Ok, so

When one stumbles wearily home at 6 in the morning after spending the entire night out, and without any good story to impart about it, one may, if one is so inclined, wonder if they lead a worthwhile existence. Especially if it's the second consecutive day such has happened

As the great Denny Crane said, those are the kinds of questions that can kill you. Luckily, I passed out before they occured to me. Sometimes even the hulking giants have to play possum.

[this has been another episode of half-assed attempt to explain my absence theater]

I was supposed to see a play at my old high school on Friday. I honestly can't remember why I didn't. Two dear friends of mine were performing, who in fact didn't go to the school. See, females are recruited from elsewhere to fill roles that would otherwise put dudes in drag and seriously you get enough shit already for being a theater geek at an all male school. In any case, another friend who was at one time sort of more than a friend and perhaps slightly is still, who I was supposed to go with, ended up seeing the show with her (not conjoined twin sister but they might as well be) BestFriendForever. I found out the following night, when going to see a different show with the two of them, that they'd run into one of my friends who was in the show. Specifically, my... [insert proper term here], who is quite bisexual, embraced and proclaimed her undying love for one of my friends who was in the play, unbeknownst to either of them that there were only two degrees of seperation between them. It was demanded of me that I deliver a phone number, when I went to see the show that I'd missed on Friday. After doing so I was able to get the other half of the story. Apparently this was not a new thing, girls were always hitting on her, though never quite in this manner. As of this writing no date has been planned, and the steady money is on it staying that way.

Which goes to show that you don't actually need to be there when wacky shit goes down to be a part of it. Especially if you happen to be me, which I... yeah.

As I mentioned, I saw two plays this weekend, both involving friends of mine.

The first was Good, a stream of consciousness work that takes place alternately within Germany between Hitler's rise to power and the night of the broken glass, and within the mind of a literature professor and novelist; a seemingly good man (at least at the beginning) who is being courted by the Nazi party because of a novel he wrote concerning euthenasia. The story is largely told to his Jewish psychiatrist as he's not in his right mind. He can never be certain quite what is real in his life as he experiences it because of the inconsistencies, such as confusing Adolf Hitler (played by my friend Jimmy) with Charlie Chaplin, and constantly hearing music intertwining with the events in his life. (best musical number by far was "Drink!"). Brilliant in writing and in performance. And moreover, it was the finest performance Jim has ever given, so I was more than happy to see it.

The other one... how should I say it... unfortunate. Fires in the mirror, a play about the August 1991 race riots in New York between Blacks and Jews. The first problem was that BC High is as white as the RNC. I think every black student in the school who could be convinced to get on stage was called in. But still, there were two pale white dudes playing black men, one of them the Reverend Al Sharpton, the other an annonymous Rastafarian. Though to be fair, they gave better performances than most others. It was performed, in a sense, in the round. However, very little of the action took place in the center, but rather on platforms around the rim of the circle. It didn't get performed in the theater (which is under construction because the theater that took 3 years for students, myself included to an extent, to build and outfit and upgrade to the point it was before the new guy took over has been torn down) but rather in the student commons, which had awful acoustics.

You decide what sort of play to put up based on what resources are at your disposal. If you don't have flying wires, you don't do Peter Pan. If you don't have people who can sing, you don't do a musical. If you don't have black actors, you don't do a play that is about black people.

This was taught to me on my first class of Fine Arts Seminar in Drama. In high school. Someone who claims to be qualified as a theater instructor; as a director, should be able to wrap his head around it.

Am I missing anything? Hmm... Well you all know about the younger Bohemian's entrance to the blogiverse. Or you should.


Oooh Also this. Now I've been intrigued by CG films since the begginning, but most of them (and in fact all of the ones put out by Pixar) thus far have been at least somewhat, well, insipid. This... isn't. It's wacky; It's absurd; yes. But it's also honest and, in a strange way, meaningful. It makes a real, honest statement, not the prepackaged one every Disney movie has. So see it already. There's nothing more for you here. Ciao!