Tripping Wires

Brandon Gentry looks back on the production of a mighty fine CD from 1994, ¡Simpatico! by local band Velocity Girl. Alas, there are no quotes from singer Sarah Shannon in the piece.

Coalescing at the University of Maryland in the late ’80s, Velocity Girl specialized in winningly sharp indie pop steeped in resonant major chord melodies and spry, agile rhythms…. Focused and concise, the best Velocity Girl is some of the best indie rock D.C. – or any other city – can claim to have produced in the last 20 years.

News from the park

Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park:

  • The crayfish population is up! Resource Management Intern Alice Millikin writes that water quality monitors as well as turtle and frog trappers reported increases. The nets used for water quality monitoring caught 28 individuals, more than the catch for the past five years combined.
  • King Rails (Rallus elegans) are back! Park Manager Kevin Munroe says in his message that a parent with four or five chicks was seen at least three times in the period 19 July to 27 July. Higher water levels, a habitat mosaic created by muskrats and beavers, and increased crayfish numbers are responsible.
  • Construction for the wetland restoration project has been delayed again. A dam breach analysis was recently completed, with the anticipation that the project can be qualified as low-hazard, and hence move through the permitting process. A 2010 date for construction is still possible, but 2011 is more likely.
  • Also in 2010-11, the surface and toe boards of the boardwalk will be replaced, this time with recycled plastic materials. Lower maintenance, and a greener message. The project is funded by the 2008 bond referendum.

Three on a match

Aunt Taki showed some of the diaries that she has been keeping since forever. Her secrets are safe from me, as well as her kids, since she keeps them in Japanese. She usually uses a book with a cool set up: entries for three years on each daily page—sort of the hardcopy equivalent of blog entries that link to this time last year. She gets her books from Hakubunkan Shinsha (alas, no English page to link to).

Takeaways: 4

making connectionsSome snaps from my recent trip to Sacramento and suburbs to move my mother into her new place. Mom wasn’t fazed by using my mobile to leave a message for her friend Priscilla.


making breakfastDoing what she loves doing (and is dang good at), my aunt Takeko (my mother’s brother’s widow), cutting melon for breakfast. At the end of the week, I used Taki’s guest room as an operations base. She’s camera-shy, like me.


mission accomplishedThis was the end state to which Rita and I worked for six days: an empty apartment, carpets vacuumed but hardly blot-free.


sic transitIn the neighborhood, the old Tower Records store on Watt will reopen as a thrift store next month. The Gottschalks down the block is also empty. But the staff at the Starbucks just north of here are the friendliest I’ve ever found.

The right direction

James Hohmann visits WMATA’s sign shop.

button for elevatorDiscreetly, nothing is said about the hand-made annotations to the elevator call buttons that are meant to keep us from pushing the emergency notifier when all we want to do is get to the train mezzanine.

Technological developments continue to change the way signs are made and installed…. In the… not-so-distant past, workers meticulously copied the wording from a sign they needed to replace. Now they snap digital photos.

Bang

One evening, after a week or two of rehearsals [of Our Mrs. McChesney], I was leaving the theater rather late, when most of the company had gone. George Hobart and I had had some changes to discuss. [Augustus] Thomas was still there. Near the door I called out across the stage, “Good night, Mr. Thomas.”

He glanced up. “Ah—good night, Miss—uh—uh—mmmm——”

“Ferber,” I prompted him, icily. He had seen me every day for weeks.

“Yes, yes, of course, Ferber. Ferber. I never can remember these Jewish names.”

“That must have been difficult for you when Mr. Frohman was producing your plays,” I retorted, by some lucky stroke; and slammed the door. Nothing slams more satisfactorily than a good heavy metal stage door.

—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, p. 218

Takeaways: 3

How to clear out a one-bedroom apartment — with fifteen years of loving/living in it — in only six days: it helps to have worked a few theater strikes. Just because a 6-inch chunk of 2×4 with two screws broken off in it is a perfectly good piece of lumber is not a good reason to keep it.

It’s also essential that you get yourself a cousin who is an absolute mensch. I couldn’t have done it without you, Rita.

Silver Line progress report: 6

first scrapesConstruction has begun all along the Phase I corridor of Metro’s Silver Line. I paused to take a snap of the early activity at the site of the Wiehle Avenue station (and terminus, pending completion of Phase II). This is the view looking west, with the Reston Parkway interchange visible in the distance.

mystery weedflowers and beesAnd then, at the foot of the overpass, I came across a bizarre flowering vine that I’d noticed once before in similar disturbed, suburban habitat. My Niering and Olmstead field guide IDs this as Passionflower (Passiflora sp.), with its ten tepals and five stamens. The bumblebees seem to like it.

Upcoming: 16

Reston Community Players and the Reston Community Center will participate in the mass premiere of The Laramie Project—10 Years Later on October 12. Plans are still being put together (as well as the script!), but the goal is for 100 regional, university, and community theaters to present the piece as a cross-country reading on the eleventh anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2009

Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown. A smartly-written, 90-minute two-hander for Anthony Crane (playing the affable “goof-bag” husband Adam) and Joey Parsons (as Jan, his wound-too-tight wife), this sweet-bitter drama plays out in the course of one evening and night in their professionally-polished Brooklyn kitchen. A secret is revealed, and in the ensuing violence and passions, the tidy ménage becomes disheveled, serving as a metaphor for the state of their relationship. The play explores the contradictions in the things we want out of a marriage. A hat tip to Robert Klingelhoefer’s set design and dressing: we hope those rice bowls are on the table at CATF’s next yard sale.

Joey Parsons’ other part in the festival is in the one-woman Dear Sara Jane, by Victor Lodato, a fantasia on our culture’s way of violence and the dissociation of personality—with musical interludes. A Sara Jane, a fragile neurotic bride of a soldier fighting overseas, Parsons offers an intriguing master gesture: she pumps both fists up, ear-level, in what her character must imagine is a cheerleading kind of gesture, but it looks to us that she is warding off a blow. Sight lines in the Center for Contemporary Art and Theater, which the festival has used for its confessional, direct-address monologues like this one, are sometimes an issue.

Meanwhile, Anthony Crane takes on the role of Paul Zara in Beau Willimon’s Farragut North, a internet-age drama of hardball politics at the time of the Iowa caucuses. The show follows Stephen Bellamy (played by Eric Sheffer Stevens), young and idealistic press secretary to one of the candidates. Stevens, striding determinedly through the snow in a camel-hair overcoat, bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Murphy in Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88. Stevens’ Bellamy is pinched between expediency and loyalty, in a milieu of double-dealing where “You can trust me” can be a laugh line. The production is propelled by David Remedios’ pulsing soundscapes that cover scene changes. asupporting work by Anderson Matthews as a genial dirty trickster of a campaign manager, and John Lescault in a cleverly-rendered cameo.

The History of Light, by Eisa Davis, follows two unhappy stories of mixed-race love, from the 1960s and the 1990s, while also tracking a young woman’s (Amelia Workman as Soph) rebonding with her estranged father (returning favorite David Emerson Toney). Perhaps there’s too much story going on here. Time periods and recollections intersect with dreamlike haze. The most effective scene comes when Workman appears as Vietnam-era shock comedian Dick Gregory, who reverse-heckles a black-white couple in his audience.

The festival is rounded out by Steven Dietz’s riff on conspiracy theorists and the women who love them, Yankee Tavern.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Yankee Tavern, by Steven Dietz, directed by Liesl Tommy
  • Fifty Words, by Michael Weller, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Farragut North, by Beau Willimon, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Dear Sara Jane, by Victor Lodato, directed by Ed Herendeen (world premiere)
  • The History of Light, by Eisa Davis, directed by Liesl Tommy (world premiere)