Maples are leafing out, offering some shade in the unseasonal midsummer heat. Frogs are everywhere, including a pair of Green Treefrogs (Hyla cinerea) resting inside our one plastic nest box. At least something is getting some value from it. New arrivals seen/heard/reported: Yellowlegs sp., Solitary Sandpiper, Great Crested Flycatcher, White-eyed Vireo, Red-eyed Vireo, Yellow Warbler, Prothonotary Warbler (a singing male and a no-bins look at a foraging female), Ovenbird. A Tufted Titmouse is squatting in box #5 again.
That would be me
As if I needed one more profile page: David Gorsline has a Google Profile.
Silver Line progress report: 5
Michael Perkins for GGW reproduces the public art under review for the new Silver Line stations.
And another one down
Yahoo! will be shuttering GeoCities later this year. We’ll have to decide what to do with Coffee Contact; it’s not like we’ve been actively maintaining the site, but it would be good to keep the content available online somewhere. I wonder whether I’ll be able to keep my .geo-suffixed Yahoo! user ID.
Another one down
From Missy Frederick for the Washington Business Journal comes the unhappy news that Timberlake’s restaurant in Dupont Circle will be closing at the end of May, to reopen under a new identity. Timberlake’s was one of my favorite places to get brunch and a glass of wine before a 1:30 movie on Saturday afternoon—at least, back in the days when I could knock back a frittata without thinking about the cholesterol impact. The decor was nothing special, garden variety wooden booths and pub furnishings: the place was just dang comfortable.
All My Sons: an update: 1
We did a stumble-through of Act I of All My Sons outdoors in the Saturday sun, which is appropriate as that act takes place on a hot weekend morning. Then we moved indoors to get through most of Act II. I/we haven’t worked much on the top of Act III, which is actually OK because I haven’t learned the words yet.
One of the advantages of working with Providence is that the company has generous access to the performance space in the James Lee Community Center for rehearsals and set building. Indeed, we start building set, in place, next weekend, five weeks in advance of opening. Every performance space has its good points and bad. The stage at the Lee is a conventional proscenium, I’m guessing twenty feet by fifteen; but the wing space is extremely shallow (about three to four feet) and there is no fly space: all the curtains only travel. Dressing and green rooms are off left; since the white cyc lies nearly flat against the upstage wall, I don’t yet know how actors get into place for stage right entrances. Something else I noticed: there’s no fire curtain.
At the park: 26
New cattail growth is ankle-high, and the understory in the forest is starting to green up. We had our first box hatch out on Friday (according to reports from a photographer), and the hen and thirteen ducklings put on a show skittering about the main pond this morning. Unfortunately, we’ve also had our first nest failure, as box #3 has been predated and the remaining two eggs abandoned. Common Yellowthroats and American Coots made their first appearance this week; Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers were numerous. Myra found a Meadow Vole (Microtus pennsylvanicus) feeding by the boardwalk.
In past weeks, at least one Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola) has been audible and fleetingly visible, and a passing-through Sora (Pozana carolina) was reported the week of March 29. Jennifer spotted a Beaver on that trip, too. Common Snipe and Great Egrets have also arrived.
Not for unsteady souls
Happy 90th to living national treasure Merce Cunningham. Alastair Macaulay’s piece for the Times provides the headline for this post. I saw Cunningham with his company in the Eisenhower in 2004.
Round Arch Style
Earlier this week a train malfunction led to my early exit from Metro at McPherson Square, and a fortunate exit it was, for my path took me within a block of a downtown building I’d never noticed before, at 13th and K: the Franklin School, a red brick rundbogenstil confection from 1869 designed by Adolf Cluss.
Now and there
Kent Boese has started a swell series of Then and now posts for Greater Greater Washington.
No applicable category
Very nice profile of sui generis cartoonist Lynda Barry by Christopher Borrelli for the Chicago Tribune. The richest praise is from fellow cartoonist Chris Ware:
“…just as Charles Schultz created the first sympathetic cartoon character in Charlie Brown, Lynda was the first cartoonist to write fiction from the inside out—she trusted herself to close her eyes and dive down within herself and see what she came up with. We’d still be trying to find ways into stories with pictures if she hadn’t.”
I read with dismay that Barry has discontinued her weekly Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but then again the local free weekly stopped running decent cartoons before that.
Antebellum
A young and naive Jewish woman of Atlanta, looking forward to seeing the world premiere of Gone with the Wind with her husband, is accosted by a mysterious black woman; while the commandant of a mid-1930s German prison camp maintains a peculiar relationship with one of his black prisoners: the links between these two stories drive the action of Robert O’Hara’s play, one that is not altogether satisfying and at times overcome by didacticism. The connection that is eventually revealed between two of the characters is not backed up by some necessary physical and character choices. On the positive side of the ledger, each of the cast of five delivers committed performances in challenging roles that require, by turns, physical intimacy and vulnerability and raging power.
- Antebellum, by Robert O’Hara, directed by Chay Yew, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Good on ya: 5
Congratulations to the Columbus Blue Jackets–the expansion team with the the peculiar logo that incorporates the Ohio state flag and the demure name that is a nod to the state’s Civil War history–for making their first Stanley Cup Playoffs.
So, what’s your next show?
Board members and play selection committees, consider Terry Teachout’s Top 15 pre-1970 (pre-Company) American musical comedies.
As far as most theatergoers are concerned, modern musical comedy starts with Oklahoma! [Rogers and Hammerstein, 1943] It’s effective to the point of infallibility—even amateurs can make it work—though the 1955 wide-screen film version is more than a little bit overblown. If you know only the movie, you’ll be surprised by how much more touching Oklahoma! is on stage.
Midmost
Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.
Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.
With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compete with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.
—Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chap. 19