Squeezing the melons

Adelaide and Sarah summon the names of a few defunct retailers in “Marry the Man Today.” Adelaide’s intro begins:

At Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s,
A lesson I’ve been taught:
You can’t get alterations
On a dress you haven’t bought.

Saks Fifth Avenue (founded by Andrew Saks, and hence no apostrophe) is still with us, after the usual bewildering chain of ownership exchanges. I didn’t know that Saks had merged with Gimbel’s by 1923, but maintaining its distinct branding. Middlebrow Gimbel’s, of course, has passed on. When I was in graduate school, I bought a great sweater from the downtown Philadelphia store.

The Philadelphia institution founded by John Wanamaker, now merged into Hecht’s and then Macy’s, once had a million-square-foot flagship store in New York at 770 Broadway. Klein’s would be S. Klein, On the Square, also long gone from Union Square.

But the real poser comes in the first bridge:

ADELAIDE: Slowly introduce him to the better things, respectable, conservative, and clean.
SARAH: Reader’s Digest!
ADELAIDE: Guy Lombardo!
SARAH: Rogers Peet!
ADELAIDE: Golf!
SARAH: Galoshes!
ADELAIDE: Ovaltine!

As punctuated in the libretto, Rogers Peet sounds like the name of a self-help guru from the first half of the century, someone like Norman Vincent Peale, Émile Coué, or Dale Carnegie. But it turns out to designate the merger of the businesses of men’s clothiers Marvin N. Rogers and Charles Bostwick Peet. Rogers, Peet & Co. was a nineteenth-century retailing innovator, introducing tags that identified fabric content and price (no haggling!) and a money-back guarantee. The final Rogers, Peet store closed in the mid-1980s.

Day off

Somewhat unconventionally, today is a company holiday for me. I made a decision not to schedule anything for today: no checklists, no appointments (except that Leta is coming over after her audition), no chores, no alarms. My bathroom needs cleaning, my to-do list is as long as it ever is, a big chunk of my files hosted at Comcast got clobbered in a recent migration and I will have to restore them, I have message from the resource manager at the Park that I haven’t answered for two weeks, but for today, I Don’t Give a Darn. I choose to celebrate that the backlog pile of magazine stories that must be read is empty, that my WATCH assignments for the year are complete, that I have a month of free evenings ahead of me. I think I’ll even skip reading blogroll today.

Still squeezing

So I hit the souvenir shop row along the the block with Ford’s Theater looking for a replacement squeeze coin purse, as the one I had from New York was getting hard and cracked. In the third shop, I found what I needed—only a choice of two colors, the popularity of this item must be sagging greatly. I squeezed it open, expecting to see some sort of “made someplace else” mark, but there was the old familiar pentagonal QUIKOIN U.S.A. mark.

Program inserts

We were called for a pickup rehearsal yesterday evening in preparation for this weekend’s run. It was a refreshingly productive hour. We reviewed only choreography, so we didn’t waste time clowning through the dialog (alas, a practice all too common in the amateur ranks). Really the point of the evening was to work Ivan into the show, as he is substituting for both Billy and Zach these next three performances. It’s not uncommon to see substitutes in the chorus/ensemble. Indeed, Kelly went on for Christy our opening weekend. A lot of the community theaters around here run four weekends for a musical, and it’s hard to keep a group of eight or twelve decent singer-dancers together for that long. It is certainly the case that the orchestra roster will vary weekend to weekend and night to night. A solo line that you’re used to hearing from a violin or trumpet one evening will come from the keyboard. There are directors who make a signature of this. RCP’s production of Barnum is storied for its who’s-on-tonight cast.

I’ve also seen substitutes in speaking roles, and in straight plays as opposed to musicals. It’s an interesting challenge to work with the different energy that you get from an actor that you’re less accustomed to.

I played Dr. Pinch in a production of The Comedy of Errors about ten years ago. The design concept for the show was sort of a comic-book post-modern Anything Can Happen Day. The multi-colored set incorporated a kid’s slide. In the world of this show, anachronism was a good thing. And there was a chorus of about eight without speaking parts; they were there to give some depth to the picture, and to participate in sight gags like a twelve-man double-take. So naturally the markeup of the chorus was fluid.

Dr. Pinch’s big scene is with Antipholus of Ephesus, whom he thinks is mad. Pinch tries to drive out the evil spirits:

I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!

Now David, my director, sometime during rehearsals gave me a battery-operated fan and said, “Use this for the exorcism, if you like, or find something else goofy.” And this eventually turned into “what is Gorsline going to pull out of his kit bag tonight?” I made an agreement with Angus (playing Antipholus) that he would see everything at least once during tech week, but once we were up, I would pull things out more or less at random. I had a rain stick, and a soap bubble pipe, and a couple of other things along with the mini-fan.

(This was not unlike the arrangement that Terry has with our director of The Foreigner that his Charlie would find a different “translation” of Froggy’s “Gomo rim jambo” every night.)

So, it must have been second weekend, and a young lady from England—Nikki I think her name was, first nanny that I met who wore Doc Marten’s—joined the chorus for her first performance. She told me afterwards that it was all she could do to keep her composure when I pulled out a hand-cranked egg beater and waved it over Antipholus like a security screener’s baton.

More is the new more

Scott Gilbertson explains HugeURL.

Update: It turns out that I’m weak. I could not resist requesting http://www.hugeurl.com/?NTM3ZjA4MTNmZjU3MGNjN2U3ZWY5OTIyNTM4
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as a synonym for http://www.ahoneyofananklet.com/.

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.