Good thing: wearing jeans fresh out of the dryer that feel a little bit loose. 

Something else: realizing that you've been walking around Target for the last half hour with your fly down. 

In other news: I saw this clip today, and it really makes me want to write a new play. (It feels a little like Traveling Light.) But, right now, I got NOTHIN'. 

Saw a truly good production of Hamlet today, at Hedgerow Theater. It made me have more sympathy for Laertes and Horatio than before. Horatio in this case is the deeply-friend-zoned would-be lover (played by a woman, an inspired choice).  And poor Laertes, the guy goes through all Hamlet's hell in less than an act. 

Got to see it with my favorite smart 12-year-old, and it was wonderful to experience it with him. 

I wish someone would make a cinematic first-person shooter of Hamlet. Seriously. 

I also wish (and I hate to say this, but I will) for a 25-year moratorium on Shakespeare.  I'd be willing to allow universities to do one Shakespeare play a season, but only if no white people are cast in the production. I love Shakespeare, but I think not enough other work gets a chance. I also think we need to let a generation roll over and see it with fresh eyes. 

that being said, it was a lovely show. 

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS

Somewhere in California, three women are memorizing* lines that I wrote. they're rehearsing and they're gonna act it out onstage. I have proof. 

Copyright Jules Dee Photography, this is Jeanette Godoy and Katie Ventura, rehearsing Pretty Petty Things.  

*I assume. we all know that off book is a lie. 

Vince got me a ticket to see this the other night for my birthday. 

Five stars, highly recommended, would see again, would name my kid after it.  

And then there's the tech, which is its own 5-star event. 

Seriously, my capsule review is that the script is so tightly woven, the actors so genuine and the moments so heightened, that you really could have done this show with just "lights up, let 'em at it, lights down." and then Danny Boyle (who directed the London Summer Olympics opening ceremony, Slumdog Millionaire, etc. etc.), brings in his visual aesthetic, while being smart enough to stay out of the actors' way.  So you have what seems like an ocean of starlight descending from the heavens, and then you realize it's a million individual antique light bulbs, each on its own cord, each globe housing a visible glowing filament. 

Miller and Cumberbatch complement each other perfectly, and I wish I could have seen it twice. I saw it with Miller as the Creature, an incredibly physical, potentially exhausting role. Victor, comparatively speaking, is British and wears beautiful clothes.  So, seeing it with Cumberbatch as Victor was kind of like watching Sherlock with the volume turned up higher. Not bad, just not wildly different. 

If the Creature hasn't been on stage for a while and we get a little break from the absolute force of nature that he is, we can see Victor's brilliance, his drive for knowledge and desire to dissect the indefinable spark of life. Put them both on stage together, and it's like watching an orca meeting a seal; the seal's really pretty and wonderful in and of itself, but blink and you might miss it. Unless the orca's decided to let you see the seal.  

It gave me a ton of food for thought, which is why I'm digging into a Mary Shelley biography right now. 

It is still playing through the month of November, but hard to find. There are two screenings scheduled in Princeton in the next couple of weeks. I don't think I'm going to have time to see it again, but if you do, you should. ntlive.com. 

I had two similar ideas, but never followed up on it. Glad I didn't, because I like this metaphor much, much better. 

Girl You Know It's True.​

in in other news; minor rewrite to the ending & cleanup of Wreck Of The Alberta, two submissions. Took longer than I'd hoped. 

I want to write the Long Day's Journey Into Night version of The Munsters. 

I know NBC tried pushing a Munsters reboot with an addiction metaphor, and I suspect I might be the only person who saw it that way. 

Am I the only person who sees The Munsters as a metaphor for living with addiction? And, if Herman was created to be Lily's partner, what does this mean for that poor schmuck? I feel very sorry for him. Is he supposed to be her enabler, or to keep her from being an addict? 

Think about it. Of the entire family, you have three vampires, one, uh, re-animated corpse construction, and one family member who passes for human. This scares me the most. Marilyn says she's "the ugly one of the family," but she's the one who passes for normal in society. She's a niece of Lily and Herman's, and she's part of the family in a full and consistent way. So, I can see how the show creators see her as a bridge between the "normals" and the Munsters, but how does she fulfill the metaphor? 

As the NBC reboot pushed it, she's the lure for Grampa's addiction issues. which makes sense. But what does a woman who has nothing and everything in common with her family want for herself? She really could leave them, but there has to be something that she wants. which means that either she's a really functional addict, or she's never been addicted, but something else makes her want to be there. 

which would mean she's controlling the addicts for her own purposes. a family of pet vampires. jeez, who wouldn't want that? 

Herman's conflicts seem obvious. he's made to be a partner for Lily, someone who won't be afraid of her addiction but doesn't share it. Then they've got a child. If you go by traditional vampire canon, either he's a child from outside the biological family who was turned, or he's the biological product of Herman and Lily. which asks the question if vampires can reproduce. I will not use Twilight as a reference. 

I am, however, stuck on the notion of Herman and Eddie sitting in the living room quietly trying to function with the fact that Lily is addicted upstairs and Grampa is addicted in the basement. 

I actually liked the NBC reboot (even though I generally dislike reboots).  I saw a lot of potential for it as a metaphor for addiction. Since Grampa becomes younger, sexier, and stronger after he's fed, it brings up the really sad part of dysfunctional families. Sometimes things are better when they're at their worst. Sometimes the happy memories of a gleefully drunk parent or remembering the smoky smell of a loving grandparent can be the worst parts of dealing with addiction. But the episode ended with a dead body in the basement, who would certainly be missed by the outside community. 

Pretty heavy stuff for something that's trying to get PG-13 audience numbers. 

I thought about writing a story about a family with a vampire-like curse, but not actually bloodsucking, fanged creatures. Let's say they suck the breath out of you or something. and you have that happening in three direct generations of the family, plus two family members who are half outside, half in, who are either enablers or protectors, who are stuck half in and half out of the family. Maybe this is worth pursuing. 

I've been watching a lot of American Horror Story in the past week. Probably not a good idea. I'm colossally bored with everything and I seem to be able to parcel this out to myself as a cheap treat.  I watched the whole first season, most of it in one marathon on Saturday night. I started watching the second season, and I'm into it so far. I like horror as a metaphor for other things. The writing is compact and it moves fast. It's a good reminder of everything I learned in school about writing. 

Today I'm grateful that;

Smart people like the podcast so far

I had it together to write a new sample article and apply for two freelance writing jobs

Vince cooked us a delicious healthy dinner 

Bebe and I went for a good fast walk in the beautiful fall weather

we can go to bed early. 

EDITED TO ADD: It's up! We don't have an RSS feed yet, but it's up! Comments and criticism welcome. 

30 minutes timed writing GO. 

Last night we had a Date Night, which we sorely needed, and the plans were good. I'm tempted to write a public blog post reviewing this, event, but I hate writing reviews which are not positive. so I would have to do a lot of thinking first. 

We went to see John Hodgman at Underground Arts. Being fans of the Judge John Hodgman podcast and fans of his work in general, we were excited about it, and probably more fangirly than usual, like looking forward more to any possible meet-and-greet afterwards than to the actual show. 

Underground Arts is a fairly good venue, but at 12th and Callowhill, the surrounding area is mostly parking lots and warehouses that seem to have been turned into loft apartments and offices. so it feels a little lonely and creepy to walk around at night. The club is in a giant basement, so it has that creepy-underground-club vibe; although it's very clean, the walls seem scraped, and it's all concrete everywhere. I'm generally okay with this. The lighting and decor seems thrifted and very DIY. Probably the most exciting piece of furniture is the faux electric chair that you find on your way to the restrooms. 

They serve food, but all I saw was large baskets of fries being ferried through the crowd by a waitress who looked like Wednesday Addams' cousin Friday. The drinks were roughly Center City prices; $5 for a PBR, $6 for a well drink, and they had a row of recognizable brands like Pinnacle and Jameson,which I didn't bother to ask about. I got one vodka and Sprite to keep things easy. 

There was seating, stackable plastic and metal chairs, but by the time we got there, it was full. I went around one corner to check the side seating, and it was clearly the people who'd arrived at 6pm. To be honest, it looked like the faculty of Swarthmore College. 

After about 20 minutes of standing on a concrete floor, I wanted to go over there and say that I was a rep from NPR's development team, and say that any top-level donors to WHYY or WXPN should follow me for a secret meet and greet. I figured at least ten would fall for it, and maybe I could lose them in the building somewhere so Vince and I could get seats. 

I'm glad I wore my Doc Martens, but I was pretty uncomfortable by the time the show started. We were standing behind the last row of seats, about a 40-foot distance, with nothing to lean on.  That being said, it was crowded and the audience was enthusiastic. 

It also was the kind of crowd where you could figure out a demographic really fast. It's not often that I feel like I'm not white-educated-liberal enough, but this was one of those times. At one point, Hodgman made a joke about "when you get enough white people in an enclosed space, they tend to turn on each other," and people laughed because it was true. 

So, Hodgman doesn't really do punchline comedy, it's what I think marketing reps would call "observational humor." It was about 85 minutes of storytelling, followed by him playing a couple of songs on the ukulele that the audience would sing along with. he played Road Runner by Jonathan Richman, and Rocky Top Tennesee, which I didn't know, but I was happily singing along with. 

here's where things felt weird. he basically talked about his summer vacation and his summer vacation homes. he has an inherited house in Western Massachusetts, and a purchased vacation home in Maine, in addition to his home in Brooklyn. The comedy reminded me of a story I heard once about Richard Pryor, how when he started peaking as a comedian, his humor started becoming about experiences he had riding in his limo on the Sunset Strip, or dealing with stalker fans he might or might not have slept with, things his audience couldn't relate to because of the wealth gap. 

So, on the one hand, he tells this story about how awesome it was so go swimming with Jonathan Coulton in Western Massachuetts, and it was a beautiful story about inhibitions and personal freedom and nature. and then the punchline was how fun it was to get recognized by some young fans afterwards. 

then he tells this story about being in Maine and dealing with his son being bullied by the local super-wealthy super-waspy summer people at the local yacht club, and how weird and creepy the divide between rich vacationers and poor locals is, and how painful and punishing the climate and geography can be. and he's sort of trying to be the participant-observer, straddling the working class and vacation class, but ultimately it feels weird because he's able to "save" his son by the sheer fact that he's been on The Daily Show, and has similar status to the kids' mother whose husband works in finance. 

and all I can think of is the people who would harass me when I worked at Ticket Philadelphia, who would use the word "summer" as a verb. and having to take it. 

So basically, here's how his material works. If you're someone who loves pure storytelling for its own sake, wordplay and sentence craft, juxtaposition of odd ideas and story elements, this is your kind of show. Not often enough do you hear material where the laugh line is "Shirley Jackson." But, if you're going to stand on a concrete floor for 90 minutes in a very crowded basement, with no pain relief besides a plastic dixie cup of ice, soda and a splash of Bankers'  Club Vodka, it might not be the best way to receive it.  

he said toward the end that this was new material. I was slightly disappointed at that, because on some website it said he was doing to do I Stole Your Dad, a rehearsed show he did several times last year, which includes his impression of Ayn Rand.  I wasn't expecting to hear "how I spend my summer vacations." 

there was a wonderfully twisted bit of logic at the end about how he and his wife were pressured into buying a boat, along with their two vacation houses, that lapsed into some storytelling that combined H.P. Lovecraft's and Shirley Jackson's styles in a way that was extremely clever, amusing and chilling, but by then I was forcing myself to stay tuned in to ignore my sciatica clamping my left thigh into paralysis. 

I have to order some more books from Powell's so I can have a Powell's Box, so I can put it on top of my printer so Mo can sit in it, instead of sitting next to me while I type and poking at me. 

We left as the applause was starting, because we were both aching. We were also dumb enough not to eat before the show, so we were starving. So, no, we didn't stand in the meet and greet line, and the elevator pitches I practiced in my head in the car on the way there so maybe he can help me find an agent are still filed for later elevator pitches. 

(if you think that's nuts, I know a woman, extremely talented, smart and skilled, who was so involved in practicing her theoretical Tony Awards Acceptance speech one night while driving that she missed a NJ Turnpike exit and ended up driving around in the dark for an hour trying to find her way back. if you don't have an awards acceptance speech practiced, you don't have goals.)

here are some take-aways from the experience. 

1) I have to stop being so hard on myself and just trust that my voice is unique, and uniqueness, craft and determination (on the characters' part) makes a good story. if this guy can get up there and talk for 90 minutes about how it was such a stupid decision for him to spend a lot of money on having a vacation paradise, then there is nothing wrong with my sketch about the woman whose mom worships Barbra Streisand. 

2) On waking this morning, Vince said, "I've figured it out; John Hodgman is Garrison Keillor for people born after the baby boom generation." 

3) if I go to see John Hodgman again, I am going early, and bringing my knitting, a hip flask, and at least a cup of almonds in a ziploc bag. and ibuprofen. 

I saw Laurie Anderson perform once at McCarter. In the performance, she said that a year or so earlier, she had sort of run out of ideas and needed something to fuel her art, so she got a job at a McDonald's in Queens. It gave her a lot of material, about class, race, privilege and the economy. Then September 11th happened, and she changed the next show she wanted to do (although this story was in the post-9/11 show that I saw, so it certainly didn't go to waste).  The story culminated in a bit where she talked about how people she knew in real life, people from her Manhattan art world, would come to the McDonald's where she worked, and she'd try to wink at them, to signal that she knew them, and they would look right through her. 

I think that sometimes when artists who mine their own experience for storytelling get a little too famous, they end up telling stories about touring, or their vacations, or airplane jokes, or things to which only other touring artists can relate. because they're so busy working that they lose sight of other experience. I think that's when it's time to get a job at McDonald's for six months or a year. 

Okay. Today we're finishing the podcast so we can submit it to Soundcloud for approval (argh), and I need to clean the basement and deal with the catboxes. I really wish I could get an e-mail saying, "hey, (theatre company) is interested in your play," so I could be bucked up by some ego boost while I scoop and shovel cat poop. 

I thought of a horrible, horrible prank, and it could so easily be played on me, so I'm just going to tell the prank idea here. That way a) nobody will try to play it on me, b)if it gets played on someone else, I won't get blamed for it, because why would I explain the prank and then do it? 

My original thought was this:
Your mark is a working musician. The more pompous the better. 
You send them an e-mail from the assistant to the assistant for let's say, David Bowie. He's doing an extremely small tour of very small clubs only for people on a fan club mailing list, and he wants a local backing band for each venue. he's playing at, let's say, The Tin Angel, and there's a contract with legal mumbo-jumbo and gag orders and stuff that your mark has to sign, but if he signs, he gets told to go to a particular studio to rehearse with David Bowie and the other local musicians that will make up the backing band. You send some sheet music or charts or something for them to practice with, maybe some midi files of chords. 
You dangle the carrot that tracks from each show may go into a live album. 

So, your mark preps some material, let's say 30 minutes' worth to make it even more annoying. They show up at the rehearsal studio, and nobody's there. 

This is where you can be as cruel or bizarre as you want. Send them to a warehouse in a deserted neighborhood, or a clean, brightly lit rehearsal studio in a nice neighborhood, with lots of moms picking up and dropping off their kids for flute and oboe practice. I think the second option would be more fun, because you can have whoever's working the front desk say, "I have no idea what you're talking about," while recording your pompous musician insisting they're there to meet David Bowie. 

I think this prank could easily be played on me, by changing only a few variables. All you'd have to do is send me an e-mail saying that a theatre company to which I've actually sent something passed my script on to another artist or company that I admire, and tell me to go somewhere for a meeting to discuss the script. Next thing you know, I'm at the offices of the Roundabout, fresh off a Bolt Bus, tearfully insisting that I'm there to meet Todd Haimes and Jill Rafson. 

OKAY. That's enough out of me for right now.

Yesterday I got over my bike fear for a bit. 

We were on our way home from the grocery store, when I saw NOT ONLY a street fair at Cottman & Frankford, BUT ALSO...

The Undergrnd Donuts Truck. 

I demanded that we stop so I could sacrifice myself to their tasty flavors. After two trips around the block, we finally found a parking spot. Unfortunately, the truck wasn't open for business for another 25 minutes, because they were waiting for the oil to heat up. But, my friend Renee (from when I worked at AC Spore) had a tent set up for her jewelry business.  The Grey Lodge had a tent for beer sales, and an old friend of Vince's was playing music there with his 11-year-old son on bass. Since it was a night market type of thing that would be open until 9,  we decided to take the groceries home and come back. 

I said, "I'll bike back." 

Vince cracked up laughing. "You're going to bike back, for doughnuts." 

I said, "Why do you say that like it's not a good idea?" 

So, we went home, unpacked the groceries and put them away, turned around and came back. The bike ride was Really Good. Mostly uphill, on side streets, just long enough to get the endorphins up, not long enough to be tiring. We did cheat and bike on the sidewalk for the last couple of blocks on Frankford Ave, but there's no bike lane there and it felt dangerous to bike on the road.  

I did get my jeans caught in the bike gears so I had to stop and roll it up, feeling like a dork. Or I earned the one leg up cred. I had "I'm Super, Thanks For Asking" stuck in my head for the whole ride up. 

We ended up hanging out for a couple of hours, chatting with Renee and her friends. And, of course, I had a Homer with maple glaze instead of chocolate. Normally we both hate living up here, but every now and then something good happens. 

The bike ride home made me realize just how invisible I really am. I have got to get some bike lights. The bicycle itself is very reflective, but I'm not, and my helmet is matte eggplant-purple, so it doesn't help. I sang "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" the whole way home, so if someone started to walk into the street, they'd hear me coming. My brakes are really, really new and tight right now, so that was also a little bit of a problem, but otherwise I was okay and it made me really happy. 

I have RydeSafe buttons, but, of course, I forgot to actually wear them. I think it'd have to wear 30 at a time to make a difference.