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.

The Succeeding Begins...

On our first night of rehearsal a cast member's car got stolen. We walked out into the nighttime rain and she gazed around, no doubt trying to remember some detail that would explain why her car wasn't where she expected it to be. It was a frightening reminder to the rest of us of just how vulnerable and dependent we are on material junk. She seems okay now, got a rental car and all, but still, you rely on your car. Anytime you can't rely on it, life becomes harder.

But the show's gonna be a blast! It's got a comic book concept, with CGI projections used to provide scene transitions with a comic panel motif. I have no idea how it'll work yet, but the broad outline sounds like my kinda stylization. I'm disappointed that I won't get to sing all my favorite songs from the show, though. Part of the reason is that a lot of the scenes require substantial dancing, so if you can't dance, you can't sing. I've always wished I could dance, but my system doesn't seemed to be wired that way. You need a baseline grace and physical control to do that stuff, and my body seems to have a second brain, kind of like the dinosaurs allegedly did. It's a really stupid brain, but it manages to keep me guessing about how the meat part of me is going to function.

We've worked on the group singing, but I haven't heard much of the lead vocals yet. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out. Generally I prefer the singing on the original cast recording of this show to that of the revival; those gutsy, brassy Broadway belting of the Sixties just satisfy my soul in a way that the body-miked contemporary style can't match. A few years ago I was listening to a recording of traditional Japanese music that included some operatic vocals. the singer was a woman with a husky, raw alto voice, dripping with experience, and it resonated deeply with me. It dawned on me that while I once liked girlish vocals I now preferred this more womanly sound; I still get a big kick out of girl group music, but it doesn't sound sexy to me any more. I like big, womanly voices that sound like they've taken the wear and tear of life and held up fine. What I like about girl-group is something other than the basic vocal qualities of the individual singers. I think it has something to do with vocal harmonies, and perhaps it's telling that teenage voices have to merge and meld to be interesting to me, while one Billie Holliday or Sarah Vaughn can win me over with nothing but a piano behind her. It probably has something to do with growing up, or at least growing old. Nah, it's gotta be growing up; being interested in young women seems to be exacerbated by mere age in plenty of guys!

Hi, Remember Me?

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I'm so much happier in general without a computer to call my own than with that I can't bring myself to get my Ibook fixed. As David Mamet said of Cable TV, 500 hundred channels isn't choice; it's coercion. And the internet's even worse.

Hey Jonathan G! I did indeed get cast in How To Succeed, as Gatch, a lecherous executive. I don't think my role will keep me onstage very long, but the rumors about getting paid turn out to be true! I couldn't live on it, but it will be, in Mr. Goldstein's phrase, a nice little payday. It's nice to dip a toe into semi-pro acting.

Anything else going on? I've antagonized a perfectly nice woman via the act of dating her. Maybe someday someone will tell me what I'm doing wrong. But at least I did learn that dating a woman who doesn't want to talk about, well, any of the things I routinely blog about, is probably not someone I should date, for her sake and mine. Also I'm getting more reading done than I ever would if I, y'know, had internet access at home.

I'm really getting into what they call Body Horror; movies (and novels, I guess) about awful things happening to the body. I watched Texas Chainsaw 2 last night and found it oddly comforting. I know this may sound morbid, but it's really not. I used to be repelled by this kind of stuff, but now that I'm aging I respond differently... Tom Savini, the special effects guru behind the gore in Chainsaw 2, really beautifies the meat of the human body. That's what I need; thinking about the inevitable rot of the body gets me down. Savini makes the meat lovely and in doing so justifies it to me.

I swear I'm in a good mood!

And Another Thing

There have been many deaths and births in my social circle lately. About a year ago I realized that whenever I heard about a birth I neurotically resented it because, since death exists to clear the way for new life, every birth is a divine assertion that I must die. Or so it seemed to me. It felt like every baby was killing me a little. That's pretty stupid, and I knew it, but it still felt true to me. Perhaps my recent fascination with vampires and the mythic warning they provide against clinging to life at the expense of others has helped heal me of that sad anti-birth viewpoint, or maybe it's just the timing of the death and birth announcements. It does seem as if every death announcement has been quickly followed by a birth announcement, establishing that birth doesn't necessitate death as I so cheerlessly believed; birth compensates for death.

Improved improv.

The Feminist Debutante Guild, an improv troupe of which I am the Zeppo, had its first show in about two years last saturday, and it may have been our best show ever! It was a variety format with several musical acts, all of which were terrif, and us doing improv and monologues. I'm usually the weakest link, and I think I was not particularly weak; meanwhile the others were in splendid form! So hurray for us. I dunno if I'll be able to do any future shows with them since I'm trying to dive back into theatre after my post-Kate break, but I'd like to see the troupe return to founder J'mel's original vision; actual long-form improv with no preordained structure. That's a gold standard for improvists, and the sooner we're willing and able to abandon preordained narrative structures the better.

Also I met a very nice lady after the show.

During the course of the show I was assigned the role of a "hard-core Republican," so of course I was rather mean to the Neo-Con artists, although if I'd been cast as a hard-core Democrat I would have been just as mean to the worst-case examples who seem to be setting the nonagenda for that party. I don't know if I was funny, but I do know I was mean. Anyway, I adlibbed a line that I've been thinking about ever since: "We're fighting them over there so they can kill us over there." I dunno how many audience members got the reference to the sound bite "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here," but since then I've been pondering this cynical shadow side of that invasion justification. For the tiny minority of Middle Easterners who want to kill Americans, it's obviously easier to stay in the Middle East than to travel to America, so if America sends them a big batch of American youngsters it makes sense that there'll be few or no attacks on our turf. Is it really that different from sending a boatload of sacrificial Virgins to the Cretan Minotaur in order to avoid a war with Crete? Do some of the neo-cons think that it's better to let a bunch of low-income soldiers die at the hands of bloodthirsty terrorists if it distracts those terrorists from coming here and maybe taking out a plutocrat or two?

Not to turn this into a political blog, so let's shift to a subject on which I have greater expertise; my weight. Let's just say that I've got 205 flava. Oh help.

This weekend I'm doing the BATA (Birmingham Area Theatrical Alliance or something) auditions. I've got a funny monologue and a powerhouse song picked out; now let's see if I can sell them. There's a ton of local directors attending; most of them have seen me and know my parameters, but there are a few folks with whom I want to work but who don't really know me. Whether I'm doing cool theatre or doing nothing between now and the holidays will probably hinge on how I do Saturday.