Gary Kamiya has written a articulate, ambivalent story for Salon about the fall of Saddam Hussein. It must have cost him a lot to write it, for he discloses some ugly truths about himself. It also happens to express, just about dead on, how I think and feel about the invasion.

He writes, in part:

This is the most compelling reason to celebrate the end of Saddam. Call that celebration a leap of faith, if you will -- but you could also call it a binding contract, American to Iraqi, human heart to human heart. We smashed your country and we killed your people and we freed you from a monster: We are bound together now by blood. We owe each other, but we owe you more because we are stronger and because we came into your country.

posted: 11:39:26 PM  

So today was Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. My boss bribed us with donuts to be cooperative; he had his daughter and a friend, both of them middle schoolers. (I'd forgotten how much girls at that age giggle.)

I helped them fill out a form that characterized skills that I use in my job. Each item could be checked, "yes, I need to be able to do this," or "no, I don't," or "maybe." Most of the skills seemed to pertain to white-collar professions, things like "3. Write letters" and "23. Address groups of people." There weren't a lot of "87. Pick up 50-pound load" or "89. Be gracious when I've been stiffed on a tip." I marked most of the skills yes, and I went back and marked five of them with a star, to highlight the skills I thought were most important:

6. Write directions and/or memos to others
8. Interact positively with people
26. Read complex and technical material
29. Program a computer
32. Be creative in problem solving

In the right-hand column of the form, the student is to rate her present ability: Adequate or Needs Improvement. Clearly the learning experience is supposed to be, "I want to be an astronaut; an astronaut has to '28. Know and use mathematics;' I need to improve my math skills."

So I went back to my starred list. I think I might give myself a Needs Improvement for "8. Interact positively with people."

posted: 11:21:20 PM  

When I turn the keys over to Lee in scene 4, I let this little whimper escape. John loves it.

He said, "That little R2D2 thing you do, keep it." Yeah, like that's going to encourage me to leave it in.

posted: 11:00:03 PM  

Tatiana Baganova and Provincial Dances Theatre, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Washington

The company presented two good pieces of post-modern dance theater, Wings at Tea (2001) and Maple Garden (1999).

They have several elements in common. Baganova shows a liking for food, be it a carrot consumed between two lovers or bunches of grapes hung from a woman's tasty bits. Her dancers move onstage as if subalterns of the Ministry of Silly Walks; walking from a crouch is a particular favorite. Baganova will replay a movement sequence in reverse, or repeat it as if we're seeing alternate takes.

There's something about her group carries and the sexy pretzels that her dancers wrap themselves into that suggests the work of Pilobolus. She noted in a post-performance discussion that she often works from an image back to the movement.

One of the images she used for Wings at Tea was a Chagall painting. The piece evokes a dance hall or cabaret of chain-smoking rag dolls in starchy silk. To open the action, a dancer turns a switch on a 6-inch plastic pig hung from the stage left wing, and the pig commences to flapping its wings and flying. When Metallica's "Unforgiven" is played later on the cello, somehow it just seems right. The piece is a stage manager's nightmare, loaded with onstage hazards: the aforementioned grapes rolling about; cigarettes, sparklers, and bits of burning paper; and pots of water. The water is used in a section where two women wet their hair down and then fling their heads, the spray arcing away dramatically.

If Wings generates more varied, interesting images, Maple Garden is more coherent. It begins and ends with the sounds of something whistling in the woods, maybe a whip-poor-will. It's a dance about the hunter Artemis, and about furtive couplings in the forest.

There are elements that call forth Western mythology: early in the piece a woman with a lantern hangs from the flies, swinging to and from until a prince/peasant comes to unhook her from the sky. One of the pictures that closes the piece is four women, imprisoned in an otherwise bare tree, their pre-Raphaelite hair draped across its branches and clipped to it with clothespins.

In post-performance chat, Baganova said that she liked her dancers to wear socks rather than shoes. Through an interpreter, she said, "for us, to feel the floor with our feet is like using our sense of smell." It's that synesthesia that informs her engaging work.

posted: 12:15:22 AM