Hughie: Slices of (Low) Life

Back from last night's dress rehearsal of Hughie, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Eugene O'Neill's one-act mostly monologue, starring Richard Schiff (you'd remember him as Toby from West Wing but you wouldn't recognize him as Erie, the down-and-out Broadway johnny of O'Neill's world).

   

Richard Schiff rehearsal photo by Nella Vera.


For me, it was a mid-week adventure after a frustrating first half of the week at work. Journeys downtown on the Metro, with rain and wind threatening, fans heading to the Georgetown Hoyas game to compete with for a decent meal. Kinda exhausted and fed up before I even got to the play.

Picture it, a talker and a listener. The talker is full of what a big shot he is - name dropper, gets into all the best clubs, limos, Broadway, knows a guy that can get him all the best dope and dolls... yeah, you know the type. And the listener checks in and out of the talk, under the weight of this overbearing ego but stuck with it for the duration.

And then after I finished my meal, I headed to the play.

Yeah, my otherwise wonderful dinner at Ruby Tuesday's kindly gave me a preview of Schiff's performance of O'Neill's low-life character study, a warm-up act courtesy of a pot-bellied middle-aged Hoyas fan in the booth across from me loudly recollecting his glory days.

I will say my waiter/Night Clerk, Kevin, was a delight. I was undecided about dessert, so he brought me a plate with chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, and cherry sauce all over. Yum! And he didn't put it on my bill. I hope I tipped him enough. Thank you, young Kevin, for being the sweet interlude in my two-act reality/fiction experience of one of the things I hate most about humanity: Middle-aged men full of shit.

Anyway, as a 50-minute one-act play, my friend and I felt that this production of Hughie might leave a typical theater-goer a bit short-changed. I recommend you eat out first and go on a night when the Hoyas are playing. (I suspect Caps fans are not so O'Neillesque.)

Hughie by Eugene O'Neill
Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre
January 31 - March 17, 2013
Doug Hughes: Director
Cast:
Richard Schiff: "Erie" Smith
Randall Newsome: Night Clerk

love, hosaa

The Clay Aiken Christmas Experience, cont'd.

Picking up after the recaps of my own tour experience, I here offer the four stories that were read on tour. These were stories that were submitted by fans for the 2007 concert tour, and selected specially by Clay to be read again this time around while he went backstage to read a book. Or at least change his clothes. *g* Each of the stories segued into a song, so the montages here include those songs.

Story #1 is "Mary, Did You?" about how a mother found solace over the death of her son by meditating on the figure of Mary in the manger. It is followed by Clay's "Mary, Did You Know?"



For story #2, there was one story that was used through most of the tour, but a second "story #2" was recorded especially for one stop at which the reader and her son had a meet-and-greet with Clay. Both stories are about mothers and sons, and are followed by Clay's "Merry Christmas with Love." (For these montages, I used different clips for the song portion, so that each story-and-song montage is unique.)

Story #2 - "The Lights of Christmas" (with Kurt)


Story #2 - "Never Too Old" (with Mike)


The third story was told by Clay Aiken's mother, Faye, and preceded the "Sentimental Medley" ("Ill Be Home for Christmas," "The Christmas Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") during the tour. The story is presented here without the medley (I'm montaging that separately, due to length).

Story #3 - "Christmas Time's a-Comin'" (Faye's story)

[Update 1-21-2013: Here is the "teal" version of the Sentimental Medley, which followed Faye's story during the concert. Check back soon for the "purple" version!]
All four of these stories were published in the book Remember When, available from the National Inclusion Project.

For the record, I also submitted a story back in 2007, "Christmas and the Great Tormentor." I recorded it for my brother, that devil of a Christmas packaging tormentor. Someday I might post it here, but for now it's just a family thing.

Love, hosaa
Remembering when....

Sex and Ideas

I've been brooding on something for a while, hesitant to write about it. But it's a quiet Sunday afternoon, so here goes.

Recently our magazine (more specifically, one of its most popular bloggers) was criticized for an anti-female bias. What sparked the criticism was the blogger's post listing the year's most "shocking" quotations about the future. What shocked some readers was the fact that all the individuals quoted were male. The inference from this omission was that the blogger--and hence the World Future Society--was telling women to shut up.

My response, from an editor's point of view, is that it's more appropriate to judge the content of a post than the gender of its author. I extend that courtesy to the author of the blog post, who was excited by the ideas of the people he quoted, all of whom happened to be male.

Yet, the truth is, most of our articles are written by men. (They're also mostly written by Americans. And by people over the age of 50.) Why? Women have the exact same opportunity to contribute to our publications and our conferences as men do. We demand three things:

1. The article must have something interesting, useful, and important to say about the future.

2. The article must be based on facts, even if it is largely an opinion piece. I have no interest in wasting readers' time with material submitted by the Dean of the Department of Making Stuff Up.

3. It must be written in English. Sadly, I have retained little of the Spanish and French I learned in college, and machine translation is yet unsatisfactory.

I'm going to speculate a little here. I think the differences in the way men and women think and communicate parallel our reproductive roles.

Men: Have a lot of ideas, send all of them out into the world, hope as many as possible take seed and grow to maturity, if not immortality.

Women: The gestation of the idea to its birth requires investment of time and emotion. Nurturing a brainchild to maturity needs a supportive environment.

This analogy is certainly oversimplified, but it might explain why fewer women actually submit articles to us. Maybe there is a greater need for reassurance that the outcome of a tenderly gestated idea will ultimately be accepted. Maybe the expectation is that we will provide more collaboration in the development process--an expectation that we don't always have time to meet.

I believe that our magazine's content is, if not "gender neutral," then at least equally of interest and importance to men and women. I find it interesting, anyway. (Pardon my anecdotal evidence.)

Take Lester Brown's article in the current issue, for example: "Food, Fuel, and the Global Land Grab," describing the trend of wealthier nations investing in agricultural production in poorer nations as a way to ensure future food supplies for their own populations.

The article, which is an excerpt from Brown's latest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), certainly met our criteria of being future-oriented, interesting, and important. The gender of the author was immaterial to me as the editor who selected it to present to our readers.

And yet, I certainly recognize that the story Brown told could have been told differently, were it told by a female. And differently, again, if told by a non-American. My question then becomes, would these be stories that our readers would read? Or maybe a better question is, what stories would our future readers read? As we continue brooding on these questions, our doors remain as open as they can possibly be:

- Check out the Writers Guidelines for THE FUTURIST here.
- Editorial guidelines for World Future Review are here.
- WorldFuture 2013 Poster Session guidelines (final submission deadline March 1) here.
- WorldFuture 2013 video contest guidelines (deadline March 18) here.

Please let us hear your voice.