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.

Christmas Extension

Back from the penultimate performance of this year's round of A Christmas Carol at Ford's Theatre. Since the final performance starts in a little over an hour, I'm glad no one is looking to me for go/no-go advice. For the record, it would have been "GO!!" - it's a wonderful, life-affirming story, sprightly told.

Edward Gero as Scrooge, with James Konicek as 

Marley's Ghost (in the portrait).

Photo by Scott Suchman for Ford's Theatre 

Cast, A Christmas Carol. Photo by Scott Suchman

Hard to believe this was my first CC at Ford's, since they do it every year. I don't know whether the production or staging changes from year to year - I suspect so. But I really liked this one a lot. The "twist" I hadn't seen before in this CC telling was the use of multiple casting such that the debtors whom Scrooge terrorizes pre-Marley's-ghost turn up later as ghosts past, present, and future. This gives it that same dreamlike quality of "you look familiar..." that you get from the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion in Wizard of Oz.

Sometimes you just get lucky and find very pleasant seatmates. Had a nice convo with a couple in town to see all the shows they could - Les Miz at National, White Christmas at KenCen, and this. Discovered also that the seat I purchased for this (as well as for the remaining two shows in this Ford's season, Hello Dolly and Our Town) is probably the most perfectly perfect seat I've sat in yet at Ford's, where as I have said before there is no good seat in the house. (Still haven't topped that second-to-last-row in the balcony where I first saw Edward Duke....)

So I was happy even before the show started. The show began with the villagers wandering through the aisles of the theater introducing themselves. I love that. The balcony was decorated with the same Christmas decor as the set. And one of the cast members I recognized right away was that adorable Tom Story I'm well on the way to having a crush on. (His last hilarious turn was as one of the unsuitable suitors of the ingenue in Merry Wives of Windsor at Shakespeare Theatre Company.)

The show was a wonderful tribute to the spirit we strive for, or at least we think we do, most of the time, when we're not all being Republicans and Democrats about this sort of thing. Humanity is our business, isn't it? So leave the decorations up awhile longer and let the season last at least as long after December 25 as it does before.

love,
hosaa,
spirit-visited

The Clay Aiken Christmas Experience

I fell a little behind in my recapping. Totally skipped the lovely evening of ballet (Suzanne Farrell), courtesy of a friend with season tickets, and the very interesting world premiere of Young Robin Hood at Round House (as always, I liked the dancer the best). Autumn just gets busy, you know?

I didn't have to travel nearly as far as some of his more dedicated fans, but the two Clay Aiken Christmas concerts I was able to attend were just far enough away to prompt me to splurge on hotel reservations. Shippen Place in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, was quite lovely, as was the venue, Luhr's Center on campus of Ship-U. Very classy place. The town, a bit run down, however, though I'd be happy to go again sometime.

That is, unless of course Clay promises to come closer to home: e.g., the Birchmere, Strathmore, Kennedy Center, National, Warner, Constitution Hall, and the forthcoming Bethesda Blues and Jazz Club, opening (they say) in February. (I already called dibs on front-row center when Clay plays there.)

Just four days after Shippensburg, Clay played at Easton, Maryland's historic Avalon Theatre (which I have yet to type without adding a g on the end - Avalong). It looked down-in-the-dumps in the Google Street photos I saw, but in real life it was quaint and cozy inside. And the town of Easton is exactly the kind of small town I'd love to live in. I'd totally go back, even if Clay played all of those above mentioned venues in the same tour.

Those who know nothing of these things and still sneer with an air of superiority ask why in the world one goes to more than one Clay Aiken concert in the same tour. Not to mention the fact (which they wouldn't know anyway) that the 2012 iteration of the Joyful Noise Tour (JNT) is more or less a "Best of" previous versions (but without dancers, truckloads of sets and equipment, and elves and heh-heh fairies).

The venues, the towns, the pick-up musicians, the condition of Clay's voice, and the vicissitudes of Clay's hair all make for completely different experiences from one night to the next. Even his banter, dependent on the same basic sets of tall tales, writhes to hilarious alterations.

This year's big audience interaction bit involved someone being chosen to pull a random Christmas carol out of the bowl and see how much of the lyrics they get right. It's funny because Clay himself has a tendency to rely on his own "random-lyric generator," as it has been lovingly named. I was all set to do dramatic interpretations of "Little Drummer Boy" or "Rudolph, the Reindeer with the Red Nose" (using person-first language here), but he didn't call on me.

Those who know nothing of these things and still sneer with an air of superiority actually think Clay ought to know me by first name by now, since I'm apparently his "number-one fan." In fact, even with two "meet and greets" now, and two group photos at the charity galas, I still haven't made eye contact with the guy. I'm not nearly vivacious enough (that's a nice word for it - vivacious) to get his attention. Those who are and do, well, that's entertaining, too. All part of the Clay Aiken experience.

The other reason to go to multiple venues is to see what works on my camera. Camera settings I borrowed from other "clack" gatherers worked pretty well in the gorgeous and spacious auditorium at Shippensburg, but not at all in Easton's tiny Avalon. (Pause to delete another g.) And for video, I just totally used the wrong format (AVCHD) in Shippensburg; switching to mp4 for Easton worked pretty well, except for having the "up my nose" view from the second row.

So here is just a little taste of the Clay Aiken Christmas Experiences.

Shippensburg:

And Easton:

Phantom of the Chem Lab (aka Jekyll and Hyde)

Back from the limited run of Jekyll and Hyde playing at the Kennedy Center through tomorrow.

So I'll lead with the good news, which was that it got a standing ovation, orchestra and first tier, and I didn't hate it.

Truthfully, I just wasn't in the mood for a big overwrought Victorian melodrama. At least the production, which initially just looked cheap to me, was evocative and economical, using sets of moving scrims and projections to recreate the lab, brothel, board room, parlor, as needed. The projections also fairly successfully recreated the internal turmoil, the madness.

And with the main attraction, Constantine Maroulis (he of American Idol season four - the one who played the rock star on TV), you knew what you were going to get: ham and cheese and the whole blue plate special. I will say he delivers the goods.

What I hate about any musical that basically only has one good song is when they put it in the wrong place in the program. "This Is the Moment," one of the greatest show songs of all time, comes somewhere in the middle of Act One and is all chewed up with Constantine's hammy acting.

I'm a sucker for a great Act One finale, and the brilliant number given to co-star Deborah Cox as Lucy (the Prostitute with the Heart of Gold), "Someone Like You," again, was buried in the penultimate position before intermission.

As I said, I just wasn't in the mood this afternoon, but Cox's performance really was the only thing that hooked me. I'll be checking out her albums.

As for the story, really, why let the great morality fable of "Jekyll and Hyde" (how to extract and eliminate evil from humanity) languish in Victorian goth? (Even Round House's brilliant Dorian Gray a couple of years ago brought the aesthetic up to mid-20th century.) With all the hopeful-yet-playing-god controversy that today's mad scientists are dredging up in the transhumanism movement, isn't a 21st century update in order? And the takeaway is the same, to me: You conquer evil with kindness.

Love, hosaa

ETA link to the cast recording of the 2012 J&H "Concept" album.

Survivance and the American Indian

The little red squiggly line underneath the word "survivance" tells me that it is not an accepted English term, but it is the dominant theme of the National Museum of the American Indian, one of Smithsonian's less-traveled treasures. It's a block past the Air and Space Museum as you come from the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station. It stands between Air and Space and the Capitol dome.

All photos by C. G. Wagner; please credit and link if used.

Some takeaways, including the official museum book and a button commemorating today (Nov. 23) as Native American Heritage Day

View from the fourth floor.

Maidu Creation Story (2001) by Harry Fonseca

Background: Kiowa moccasin leggings

Inset: Kiowa Aw-Day (beaded sneakers) by Teri Greeves, 2004

The term "survivance" is attributed to Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor in the 1994 book Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance and means "more than survival," according to the museum exhibit notes. "Survivance means redefining ourselves. It means raising our social and political consciousness. It means holding onto ancient principles while eagerly embracing change. It means doing what is necessary to keep our cultures alive."

I admit I came to the museum today with no idea that it was Native American Heritage Day (or even American Indian Heritage Month). The day after Thanksgiving is just a good day to explore the unknown parts of my own neighborhood. And I take the broadest sense of that word: the cultures I walk among that are largely strangers to me.

So ignorant am I of this subject matter that, literally, the first I'd ever heard of Squanto was just last night, watching the Peanuts Thanksgiving special (the "Mayflower Voyages" half). So I was happy that the first exhibit I saw today had to do with Squanto, the Patuxet who was kidnapped by Europeans and, upon being returned to North America as a fluent English speaker, helped the Pilgrims adjust to the harsh land and climate.

The signage in the museum directs you to start on the upper floors, where you begin with the beginning, the mythologies of the universe and of creation. I stopped to watch a video presentation of a Cheyenne story about how the Big Dipper was formed. (Down in the bookshop, I could find no book or video or any souvenir of that charming and even tear-inducing story, but here it is at First People's Legends page: "The Quill-Work Girl and Her Seven Brothers.")

You can't help but be impressed by how fully integrated the indigenous peoples of the Americas were (and are) with their environment. It is embedded in the DNA, this reverence and respect for the natural world. I followed the crowd to a display of Alaskan wares, where there was a sheer coat made of an unusual, diaphanous material. Since I was the one standing next to the caption, I identified it for the group as "seal gut." Oooh! was the response. "They didn't waste a thing.... Waste not, want not." We all wondered how it could possibly have kept anyone warm.

"Waste not, want not" needs to apply to people. After having just seen Lincoln and the battle for treating slaves as human beings, I stood there wondering who had been treated worse--Africans who had been kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, or the indigenous peoples whose lands were stolen out from under them and killed outright. (Some of this murder was apparently an accident; the Europeans brought diseases to which natives had no immunity, and their populations were decimated.)

Death and destruction of culture continue even through "modern" times, as Native Americans have had to fight even for the right to educate children in their own languages and customs, and not be confined to a "choice" of either Protestant or Catholic schools.

I have no claims to a religious worldview, but the spiritual connection of humans to each other--and to animals, the land, the elements--makes a lot of sense to me. We are connected to everything and must be, lest we waste whatever it will take for all of our future survivance.

"Limit chaos
And cultivate order:
By singing, dancing, and
Talking to each other.

Realize life is short,
Respect your elders,
And recognize that death
Is a part of living."

--excerpt from "The Maidu Creation Story," told by Henry Azbill, 2002, and put to verse by Judy Allison