Seriously. BUY IT.
Not because I have a play in it.
Not because my husband is on the cover.
Not because of the truly brilliant plays, reviews, and essays from the likes of Ken Urban, Jason Grote, Brook Stowe, August Schulenburg, Gary Brackett, Brian Boyles, Zachary Mannheimer, Howard Pflanzer, and Jessica Slote.
Not EVEN because it will look damn good on that shelf of yours.
Buy it because in a few years you'll be able to brag that you got it when it first came out. Consider it a friendly tip. No one likes to be the last to know...
So remember that post I did last month about the page I ripped from the in-flight magazine? Well, a fella who works for this arts foundation read that and decided I'd be perfect for the "Rants and Raves" section of his newsletter. Basically, I was hired to go on and on about things I love/hate. I was asked to make it vaguely career-related, but I had trouble with that part. I really hate talking about theatre publically. My opinions and feelings change daily, and there are quite enough folks out there talking about it intelligently... plus I get weirdly insecure about misrepresenting myself.
But at any rate. It was so fun to write. Here is a sneak preview:
RANT NUDITY ON STAGE: I appreciate nudity as much as the next person. I even appreciate it in the theatre. But I can't handle it. So I must rant. Maybe I should rant against myself instead of the nudity. It's not the nudity's fault that I can't concentrate once it presents itself. No nude actor ever asked me to stop paying attention to the play once his/her genitals were unveiled. But I don't think I've ever seen a set of boobies or a sack on stage where I didn't have to focus on NOT looking. Unless I was utterly spellbound by the gear. But in either case the play disappears entirely. I realize I am the precise type of audience member that makes actors nervous to take roles that require them to disrobe. Perhaps if producers put a warning into the program beforehand, something like: "For those of you sensitive to unclothed body parts... please be aware that the next hour of your life will contain them." Then I could spend the time leading up to the nudity concentrating on picturing the actors nude, so that when the moment finally arrives it'll be no biggie. It will also spare those around me from thinking they're sitting next to a seven-year-old boy, what with the giggling and pointing and profuse perspiration.
You'll have to READ THE ARTICLE to get the rest...
**note: some themes might be familiar to regular readers of zee blog
Feeling guilty about writing such a melancholy post for my birthday... so here I am to counter all that pensive, tormented energy I put out there.
YIPPIE! I was BORN TODAY! And so was Sarah Ruhl, so go wish her a happy birthday too...
Birthdays are Fun Times to Celebrate with Friends. I don't have any Friends in Tallahassee, so I will Celebrate with the Dying Cricket who found his Way into my Home last night. He has been Dying for nearly Twelve Hours! How thematic, for him to be Dying on the day of my Birth! Thank You, Jiminey!
Here's a little birth/death day Poem for you!
Buck up Little Guy!
You've had a Full Life.
Let's raise a Blade of Grass
To the End of your Strife!
WHHHHEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
On this very day in the year 1973 in the borough of Queens in the city of New York, a set of Kegel muscles forced a tiny human out from within the small body of a young woman. The doctor placed the human into this woman's arms. "What is your daughter's name?" the doctor asked. "Anne," she said. She said this out loud after looking at her daughter. While looking at her daughter. Decided the name based on, what, the frizzle of fine black hair on her head? A fraught quality to her eyes? An old friend she knew in high school (not that long ago for her)? A dead relative? Or had she named her months before, when the little thing was swimming/kicking/sleeping inside her as she ate/walked/slept/wept?
At any rate she said this name out loud, "Anne", and someone wrote it down on a document next to her last name. Both names were mine, until they weren't. Several months later these names were replaced by a new set of names from another woman, the woman who raised me and whom I call mother and whom I love.
What I find myself wondering about, now that the burn of that stunning discovery six months ago has cooled, are the spaces in between. The space between the moment I was in that woman's arms covered in her blood and the moment she released my body to a stranger; the moment she discovered she was pregnant and the moment she realized she would set this one free; the moment she invented a name for me and the moment it left her lips and dissolved in the air. As much as I try not to romanticize a non-relationship, the potentialities move me.
The most interesting aspect of these musings is that the spaces may very well be filled with truths in the not-so-distant future. The question however that continues to plague me, the one that keeps me up at night, is this: at what cost?
A little knowledge is such a dangerous thing...
Nothing to report in Tallahassee. I wake up at 6:30am, re-read the play I will be teaching that day over coffee, get dressed, ride my bike to work, teach my 9am class, hang out in my office and do some work, come home, cook dinner, go to bed.
I know you are hungry for details... so I will oblige. Here is a list of everything I imbibed today (in order).
- 1 packet instant oatmeal with bananas and blueberries
- 1 mug very strong black coffee
- 2 large gourmet raviolis with spicy sauce, soy meatballs and roasted vegetables
- 3 celery sticks
- 9 strawberries
- 23 raw unsalted almonds
- a plum
- a "berry blast" protein shake with a scoop of "energy powder"
- 1 medium-sized insect (may not count, flew into lungs on bike ride home)
- 1 piece Atlantic salmon, grilled
- 1 large salad with roasted red peppers, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cucumbers, tomatoes, fat-free mild cheddar shreds, walnut pieces, and dried sweetened cranberries
- 1 mug chamomile tea (2 tea bags)
- 2 Advil
- 1 mug very strong black coffee
You're welcome.
Is it just me, or is there something slightly unsavory about Google's header image today?
Not initially. At first you're like, oh how delightful, Google is commemorating our country's most famous and eloquent leader of the civil right's movement... uh, by replacing an "O" with his HEAD?
How do you suppose would Dr. King feel if he knew his effigy was being used to 1) supplant a vowel on a billion-dollar brand search engine, and 2) keep a blue "G" and a red "O" from smashing into each other?
Well, perhaps that last device is symbolic... but still...
And while we're at it, whose idea was it to give Dr. King those children-shaped epaulettes? Creeeee-py.
Funny. Once again, thanks Johnny Z...
Here I am in Tallahassee on a two-month teaching gig, and I am operating on limited internet capabilities at my temporary abode. No DSL, no cable, no high-speed. And while dial-up isn't what it used to be, I am still am still unable to download my Howard mp3's. Thus I missed his first day at Sirius yesterday. Luckily, I have equally obsessed friends who filled me in on the details.
So before they left terrestrial radio, the staff of the Stern show agreed to reveal a series of cliff-hangy personal secrets, which were announced yesterday. One secret per staff member. The listening audience has been given a week to guess whose revelation is whose. The revelations are really good, ranging from cheating on one's spouse to having sex with produce.
While speculating on who did what via email with my professor friend (a feminist scholar who shall remain nameless), I received this delightful response:
I'm sitting in my office, door open, so students passing by see a studious, bespectacled prof typing away, brow furrowed, and all I'm actually doing is trying to figure out who out of several people I've never met is most likely to have been ejaculated upon.Ok, gotta go to class.
So to honor Howard's move and to lament my loss, I am posting one of my favorite phony phone calls. Two dudes call room service at a hotel pretending to be Pavroti and his press agent. The press agent orders food while Pavroti "warms up" in the background. It is a bit long, and so supremely silly. The Pavarotti impression is appallingly bad, but the woman on the phone never skips a bit. You can hear Howard and Artie Lange laughing quietly over the clip.
Enjoy...
"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?"
"I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art."
"Your appearence doesn't suggest the anchorite."
"All that business fills me with disgust."
"Human nature is a nuisance, isn't it?" I said.
"Why are you sniggering at me?"
"Because I don't believe you."
"Then you're a damned fool."
I paused, and I looked at him searchingly.
"What's the good of trying to humbug me?" I said.
"I don't know what you mean."
I smiled.
"Let me tell you. I imagine that for months the matter never comes into your head, and you're able to persuade yourself that you've finished with it for good and all. You rejoice in your freedom, and you feel that at last you can call your soul your own. You seem to walk with your head among the stars. And then, all of a sudden you can't stand it any more, and you notice that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it. And you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind with rage."
He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very slowly.
"I'll tell you what must seem strange, that when it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure. You feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial; and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God. Can you explain that to me?"
He kept his eyes fixed on mine till I had finished, and then he turned away. There was on his face a strange look, and I thought that so might a man look when he had died under the torture. He was silent. I knew that our conversation was ended.
--by W. Somerset Maugham, from The Moon and Sixpence
Perhaps you're the type of person who might google your first name along with a provocative phrase, just to see what a virtually random string might lead to. Perhaps you might use the phrase, "[your first name] is pissing me off." I would venture you would most likely not find a post that refers to you directly.
I however, discovered after some research this not to be true in my case. In actuality when one googles such a phrase using my first name, one indeed finds a post about yours truly. Perhaps this means I am not most people.
It was also discovered that the same result can be found by googling the phrase "FUCK YOU, [my first name]! YOU MAKE ME SICK!!!!!"
Oh internet. You provocateur...
