Happy Thanksgiving!

I am sick so I'll be staying home this Thanksgiving, but I still plan to eat well. But instead of spending time with beloved family members, I'll be staying in bed. At least I'll have time to catch up on my reading. I'm sniffing at Polaris, another one of those indy RPGS. This one is apparently at the vanguard of the indy games thing. Before you get to the game part you've got to get through the extensive backstory, though. It's slow going. Imagine Dan Clowes mocking an E. R. Eddison wannabe and you'll have the right idea. A sample from memory: "These few examples will have to suffice you." If that "you," which is representative of the grammatical carelessness plaguing game designer Ben Lehman's attempted elevated prose, didn't make you wince or cackle then you may enjoy his turgid high fantasy prose more than I do, but it's more inflated than elevated. I suspect that Lehman's real artistry as a game designer will do much to compensate; I certainly hope so! There's a creative artist in there somewhere, although centering a high fantasy adventure around the notion that the Sun is BAD is pretty counterintuitive to me. It's like saying apples or hugs are bad.

(and yes, my own prose is riddled with faults, but I'm not attempting anything more complex than a blog. Pulling off what John Gardner called "The High Style" takes a degree of linguistic virtuosity that neither Lehman nor I possess. But hey, God bless him for trying, and I really do want to be able to report back with a positive take on his game as a game.)

Christmas Carol is taking shape, but it's slow going; wrassling such a huge production into a stageworthy show is no mean feat, and we are all having trouble remembering how all our bits and pieces fit together. Offstage, I know all my lines, lyrics, notes and choreography. Onstage everything falls apart. The gap between knowing stuff in one's head and actually being able to do the stuff is something I rediscover with every show.

SOB!

On both of the musicals I've done, I teared up on the final show. It didn't mess up my performances, but I sobbed myself sick backstage. Christmas Carol has a Road-To-Damascus style redemption story, and those always make me tear up too. So for this show I fully expect to transform from a human being into a big tear duct, like a mopey Emerson. I don't cry often, but durned if a musical closing doesn't discombobulate me. I'm already thinking about strategies to make sure I don't wreck the performance with onstage bawling.

Just found out my car has a coolant leak. Oh good. The repairs would cost more than the trade value of the car, so it's time to get some fresh wheels. My preferred solution to this problem is to live in a world where cars are unneeded. Some communities have substantial public transportation, but Birmingham will never be one of those; tightwad crybaby taxpayers + a local government that will spend any and all revenues on cocaine and hookers= I need a car.

Birmingham radio personality Dollar Bill is our Scrooge, and it's a delight to watch him work. It's an even bigger delight to hang out with him; he's one of the most effortlessly funny people I've ever met. He's a natural storyteller, and even though a disproportionate number of the anecdotes I've heard from him involved throwing things out of helicopters, I'm always willing to hear more. I wish he'd cut an album.

In this show I have a cute, smart, funny teenage wife. She's a joy to work with, but this is as close as I'll ever come to having a cute, smart, funny (nevermind teenage) wife. Which fact just makes me want to sob all the more.

I've been rereading Naked Lunch, and the group known as Liquifactionists, the people who want to blend all of humanity into one big amoebic mass, reminded me of the ending of The End of Evangelion, in which humanity does indeed meld together (in an apocalyptic semi-religious event) but the hero's rejection of this nirvanic loss of identity causes the whole thing to fall apart. Speaking for myself, I'd love to be able to merge with my fellow creatures into one divinely interconnected assortment of enlightened beings, but I'd want to be selective. I'd want to pick and choose the folks I merged with. A Liquifactionist snob, I guess. Although it's not as if I'd be checking anyone's teeth or pedigree; it would be purely on an I-like-you basis.

Do I sound okay? I feel okay.

Primetime Adventures

There are plenty of topics I could address in this, my first post in a while, but I'd rather talk about a game I've bought, Primetime Adventures. It's one of these here indy role-playing games, with a TV show premise. It's an awful lot like an improv format, so its appeal to an occasional improvist is obvious, but it turns out there's no one I can actually play this game with. Most role-playing games are about pretending to be, say, Agents Mulder and Scully. This game is more about playing Chris Carter. You don't play the game by using your character as an alter ego, but as a storytelling subject, the same way a TV show writer/producer would. Well, most of my friends can be roughly divided into 2 groups: the ones who'd rather play Mulder and Scully, or the one's who'd rather actually BE Chris Carter (or at least actually produce a play or film that others can watch).

God Bless Us Every One (And There's A Lot)

Here's an interesting old Tom Spurgeon article about "A Christmas Carol," in honor of my next musical. (Also my last musical for a while, I dare say, since I feel like I've really hit the limit of my ability to contribute to that exciting form-I need to do a few small-scale plays again.)

Anyway, this production has the biggest cast I've ever seen. I think there are more people in this show than Bush has looking for Osama bin Laden. There's a slew of people I've done shows with, which is one of the best parts of doing community theatre.

War on Hornets

I know I'm not the first person to think of this, but suppose the government had declared "war on terrorism" after the Oklahoma City Bombing? Imagine if they'd had soldiers occupying rural towns, firing cruise missles into Baptist churches, bars and pool halls, abducting folks with anti-federal government leanings and torturing them in secret locations? I know a few Clinton-haters with guns who only needed a flashpoint to join an insurgency. I suspect the USA would look a lot more like Iraq currently does.

So I'm glad the government didn't do that. Instead they treated it like a law enforcement situation, so the only anti-government types they threw in prison were the ones who'd actually pulled the bombing. So the others had no real excuse to insurge, if "insurge" is a word. If only the Bush Administration had shown such restraint.

If you don't kick a hornet's nest, you're less likely to get stung. If hornets build a nest on your porch, smoke 'em out, but don't declare war on hornets and go looking for nests to kick.

33

Sunday I turned 33 and my electricity went out. Coincidence or omen? A friend of mine sez this is my Jesus year. Great. The pressure's on.

Anyway, there's so much theatre in town this month! There's about a half-dozen shows I wanna see over the next few weeks.

I also gotta scrounge up a halloween costume for a party. Perhaps someday I will have a girlfriend with whom to do one of the two two-person costume concepts I yearn to do: Connie and Raymond Marble from Pink Flamingos, and Cora and Clarice Groan from Gormenghast.

A Month Later

The following post leaps from thought to thought with no attempt at structure whatsoever. Sorry.


H2$ was a success in my book! The final matinee was one of the most satisfying performances I've ever worked on. One dramatic moment: the power went out for just a minute, and all the equipment in this tech-heavy show went down. The stars were onstage singing "Rosemary," a tender love duet, and they just kept going, a cappella and in the dark, until everything came back up. After the final dramatic note they embraced in genuine relief and affection as the crowd went bananas. I spent the rest of the day barely holding back tears of delight.

Now I'm exausted, due in large part to the wear and tear of this show. Staying up partying on friday and saturday nights didn't help. Well, they helped with some things, but not my energy level. My parents are on a trip, and they insist on calling me with their cell phone instead of a real honest-to-goodness phone (cell phones are the mark of the beast). They called me at work today and after their phone stopped wonking out I couldn't find the energy to speak at all. I usually want to talk to my folks whenever they call, since I'm increasingly mindful that one day we'll all, in the words of Firesign Theatre, fall apart like rotten fruit (thanks for the shoddy workmanship, God!) but I'm so enervated that it's all I can do to type this.

Anyway, I'm delighted that I got to work with the phenomenal Carl Dean, and terribly excited about doing Christmas Carol with my friend and neighbour Frank next, but I'm about ready to do some meat-and-potatoes straight theatre again. There's only so much singing and dancing I can do, much as I love it.

Backstage was the usual blend of friendships, slights and simmering loathings all round, but I feel like it was a net gain. I learned a lot about professionalism from the lead performers; Wes, the guy who played Bud, was a particular inspiration to me. Even though we changed costumes next to each other I became utterly starstruck by him, and turned into a gushing lobotomized praise machine whenever we spoke. He showed me how to be continually inventive yet flawlessly consistent. He also showed my how to be gracious when some twit is constantly boring you with praise. I should know by now that no one really wants to be praised for more than a minute; at least no one whom I'd actually want to praise.

I couldn't attend the Sidewalk Film Festival this year, but durn tootin' I weaseled my way into the after party at Sloss Furnace. I bumped into a talented filmmaker I know and she lied me in; the next day she won an award for her film, so bravo Jennifer!

I feel a bit like the guy in Fight Club who attends support groups for diseases he doesn't have; I attended the prayer circles a few cast members had before each production of H2$. I agree with David Mamet that (paraphrasing his book Three Uses of the Knife from memory) prayer is when we let down our defenses and acknowledge our fragility, our needs, our reliance on one another and the kindness of strangers, including a very strange God.

A few things I learned this weekend:

If you're at a party and you're gonna say something mean about somebody else at the party, do it in a whisper, not a holler.

Dancing to loud techno still feels really good, many years and pounds later.

Red Bull is magic.

All cute married people should be required by law to bling their wedding rings at single strangers before making friendly, flirty conversation.