Musings, First Wednesday in November (2009)

November 5, 2009 at 1:18 am (Books, Eavesdropping, Home, Insomnia, Plays)
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Brother Tommy, who is the best, absolutely the best brother in the whole world, just sent over (through his in-laws), 10 precious copies of The Lost Language.  Brother’s in-laws were staying in the City, so hubby had to rent a car to pick up the copies (since both our cars are being repaired!) Does anyone want to order? Self can do first come, first serve. She’ll bring the copies to this Saturday’s reading, as well. Then, whoever gets a copy will see that awful first story that had Dearest Mum reeling — BWAH HA HA HA — “Dumpster”

Let’s see, what did self do today?

  1. She took out the trash.
  2. She began reading only her second Precious Ramotswe mystery, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (Her first was The Kalahari Typing School for Men) and is enjoying it so much! It occurs to self that if she wants to absolutely forestall any insomnia, she should perhaps quit reading World War II novels, or any books about the Holocaust, for they always make her angry and sad.  She went on quite a bender over the last one she finished, at 3 in the morning, Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise.
  3. She watched “Oprah.” Hilary Swank was the guest. It occurs to self that Hilary Swank is exactly the kind of actress Oprah-watchers adore: she takes on roles with uplifting messages. She was married to Chad Lowe for many years and she divorced him without becoming tabloid fodder and is now dating a guy who is not a movie star, not a director, not glamorous. Perhaps self will relent and see “Amelia” after all? Especially as she herself could do with some “uplift” in the dull dull early weeks of November?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Ode to Cal Shakes: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

September 27, 2009 at 2:37 am (Plays)
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It was hot.  So hot that self felt she was sitting in a jeepney in the Philippines.  But she didn’t want to get up or miss even one minute of the Cal Shakes’ production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She loved every single moment: Young love, crossed purposes, magic potions, sexy Queens, a handsome Lysander (strumming a banjo –  and his voice was not bad, either), a feisty Hermia, a very hip Puck (bronze Coke-bottle shades, fur down both pants legs, bare chest, thank God he was buff), a hilarious Bottom, mood music, a rousing finale –  what more could one wish for?

In keeping with the setting, this production was like a family affair: Puck addressed the cell phone issue and segued right into his lines from the play.  Characters ran up and down the aisles, or looked directly at various audience members as they were speaking.  When The Players perform, in Act II, members of the cast were seated among the audience, shouting their comments.  It might have been like this at the Globe –?  This is what self loves so much about watching a Cal Shakes’ production:  There is a lot of extemporaneous and impromptu action.  Shakespeare isn’t “heavy,” like a classical tome.

DSCN1458

Plays are not really Read the rest of this entry »

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A Long Digression

September 26, 2009 at 4:09 pm (Books, Insomnia, Plays, Writing)
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One thing you can say for self: she tries, she really tries. Here she is blogging, on this early morning Saturday (when very soon we will have to leave, pick up rental car from the airport, then pick up son’s friend from the city, then drive over the Bay Bridge, then present to Orinda, where self will unburden herself of the chips, bean and guacamole dip, honey turkey slices, 2 lbs. of salami, loaf of sliced sourdough bread, Mission flour tortilla chips, bottled water, liter bottles of coke, chicken salad, and fruit she bought yesterday in Safeway, in mad effort to approximate an organized being, preparatory to watching Cal Shakes’ “A Midsummer Nights Dream.”)

Self tried like might and main to reach niece G last night, to see if she wanted to come along, but after leaving three messages and getting no response, she has to face the cold hard fact that niece has probably made other plans for today.

Then, somewhere around midnight last night, when it became clear that self would not easily get to sleep (bad enough on ordinary nights, but son presented at 11 p.m. There goes sleep!), she tapped out two pages of her novel-in-progress. Of course, she doesn’t know where the character she was writing about came from. All of a sudden, she was there, in self’s computer, and wouldn’t get out, no matter how hard self tried to banish her to a walk-on part. So, well, this is how novels get written. You stay up sleepless and you start hearing voices.

Anyhoo, the ostensible reason for this post (pardon the long digression, dear blog readers), is to list the books self is interested in reading after perusing the 20 September 2009 issue of The New York Times Book Review. It is (thankfully) a shorter-than-usual list:

1.    After reading Malena Watrous’ review of Joyce Carol Oates’ 57th (!!!) novel, Little Bird of Heaven:

2.    After reading Thomas Mallon’s review of William Trevor’s xxxth novel, Love and Summer:

  • William Trevor’s Love and Summer

3. After reading Gregory Beyer’s review of Jonathan Ames’ collection of essays, The Double Life is Twice as Good:

  • Jonathan Ames’ The Double Life is Twice as Good

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Saturday in the City, Beautiful!

September 6, 2009 at 5:00 am (Food and Drink, Plays, Writers and Others)
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Oh, today was splendid, simply SPLEN-did, dear blog readers! Self was in the City, meeting up with niece G, who she had not seen since niece’s graduation from Stanford. Since then, so many things have happened: self has been to New York, Michael Jackson has died, and niece has started teaching at Daniel Webster Elementary School. It was so wonderful to get together, and Luis Francia’s play provided the perfect occasion! Niece really liked the anthology he co-edited, with Angel Shaw, Vestiges of War. She said she had used a lot of the information for a senior paper.

So, self went to the City (successfully negotiating BART, but it took her an hour and a half, starting from the minute she exited her house to the arrival at the Civic Center station — compared to New York’s subways, BART is pathetic), and watched Luis’ play with niece (Super-entertaining! And not a dull moment! Self couldn’t help wondering, afterwards, why Read the rest of this entry »

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YAY!! Other Good Stuff

September 2, 2009 at 2:05 am (Calls, Plays, Relatives, Surprises)
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While self was getting all sweaty in the garden, the phone rang. Self has given up dashing inside to try and reach the phone before it goes to voice mail, for she knows from long experience that she never gets there in time.

When self finally went and checked the message, it was from niece G!!! Who she’d invited to go with her to the reading of Luis Francia’s play this weekend!

Just a little update on niece: She graduated from Stanford this June (Self forgets who the commencement speaker was. She’s sure it wasn’t anyone like Steve Jobs or Oprah. Or James Franco. Was it the Google founder? Nooo. Then who was it? Think, self, think!) Now, niece is going to begin her first year of teaching for Teach For America: at Walter Hill? Is that in Potrero? Niece was sooo lucky (so was self!) that she got assigned to San Francisco! Now self will see more of her!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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THE STRANGE CASE OF CITIZEN DE LA CRUZ

August 16, 2009 at 4:04 am (Opportunities, Plays, Voices, Writers and Others)
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This is happening in less than a week, people . . .

A staged reading of a new play by Luis Francia

WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009, 2 p.m.

WHERE: Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Public Library, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA  94102

This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

(In a nutshell)

A plague seems to be affecting the virile young men of a police state, and a patriot can’t figure out if he ought to be a lover or a warrior.

Presented by Bindlestiff in collaboration with The Filipino Center of the San Francisco Main Library and Arkipelago Books.

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Why This Weekend Was a Very Special Weekend

August 10, 2009 at 2:58 am (Dogs, Food and Drink, Plays)
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  • Gracie (younger beagle) did not have constipation (This is no small thing, dear blog reader. Last weekend’s bout did us in for $440) And she began barking at everyone walking by again. And self realized it had been weeks — weeks! — since she’d last heard Gracie barking.
  • Self had her first taste of Fat Weasel Pale Ale (brewed in Ukiah, discovered at Trader Joe’s) and liked it. (In the interests of full disclosure, self decided to check out FW’s ranking on the beeradvocate website: a lowly B- )
  • Self ordered take-out from Crouching Tiger, restaurant in downtown RWC specializing in Sichuan cooking. The Dry-Cooked Prawns and Hunan Preserved Pork set our mouths on fire (but Read the rest of this entry »

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Eugene O’Neill Redux

July 2, 2009 at 6:13 pm (Plays, Quotes, Recently Reviewed)
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Self is extremely curious as to why the Robert Falls production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” closed early on Broadway ??!!

Self loved the play when she saw it at the Goodman!  It was definitely the highlight of self’s first trip to Chicago!

So, self was very happy to see an article about Eugene O’Neill in The New Yorker of 11 May 2009.  And she’s been wondering how to blog about it ever since.

Let’s see:  “Desire Under the Elms” brought the original cast –  Pablo Schreiber, Carla Gugino and Brian Dennehy –   to Broadway.  Here’s what Hilton Als has to say about it:

” . . .  the most powerful character in the beginning of “Desire Under the Elms” is the ultimate unattainable woman:  a dead mother.”

Wow!  That is just so funny.

The young hero of the play, Eben, is now “the only woman in the house; he wears his mother’s apron to cook for his brothers and keeps her parlor intact with a Norman Bates-like fetishism.”

Als has a really great way of re-creating dramatic mood.  Here’s how he describes the play’s opening:

” …  Falls opens the production in silence.  We see the two older brothers carting stones across the murky landscape.  Then we watch as Peter removes the entrails of a pig  –   the landscape can yield only blood, which is one reason that the brothers soon head for California.”

and

“We watch the daily life of the three characters  –  Eben, Abbie, and Ephraim –  develop to the strains of Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet.”

Als describes the play’s two young leads (Gugino and Schreiber) thus:

“Separately, they have spun poetry in the most literal-minded of mediums:  television.”

He has good things to say about both, but it’s his analysis of the female character that really wows self:

“While watching Gugino’s pretty, deceitful, lonely heroine bringing down the house she so longed for, I thought of the imperious and beautiful Carlotta Monterey, O’Neill’s last wife …  Monterey, a former actress, knew how to love and torture and deceive him just enough to keep him writing about the same woman over and over again.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Momentous, Stupendous

June 22, 2009 at 1:24 am (Places, Plays, Surprises)
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Oh dear blog readers, self has had a most momentous day, for this morning she was in Redwood City, and this evening she is on New York’s Upper West Side, and she has already spent several hours standing bedraggled in the rain in Central Park, awaiting a performance of “Twelfth Night.” Many many people were standing about, and there was a man in a kilt playing bagpipes at the last curve in the road just before the Delacorte Theatre (And — geez! It is just super-hot and muggy here in New York! And trash day is tomorrow so the sidewalks are real obstacle courses, with mountainous piles of garbage bags that totally dwarf passers-by!)

Even though the performance was rained out, self did get to see Anne Hathaway in the flesh, who came out to thank everyone for coming but who said that circumstances beyond her control actually prevented her from performing.

Self was with old high school chum Minette, who said that the guy standing next to Anne was cute. Unfortunately, self saw nothing of him except a rather shapely pair of legs in stockings or whatever you call those tight-fitting English pants that go into riding boots. Are those called leggings?

Anyhoo, it’s been a most stupendous, eventful day. Thank God self steeled herself from buying any fastfood in the airport in Minneapolis. That would have really made her feel awful. And all she had on the plane were three miniscule bags of roasted peanuts to go with the complimentary drinks. But self did get into an interesting conversation with the girl sitting next to her, who happened to be reading Ha Jin’s “War Trash,” and self was so nosy she actually leaned over and asked her, “Do you like that book?” Because, for the life of her, self couldn’t see the attraction of so many Amazon readers to this particular book, though it did have that by now almost de riguer detached, ironic, semi-documentary style of narration … OK, self, now you’ve totally lost yourself again in the thickets of a digression.

And the pilot, who perhaps was not as skilled as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, had to make two passes at the runway. First self felt the plane descend, and then she popped two squares of peppermint sugar-free gum into her mouth, and then, just as she had practically chewed all the flavor out of the gum, the plane gave a great groan and she felt it ascending again, and then the captain went on the speaker to apologize and say that there had been a plane lined up in front of them, and the traffic control tower had thought there should be more separation between them for the landing, or whatever. Oh, what a relief! Self thought a Canada goose had gotten into one of the engines. But then self had to keep chewing that gum for 15 more minutes, because she didn’t feel like spitting it out and wasting two new squares.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Quote of the Day: New York Playwright Walks Out on His Own Play!

April 20, 2009 at 4:49 pm (Plays, Quotes, Writers and Others)
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The following is from John Lahr’s review of Christopher Durang’s new play, “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”, in the 20 April 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

I have seen actors walk off the set. I have seen audiences walk out of the theatre. But not until Christopher Durang’s “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” (at the Public) have I seen a playwright walk out on his own play. “I don’t like this, I don’t like what’s happened,” the ingénue Felicity (Laura Benanti) says, near the finale, having spent most of the evening desperately trying to enlist the help of her reactionary parents in getting an annulment of her marriage to Zamir (Amir Arison), a Middle Eastern stranger whom she married after a drunken one-night stand, and whom she thinks might be a terrorist. “There’s no way I can imagine a positive outcome from this. I don’t want to be a part of it,” Felicity adds, and we feel her pain.

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