inspiration and joy

If there’s one thing I wish I could have in the coldest darkest time of year, it’s inspiration and joy. Two things that bring me inspiration and joy are dance and music. I know little to nothing about either discipline.  Probably because of that, I get excited and propelled creatively by them; I can’t analyze it at all, because I don’t have the vocabulary or tools, so how can I overanalyze it?

In any case, this morning as I was cleaning the kitchen, the song “Right as Rain” by pop singer Adele came on the radio. Out of nowhere, I was compelled to dance like a rag doll, like a Peanuts character, like a Muppet. My dogs ran in barking, and I danced with them while they barked and wiggled in circles and wagged their tails joyfully.  This song always makes me dance, and I’m not a dancer.

That music reminds me of years ago when Twyla Tharp visited the McCarter Theatre while I worked there. Her dance company’s show had sold out so quickly I couldn’t get a ticket, and I had to work in the box office that night anyway. I was sitting in the box office when I heard someone whisper, “There she is.” Along one side of our office were floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked out onto a brick walkway and out into the leafy, blossomy spring evening. A woman was sitting on a wooden bench, smiling and laughing, as another woman stood and told her a story, her back to the window. This woman was petite and all muscle and sinew, like a racehorse, in jeans and a T-shirt, with a cap of bobbed silver hair. It was Twyla Tharp. As she told this story, which none of us could hear, she became more and more animated, all elbows and hands, knees and feet, bounce, swing and glide, rhythym and melody, and her friend laughed. We sat in the box office like the wrong species in a duck blind, looking across the darkened office to the bright window, as she made her friend laugh uncontrollably on a spring evening.

It was better than the show could have been.  I bought her book on creativity. Before I could even get through the first two chapters my mother “borrowed” it from me and then “lost” it. I’m still furious about it and I want it back, Mom.

I sincerely wish Twyla Tharp would choreograph a dance piece for Adele’s song “Right as Rain.” I think their styles go together.

But in the meantime, try this, because it’s really fun.

1) Go to emusic.com and sign up for a trial membership. It’s free and you get free downloads.

2) Download Adele’s Grammy-award nominated album, 19. It’s good stuff.

3) Go to YouTube and bring up BeetTV’s video, Dancy Dancy by Twyla Tharp.

4) Hit Pause immediately, but let it load.

5) In the YouTube video pane, mute YouTube’s sound.

6) Open your mp3 player and bring up “Right as Rain” by Adele. Cue it up and hit pause.

7) When you’re ready, hit “play” on the mp3 player and then play on the YouTube video.

I guarantee you, this is at least as much fun, if not more so, as Dark Side of the Wizard of Oz.

The Importance of Family Planning

If you can navigate a website, and read and follow this sentence, then you know that there is no single social or political concern that stands alone. Whether it’s the environment, the economy, foriegn policy or the arts, all of these issues are so intertwined that there is no way that you can take a stand on one issue alone without affecting many other issues around it, or finding a cause in these other issues.

Take family planning, for example. What does family planning really mean? Family planning means providing birth control and medical assistance to anyone who might have reproductive organs. This is a healthcare issue and a social issue. However, it feeds into environmental issues such as overpopulation. The economy isn’t immune, it certainly doesn’t need more mouths to feed, to put it lightly. Then we start getting into tax dollars for education versus tax dollars for war, and so on and so forth. Family planning, ultimately, is everyone’s issue, and it does affect aspects of your life about which you might be unaware. We’re all in this together, and until all of us are free and safe, none of us are free and safe.

My dear friend Elle has come up with a simple analysis of the situation. Let’s say you have five dollars. You could donate that five dollars to Planned Parenthood and do a good deed for people who don’t and/or do want to reproduce everywhere. You could even donate it in honor of Sarah Palin, and they will even send her a kind card letting her know that your five dollars has gone to ensure that more women do not end up following her shining example of preaching abstinence and breeding a softball team without thinking first. Elle has a Cafepress store that provides an analysis of the importance of family planning in a clear, concise way so that not only can you enjoy it, but also, you can share it with others. Every shirt on this cafepress store is marked up only $5 and sends that as a donation to Planned Parenthood, in honor of Sarah Palin. And Palin will get a little card in the mail, for each one.

Because, ultimately, funding for birth control now means more tacos for you later.

Thank you.

“Everybody’s got the right to some sunshine; not the sun, but maybe one of its beams…”

For the record, I do not like musicals. I like drama.

I saw Assassins at the Wilmington Drama League, directed by Chris Turner, and I only had to eat some of that statement. I really did not want to do this, but I’m afraid I’ve seen a production of a Sondheim musical that compels me to tell you all about it, why it was electrifying and you should go see it.

Essentially, the whole conceit of Assassins is that the American experience is a game; striving to succeed, get a piece of the pie, realize your dreams. However, you and I (and, fortunately, Sondheim) all know that the rules of the game don’t affect everyone the same way, and a lot of people don’t succeed without cheating. A lot of people who try to play by the rules will get swept by the wayside. So the central issue of Assassins is this: The American experience is a game. You pay to play and shoot to win.

Traditionally, Assassins is presented in a carnival shooting gallery, and Sondheim’s music builds that world, suggesting American innocence tempered with hucksterism. Turner chose to set it in a reality TV show instead, lining the stage with video screens, using cameras onstage to strengthen the Ensemble’s relationship to the audience; everyone wants to be on TV, everyone wants to be in the spotlight, as they fight with each other to make sure everyone knows they saw or heard or was part of a little slice of history.

Sondheim includes actual and attempted presidential assassins in his tale; some win, some lose, but all of them yearn for something greater, to have the place in history that John Wilkes Booth took. Time, fortunately, is something Sondheim is able to play with masterfully; the plot is driven by dramatic intention, not by a ticking clock. Luckily this means we get to see John Hinkley and Squeaky Fromme sing a chilling, precise and pure duet to unrequited love that the world would be smaller without. The mechanism of the game is transformed by its players so that the two game proponents become assassins as well.

Turner’s choices in this show were very strong. The Balladeer and the Proprietor became a Cameraman and a Game Show Host. The Balladeer is Sondheim’s stand-in for the audience’s feelings throughout the show. In this production’s case, he shows the audience where to look, although not how to feel. He would simply sing us the story and let us draw our own conclusions. The Game Show Host led the contestants, stone-faced, through their trials, leading them straight to their chosen targets, and letting them succeed or fail. Because it’s not his job to care, it’s hard for the audience to care about him, and often times he disappeared in these moments because the focus was on the assassin themselves, but a wrenching resolution walked into a book depository. It led up to a heart-breaking conclusion that left the audience shaking but singing on the way out the door, and really, for what more could you ask?

All of the actors provided strong, memorable, heart-breaking but focused performances. Most notable were the two women who played Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore. Both had elegant voices and delivered quirky performances that sparkled and provided an excellent commentary on how un-fun it is to be an American woman sometimes. Tina Sheing and Miriam Pultro delivered the sense of these ladies as cut from the same cloth. Pultro’s Squeaky was a spring chicken, full of burning desire to eat the world alive, and Sheing’s Moore a prize mother hen who would take the world under her wing, if only she could keep it all together. Their joyful and determined target practice with a KFC bucket made me so happy.

In fact, every assassin in this show had a moment that should be set up as a case study of How To Make Excellent Theater out of American Pain and Ambivalence. Mike Ware’s Samuel Byck was funny, sad and right as he chugged his cans of Bud and rambled into a tape recorder, begging Leonard Bernstein to write more love songs and challenging Nixon’s failed presidency; Jonathan Dalecki’s Czogloz was brutal in his mechanically fierce descriptions of the factory worker’s life and tender as spring in his gentlemanly worship of Emma Goldman. Mike Renn’s Giuseppe Zangara had a very real fire in his belly that suggested Kurt Cobain and the current healthcare debates, along with a profound voice. Brian Turner’s nearly-silent, restrained but desperate to connect John Hinckley was chilling simply in the way he moved across the stage, his discomfort in his own skin; he was truly the guy you would not sit next to on the subway. Then his duet with Pultro, “Unworthy of Your Love,” made his chase of a flickering Reagan mask and voice so much more painful.

This plays for one more weekend at Wilmington Drama League so get down there.

Ok. I have said it. I saw a Sondheim musical and I enjoyed it, I even drove to see it IN THE RAIN, but only because it was this one, this production, this company, this director, these actors, this time. I will now go back to hating all musicals. Keep your Sondheim away from me.

The Palin Joke For Which You’ve All Been Waiting

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, looking scrumptious in red.

NEWS REPORTER: This week’s top story, Republican would-be presidential candidate Senator John McCain stole the thunder of Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama, by announcing his own pick for vice president, Governor Sarah Palin. Selection of Governor Palin, an Alaskan politician new to the national arena, was a move that surprised even residents of her home state.

SOUND CUE: BOMP-BOMP-BOM-BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!

SARAH PALIN: Nnnnooooo one expects the Alaskan Politician! My chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear, fear, surprise, rrruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to Dick Cheney – I’ll come in again.

(exits, repeat with slight variations ad nauseam)

Thank you. Don’t forget to tip your bartenders and waitresses.

It’s an eyesore!

Northeast Philadelphia has more than its fair share of billboards. It’s an area where residents are low-income enough to not have the time, energy or resources to fight absentee landlords, much less keep landowners from selling off green space for the advertising dollar. That’s where this little corner of Bustleton Avenue comes in. Nestled in a little grove of trees next to a convenience store, this shady spot gets a fair amount of traffic from commuters to and from Frankford Transportation Center, a major hub for SEPTA. So it’s worth it to keep this spot looking nice, especially as it’s bordered on two sides by housing. But it’s obviously more important to the landowner to keep it profitable, which is why they built a big billboard on it to rent.

In the winter of 2007, Pro-Life America had another one of their advertisements on this billboard. You might have seen them, if you live in a low-income neighborhood. They touted babies with Down’s Syndrome as a fun item (like a Happy Meal Toy. “Collect them all!”) and generally oversimplified pregnancy into a process by which one gets a fun object to play with. The billboard on Bustleton Ave was fortunate enough to deserve the ad with a smiling, white-faced, uber-Aryan blue-eyed baby beneath a fiery orange shining sun and the legend, “God knew my soul before I was born.”

This billboard stayed for a couple of months before it was replaced by an ad for the movie 10,000 B. C. Well, sort of. As you can see from the picture below, at about the time the ad was pasted up, the “For Sale” sign on this little corner went up too, and the job was left incomplete. Or was it?

February, 2008

The contrast raises questions about the intelligent-design-versus-evolution debate, but that’s another topic. For sheer hilarity, you can’t beat the caveman with his big spiky spear gingerly poised to strike at Giant Sanctimonious Baby, where we know (from billboards all over the same neighborhood) a giant saber-toothed tiger should be snarling.

You’d think, from the sloppiness of this paste-up job alone, the owner of this little plot of land would be embarrassed enough to tell the paste-up company to do something about it. Or perhaps the company that brings in the advertising for this spot would be embarrassed at the shoddy service they’re providing to their clientele. Or maybe the companies seeking the advertising would notice and take offense. Certainly this diminishes their agenda. Quite frankly, I don’t see how this billboard makes anyone want to see “that caveman movie,” or make babies. You’d think the local politicians would take offense at this mess. You’d think something would happen.

August, 2008

As you can clearly see, over the next eight months, a lot happened. Can you spot the differences between the two pictures? Here, I’ll make it easier for you. The snow melted. The grass turned a lush green. The trees grew. The layers of paper on the top billboard are peeling off and falling down. Any change in the advertising? Nope. But here’s the kicker, folks;

The lawn has been cut.

That’s right. Look at the bottom, the most boring part of this image, and you’ll notice that the grass is a short, spiky, healthy green. Some maintenance has been done here. Why? Because in Northeast Philadelphia there is no greater offense than an untrimmed lawn? Or is it to make absolutely sure that the “For Sale” sign is nice and clear? I think it’s going to take a lot more than a lawnmower to make a venture capitalist pull his Jaguar over, look at his Rolex and say to himself, “Self, it’s time to spend some money. By Jingo, this little spot looks like a prime real estate opportunity!”

So, what do we learn from this object in our neighborhood?

Companies with money (realtors, pro-life agitators, movie studios, landowners) don’t care about people in working-class neighborhoods. They probably don’t even know about this mess. Whoever owns that triangle of land certainly doesn’t care about the community. Ditto the local elected representatives. Personally, I think this is an amusing testament to neglect. It says a lot more about Warner Bros. and Pro-Life America than they ever could have imagined. I wonder how long it’ll stay this way. The most interesting thing about this billboard is that no graffiti has been sprayed on it. It makes enough of a statement on its own.