Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas yesterday!
Mine was some combination of low key and incredibly rushed. My parents are decamping for the Florida condo tomorrow morning, so once we got up on Christmas and had a little breakfast and got dressed, we got right to the present unwrapping (a quick affair this year) and then, almost immediately, the Christmas tree comes down and all the holiday decorations are reboxed and put back in the attic. Then we ran out the door to head up to Bucks County for dinner at my aunt's house.
After dinner, I was dropped at the bus station and I assume the parents returned home to continue readying to leave for 5 months tomorrow.
It was like that episode of I Love Lucy where Ricky tries to keep Lucy on a time schedule. Everything was just boom boom boom and was over before I knew it. Christmas was basically done and put away at 1.00pm.
I got a very nice watch from my brother and a countertop dishwasher from my parents. Socks, as usual, from one of my aunts. I have more white socks than anyone has any right to own. She gives me white tube socks each and every year. I can't go through them fast enough. Shirt and pullover (what my boyfriend would call a "jumper") from another aunt and my cousin. Lovely.
Didn't go as overboard this year on gifts for the parents. I got them tickets to see the national tours of both Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Wicked at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. Whoo-Hoo! They will enjoy going and they really don't need any more "stuff," you know?
Met the brother's girlfriend when they flew in for 18 hours or so for my mother's birthday. She seems nice. Very different from my former sister-in-law. Quieter and more reserved. There are whispers of my brother leaving South Carolina and buying a house in suburban Atlanta (where his airline is based) and, should this happen, it seems like he might be inviting this girl to live with him. Well...he's going to do what he's going to do. Personally, I think it's all a little fast and just reeks of him being terrified of being alone, not to mention the whole rebound idea. My brother has always been the kind of person who functions best with an audience anyway, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it seems like he thinks he'll cease to exist if he stops hearing the sound of his own voice.
Anyway, the only thing I said to him about it was to please sleep with her (sex issues were partly to blame for the end of his marriage...I know this only because he was telling everyone) at some point. I hope he does. Or else he may be on to the next wife and/or the next after that. How many weddings is it before you don't have to buy a present?
She's a flight attendent with his airline, which strikes me as potentially awkward if and when this relationship crashes and burns (no pun intended). It seems smart to me, television series aside, to very much not get involved romantically with people at work. As less refined folks might say "Don't shit where you eat."
But, the nature of his job (airline pilot, by the way) is unusual and I suppose that it's difficult to even meet people outside the industry, much less see them enough to start a relationship. By the way, the former sister-in-law was a gate agent for the airline he was with at the time, which is how they met. This one's a flight attendent. I thought about suggesting he meet people any place, but an airport, but then I realized that he probably doesn't spend much time in places that aren't airports.
So I was back at home by 10.30pm on Christmas night and now it's over and things are back to normal for a few days.
Christmas Eve.
We're sitting here watching A Christmas Carol on television (the George C. Scott one, my favorite). We went out to church earlier in the evening for the 7.00pm service (rather than the preferred 11.00pm one) due to my mother's still having a bit of trouble moving around. Her cast came off this morning though and she seems to be healing nicely.
I just want to extend my best wishes for a wonderful Christmas (or whatever you may celebrate) and good fortune in the new year.
I'm very much looking forward to how 2008 unfolds. Things are looking up.
So I made it out of town today with little ceremony and I'm currently down the shore at the parents' house. My brother flew in for the evening with his new girlfriend, who seems nice. I've been down here a few hours and I'm already ready to go home...so, in other words, the usual.
Very much missing having my own boyfriend around tonight. We're trying to figure out a way to rent a house in Scotland next year and get a bunch of the family over there. That'd be a fun way to shake up the traditions, huh?
Brother Man and the girlfriend are leaving tomorrow. Since my parents are in a rush to head out for Florida, we are dismantling the Christmas Tree and all the decorations as soon as the presents are open on Tuesday. I just don't know how much longer these traditional "family" Christmas will make sense. I get bored hanging out in New Jersey, my brother has a job that requires him to work holidays, and my parents seem more and more to just be going through the motions of the traditional holiday for no reason other than this is always how they've done it. I expect that soon one of them will realize that going through all this is silly and Christmas will be greatly simplified.
It just doesn't seem all that "fun" anymore. It just seems like this is what we have to do before we get the stuff we all really need/want to be doing.
But, anyway, I'm here. It's fine. I miss the boyfriend. I'm tired. Going to bed now.
So I'm leaving town tomorrow afternoon to head down the shore to spend a few days with the parents for Christmas. Can't come soon enough. I'm really tired of it all and am thinking of converting to a religion with no holidays. Or one whose rites and rituals involve worshipping by the pool of a resort on some tiny island in the Caribbean with brightly colored drinks in hand.
My best friend, Greg, has been in town this week, but I've hardly been able to spend any time with him since I've had to work as much as possible. He's spending his days sightseeing around the city and his nights seeing Broadway shows. So far, he's seen three shows that I disliked: Mary Poppins, Young Frankenstein, and Curtains. His reactions have been mixed thus far. The plan tonight is for us to meet up for dinner and try for cheap tickets to the new Aaron Sorkin play, The Farnsworth Invention, at the Music Box Theatre.
I really shouldn't be spending the money, but I've hardly seen him since he's been here and I'd really like to spend a little time with him. Plus, I am interested in seeing the play...and, as it turns out, I've worked with three members of its cast.
I've volunteer ushered for two plays this week: Pump Girl at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II and My First Time at New World Stages. Didn't much care for Pump Girl and thought the potentially interesting story got lost in the playwright's static monologue-laden writing. And does everyone in Ireland lead miserable, horrible lives? Why does every play that comes to these shores from that country deal with the stark, miserable existance of its characters? The Irish tourism board should know that its theatre is doing the country no favors.
My First Time is actually a lot of fun. Basically, this is four actors telling stories of first sexual experiences gleaned from a website at which people from all over the world have contributed their own stories. Some of them are funny and some are sad and others are downright disturbing. The cast is all charming and likable and very adept and moving from character to character in the space of a few lines or a few words.
The only problem I saw with this show was whenever a story would turn out to be especially sad, it just seemed awkward to pick up with more funny "loss of virginity" excerpts. But the cast pulled it off masterfully.
Definitely worth seeing.
I've been taking a bit of time to clean up some some links here that were no longer working and delete some blogs from the blogroll that seem to have gone dormant.
If you're reading this and have a blog that you'd like linked here, drop me a line. If you're a reader of mine, I'm happy to link up with yours and return the favor.
As usual, comments are not working, so an actual email will be necessary. Just click on my name at the bottom of this post.
Thanks!
So how was your weekend?
I did almost nothing this weekend except hang around the apartment and work on learning an Edgar monologue from King Lear.
I am just SO MUCH FUN these days, I cannot even describe it to you. I am the life of the party.
And I still have one more Shakespearean monologue to learn. I think it's probably going to have to be the famous Romeo "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks" one.
You see, when drama schools give you a short list of monologues from which to choose, you suddenly realize that, of the ten or twelve available, you hate...all of them.
Of course, I don't really do classical theatre and these things are a sort of bugaboo for me anyway. I adore Shakespeare. I would go to see one of his plays every night of the week. And I even understand most of what I'm seeing when I do. The problem is that I just have trouble memorizing the words themselves. It's like trying to commit 100-150 random words to memory and having to spout them in the proper order.
Try that sometime and see how well YOU do.
But, like all impossible things, this must be done and it will be done. I'm just not having as much fun as usual these days while I'm doing it.
Bah!
So the comments here are still not working, as they havn't been for several months now. If there's anyone out there who knows anything about Movable Type and/or has the time to futz around with this stuff, drop me a line.
Thanks!
I have a friend who has, apparently, changed his first name. I say "apparently" because I've never gotten any sort of notification of this...I've just noticed that he's been using a name I know not to be his own.
I've emailed this person several times and asked about this and gotten no reply. Am I just supposed to ignore this?
To be clear, I have no problem with someone changing his or her own name. I just think explanation should be provided for those of us who go back long enough to remember the real name.
Strangely enough, one of my aunts did the same thing about 10 years ago. Out of the blue, she changed her named from Virginia to Ginger without really telling anyone or explaining why. I still call her Aunt Virginia, although not to her face. And I won't call her Ginger either, at least not till there's some sort of explanation.
Is it wrong of me to expect an explanation from people who suddenly change their names? And is it rude to keep asking for one?
If my friend, for example, told me that he'd rather not say why he decided to change his name, I'd drop it. I'd be happy that he acknowledged my question, but just preferred not to answer. But to ignore the question makes it look and feel like something shady is going on.
People are so bizarre...I don't get them at all.
I didn't have temp work today, so I was able to meet up with my parents for lunch. They were in town to see the Roundabout's production of The Overwhelming at the Laura Pels Theatre. Awhile back, they took a mini-subscription to the Roundabout and have had a wonderful time coming into town to catch plays that they never would otherwise thought of seeing.
There was concern because my mother fell a few weeks ago and broke her foot. She's been basically immobile since just after Thanksgiving (when she had surgery to have some screws put in down there). Crutches hurt her shoulders, so she's been spending most of her time in a wheelchair.
They decided to forgo taking the bus, as usual, over concerns that Mom would not be able to get on and off the bus easily. So Dad drove in and parked at Port Authority, where I met them, and we got Mom into her wheelchair and proceeded to push her around Times Square for the afternoon.
It was fun, although it took some practice for me to be able to control the chair easily. And you just don't notice how uneven and angled many of the sidewalks are here until you're trying to push a wheelchair. Many of the ramps at the streetcorners aren't even flush with the street, so, if you're not careful, you're in for a big bump when the wheels crash into a "ramp" that's 2 or 3 inches higher than the street.
And it's amazing to me how many people in this town pay absolutely ZERO attention to what's going on around them. One man stepped backwards across a busy sidewalk right in front of Mom's rapidly moving wheelchair. No idea why...he was not paying a lick of attention to anything. Luckily, I was able to stop just in time. I yelled at him that he needs to watch where he's going. I have no idea what possesses people sometimes. In this city, it's always busy. You need to be paying attention AT ALL TIMES. You need to have a 360 degree awareness of what's going on around you at all times. If you see a wheelchair approaching and you know that you're standing on the ramp on the corner, move your fuckin' ass, you know?
I was touched, however, by one little girl. We were crossing the street and she was as oblivious to the wheelchair as kids are to most things and was moving over close enough to the chair that she eventually accidentally hit it as we were crossing. Unbidden and entirely on her own, she turned to my Mom and sweetly apologized for this and kept a wide berth for the remainder of the cross. Awww...so sweet. Mom said something to the effect of "That's okay, honey."
The Roundabout couldn't have been nicer to the parents. With no hesitation at all, they exchanged my parents' tickets for tickets in a row with room for the wheelchair and easily directed us to the elevator, which offered easy access to the subterranean theatre. I was even allowed to stay and see the play (which I'd already seen, but it's excellent, so why not) since I was assisting with the whole wheelchair movement. Very classy.
Then it was back to the car and seeing the parents on their way back to New Jersey. Then I ran back home and changed clothes, so I could go usher for a show at Signature Theatre called Queens Boulevard.
What a weird, quirky little show. It felt like a surreal dream one might have after having too much Chinese food, watching a Bollywood musical, and falling asleep on the E train. I loved it. You should go check it out.
I had one of the oddest auditions I've had in quite a while today. Are you familiar with American Girl dolls? This is a range of dolls of characters from different eras of American history whose backstories help teach girls about American history. Well, this company has a big store on Fifth Avenue and 49th Street here in New York and in this store is a small theatre where the company produces musicals based on the stories concocted for these dolls. This is what I went in for today.
And what I found was that, once I stepped through the doors into the premises, I entered an entirely new world, a foreign culture where the natives were all either little girls on a mission or their tired guardians. Weird. Weird. Weird.
As a single man with no children in tow, I was most definitly out of my element, a stranger in a strange land.
But the audition went well and maybe I'll get a call from these folks. You never know what they're looking for with these things. And they do lots of performances, so it could really be some decent money.
We'll see.
I totally forgot that Tim and I also went to see The Drowsy Chaperone on the day after the Broadway stagehands strike was settled. He had heard good things from a friend about the short-lived West End production and it's a show I really love, so I'm always up for that.
The bonus for me was that Bob Saget is now playing Man in Chair, so I was interested in seeing him as well as Mara Davi, the current Janet in the show.
While no one will ever quite bring the star quality that Sutton Foster brought to the roles of Janet/Jane, Davi was superb and really hit the mark. She was a huge improvement on the previous two actresses I'd seen in the role (Foster's understudy and her first replacement).
I was pleased that many of the original cast are still with the show, including Beth Leavel and Danny Burstein as the Chaperone and Latin Lover. Irreplaceable performances, both.
Bob Saget gave a much different performance as Man In Chair from originator Bob Martin and replacement John Glover. For lack of a better term, he played it...straighter. The gay bits were somewhat de-emphasized and he improv-ed some of his own lines. But the performance still worked and is a testament to how strong the book of this show actually is. Saget even sings well enough to handle the finale. I really enjoyed what he did...a very different side to this character.
This show is still worth going to see. And it's still a big favorite for me. Love it.
I wonder if there's anyone out there who still reads this? This last long break from blogging was unintentional. Life was happening all around me and I just didn't have much time to write about it. Blogging may still be sporadic for awhile, but we'll see.
The big news here is that I seem to have found myself in a relationship. It's challenging because I don't know much about being in a relationship. And it doesn't help that Tim, the boyfriend (a term to which I'm still getting acclimated), lives in another country.
But he was just here in New York for two whole weeks and got to meet a whole bunch of my extended family (on Thanksgiving, no less) and friends in the process. And everybody seemed to love him. Not that I need validation here, but it was very satisfying to have people continually coming to me in private and giving me the thumbs up and telling me what a keeper he is.
And, by the way, what IS the proper response to that? To say "Thank You" would seem to imply that I had something to do with him being a great guy, which I didn't. To say "I know" seems to be needlessly snotty about it. To say "I'm so glad you like him" seems somewhat formal and weird.
Did I mention that I know almost nothing about relationships?
As you might expect, I don't think that I'll be writing much about this whole thing here. It's just too public a forum for the minutiae of something so private. It's day-by-day thing and that's how I'm taking it.
Anyhow...what else have I been doing?
Well, I'm working on putting together material to audition for graduate programs, which is tougher than I first imagined. But it's a necessary evil, I suppose.
I'm looking for a sublet for the month of February if you or someone you know is in need of a swank pad in midtown for a month, drop me a line.
I've been to the theatre some, including sitting with Tim in the front row of the current hot show in town, Mel Brooks' all-star Broadway musicalization of his 1974 film Young Frankenstein at the Hilton Theatre.
What did I think? Well...I didn't much care for it. The cast is working really hard, but even these very bright lights can't do much with material that seems content to want to simply rehash the film rather than being something new (as The Producers was).
I never really bought Roger Bart in the lead, despite liking him in many other things in seasons past. He seems to have been directed to mimic Gene Wilder's manic shouting from the film and ends up seeming like Mario Cantone on a particularly caffinated day. And I don't get him here as a romantic leading man type. There's not much going on in the show's book to explain Frederick Frankenstein's appeal to the two beautiful women who want him (Megan Mullally as his shrewish fiancee and Sutton Foster as his nubile lab assistant) and Bart doesn't really have that sort of vibe on stage that would allow you to accept it without question.
Money has obviously been spent here though and the sets and costumes are gorgeous and the large (25 or so) pit makes the thin score sound terrific.
The best part of the show is Andrea Martin as Frau Blucher, who seems to be the only actor on stage concerned with making her character really and truely her own, rather than a recreation of someone's performance in the movie. She pretty much owns the stage whenever she's on it and easily outdoes Foster and Mullally in much showier roles (although, to be fair, Mullally barely appears in the first act at all).
It's not that the show is embarrasing or totally awful. It's just nothing special and, with the talent involved here, it really should have been. Lot of folks love it, including Tim, who had a great time. It just didn't really do it for me. I'll be curious to see how it fares when the cast starts leaving and new hot shows begin to arrive. The Producers hung on for much longer than I ever thought it would without its original stars, but Young Frankenstein is going to have a tougher time of it because the material isn't as good (making it more dependent on the stars) and because it inhabits the cavernous Hilton Theatre, a challenge for any show to keep filled on a regular basis. I haven't heard any reports that tickets for this are especially hard to get (if you want to pay full price) even now, and demand will only lessen with time. It just doesn't seem to have the white hot sheen that The Producers had, but I bet the tourists will keep it open for awhile.
Coincidentally, I also saw the off-Broadway Frankenstein musical that just closed this past weekend. It's very much in the style of those big British musicals from the '80's or the smaller Frank Wildhorn shows of the '90's. Think of a cross between Les Miserables and Jekyll and Hyde with a smaller cast and you'll get the idea.
Lots of money has been spent here and this may be the most expensive looking off-Broadway show I've ever seen. There were lighting instruments for days and a sleek multi-level set with projections that probably weren't cheap.
The leads are all fine, although Christiane Noll as Frankenstein's fiancee/wife has little to do here, but Hunter Foster (whose sister Sutton plays Inga in the Brooks version) seems miscast as Victor Frankenstein. He's just too...slight...for the role. That said, he sang it well and did all that was asked of him. I just didn't believe him entirely. Much has been written about Steve Blancherd as the Creature here, mostly about his torso, on display for much of the show. I didn't mind that so much, even though it does strain credibility as the Creature flees into Arctic climates. What I didn't get was the whole conception of the Creature as a character. He was played as hyper-articulate and entirely ambulatory and there was really no telling this character from any of the human characters. The Creature keeps talking and singing about how there's no place for him in society and I kept wondering why that was the case since all that was needed was for him to learn some rudimentary social graces ("Don't hug people so hard that you kill them").
All that being the case, the show almost had me, right up until the moment of the Creature's first entrance. At this point, the show takes such a marked left turn into melodrama that it was hard to take seriously.
What else? Tim and I took in a performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee during the strike. Even though I love this little show, Tim hated it with a passion. I will say that the current cast (most of whom originated their roles in two major regional mountings of the show) are just not quite up to the level of the original company. I wouldn't have thought those actors would be so iconic in these roles, but it turns out to have been the case. The show works perfectly well without them, but it's just not as special as it once was.
What else? Not a whole lot. Temping has been spotty, so my income has been lower than usual these days. Need any office help? Here I am. The most telling effect of this is that I'm not out and about doing most of the stuff I would normally be doing because I'm staying home more trying to conserve the limited budget.
Okay, so I'll try to post more, but no guarantees. Some days I'm just too tired to care. I'm sure you understand.
Oh, and, as far as I know, comments are still not working here. It's not you, it's something to do with Movable Type. I'm told that it's being worked on.