaterian, with a shade of John Glover), the man gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life. He did not let up for a second. From absolutely brilliant clowning comedy work (a bit with some very strong parsnip wine being probably my favorite) to absolutely wrenching, heartbreaking (especially if you identify with Annie, ahem) acting. I'd never known these plays before, but you need someone very special to play Norman. There's the requisite comic genius, of course, but he's a tricky character - he needs to be totally, overwhelmingly lovable, intensely charming and charismatic but also somehow unassuming and unthreatening. (There are multiple references to Norman as some sort of puppy or dog.) He can't seem like an asshole or a cad, but has to totally be one, without losing the audience's love. (At the end of one particularly cruel scene, I leaned over to James and very sadly said, "Now I can't love Norman anymore." It was a great loss. And I still pretty much loved him.)

Stephen Mangan nails this all. Even just thinking about it now, my heart hurts a little. Norman's arguably incredibly self-centered, a total user, but he does it so well that I'm like, Where do I sign up? (I think even folks without a predisposition towards tall or curly-haired or sweetly caddish people would agree.) If the audience doesn't love Norman, this play can't work, but seriously, where do I sign up?

NB: These plays are advertised as working in any order, but I really think Round and Round the Garden needs to be seen last. (Its last scene is the chronologically last among the trilogy, and really is an ending.) The order of the marathon day - Table Manners, Living Together, Round and Round the Garden - seems to make the most sense, but I think the third being third is most important.

Gah, I loved these plays so much. I can't wait to see Table Manners, except for knowing that it'll just reinforce Norman's hold on my heart, and being in love with a fictional character, especially such an emotionally dangerous one, can't be very good. And also, two more hours of The Norman Conquests is just going to leave me wanting several hours more.

I saw Ben Brantley at Round and Round the Garden, and he looked to be having a fantastic freaking time. I fully expect a rave when these shows open in a few days. They deserve it. Who knows if that'll translate to amazing ticket sales (I hope), but get some tickets now.

--------
*approximately

New Find

2009-04-15T11:21:00.004-04:00

Not that I was taking a moment to google image search Ron Mueck's guy in a boat or anything, but something led me to this...

Which led me to this:

the lolvant garde

Man in Boat is actually one of the less clever lolvants. For example. And also. But what makes it truly awesome is the commentary that goes along with the images. Such as:

Acconci was a poet. Then he masturbated under a ramp in a gallery where people were encouraged to walk around said ramp. He also cooed sexual fantasies at people using a microphone. People agree this is a brilliant piece because it took conceptual art to it's logical conclusion: replacing figurative masturbation with the real thing. 1972.

Zing!

via Peter Sagal (aka Pedter Siwa)'s Twitter Feed

2009-04-14T15:51:00.003-04:00

What's your NPR name?

Just call me Ajaime Fiesole.

My little sister is Marlissa Vaughn. May I never forget how blessed I am to have a sister who cares what her NPR name is.

BEOWULF!

2009-04-13T14:08:00.004-04:00

I only have a few minutes, so this is going to be more slapdash than usual, but I've sat on this all weekend and can't keep not telling you how AWESOME Banana Bag and Bodice & Shotgun Players' Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage is.

How awesome? Very.

It's a smart, messy, exuberant show - a visceral rock musical, a thematic exploration, a skewering of the academia of thematic exploration. And just a great story, well-told. Rockingly told. (I saw a couple of families with teenage boys in the audience, and this is a brilliant show to bring teenage boys to. But also theatre-lovers and Beowulf-lovers and such.) The conceptualization of the production is gorgeous and brilliant. Amazing design and choreography. They manage to create a world where one little thing - a small gesture, an article of clothing - carries so much meaning. The script is funny and smart, and surprisingly moving. The whole cast is fantastic, but I have to mention that Beth Wilmurt is a total fucking genius. Oh my god this woman is a genius. The Bay Area is a lucky, lucky place.

It's only playing through this weekend, but if you at all can see it, do. Tickets and info are here. Go!

Rambo Solo (with a Well-Quarantined Spoiler)

2009-04-07T17:52:00.013-04:00

Dear Soho Rep, your 99-cent Sundays are the best thing ever.

I probably wouldn't have gotten to see Rambo Solo, the new offering from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, without 99-cent Sundays. I managed to remember when tickets went on sale, and snagged my pair before they were gone (an hour later). I saw NTOK's No Dice last year, and rather liked it. Very weird, "experimental," but in the wise words of young Gareth Campesinos!, "I'm into some very avant shit," so.

Rambo Solo is Zack (seriously, Zach/Zack is maybe the name spelling that baffles me most in the world) Oberzan's one-man exploration of and love letter to First Blood, the novel on which Rambo, I think, was based. (When I'm planning on seeing a show I live in a little soundproof box that admits no reviews or summaries, so apologies if everyone in the world already knows this.) Here's the description from Soho Rep's website:

Built upon actor Zachary Oberzan's deep-seated obsession with the story of Rambo: First Blood, the performance charts Zack's endeavor to recount the entire plot in all its sweaty, athletic detail. Set in the dark heart of Zack's tiny New York studio apartment, Rambo Solo follows one man's private passion to its limits.

Sure, that sounds about right. Except it seemed less about "one man's private passion" and more about storytelling, and also it seemed less About Something and more just enjoyable. Enjoyable with some good little avant layers of theatricality and cleverness. And yes, okay, About Things. (Saying it's set in Zack's studio is, while I guess sort of true, also totally false, as it very much takes place in the theatre at Soho Rep.) The first 20 or so minutes of discovering the world of the play and the aspects of the performance were probably the best, engrossing and interesting and funny, but even after the excitement of that discovering was mellowed out, it was still mostly always great.

In case you're living in a spoiler-free soundproof booth about this show, which I totally respect, you may want to skip the next bit. But if you've seen the show, aren't seeing the show, or are not this sort (my sort) of crazy, read on. No major plot points are given away, but it's something I'm glad I didn't know going into the show. Although something I wish I had known? That the seating is pillows on a (very plush) carpet. If I'd known that, I would have worn jeans that do a less dramatic sliding-down-my-backside when I sit. (I decided, btw, that if I were to get a tramp stamp, it would be of Voyager II. But maybe I can find a place for this.) But okay, just skip the next few paragraphs if you want to keep your theatre-going totally pure, down to the little picture of hitchhiking John Rambo. I will even make the font a little smaller to facilitate your journey.

Before the show, sitting in the front row (on the front row of pillows), my friend and I were talking about audience participation. Joking about it, really. She said she'd make sure to avoid eye contact, and I was like, No, some people go for the eye contact-avoiders. It's like cats. (They do that, too, always go for the people who hate cats.) Okay, so, ha, very funny, conversation forgotten, and we get into the show, and we're front row for a very intimately-set solo-show - sometimes Zack's sitting at the edge of the little stage, right in front of us, and as I'm, y'know, watching him, there's eye contact, but I think nothing of it, beyond, like, wondering if we'll hyphenate our last names, and one time, on the other side of the audience, he even sits down on the carpet, but whatever. And so towards the end, when he's down right in front of me and extends his hand, it doesn't really strike me as anything, and then suddenly he's taken my hand and is standing me up, and I'm on stage.

It's not even like in Thom Pain, when I thought there was impending audience participation, and I had that awful yearning in my chest, a literal physical thing in my chest. This was just watching the show and then being pulled on stage.

First thought: I hope my pants are not slipped down my back enough to be showing my underwear. Second thought... Well, there aren't thoughts so much, not beyond Don't be the awful audience participator, Don't be the awful audience participator, and then also just trying to go along with what's happening as well as possible. It's not quite the actor's nightmare thing, because I know I'm not supposed to know what's happening, but it's like a super-intense improv pop quiz - go along with it, say yes, sort of psychically get the flow of what he's doing, what he's indicating for me to do without actually, like, saying anything to me.

When I saw Blue Man Group (shut up, we got comps), there was an audience girl brought up on stage who just would. not. cooperate. She refused to eat a twinkie in a way that kind of ruins a gag. I did not want to be that girl.

I also didn't want to be the person who's so self-conscious (and audience-conscious) that they're distracting and annoying. And other than my initial giggling fit, I think I did okay. (The other audience member who was pulled up for this segment was, luckily, good and game. And having someone else made it less scary. Less pressure.) I even got back into watching the show, albeit from onstage, which was cool, that I could get my focus reabsorbed that way. Overall: a disorienting and pretty cool experience. The whole thing definitely colored my experience of the play - spiced it up for sure - and maybe did or didn't teach me some lessons about brazen eye contact.

(Speaking of eye contact, a male friend once told me that you can tell when a guy is trying not to look at a girl's boobs because it's like, intense eye contact, a sort of don'tlookatherboobs, don'tlookatherboobs thing. And I thought of that insight when, towards the end of my on-stage stint, Zack Oberzan stripped to his underwear and I was suddenly fascinated by what was on the video screen behind me.)

one fucking badass green beret.

And now I see that Helen Shaw's Time Out NY review for the show begins with, "Do not wear tight pants to Rambo Solo; (1) seating is on the ground, so you should dress with flexibility in mind..." So maybe the spoiler-free zone has its downsides. Dude who was sitting behind me, I'm sorry. Or you're welcome.

Rambo Solo extended to... um... April 19th. Tickets for the extension are $35. You can get those and info here.

Theatre and Cookies, or, really, Cookies and Theatre

2009-04-07T14:54:00.003-04:00

This morning at work there were two tubs of cookies, leftover from last night's board meeting, set out for office consumption. As I walked past my friend's desk, I saw this on a post-it on his computer monitor: COOKIES MAKE JOHN UGLY AT THE BEACH AND SINGLE.

"I need one!" He wrote for me: JAIME LIFTS WEIGHTS, NOT COOKIES, and we exchanged a solidarity high-five, but after taping it up, I realized, first of all, that I can lift weights and cookies, and second, that it wasn't quite what I needed. Now I've got COOKIES ARE NOT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT, which may not be 100% true, but seems to be doing the trick.

* * *

I'm happy to, at least for the moment, be back into the theatre-going swing of things. Or the swing of theatre-going. Got to go to my, I believe, second Broadway opening recently, and I would like to pen the little mini open letter: Dear producers of that show, thank you for the booze. Despite my conversion to whiskey, I am not too proud for signature cocktails of champagne and grenadine, because maraschino cherries eradicate all shame. Also: Dear first pizza place I saw open on my way to the subway, I should have waited for the second.

Then Sunday night I saw Rambo Solo. I actually just wrote all about it as part of this post, but it turned into what should be its own post, so I will set it to publish tomorrow morning, so, woot!, you get me two days in a row. Just like in the old days, when I didn't suck.

Support Excellent Strange Theatre!

2009-03-26T11:21:00.002-04:00

Hey, remember Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, the pirate puppet rock musical I was obsessed with last spring & summer? Well. Auteur Nick Jones has teamed up with Rachel Shukert and Peter Cook to form the Terrible Baby Theatre Company. They've got two shows coming up at the Brick this spring (disclaimer, or announcement: I'm helping out a bit), and tonight - yes, tonight! - there's a Launch Party Benefit Party Thing for the company:

Tonight's the night!!
Put on your shit-kicking tuxedo or your creepy bird mask!

It's the

TERRIBLE BABY BENEFIT LAUNCH PARTY

w/
Jollyship the Whiz-Bang
Edison Rocket Train
Corn Mo
Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad

Starting at 8, at which time you will find treats for you to eat!

Glasslands Gallery
289 Kent Ave, Brooklyn, Williamsburg
(between S. 1st and S.2nd st. Kent is down by the river)

L to Bedford Ave.
JMZ to Marcy

$20

ALL PROCEEDS GO TOWARDS EXCELLENT STRANGE THEATER PRODUCTIONS!!!

See you there.

Surplus Throwback

2009-03-25T17:22:00.002-04:00

Remember when, the first year after work found out about my blog, all I did was post lolcats?

This is nothing like that.

(via)