Wildlife and wind power in California

The California Energy Commission has adopted a set of voluntary guidelines for wind power projects in the state, as reported by The Birding Community E-Bulletin. The document’s abstract:

These voluntary guidelines provide information to help reduce impacts to birds and bats
from new development or repowering of wind energy projects in California. They
include recommendations on preliminary screening of proposed wind energy project
sites; pre-permitting study design and methods; assessing direct, indirect, and
cumulative impacts to birds and bats in accordance with state and federal laws;
developing avoidance and minimization measures; establishing appropriate
compensatory mitigation; and post-construction operations monitoring, analysis, and
reporting methods.

The guidelines were developed in conjunction with the California Department of Fish and Game.

The cows and chickens are goin’ to the dickens

We’re two weeks into the run now. Audiences have been packed and enthusiastic. Some of the messages that Sue has sent our way from happy watchers have been gushing.

Lots of fun technical elements in this show. Bea and Jerry have dressed the newsstand with a panoply of old cheesy pulp magazines salvaged from eBay—racing and turf news, turbo-charged action stories, comic books, pinups and confessionals (“Why I Am a Prostitute” is one cover story). The only bad thing, for us, is that the mags are stapled closed onto the set piece. I’ll never get to read that interview with Ava Gardner.

I have a great costume of olive greens and golds, incorporating a hat that I bought for myself about 15 years ago, a bad-plaid sports jacket that somebody’s ex-husband once wore, a 40s-era psychedelic necktie with still more greens and golds, and pants (built by Anita and Maggie) with a waist that sits under my rib cage.

The orchestra sounds great. Brian has found five woodwinds (including bari sax!), five brass, acoustic bass, drums, and is filling in the rest with keyboards. I particularly like the bit in the overture where the “A Bushel and a Peck” theme is introduced with piccolo and bass clarinet.

I’m liking my fight choreography in the “Havana” sequence: Dana clocks me with a serving tray, twice, and I finish with a back fall (make your legs into a figure 4, land on your well-padded tushie, and roll the rest of the way down). The only hard part, oddly, is getting up again. Sometime during tech week I pulled a muscle in my chest trying to bounce up too quickly in the following blackout. In fact, I’m nursing a couple more dings and scrapes from this show (one of them definitely my fault) and the rest of the cast and crew seem mildly cursed as well.

I love the grammar lesson that Sarah gives to Adelaide at the end of the intro to “Marry the Man Today:”

ADELAIDE: Now doesn’t that kind of apply
To you and I?

SARAH: You and me.

I think the best thing about doing an ensemble role like this is that I’m so focused on doing my own work well (cleaning up fuzzy bits of choreography; trying to make the inner harmony I have in “Oldest Established” audible) that I’m not wasting energy worrying about what everyone else is doing. Well, that’s mostly true.

Sometimes, just before curtain, I will get all New Age and lay my hand on the floor to pick up some positivity. I think about the many times I have performed in this theater, all the way back to The Foreigner in 1989 when each night I would step blind into a trap door, with Mary Jane’s hand guiding my foot down. So last Saturday night, I placed my palm on the wooden stage deck (instead of the concrete around the edge, like I usually do) and I could the vibrations in the boards as the rest of the cast was moving into place. I felt bubbles of anticipatory energy, just the way Leta describes it.

I’m having a good time.

Memorable

John Dean generally puts his biography subject, President Warren Harding, in the best possible light, but he does quote this assessment by H. L. Mencken of Harding’s speechmaking:

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm… of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and rumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. (p. 73, quoted from Paul Boller, Jr., Presidential Anecdotes)

On the road

Google Maps’ search features have become more forgiving, so that a state-by-state search for thoroughfares named Gorsline turns up usable results:

Each one is a concrete tracing of someplace that my ancestors and family have passed through.

Summer Garden

Naturally, Miss Dawn Astra reciprocates Ambrose Hammer’s love, because all the time she is Julius Smung’s sweet pea, the best she ever gets is a free taxi ride now and then, and Julius seldom speaks of her as an artist. To tell the truth, Julius is always beefing about her playing the part of a strip dancer, as he claims it takes her too long to get her clothes back on when he is waiting outside the Summer Garden for her, and the chances are Ambrose Hammer is a pleasant change to Miss Dawn Astra as Ambrose does not care if she never gets her clothes on.

—Damon Runyon, “So You Won’t Talk!”

The various venues known as the Winter Garden are well-known in New York, but I had never heard of the Summer Garden. So far, all I’ve been able to turn up is a 19th-century theater also known as Wallack’s Theatre. Not much on dates of operation, but by 1937 the repertory at Wallack’s seems to have moved downscale.

Guys and Dolls update

It’s been a busy, busy couple of weeks, but we are comfortably moved into the theater and we’re on a glide path to opening on Friday. Crew are working out the logistics of scene shifting. Here’s hoping all works out with the operational fountain that is planned for the “If I Were a Bell” scene, which is my surprise favorite, due to the tipsy abandon that Molly brings to the song.

I’m really enjoying working with Brian as a music director. A lot of the things he does (like actually conducting warm-ups, so that we will focus on following him; and his harmony exercises) I’m sure are standard practice, but they’re new to me. He has a dead-calm demeanor, which can make him hard to read sometimes, but placidity during tech week is a valuable commodity. Along with my keyboard and iPod, a really helpful tool has been MTI’s RehearScore, a MIDI-based rehearsal pianist who never gets tired. I’ve been looking forward to music rehearsals, because the music for my four songs (“Luck Be a Lady,” “The Oldest Established…,” “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and the reprise of “Guys and Dolls”), for the most part, has been easier to learn than the choreography that goes with it.

It’s no surprise that I am one of the slower learners at choreography. Choreographer Ivan and assistant Katherine have been generous and flexible as they take a bunch of middle-aged white guys and make them look like spicy salsa dancers and jitterbugs. Building a dance, in my sparse experience, is more like fashion than anything else: it’s about trying things, piling on things, and then editing them down. From the outside, it looks like the choreographer is “making it up as he goes along.” All this can be unnerving to us short-bus dancers in the back row. When you’re struggling to execute something, it’s hard to hear, “okay, that isn’t working, let’s try this” or “there’s a little dead spot here, so we need to add something…” Now in a scene, if a director were to say, “it’s not reading, try it sarcastic… now try it tragic,” I would think nothing of it. That’s the work. But remembering which way Ivan’s “Happy Arms” move goes, and expressing something with my face at the same time, is another thing. Section leaders Chris and Mark have also been very helpful in getting us through the dances.

Most days at the rehearsal hall, my practice clothes have been a fedora, t-shirt, hiking shorts, and shiny black FBI-shoes oxfords. I look like a hapless tourist. But I am long past caring about that.

Nothing Sacred

Firebelly Productions takes on George F. Walker’s Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s novel from 1862. Walker, Canadian taxi driver turned incendiary playwright, is not one to be pigeonholed, and nothing bespeaks this fact like the current offering, a tragi-comic Russian study of generation gaps and social revolution.

The central figure of the story is Yevgeny Bazarov, medical student and nihilist, played with ample quantities of supercilious arrogance by Jon Townson, who brings a whiff of Kevin Kline to the role. Bazarov befriends Arkady (Patrick Flannery), son of Nikolai Kirsanov (amiable Charles St. Charles), a freedman on whose farm most of the action takes place. Arkady, newly graduated from university and still somewhat impressionable, is seeking a path through life different from that of his father and his Europe-infatuated uncle Pavel (Dave Bobb). Unfolding events lead to declarations of love inappropriate, foolish gestures in defense of honor, much fumbling and fighting (most of it in the moonlight), and a death by stupid accident.

Among the supporting cast, Scott Zeigler makes his mark as Viktor Sitnikov, a fawning innkeeper’s son and friend to Arkady and Yevgeny with a keening laugh, maybe the most annoying sound in literature; and Cliff Williams III as Sergei, bodyguard to the widow Anna Odintsova (Kelley Slagle)—Sergei is a Clydesdale of a man with a comic susceptibility to folk tales of wood demons.

Director Robb Hunter keeps the action moving at a good clip, but sometimes doesn’t allow moments the time they need. For instance, Nikolai’s hesitations and self-interruptions seem forced and unmotivated. On the other hand, Hunter’s device of using title cards to help us keep track of scenes is well-handled (and indispensable in the modest playing area at Theatre on the Run) and is nicely reprised at the curtain call.

To from whence it came

Sources are ambiguous about the precise meaning of Hollanderize in Adelaide’s line from “Take Back Your Mink”:

So take back your mink
To from whence it came
And tell them to Hollanderize it
For some other dame.

While most indicate that it is simple cleaning and reconditioning, Seymour Kass, in a 1992 letter to the New York Times and speaking from a position of authority, points to a subtler connotation:

The common meaning of Hollanderize, when I worked as a furrier for my father (“King of the Muskrats”) in the 1940’s and 50’s, was to dye the cheaper, plebeian, widely worn muskrat coats to give them the look of mink.

It’s all the more confusing, because when the verses are repeated in the fast, dance section of the song, the Girls sing instead “and go shorten the sleeves/For somebody else.”