attachment

yesterday was really beautiful here in San An. there was a blue sky with scattered multi-shaped clouds. as i embarked on my walk, a few drops of rain fell. i stopped and thought about turning back and waiting, but it seemed the rain was light, so i continued. 

across the street from my apartments there is an old road which was destroyed by flooding years ago. the road has been closed for a long time, which has made it a good place to walk. yesterday i saw that the road has been changed into a greenway path, a sort of walking/jogging trail complete with mileage markers, paved roads and signs describing the wildlife of the area. it's very nice, and one no longer feels sketchy about walking there. though there are more people on the path, and therefore less privacy or sense of knowing about something no one else knows about, it seems safer and is actually quite beautiful.

i had set my iPod to shuffle on the beatles. when i reached a point in the path where i was ready to turn around, the music stopped. i looked at the screen and it appeared that the next song was about to start... but it never did. i tried several methods of revival, did everything short of giving it mouth-to-mouth, and now it shows me a big red X when i try to start it. 

i am fully aware that we must not become attached to objects in this life, but music is different... isn't it? is it impossibly perverse that i gain so much pleasure from having my entire music collection in my pocket, so perverse that i must be struck down and tuneless due to a faulty piece of equipment?

never fear, i'm being histrionic on purpose. i am going to have to figure something out, though. i'm thinking i'll take it to the apple store tomorrow and see what they say.

in other news... i'm in another play. TRUE WEST opens this thursday. today's our tech day. things are going well enough, though i am at that predictable place of panic which always occurs several days before opening. if you live in san antonio, well, SEE it! 

a lot of thanks to be had

happy thanksgiving.

i am well. the play called booth was relatively well-received, i worked hard on it and even though there were some criticisms of the script itself (mostly that it was too long), i got a lot of postive feedback and felt that i learned quite a lot along the way.

as i throw a piece of wadded raffia for my cat to catch mid-air and bring back to me, i am most thankful for my own unique family-- freda (the cat), and my newly 32 year-old hubby with whom i have been together for six months as of the 29th of this month. i am very thankful indeed.

now i'm working on sam shepard's play called true west. it is at least as intense as booth was, perhaps more intense, and has been a lot of fun. tonight siggi was there and he took photos of us. not sure where they'll be posted, but check back here.

double bagging

today the checker at walgreens forced me to take TWO plastic bags for my "merchandise."

she was an older woman, probably in her mid to late seventies. her hair was swoopy and curled and i had observed her helping others ahead of me in line.

"the handles just broke on that bag!" she said, referring to a bag of "merchandise" she had prepared for a customer. then she said, "scary!"

so when i arrived to the front of the line, with a box of Dots, a stack of blank cds, and a bottle of shampoo and conditioner (all held comfortably in two hands), she double-bagged me!

"one bag is fine," i said.

and she proceeded to take a second plastic bag and place it inside the first one.

"i don't need two bags," i emphasized, thinking for a moment she was hard-of-hearing.

"the handles on these bags have been breaking!" she said. "i have evidence of that right here behind the counter."

so i took the double bag and left.

refuge from harsh reality

my car is stretched out on the couch next to me

its exhaust having exhausted it

present joys lighting the forest

which still and always 

carry their candles out the sliding glass door

carefully, with fur

and bullets.

various

it upsets me a little when people don't like obama.

more specifically, it upsets me when my niece posts something like this on her facebook:

"Obama is in "over his head". Looking at the photos of him and his family watching the returns come in Tues. night was very telling. He looked uncommonly nervous, ringing his hands before and after the networks called the election. No celebratory response, not even a smile. He' a novice and he knows it. BO was created by his party and they own him completely. He'll do what he's told, like the poster boy that he is. As for how it affects us as believers, it is clear that God is pulverizing His church into submission with one political disappointment after another. Watching the pagans put our dear Constitution through the shedder is hard, but politics is not our Savior. We serve King Jesus and Him only."

there is so much that is so wrong with this, it's almost impossible to react at all. i almost didn't post it, but by posting it i feel a little bit better about having seen it. it shouldn't bother me, but somehow it does. and you know, we pagans really should stop putting the constitution through the 'shedder.'

in other news, strangely related, i went back to churchill high school to see a production of arthur miller's THE CRUCIBLE on saturday night. though it is overdone to death, it is still a great play, easily applicable to many periods of history, because of people's unfortunate proclivity to demonize each other. besides all that, the students did it well. 

we had a six-hour tech day for BOOTH yesterday. i enjoyed it. we got to see some of the sets and lights, and based on what i saw, it will be a pretty show. tonight we are dealing with costumes for the first time. i am playing a harsh, egocentric, delusional tyrant with a heart of pyrite. though i have some things in common with the character, it is an extremely challenging role for me... but i am having fun with it, and looking forward to performances.

when i'm in my car and i turn on my left turn signal, it doesn't turn off. this is a recent development.

my cat is stretched out on the couch next to me.

i bought a pizza last night. it was half pepperoni and half jalapeno/mushroom. it was pretty good, but what made it delicious was some hot sauce david made. we ate it while watching iron chef.

president obama

the election of barack obama as our 44th president is the most wonderful and exciting political event i have ever witnessed.

when i first saw obama speak, somewhere on TV, i was riveted. by the end of his speech my spirits had lifted. i felt like what he was giving was a very necessary medicine for our people. we are so cynical about politicians, so jaded about the deception and corruption that has seemed to be taking over. it has become so easy to feel downtrodden about our country's affairs at home and abroad. but when i listened to obama, i felt a little glimmer of empowerment-- i felt like i didn't need to give up or feel hopeless about our situation. 

last night when i got out of rehearsal at 11:15 he had already won. i got these texts from various friends on my phone:

"Times square is a huge party!"

"Woooooo! Fucking awesome!"

"Sarah Palin is wearing BLUE!"

"Yay :-)"

"This here is what we call an election ass whoopin'"

i'm so happy that barack obama won the election, and i'm so excited to see how things change during his presidency.

sunny, happy, chirpy

GLASS MENAGERIE had its last 4 performances in gonzales, texas this past weekend. we performed at the historic crystal theatre. the town looked like the town in 'waiting for guffman.' in fact we wondered if any of it was filmed there. the theatre had a nice feel to it and in my opinion our performances were a lot more relaxed and interesting than they had been at the venue in san antonio. and... WE MAY BE GOIN' TO BUH-ROADWAY! ...not really.

the other great thing about the weekend was that we stayed in a cool old house in the country, with cows and horses and strange burrowing rodents. i sat on a porch staring at a field, took a walk on a country road, and felt myself relax a little. now that i'm entering into the final two weeks before BOOTH opens, i needed that small respite.

i think i'm starting to develop an actual relationship with the idea of my own mortality. i had a sort of death-like experience after smoking salvia a couple of months ago and it really freaked me out. as i have reflected on it since then, that freak-out feeling has begun to change into some semblance of maybe beginning to understand mortality outside the life-after-death paradigm. i guess what i'm trying to say is, i'm coming to terms with the idea that i won't exist anymore.

ps. jo jo d, thanks for your comments. i put your blog in my list of blogs to check daily, so i expect to see some action young man.

newspaper

today there's an article about me in the san antonio express-news.

tonight i am giving a lecture at the stieren theatre at trinity. i'm going to talk about how i got involved in theatre and the major theatrical milestones i've experienced (peeing onstage first grade, high school speech team, north carolina, russia, new york, KITUS), and i'm going to give some ideas/advice to the students in the audience.

the master classes i'm teaching have gone well. we've had two and we'll have three more. we're working on shakespeare's sonnets. each of 12 students in the class was assigned a sonnet randomly. my approach is very non-academic, we don't really talk about structure or technical elements of the sonnets much. we are focusing more on unlocking the hidden meanings in the sonnets and then applying those meanings to each student personally. it has been fun.

rehearsals for the plays are going well. i am 2/3 memorized for BOOTH and we open in 3 weeks. i do have some anxiety about this and it just means i will have to get on top of it this week in a big way. but rehearsals have been fun and interesting.

TRUE WEST rehearsals are also fun, but again the frustration comes in that i'm still not off-book, so there's only so far i can go with a script in my hand. but i look forward to making that happen as soon as i'm confident about the lines for BOOTH. 

this makes it sound like acting is all about memorizing lines, and it's not. but it is important to have a certain level of confidence about them, so that some exploration can take place.

i am taking deep breaths. i'm excited about the lecture tonight. david helped me put some pictures on a power point so that there'll be some visual component to the talk. also i chose some music to play while the audience comes in... rachmaninov and prokofiev. 

glass concentration

our production of THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened last night. i don't generally like opening nights because the performance energy is too high-- you don't get a true experience of the play (as an actor or as an audience) because of all that nervous tension which comes from the actors having an audience for the first time. 

i felt pretty good about the performance last night, until my speech at the top of act two. i had a mini-panic attack and left out a huge chunk of the monologue. though it wasn't a glaring mistake, it worried me. i have been thinking about it and analyzing it all day, in typical over-sensitive andy manner. 

the last time i forgot my lines onstage was in mamet's OLEANNA, where many of the speeches contain overlapping meanings, and the speeches are threateningly long and intense, and that intensity needs to be sustained in order for the play to work properly. on the other hand, during the last play i was in, LINCOLNESQUE, i spoke long speeches directly to the audience, and never had a problem getting distracted or losing my text. in GLASS MENAGERIE i also speak directly to the audience, so i've been wondering what the difference is-- why did i have that mini-panic attack during this show, and not in the other?

i'm thinking a couple of things...

1. tennessee williams' writing is not functional or utilitarian; it is poetic and elaborative. much of it, in terms of plot line, is unnecessary. it says the same thing in four different ways, and my andy brain doesn't really work like that; i don't say things like that, i just state the facts and shut up. usually.

but more importantly,

2. i have identified this character very much with myself. other than a modest vocal change, i have not done any real 'character' work, meaning i haven't really added any character traits or qualities that would suggest someone else. this was also true of my interpretation in OLEANNA. however, it wasn't true of LINCOLNESQUE-- in that play, i felt i was playing, through a deeper part of myself, someone quite different. 

so my hypothesis is: without a certain veneer or shield of character added on as protection, i seem to be more vulnerable to distraction onstage. it's almost as if my own persona were being attacked by those eyes in the audience; whereas if i were a character, or someone else up there, i would be completely protected and impervious. 

i don't know how true it is, but it occurred to me, so i thought i would write it down.

i'm a little nervous about tonight's performance, but doing my best to relax and see it more from a character point of view, or a different emotional reality, in order to achieve that protective confidence.

the great frank zappa

i felt a terrible loss when frank zappa died. he died of prostate cancer in 93. he was about to turn 53. it's not much of a consolation, but lucky for us humans, he was an incredibly prolific and perceptive artist and person. i entertained the idea that the government knocked him off because he was just too smart and subversive and proactive, or that he knew too much. i'd read an interview where he discussed the power of sonic waves, that sound could actually be used to control people or even kill people. for a while there was a movement going to get him to run for president. he was very politically aware and had lots of good ideas. i'd like to live in that world, where zappa could actually get nominated... that would be a better world.

his music is a balm to my soul. it feels healing and dynamic, like something's happening inside me when i listen to it, like wounds are being tended. it's not a cerebral appreciation. it's very visceral. and i just discovered a great album of arrangements by the ensemble ambrosius. re-workings of some of zappa's classics like "RDNZL" and "inca roads." sweet arrangements.

i once had a dream i was taking a shower with frank. it wasn't sexual, but it was very intimate. i woke up feeling so close to him, it was excellent. yeah i know it's ridiculous, put it on the same list with my dream that i was hanging out in an apartment with andy and colin from XTC, or when i had become the 4th beastie boy (AdRoc mentored me). 

but you know, thank God for dreams because otherwise i never would have had these amazing opportunities.

new technology

despite my apparent devotion to my iPod, i have upgraded to a new iPod which contains more memory. ah, the fickleness of the music-obsessed consumer.

so now i have room to put everything in my little silver lozenge, even my extensive frank zappa collection, much of which i haven't listened to since 1998. wow, "artificial rhonda." just wow.

as for the old iPod, i have taken care of it, taken care to provide it with a caring new owner, which just happens to be my boyfriend david. so it's all in the family.

missions

today david and i packed up some water and snacks in a backpack and drove out to mission concepcion. we walked around the church for a while then, after a brief tussle, drove to mission san jose, which is bigger and more impressive than mission concepcion because of its living quarters skirting the perimeter of the grassy area and the relative scope of the place. i liked to imagine the indians having affairs in the grass with wayward fathers, or escaping the mission walls under cover of night, coyotes baying in the background. we walked around there a while, then set off on the mission trail. we got about halfway to mission san juan then turned around and walked back. i'd say we walked somewhere between 4-5 miles in all. it was fun walking along the san antonio river (the real one, instead of the riverwalk), and we both needed the exercise and the sun.

why did my mom never take me to the missions when i was growing up? i realize she was busy and all, having four kids, and me being the youngest, well i guess she was tired by that time, always multi-tasking and then she got her own career going, so in some ways i understand... yet i also felt amazed at the thought that we have these incredible, historical monuments to colonialism in the guise of spirituality in our fair city and we never visited them even once!

the only time i've been to a mission (well, besides the alamo, which seems tiny in comparison) was at my friend mikki's wedding. i've forgotten which mission it was, but it was a beautiful place to get married. i was fantasizing about getting married to david at one of the missions. one of us would have to dress as a woman to fool the priests. i was imagining david in blonde wig and tight raspberry taffeta.

so tonight i put lotion on my face. i feel like my summer is now complete, having acquired a sunburn; and it couldn't be at a more appropriate time of year-- the autumn equinox.

this is not an ad for facebook

(and the last entry was not an ad for iPod.)

a few weeks ago, prodded by a friend of mine, i set up a facebook account... begrudgingly. i don't know why i was so reluctant. i guess it seemed like something 'young' people do, like people of my students' age. and true enough, most of my contacts have been former students, but there have been other contacts as well, like theatre people in the area.

but this week i had two great surprises.

there comes a time on facebook when you start racking your brain for old, old friends-- like the kind of friends who are so old they've become kind of legendary in your mind, because all your memories of them have been so rehashed over the years, and it's been so long since you've spoken to them.

one of the friends i got in touch with was philip, my next-door neighbor from childhood. we had a lot of fun together doing kid things, and he had a pool at his house AND a tennis court we played on. i wasn't sure he would want to contact me, because i was kind of a weirdo as a kid (i'm TOTALLY normal now, make no mistake), but phil wrote back and asked how the hell i am. he is now living in phoenix and has a little family going.

there was an even bigger reaction, however, last night, when my best friend from first, second and third grade (my first, and therefore truest best friend) responded to my friend invitation. his name is j.j. and i have all kinds of memories and stories about him. i hadn't seen or spoken to him since he moved away to tucson after fourth grade. nary a word. so you can imagine, over the past thirty years there's been plenty of time to miss him, wonder where he is, and think about all the things we did as kids. this is the kid i loved so much that i threw a rock at his head. it's true.

last night all my long-standing questions about j.j. came to a resolution. he's an aerospace engineer (he was always really smart), has a wife and three kids, and lives in nearby austin. he looks great in his photo, still like himself and not transformed by the overwhelming grief of life. i don't know if we will keep in touch or rekindle our friendship, but the important thing is just to know he's well and thriving in the world, and that he actually does exist outside my memory. it's a nice feeling and... well, it's a life-changing event.

iPod pleasure

when did i start loving music? when did i start really paying attention to it?

my brother had this huge LP collection. then he won a drawing at a local music store and won something like 500 more LPs. it was a huge deal. a lot of them were garbage, but a lot of them were worth keeping. if you had a question about a band or an album, craig would usually know the answer. he gave me hand-me-down 8-track tapes of rickie lee jones, earth wind & fire, and barry manilow. and later he gave me cyndi lauper's "she's so unusual" on vinyl, and linda ronstadt's awesome rock album, "mad love," which featured at least two elvis costello covers.

craig gave me my first mixed tape, "music for white men" (i was called "white man" as a child because i was so lacking in pigment), when i was a freshman in high school, right around '81-'82. it contained: laurie anderson, the roches, randy newman, mel torme, peter gabriel, the violent femmes, todd rundgren, the shangri-las, xtc, kid creole & the coconuts, jonathan richman, tom waits, godley & creme, dionne warwick, tom tom club, frank sinatra, the waitresses, loudon wainwright III, bryan ferry, the beatles, lindsey buckingham, and kate bush. this particular tape, i have since realized, shaped my sense of what a music collection should be-- eclectic, above all... also, surprising, fanciful, with blasts of the past and the future. i have told craig about the debt i owe him for bringing such a broad and rich spectrum of musical taste into my life. i don't claim to have particularly good taste; but you can't deny it's eclectic.

this broad and rich spectrum has taken on many vehicles over the years (walkmans, car stereos, discmans), but the most recent and most amazing vehicle so far has been my iPod. now i have sensed the backlash against iPods, and i understand it-- there's something a little evil about them in the sense that they are becoming ubiquitous and that they seem to cut people off from each other. true enough. my pleasure in the iPod is the still mind-staggering fact that my e n t i r e  m u s i c  c o l l e c t i o n can reside within its perfectly compact rectangular body. something about this fact turns me on no end. i can float down memory lane by flipping to "sandwiches of you" whenever i want. all those songs i love can be in my pocket at all times. i made an iPod playlist of "music for white men" and it is beautiful... still beautiful.

i got my iPod in may of '07 and have been loading it down with pretty much every album in my possession since then. it is now reaching its maximum capacity (i have only 2 GBs left out of 80) and so i have been worrying that i am either going to run out of room or that it will crash and i will lose all that beautifulness. 

so i have been considering ways to insure the iPod. since i don't necessarily still have all the cds that are contained on it, and i wouldn't necessarily feel happy about sitting down to download them all again, i was considering purchasing another iPod and transferring all the music on the existing one onto a new one. i saw in a magazine that there's a doohickey you can get which will plug into two iPods and transfer files from one to the other. i researched that a bit, and it seemed more complicated than i had in mind.

but yesterday i downloaded Music Rescue 4.0. what it does, according to the apple tech worker i spoke with, is: "it sucks the music out of your iPod and into a file, then you can download it onto your iTunes." so that's what i did-- i got Music Rescue, plugged in my iPod and my external hard drive (120 GB), and backed up all my music onto my hard drive. 

talk about bliss. bliss. as tootsie says, "sheer heaven."

that oboe/clarinet solo on joni mitchell's "down to you." the irresistable whistling hook on "young folks" by peter bjorn & john. kate bush's roar on "get out of my house." hey, i remember where i was when i first heard that. i remember the feeling i had. 

surprises

this week i got a great surprise-- i was asked to be the stieren guest artist at trinity university here in town. the stipulations of this residency are that i will teach 5-6 master classes, give a 45-minute public lecture, and act in a production of austin pendleton's play BOOTH with drama students at trinity. i am thrilled about this, for several reasons-- it gives me a chance to work with students on the university level; the part of junius booth in BOOTH will be challenging for me (now that i'm 40 i guess i can sort-of legitimately play a 50-something year-old); and my financial concerns will be assuaged for another blissful period of time. beyond all these particulars, this fellowship being offered means something in general for my life and my decisions that is very exciting, and which fran verbalized well in an email yesterday: "I think you drew all these things to you by embracing your desires-- how magical is that?"

today i noticed that someone named "rocketts" posted a comment on this blog. as i investigated, i discovered a newly-established blog called Box 104C which seems to chronicle in pictures the KITUS years at schoolhouse. 

being a man of the moment, i often live as if i had just been born, forgetting, for all intents and purposes, that i have led a rich, sumptuous, moist, creamy, chunky, volatile, teary-eyed, screamy, itchy, sexy, international existence. but seeing the blog Box 104C reawakened my memory of some wonderful moments in my life, reconnected me to them, thereby enriching my current moment of existence. thanks rocketts, much love to you. 

resistance

i've been noticing little ways that i resist everything-- i resist the pleasure of the moment by worrying about ten minutes from now. i resist healing by dwelling on the past. i resist so much every day without realizing it. it surely started out as a coping mechanism, a protection device put firmly in place after i got hurt or humiliated, until it just became part of my unconscious modus operandi. but now i'm becoming aware of it. 

they went back to school two days ago. i wonder how it's going. i've gotten reports here and there from different students... they've painted the drama hallway red. other stuff like that. i am deeply happy not to be there; at the same time i have some anxiety about my future and that is why i am realizing about resistance and how insidious it can be. 

you know, i'm really haunted by that goddamn aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ants. was it a grasshopper? i think so. he spent the whole summer playing and making music while the ants worked. in winter he froze because he hadn't prepared. that thing really messes with me! that story of impending doom became a building block of my identity! 

of course a solid work ethic is important, chiefly because it gives one a sense of purpose. but that story is such scare tactics, and it's caused me, in the past, to not enjoy the current moment, worrying that if i have too much fun, i'll pay for it later. 

love and trust more; hate and resist less.

too much reality

ten years ago, sergei and yulia were visiting me in truckee. with dion, my native american friend, we went to a jump dance ceremony in happy camp. we drove to the coast and the redwoods. one night when we were driving home i hit a deer, grazed its back leg. it got up and ran away lopsided. i knew that deer was my spirit animal so i took it hard, trying to understand the spiritual implications of such an event. i never came to any particular conclusion. now as i look back i can see that my spirit was damaged during that trip with dion and my russian friends-- i felt torn between them, it wasn't harmonious. a couple months after sergei and yulia had flown home, i knew i had to heal and called the whole thing off with dion.

the other day while watching a documentary on sasquatch, i got excited when they interviewed people from happy camp. it's a very small town on the klamath river way up in northern california, not far south of ashland oregon. 

yesterday i read about edouard manet. we ate thai food. we watched LOST IN LaMANCHA and then the documentary CRUMB. i never considered CRUMB an overly depressing film, but watching it with someone else made me realize that it is pretty distressing. i believe david said, "too much reality!"

summer lovin'

it's already august. right now at 12:25 daytime, it's overcast and mild outside-- not really hot at all. it's been a quiet, pleasant saturday morning. it doesn't hurt that i'm in love. 

last night's opening went well, though i had to stop the show 5 minutes in because a screen onstage had not been removed and would have messed everything up. so we got rid of the screen and started again from the beginning. the show was passable, wasn't at its best, but that's usually true of opening nights anyway. as the actors settle into their routines and begin to feel more comfortable, the show will improve.

this week i got the pevear/volokhonsky translation of WAR AND PEACE. it's lovely to read it again 15 years later, and even better in this very conscientious and readable translation. i found an interesting article about this translation and another, both of which were released around the same time. 

tomorrow i have an initial meeting about the next play i'll be working on as an actor, tennessee williams' THE GLASS MENAGERIE. i'm looking forward to starting work on that.

my cat pooped in the corner of my room this morning because her litter box hadn't been changed in two weeks. i am usually very careful about changing it every week, so she's gotten used to a schedule, and that schedule was interrupted, so i didn't blame her for her actions. 

david is making biscuits and gravy and something else with onions that smells really good...

good samaritan opens

THE GOOD SAMARITAN, a play i have been directing, opens tomorrow at the overtime theater. here is an article. it has been really fun and rewarding working on it and i think it looks great. i hope the audiences will think so too.

the beach

i hadn't been to port aransas, that i can remember, since i was in high school. i just went back there this past weekend and it wasn't as i recalled it at all.

the beach was bordered on the shoreline with a substantial barrier of seaweed, the intense bright green bushy kind with berries that looks like something you'd buy in the garnish section of hobby lobby. this seaweed had also been pulverized into most of the sand, discoloring it and changing its texture. where i had remembered soft, duny sand there was now a hard sandy surface. it took me a while to assimilate this change and accept the fact that the beach had changed. as i looked at the little kids running around i thought, "they think this is the way the beach is supposed to be." then i thought of myself as a kid and how someone older might have been sitting on the beach when i was running around and they were probably thinking, "he thinks this is the way the beach is supposed to be." for me then, as for the kids now, the beach was perfect just as it was. nothing to compare it to. after i processed all that, i relaxed into the scene a little better and it became less alien.

yet another jarring development was the warmness of the ocean. i can't remember ever walking into an ocean that felt like warm bathwater. but the gulf felt that way this weekend. it wasn't really unpleasant, but again, it wasn't what i expected or was used to. it seemed just a little wrong. 

despite all my comparing the present to the past, david and i floated in the water and sat on the beach having a perfectly lovely time. also, we visited my aunt and uncle, who live in rockport, and that was really nice.