Category Archives: Like Life

One of the goals I set for myself this year was to get out and visit some unfamiliar performance venues. I think I did okay, if you start counting from last December.

• Gaston Hall (Georgetown Univ.)
• Goethe-Institut
• Fort Fringe: The Shop
• Dance Place
• Black box, Artisphere, Arlington, Va.
• Blair Center (The Bullis School), Potomac, Md.

Leta with great-nephew Chase and great-niece Shania, for the one moment in Martinsburg when the three of them weren’t running about.

Best meal of the trip: blackened mahi mahi at the Pharr/McAllen location of the local Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen chain, sort of a Gulf Coast inflection of our Legal Sea Foods.

Stacey tapped me for a bit of a challenge: voiceovers for five audio clips (at NPR we call them “actualities”) from Zhou Youguang, to be part of Louisa Lim’s profile of him for today’s All Things Considered. Zhou headed up the committee that devised the pinyin system, thereby reforming the Roman transcription of Chinese characters. Stacey asked for an older man’s voice, seeing as how Zhou is 50 years older than me (his spelling system was published when I was two years old). Older, but spry and mirthful. I hope I gave her what she was looking for; in any event, the completed piece sounds like magic.

I think this is the only time that I will voiceover someone who has his own Wikipedia article. I am deeply honored to have worked on the story.

Last weekend was a time of watching things go very fast—the Baltimore Grand Prix, from our grandstand on Pratt Street. The people we saw on the office building roofs had the best vantage point. Leta was bemused by the sponsorship of Braille Battery.

And for watching things that go much slower, but not necessarily quieter. Pekoe’s purr has been known to approach the triple-digit decibel range.

Fulfilled my modest Chunkster Challenge for the year, so most of the pending titles are more slender. My to-read list includes a couple of borrows from Leta, new titles from my favorite A’s (Ali, Anne, Atkinson), some backlist items from Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown. Towards the left end of the shelf, some art books to browse through during hockey intermissions.

Stacey asked me to do a voiceover for the first part of Jason Beaubien’s three-part report on the harrowing journey that Central American migrants make across Mexico, so they can then cross (illegally) into the United States to find family and work. I voiced the worker Hector Valdez, who is remarkably low-key about the prospect of being kidnapped by gangsters; he’s introduced at 2:00. And who’s that we hear near the end of segment? Stacey herself!

The entire series is worth a listen (part two, part three), as well as Beaubien’s reporter’s notebook post:

I’d dozed off on what the local media have dubbed “the Highway of Death.” I jerk awake and immediately feel for my backpack on the floor of the bus. My bag is still there.

The bus has come to a sudden stop and several young men are coming up the front stairs. A few weeks earlier, hijackers, allegedly from the Zetas cartel, had been boarding buses on this road, pulling off migrants, bashing their heads in with blunt instruments and dumping them in mass graves.

The young men are yelling and for a second I’m trying to make out what language it is. This often happens to me when I’m traveling. I wake up on an airplane, I look up from a cup of coffee in a restaurant and I have no idea where I am.

It’s Spanish. They’re speaking Spanish and they’re selling snacks. Everything is OK. I fumble in my pocket for some coins to buy one of the sandwiches wrapped in foil that they promise are very hot and very tasty.

So before I whacked this Paulownia tomentosa to the ground I thought I would get some photographic evidence. Leta helped out, but balked at doing a fan dance with the dinner plate-sized leaves. More fool I for not identifying the tree (known as Princess-Tree or Blue Catalpa) last year and letting it overwinter. There are several other weeds along this side of the house that I need to deal with, as I clean up after the overgrown juniper that was damaged by recent winters, but one thing at a time, please. Besides, I rather like Pokeweed.

How did it get here? Well, Sibley describes the fruit as “pods persistent, brownish, splitting open to release hundreds of seeds.”

The monthly newspaper of a certain advocacy organization for which I only recently became eligible for membership is generally forgettable (at best), especially when it comes to “Do you remember this?” roundups. But the staff box callouts for a web site feature brought back to mind a game that I’d forgotten that I remembered: Cootie. I had a set when I was a wee one, and the reason that I don’t remember the rules is that they’re so simple they hardly exist: roll a die until you collect all the plastic body parts for your cootie bug. Sort of like playing Hangman with less skill required. I recall putting the critter together, Mr. Potato Head without any possibility of phenotypic variation, but I don’t think my parents or anybody else ever played with me. There were limits, even in 1961, to an adult’s capacity for boredom just to entertain a child.

A small armload of books from last week’s Stone Ridge Used Book Sale plumps the shelf. The Dylan Thomas has a title that has long intrigued me, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and for two beans, how could I say no? TriQuarterly #137 is, alas, the last print volume for this alma mater literary publication. The Rachel Carson is a loaner from Leta, residual from last October’s project.

Louisa Lim and me, together at last. I voiced Peking University sociologist Zheng Yefu for Lim’s piece about new sumptuary laws in China restricting language on billboards. 2:50 is the lucky time point again.