Stirred, Not Shaken

The tricky thing about the distractions and diversions in my life is that, in most cases, I put them there.  No one else. And sure they can soothe me, and calm me, but more than anything, they can waste my time.  I can while away the entire evening with a pointless iphone game and the next day feel this funny ache, this regret, this knowledge that I should have manned up and done some writing, or exploring, given up on instant gratification to feel some long term gratification.  It can be a fight, all the harder now that I have a full time, stressful new job, my attempts to wrap my brain around which are keeping me in the office long past the time I'm required to be there.  And when I get home the last thing I want to do with my time is exercise my fucking mind.  And yet...

It was a wonderful weekend full of inspiring theatre and magical friends and affirming time with my mom and dad and a couple of those bubbling up warm fuzzy feelings thrown in for good measure.    It's also been "stirring".  The job mentioned previously takes a lot of faith that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel once these lessons have sunk into my brain.  And the fact that this job is not very artistic, in some ways not at all aligned with my natural tendencies, it makes me wonder if it's worth the time and pain.  However, these challenges, as they say "strengthen" us.  Remind us that we can get through if we trust.  And if we don't trust and we give up?  Then we reinforce the negative message that we will not make it and the things that seem so wonderful at the beginning will inevitably turn sour.  But if we DO trust, then the sour things turn back to sweet (oh lord this is one lame-ass analogy, but you get the point...right?) and you can feel good about yourself for not giving in to the momentary weakness.  

Or...have I jumped from one dead-end job to one that may have a clear path, but a path that I don't particularly want to travel down?

And yet, as my friend Mark reminded me, it's not boring.  And in a lot of ways, these moments of life are exactly what he hope for during the lulls.  I'm right in the thick of life, feeling emotions, figuring things out, experiencing.  And I am being creative.  I'm blogging, I recently finished a screenplay which I'm submitting to competitions and festivals, and I'm gearing up to be participating in a pretty unique multimedia stage piece which explores some of the myths that fascinate me through a modern sensibility.  And, it's nice to be reminded occasionally that pleasant surprises can find you without your working so hard to find them, as long as your opening doors and walking through them. 

Things are happening, inside and out, and right now it's enough to know that.

The "Extras in the Movie of Your Life"

It's a concept I was introduced to a while ago through a podcast called "How Much Do We Love".  They talked about the people you we run into on a semi-regular or sporadic basis, who inform and entertain our lives in some relatively small way, and I think it's a pretty lovely way to look at them.  You couldn't call them friends, or even acquaintences, they are just...extras in the movie of our life. Here are a couple of my more notable ones.

The Lady in White-  When you live in LA you are always about two blocks from a crappy neighborhood.  I was no exception.  There's a strip of PicoBlvd  that is populated by faded business that are barely hanging on, but somehow manage to stick around:  a nail salon, a palm reading shop, a perpetually empty Jack in The Box.   It was in this neighborhood that I would see the Lady in White.  She was in her mid-thirties, beauty faded, white robes, white leggings, white high heels, frizzy bleached hair (Think Elayne Boozler, circa 1983) Even her lipstick was white.  She was so thin and angular, you'd expect her to walk sharp, or even to stumble as if in a daze, but no...she glided effortlessly down the street like Glinda the Good Witch gone to seed.  Her white robes always seemed to flow behind her as if accompanied by a perpetual breeze.  I imagined a life for her, like you do, and imagined that she'd fallen into drugs and prostitution from a life as kept woman, from a life in the corporate world, and she was holding onto her lost virginity by cothing herself in the colors of purity that were yellowing, though she pretended not to see it happen.

Dreamy Starbucks Barrista-  I have a favorite Starbucks where I go to organize my thoughts, to read, and ocassionally write when I'm able to power through the doubt, and it is graced by the Dreamy Starbucks man-child.  He's in his mid to late twenties, and I think he's only there when they need a little help so he strays from the Starbucks he manages to pick up the slack at this one.  He's slender, with an effortless beauty.  He doesn't seem to work at it one iota and I picture him tumbling out of bed and his thick black hair tumbling right along with him.  I've always had a weak spot for incongruous pale skin and dark hair, and the black button down he wears accentuates the contrast.  Add to that his extremely helpful demeanor (also effortless) and a deeper voice than you would expect to come out of his pillow lips, and you can color me happily uncomfortable any time I see him.  Uncomfortable because I don't want him to think I'm looking and noticing him, so I just take tiny little glances in his direction when he's not looking, in a way that is hopefully not creepier than if I openly stared.  After all there's no pressure.  I don't expect to date him, don't think about him outside of the Starbucks, but he is pretty...even more so for the fact that he doesn't seem to know it.

The Best Song You Are Not Working Out To

My friends make fun of my work-out music, but I truly do not know better way to run than accompanied by showtunes in my ear to keep me going.  Dream Girls???  That sound track is full of songs that start with a beat and just build til I can hardly staaand it.  "Move"?  Yes, please.  The disco version of "One Night Only"?  Fuh-get about it.  And who wouldn't run (as my Dad used to say) "full-tilt-boogie" when listening to the theme song from Wonder Woman?  You can always surrender to the power of thigh high red boots for the two minutes it takes the song to run its course. 

But my favorite... my go to song... the one that I play when I'm just about tuckered out and I don't think I can make it to the end end of my regularly scheduled work-out...is from the musical version of All About Eve, a little show called Applause, which featured Lauren Bacall's Tony winning tenacity and foghorn voice.  Said voice is prominently dispayed in her tour de force song "But Alive". 

Imagine yourself on the treadmill for a moment:

It starts out like they often do, nice and easy, a saunter really, a stride.  But one minute into it and we're cantering, trotting, energized.  The anticipation is palpable and so we've sped up the treadmill up a couple levels.  Then, 2 minutes-  We're up to a nice run, nothing we haven't done before.  We listen to the chorus of disco chicks and dudes scatting the nonsense words "Tralla- Shaba-Daba-dada" and can imagine Lauren throwing down some sassy dance moves.  3minutes in you feel like this must be the mecca!  The high point of the song.  Lauren is braying "ALIIIVE" over and over again at the top of her leather lungs and the chorus of gay boys (this scene takes place in a gay bar in the Village, btw) is chanting "Margo!"  You unflinchingly add another level to the treadmill.  It's done right?  That's it?  But no!  3:24. Key change!!  You are kicking it at a 8 or 8.5, nothing can stop you!  You feel brilliant and brash and bombastic, limp as a puppet and simply fantastic, but alive!  Even when Lauren is done singing the chorus goes on and on and just when you think you can't go any longer they finish it off with one last rousing "MARGO!!!!!"

If you're ass isn't kicked by the end of the song, you didn't do it right. 

Here's a clip from the televised version of the musical to give you a visual, and if you know where to find the full version of this little gem, lemme know, will ya??

 

 

 

And Oh and yeah, while searching for this video I found another treat.   The same song as lip synched by a rather zaftig drag queen lip-synching in front of a chorus of well-built tight shirted "sailors".  I post this only on the condition that you watch the legit version first.  And don't bother thanking me.

 

   

Marilyn, Marlon, and Truman

It's not new to say that film stars are the Greek Gods and Goddesses of our time, but I can't think of a better analogy to explain why they hold such a fascination.  Movie Stars fulfill the same purpose for us in a lot of the same ways that those ancient beings did.  They represent giant ideas and emotions in a comprehensible, human package.  This is especially true of those stars from the mid-twentieth century.  Not only because their stories are complete, with a beginning and an end, but because their images were so concrete, shaped by themselves and by some of the best PR people in history.

Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart.  These are people we think we know.  We can reduce them in our minds to one image, to one adjective even.   We place our hopes and dreams upon them, see our struggles in theirs, find hope in their triumphant moments.  It's almost religious, and sometimes their...people hood... can be usurped by what we need and expect them to be.   

In keeping with my current interest in long form journalism (albeit, entertainment journalism)  I found two features on two of the great stars of the past, as seen by the fractured and mischievous sensibility of trickster, Truman Capote.  Both of them made me rethink what I thought I knew.

The first one is a 1980 article by Truman in which he recounts an intimate encounter with Marilyn, and it's a tellingly different look at someone who often gets reduced to a wispy, powder faced baby doll.    The second, is a profile of a profile, the story of how Truman Capote seduced Marlon Brando into giving up more of himself than he'd planned.  The resulting piece premiered in The New Yorker in 1957 and was the forerunner of the current trend in celebrity journalism.  Both articles are juicy as hell. 

For those of you who are also interested in longer articles, and like me were having trouble finding them, longform.org culls some of the greatest pieces on the web, old and new, and will surely provide you with hours of reading pleasure.

Michael Chabon as seen by Kathryn Schulz

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was one of those novels that I devoured like porn when I was in my early twenties, that is to say with one I glued to it's pages and ears to door in case someone should stumble upon me reading it.  I was at that time, not ready to come out of the closet (even to myself) but still had this... "itching", this intense curiosity about what it meant to be gay.  Luckily the book was a respectable book, appreciated by critics, and mainstream enough, with a bland enough cover that no one who might see me reading it (people at the office, friends, my parents)  would have any inkling what it was about.  And if anybody did asked me what it was about, I told them in a way that I hoed sounded as blase as I intended it to. 

After all, what was I hiding?  I was just a straight dude with a passing interest in how a different breed lived, right?  But as I hungrily flipped page after page I should have known that I was far too curious about what might happen between two men and a lone bottle of corn oil than any straight guy would be.  And while I hated the protagonist for cheating on his girlfriend with a man, I just as much pitied him for his inability to escape what I deemed at that time to be mild perversion, and   feared that his fate would be my own.

So ... that was my introduction to the hesitantly hopeful work of Michael Chabon and his well meaning protagonists who seemed doomed to fuck up their lives and others.  Years later I read and absolutely loved his short story collection "Werewolves in Their Youth" for its ability to suck me into the pivotal moments of ordinary men's lives, and equally adored The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for it's epic scope and rich pulpy details. 

Aside from his work, there is something else that has kept me intrigued by him, a personal ambiguity that I find fascinating.  He is so mysterious, fumbling, intellectual... a straight man who admits to having had affairs with men, a man who writes both the high and low-brow (aside from his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, he also wrote the screenplay for John Carter) He's a kind of hipster/geek/intellect/sensitive/hetero-flexible/dreamboat, and in short, I would love to be the proverbial fly on the wall of his office, and living room, and bedroom. 

Thanks to Kathryn Schulz and her feature originally penned for New York Magazine, I feel like I have been.  She has a great ability to evoke his style, his awkward charm, and his gentle intensity, and has crafted an article that is as much of a page turner as Chabon's compellingly readable works. 


 

"Where in the World Can I Find the Camp Classic 'Stepping Out'?"

It's a rhetorical question, because I already know that the deliciously hokey and heartwarming 1991 comedy about a former Broadway dancer named Mavis Turner (Liza, but of course, looking and sounding lovely) and her rag tag bunch of tappers, is available in its entirety on Youtube.  This doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of the VHS copy my best friend and I got from E-bay, but it does mean I will be watching this shit in all its grainy glory, again and again on-line!

Rounding out the cast are Julie Walters as the compulsive cleaner in the class, Ellen Greene as the slightly slutty Maxine, Jane Krakowski looking surprisingly fresh, Bill Irwin, Andrea Martin, and Shelley Winters!!  What?  Yes, it's true!  They DID get that many amazing talents in one film and it is somehow not available on DVD.  Trust me, you will laugh at the film more than you laugh with it (watching Liza Minnelli try to play "edge" is almost as funny as watching Jessica Chastain do "punk" in the horror film Mama) but like the amateur tappers at it's center, this film just oozes heart and the desire to please and if you aren't crying little sequined tears at the end, you might have a cold, cold soul.

ALSO- check out Nora Dunn playing a biatch as only she can, and Dean McDermott (yep, Tori's husband) as "young man at bar".  I know you've been panting for the link, so here it is...

A Podcast I Love: Off-stage and...On The Air

I love podcasts.  Love 'em!  They are basically radio shows available on the air, and while some of them are available on the FM dial, many of them are produced exclusively for the internet.  Whatever your interests or passion (old time radio shows, Harry Potter, crocheting) no matter how eccentric,  it's likely someone on the web is podcasting about it.  Some are professional, very polished shows and some are as simple as a guy (or girl) on a microphone.  In case you've not listened to them, they are treasure troves for artists of any kind, as many shows focus on the creative process, explore art and culture, and these shows will also talk in depth to wildly talented folks like John Hodgman or  Charles Busch, or Neil Gaiman, who don't get a huge amount of time on the radio or TV.    I hope, in the future to talk about a lot of my favorites, but thought I'd start with a local podcast I enjoy which is available on I-tunes.  That Podcast is...(drum roll please)



  Off-stage and... On The Air (with Lisa Scheps and Nicole Shiro)-


 My college professor used to drill it my and my peers young undergraduate brains that if wanted to call ourselves theatre artists we needed to suck up every bit of knowledge we could about current events, culture,visual arts, food, theatre history, and certainly about what was happening in the present in the theatre scene.

I paraphrase him and say, if you want to call yourself a theatre artist (or theatre appreciator), especially in the Austin area, you need to be listening to Off-stage and... On-the Air.  The two hosts (Lisa Scheps and Nicole Shiro) are opinionated, passionate, kooky and have a charmingly self deprecating sense humor.  Both care deeply about their subject, but don't usually "insist upon themselves". They're the kind of people you want to hang out with at a dinner party, and that's exactly what I want out of an on-air personality.  As for the show's content, not only will you hear run-downs and reviews about what's going on in Broadway (what's in development, what's opening and what's closing, and reviews on those shows), but you'll also hear what happened "on this date in theatre history", and get interviews with Austin artists discussing their current projects. 

I've been on the show a couple of times and seeing it from that side is, needlessly to say, a very skewed way of catching the show.  I was so caught up in how I'd sound on the air, whether I'd fuck something up in the dramatic reading of the scene we were performing or some other self-involved nonsense, that I didn't get to enjoy the rest of the program.  As an audience member, I get so comfy and relaxed and I often listen more than once to soak up the tidbits I missed the first time.  So, please sidle up to your radio station on 91.7 KOOP Wednesdays at 2PM CST or download the podcast on I-tunes, or at their website. 
http://www.offstageontheair.blogspot.com

And if you are like I was and had only been on it and never taken the opportunity to listen, do yourself a favor and "step right up".

I will only eat one kind of pickle from now on!

Clausens, that is.  For a while I'd taken issue with the vast difference in quality between the pickles I got at the deli and the ones I found in jars at the store.  In comparison the store pickles were limp, flaccid, and the juice resembled what I imagine formaldehyde might taste like.  And then, a miracle!  I was hanging out at my friend Meg and Dave's house, when Dave offered me a bite of his pickle.  It was delicious!  Crisp, salty, delicious!  I had to see where they came from, because from now on I would only eat this pickle.  One pickle for the rest of my life:  Clausen.  Halleluj.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the pickle aisle of my local store and found it overrun by the Vlasic Stork, and some asshole named "Miss Olive".  No thanks.  I'd been ruined for other pickles.  If it couldn't be Clausen, it would be nothing.  I went to another store, same result.  Had those bastards run the Clausens out of the pickle business I wondered?  A search on the Internet revealed no such occurrence.  Thanks to a quick text to Dave I discovered that Clausens were in the deli area, refrigerated.  Because Clausens are NEVER heated!  I love them so I've even taken to dipping them in hummus.  What a snack sensation.

Accept no other.

Ira Update

I mentioned several posts ago that my cat Ira, who's been with me for many years, has been experiencing major health issues and I was struggling with thoughts of putting him to sleep.  Opinions on the subject were varied, but most were leaning toward the unhhappy ending, and I was completely confused about what was best for him.   Emotions were up and down for about two weeks in conjunction with his health outlook.  And then, a a couple Tuesdays ago my vet became more hopeful that he might make it.  He was under the bed in hiding most of the day, but not all, and the fact that he was feeling at all sociable seemed to be a good sign, plus, the veterinary dentist had seen other cats with his condition recover, and he was taking food by syringe, so home he went.  

I syringe fed him three times a day, gave him pain meds twice a day, and injected fluids into him twice a day for several days.  It wasn't fun for either of us, but it got results, and I'm happy to report that he is back to his sassy, vocal self, sleeping on the bed rather than under it, and he is even drinking and feeding himself (though I'm still supplementing with the syringe so we can get his weight up closer to where it should be).  In short, he seems happy, and I'm glad I waited it out, as bleak as things were seeming for a while.  Thanks to everyone who gave their advice and well wishes, as they were sorely needed.

The Punchy Players!

The Punchy Players have been creating some hilarious videos at their youtube channel featuring celebs and TV characters of the past including Hazel, Caroline Ingalls, Lucy, Liza Minnelli, Julie Andrews and Ann Miller.  Their humor is always fresh, sharp, and never mean spirited, which I love.  They often feature videos with Judy Garland, and they first came to my notice through "Judy's Cream of Wheat".  While that one is definitely a keeper, this new one might be my favorite.  It imagines what might happen if a child brought Judy to "Show and Tell".

And... here's an original medley, for those of you who haven't seen much of Judy's 1960's work.

"Total Faith" due out on April 16th

A new cd from Broadway sass-bucket and all around talent, Faith Prince, is due out in just a few days!  Those who live in Austin and were lucky enough to catch her at Austin Cabaret Theater a few years back will be pleased to know that almost all the material is new, aside from a story about a duck which I'm assuming is the same one she told at The Mansion at Judges Hill, because how many duck stories can there be?  For those who wish to revisit that evening, many of those same songs and stories can be found on her previous cd, A Leap of Faith. 

A few of the promising tracks from the current disc include: a medley of "Somewhere That's Green" and "Suddenly, Seymour", "If He Walked into My Life", "The Ladies Who Lunch", and "But the World Goes 'Round".