EXTRA CRITICUM

Street Theatre: The Great Subway Hope

So, last night I was having a pretty tough day at the ol’ survival temp job and have been contemplating my life as of late. Despite whatever is going on in my life, I need to remind myself that the big bad city is still big and bad. Good days are cherished here, but despite what you think, the attitude of the city is really never going to change. You can get your purse stolen really easy if you aren’t paying attention. Someone could slam into you while you are talking on the phone, make it fall out of your hand, break it and keep on walking like nothing happened. With so many people on an island, someone is bound to get pissed. However, there are a number of people here in the city that are kind. Who actually open the door for a complete stranger. Who actually let you go in front of them in the turnstile for the train.

No sleep til Soho!

I have long since ceased trying to separate the different parts of my life, or the many different roles I've played. One of my favorite roles, was rock geek/zine writer. I was actually at the ROCKRGRL conference in Seattle in 2000, staying at a hostel when I got the call to come in for an interview for my current job (travel editor). (I also got a full-length play out of my wanderings.) So now they're letting me and a bunch of other editors blog for our company website, and I got a chance to combine old & new stuff with this post about a pre-opening tour of the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex in New York City. Checkitout.

To quote myself:

"All in all, there's a great deal of history and memorabilia well-proportioned in a compact space. There is not nearly enough Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, but then I feel that way about most of life."

The Mind is Always Free

In my day job, as Director of Membership for the Dramatists Guild of America, I get my share of mail. It generally runs from the mundane ("Why has my membership expired one month early?!") to the touching ("These are the ways in which the Guild has changed my life...") but nothing could have prepared me for the plain white envelope I encountered the other day.

In a childlike cursive, rolling along its face in a vaguely diagonal path, was simply the name of our organization and our address. In place of a return address: #F130085, Dept. of Corrections, Ossining, NY.

You've got to be carefully taught...

I got a call this morning from a playwright friend who lives in another state. She called to talk about a listserv we are both on, specifically about how to respond to a post and some backchanneling that had upset her.

She told me about a call for submissions she'd received for an anthology of monologues with "language and theme sensitive for high school/college classroom discussion" (which I'd also received and posted on my En Avant playwrights opps board). She'd corresponded with the editor of the anthology and come away with the impression that monologues on gender and identity would not make it in.

A Triumphant Return to Berlin

I screened my film, Tango Octogenario, at a small dance film festival in Berlin last week. The festival was in its second year and still in the throes of growing pains. It hasn’t managed to find an audience, and doesn’t really know how to do that. (If anyone out there does, I mean, REALLY does, please let me know!) I knew that going in. Mostly I used the festival as an excuse to spend a few days in Berlin, a city I had never visited before.

Defiance

Okay, I've been going to the movies a lot recently. It's that time of year when I get invited to what seems like almost every screening in Los Angeles. It's what I like to call the "Awards Season Film Festival," and I go to about five films a week, most of them pre-release. So bear with me while I ramble a little.

A Yul Haiku

Which was it, Westworld
Or Magnificent Seven
Or both? Yul, Robot.

Mr. Mom in West Palm, Part III - In Which the Strain Begins to Show

It begins, as so many stories of mounting strain seem to, with a lack of sleep.

Our son Hank started sleeping through the night a few weeks before we came to Florida. He would occasionally wake up and cry for a few minutes, but almost inevitably put himself back to sleep. When we got to Florida, he was even better. He would sleep 11 hours straight without so much as a peep.

And then... not so much.