Last night I cleaned the shelves in my room for the first time since I moved here. You may remember last year when I re-energized a whole corner of my room by moving the shelves around and putting a chair in. But even then I didn't clean the shelves, I just moved them. So last night I finally took everything off the shelves and apprehended the dust bunnies and re-distributed all the detritus found there... some to the trash can, some to other rightful positions. I took my stereo equipment and the speakers and put them in the dining room, where I've been keeping the LPs anyway, so maybe now I'll use it more. The CD player, perhaps from sheer disuse, has stopped playing CDs. But the turntable, tape player, and receiver work fine... poor old dinosaurs that they are...
The thing about cleaning is, as soon as you start doing it, you keep finding more things that need to be cleaned. Your eyes and nose become dirt sensors. And everything is covered in dust. It's a good thing really, because my closet really does need a lot of work, and the kitchen blinds over the sink, I noticed last night, are coated in dust. Blet. Dust is weird and disgusting.
Another thing I did last night: dusted off my old LPs and decided to display a few of them in my room on a ledge over the window:
Rickie Lee Jones, "Girl At Her Volcano"
Crowded House (first one)
Prince, "Around the World in a Day"
Elvis Costello, "Imperial Bedroom"
Cyndi Lauper, "She's So Unusual"
ABC, "The Lexicon of Love"
And at the end, the triple LP of Joanna Newsom's new album, "Have One On Me."
Admittedly, part of my cleaning frenzy has to do with my friend Dave, who is coming to stay with us for a few weeks in December while he performs his one-man show STRAIGHT at AtticRep here in town.
I need to clean the fan blades today.
On Sunday I attended the 20th annual Alamo Theatre Arts Council Globe Awards Gala, which is San Antonio's little version of the Tonys. I have decided that the gala is a study in the Ridiculous and the Sublime. There is always something great and wonderful (my high school drama teacher Sam Gilliam's fantastic introduction of this year's lifetime achievement honorees Bill and Frances Swinney), and there is always something horrendous (a performance from a local production of Sweeney Todd). You just have to be able to stomach both extremes. I was given an award for playing Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and whether that's sublime or ridiculous is not up to me to judge.
