theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
I found a couple of performance spaces in the Smith Center that I hadn’t been to before, unless I’ve lost track.
The year-end roundup posts continue. Overnight stays in 2013:
2012’s list. 2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.
The backlog has been reduced a bit, but there are new titles here (thanks, Leta!) and some more volumes on order. The play collections are probably the longest-tenured books on the shelf. I started the Kate Atkinson, hence I removed the dust jacket, but I only got about three pages in before something else tempted me more.
I’m in the back with Patrick.
Leta and I spent most of our time at Longwood Gardens in the controlled environment of the conservatory, while the rain washed the outside. One of the destination plants of the conservatory is this single individual bread palm, Encephalartos woodii; the species is extirpated in the wild. Each of this cycad’s bright orange cones, each larger than a loaf of bread, is a pollen strobilus.
My copy of Chris Ware’s Building Stories has been sitting on a shelf—well, lying on the floor propped up against a shelf—for months, too pretty to unwrap. This afternoon I finally had some time to clear off the coffee table and take a few snaps of the unpackaging.
Also solved today: I made horizontal space on a shelf where I can store the book once I’ve finished devouring it.
I like big books and I cannot lie.
Just as I act on stage “for fun,” and I’m reluctant to engage in paid work because of the baggage that comes with it, I’m perfectly happy to record textbooks on a volunteer basis. But I think it’s great that the growing audio books industry is keeping some professional actors afloat.
Entertainer’s Secret? Gotta get me some of that stuff.
I’m back with NPR for a short gig, working on- and off-site. As Scott Simon reported this morning, NPR is relocating from its Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. building (really two buildings stitched together: on the 5th floor, there’s a two-stair difference between the blunt end of the building and the Tiny Desk Concerts venue at the “skinny end” where Bob Boilen sits) to new digs on North Capitol Street.
The move is happening in phases; this posting in the elevator keeps everyone informed of the GO dates.
My consultant’s badge for my new client has this awesome legend on the back:
All Authorities are requested to cooperate in facilitating the movement and emergency mission of this bearer.
Well, “awesome” isn’t quite the word for it. “Humbling” is better: a reminder that some people work at a job where they don’t get to come home every night to a warm bed and a roof.
Now that I’m not commuting downtown, the backlog is building. The read-me shelf has spilled over onto one of the DVD shelves.
Hmm. I see a lot of these titles are still on the shelf from last time.
As I was looking for pics of Mom, I found pictures of the Austin America (the one that I crunched). Something in the chronology is wrong here: the date on the edge of the print says 1970, but I would have been only 14 then. Did we really shoot pictures of me behind the wheel when I wasn’t legal? Also, I’m not sure when it was that we lived in the house on Roy Avenue, which you can see in the background. Was it 1970 or 1972? I remember hanging out in the semi-finished attic, reading David Copperfield for class, so maybe it was 1970.
I visited a couple of new DC-area performance venues this past year. The conference room at MITRE is stretching the category a little bit.
Yet more traveling this year, visiting family and plants. Overnight stays in 2012:
2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.
Our last stop in the Dayton metro was at Oakwood High School, a rather fine institution from which I was graduated in 1974.
There is nothing new under the sun, and a young person with access to an automobile will find a way to use it for mischief. And so it came to pass in those days, that after an evening with my nerdy friends of playing Risk and usually intoxicated by nothing stronger than diet soda, we would find ourselves on the streets of this lovely, leafy suburb in my mother’s blue Austin America (an underpowered MG with a singularly peculiar suspension system).
And lo, the people saw that the faculty parking lot along the south side of the high school gave onto a sidewalk with no curb.
And my friends said, behold, the other end of this sidewalk ends with a curb cut on the Avenue of Schantz, near the playing fields. Let us rejoice in this attractive nuisance, and drive your vehicle from the parking lot directly into the Avenue of Schantz, without impediment.
And so it was done, and we drove the America down the sidewalk (think of Jason Bourne being chased through the streets of Paris in his Mini Cooper, but at vastly reduced speeds), and it was good.
That is, until some obstacle loomed on the passenger’s side and put a big crimp in the door. (Was it that big red oak that you can see in the first image? I seem to remember some sort of stanchion.) I achieved a new level of creative prevarication when I explained to my mother that the damage wasn’t my fault. (It was only last year, when she was zonked on hospital sedatives, that I came clean to my mother. But I think she’d figured it out a long time ago.)
Mom drove the America for another year or so, into my first year of college at least, until the hydrolastic suspension leaked and the car developed a severe list.
In any event, the sidewalk connection and the curb cut are still there, almost 40 years later. The ADA-compliant bumpy bits are the only change.
We took a quick drive through Dayton on our way back home to D.C. I spotted this building-mounted street name sign in the Oregon district. Back in the 70s when I lived in the metro, the Oregon was ju-ust starting to be revived and redeveloped. That might have been the first time I hear the word “gentrification” (though perhaps it was when I arrived here and heard what was going on on Capitol Hill). At any, the neighborhood looks rather spruce these days.