theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Made my last visit to Edward Durell Stone’s Kleenex box for a while.
Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.
YouTube has been feeding me scratchy videos of Jay Ward’s Fractured Fairy Tales, and I’ve been eating them up. In “The Ugly Almond Duckling,” Edward Everett Horton’s narration opens with a joke that, in the hands of lesser makers, would be the punch line to a shaggy dog story involving Chinese hydrology. It’s a riff on a page from the Great American Songbook that hardly anyone sings any more, “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)”.
In time for last-minute tax deductions, here’s my annual list.
What organizations are worthy of support? Please give some consideration to this list.
These are the groups and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2025.
Two long-view takes, from Scott Samuelson and Mark Harvey, on the conundrum that is 47.
Adjudication assignments for WATCH for 2026 are out. I am scheduled to see:
As well as three TBDs.
I’ve acquired a couple new doorstops. I’m almost through the collection of Philip K. Dick novels.
I need to catch up on my Goodreads notes.
More fun with punctuation marks: I recently learned that the humble colon (:) is used in Swedish names as a mark of abbreviation, much as the apostrophe is used elsewhere. I first came across this usage through the name of one of the Ax:son Johnson family.
Ooh ooh ooh: a new Hal Hartley film is rolling out.
The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.
Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.
6000 planets! How cool is that? When I was a boy, there were 9, er, 8.
It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere…
Jonathan Kalb, a professor at Hunter College who met with Beckett, disagrees. “It’s actually not true that there is a definitive pronunciation,” he said in a recent interview. “The fact is, he was very tolerant of different pronunciations.”
KOFF-KOFF Just about the only variation of which he was tolerant.
The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions is a funny-sweet-bitter reflection of playwright Paula Vogel’s emotional journey with her mother, named in the play’s world as Phyllis Herman (the always watchable Kate Eastwood Norris). The “evictions” of the title refer to the series of house moves undertaken by the Herman family—mother, son Carl (the surprising Stanley Bahorek) and daughter Martha (steady Zoe Mann)—gradually stepping up from a cockroach-riddled basement custodial flat* to a spacious three-bedroom apartment, all in the D.C. metro area. As Martha says early in the play, there is a season for packing, and a season for unpacking.
It’s not clear in the text whether each change of domicile is entailed by formal proceedings, but that’s not important. Rather, we can read each eviction as a point in the Herman’s lives when something is lost, and maybe something found. As the various Herman family apartments gradually become airier and more spacious, equally so the living rooms become emptier of furniture, highlighting Phyllis’s rejection of her children and general isolation. The Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me” recurs as underscoring: Phyllis never does find that Someone until the closing moments of the play.
Shawn Boyle’s projection designs are formidable, perhaps even triggering.
*Writing as someone who’s lived with cockroaches in Prince George’s County, I’m of the mind that you’re never really rid of them.
A quick stroll in woods and meadows of a section of Leopold’s Preserve that I hadn’t seen before, led by Marion Lobstein and Claudia Thompson-Deahl. We stopped for a look at the ruins of the Brent family homestead. Red-legged Grasshoppers (Melanoplus femurrubrum) were still hopping.
Now, where was I?
The last time I was on stage was early summer 2016. I had some personal setbacks for about 18 months after that, so I went on a hiatus that turned into a four-year break. Then I was cast in a show, we were about two weeks into rehearsals, that was February 2020, and we know how that turned out.
So I am very glad to be back in the rehearsal room, working on Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher for The Arlington Players. It’s a sweet, silly, very theatrical prequel to the Peter Pan story, based on a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. There will be singing, and there will be pirates.
I will play Robert Falcon Scott, a character very loosely based on the historical figure. There are some screaming anachronisms around his presence in the play, and TBH I’m not really sure why he’s in this play. First table work session is tonight, maybe we will figure that out.
Also glad for a commute that doesn’t involve Beltway construction.