tara buck interview

Here's an interview with actor Tara Buck, discussing her role in my play Ten Cent Night currently playing at The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, CA: http://www.trueblood-online.com/cast-crew/tara-buck/the-vault-exclusive-true-bloods-tara-buck-in-ten-cent-night.

Tara has a recurring role on HBO's True Blood -- that's why this is on a True Blood fansite. There are no vampires in Ten Cent Night, but by golly, what a great idea for a rewrite. Alan Ball, call me.

breakfast

Oh god, I love Gordon Ramsay. It's hot the way he calls contestants on Hell's Kitchen stupid donkeys. I gave his scrambled egg technique a whirl today. It's a terrific and easy way to make eggs if you like 'em salmonella soupy. I will never whisk my eggs again.

The quick trip to San Diego was good. My 8:10pm flight out of O'Hare suffered a one hour "customer service delay" as the flight waited for 30 junior high school kids making a connection from New York. They finally got on the plane and started swapping seats with each other to sit next to friends, holding up the flight longer. Flight attendant on speaker: "Sit down, please. We WAITED for you. Take your seat NOW." Kids. If they're not on your lawn, they're screwing your air travel.

My first rental car experience went down easy if I don't count the part where I trekked across a long parking lot, only to watch my rental car back out of the parking space and drive away without me. It's almost midnight. I'm alone standing in a rental car parking lot watching the tail lights on my rental car disappear into the night. What just happened? It was like that scene in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles where Steve Martin gets to the rental space and there's nothing there but peel-away tire marks on the pavement ("You can give me a fucking automobile: a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat!" youtube it). So I had been assigned the same car as the customer ahead of me. For my inconvenience, I was upgraded to a sporty, blue Toyota Corolla with a trunk. Ohmygod I know, right?

The MOXIE Theatre production of The Butcher of Baraboo was a lot of fun. They served the play up right, and it's not an easy play to get right. Awesome set and design, killer acting, terrific directing. I saw it with a packed Saturday night house. Laughs in all the right places. It was nice to enjoy a production of that play as an audience member. Very satisfying to watch talented people take your script and make it fly. It was therapeutic, I suppose, if you know my history with the play. I enjoyed meeting everybody and hanging out after the show. Always fast friends in the theatre world. Glad I went. I wasn't going to go up until a week before closing weekend. But glad I did.

I just stayed up all night after the show, headed to the airport at 4:30 a.m. for my early-ass flight. I was in the emergency exit row on the airplane, so facing me was the flight attendant in the jump seat for takeoff and landing. As we were landing, a bird flew right by the window, and her eyes got big and she said, "Oh, wow, did you SEE that? That bird went right by the window. I've never seen a bird go right by the window like that. Are there any more out there?" Personally, I prefer my flight attendants to be a little more unflappable.

I decided last minute-ish to fly to San Diego to see this.

I'm out the door in a few.

A slight entertainment in the meantime. The genius of this, besides everything, is the use of a karaoke cover of Da Do Run Run. Get to the choppa, kitteh!

I didn't see 'the piano lesson' at The Court

(on Gchat with Brian)

Brian: you know what i saw that was amazing was 'the piano lesson' at court

fucking loved it

really amazing

me: I haven't seen 1) anything at the Court, or 2) an August Wilson play. So I should probably see that

Brian: you'll get your chance again soon

ma rainey's black bottom is their first show of next season

same director

i've seen fences and the piano lesson at the court now and they were both amazing

me: I want to see The Piano Lesson, so, I should do something about that

Brian: it closed :(

me: FUCK!!!!!!!

Sigh.

Dammit.

(throws chair against an upright piano)

Brian: that's the lesson

me: Learned.

o, california!

To my dear friends in California:

I know it's been rough. Your state is descending into crippling depression, it routinely gets set on fire, and earthquakes will cause it to drift into the Pacific. What can I do to help? I can offer the gift of theatre! Ooh aah. Two of my plays open on the West Coast very soon. They are funny plays. While you are laughing, you can forget that sharks have developed a taste for human meat as a result of Mexican drug traffickers dumping bodies in the ocean.

The Butcher of Baraboo produced by MOXIE Theatre
San Diego, CA
June 6 - June 28
http://www.moxietheatre.com/

Ten Cent Night produced by The Victory Theatre Center
Burbank, CA
June 19 - August 2
http://www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org/

See, it's not all gloom and doom.

revised pixar film rankings

1. Toy Story 2
2. Wall-E
3. Up
4. Toy Story
5. Monsters Inc
6. The Incredibles
7. A Bug's Life
8. Finding Nemo
9. Ratatouille
10. Cars*

* I haven't seen Cars.

Notes

• The first 10 minutes of Up made me as teary as the Sarah McLachlan musical interlude in Toy Story 2
• Tough call between Wall-E and Up. I err on the side of adorable, sentient robots
• However, I may swap the rankings of Up and Monsters Inc in a few years
  
• I'm in the minority on my #7 ranking of A Bug's Life
  

first names are disregarded

A startling declaration in the stacks of the Harold Washington Library. It's not accurate. First names are regarded when multiple authors have the same last name. In your face, Chicago Public Library.

I was there to return an overdue book that I didn't finish and wasn't going to finish. Might as well browse the shelves and pick up another book that will accrue a fine 3+ weeks from now. Thanks always to the circulation desk staff for your belligerent service. I understand that checking out books is a major fucking inconvenience.

On the timeline of human existence, falling thousands of feet from the sky into the ocean at hundreds of miles per hour is a new way to die. A plane crash would be as exotic to a caveman as being gored by a mastodon would be to me. What's so terrifying about an airplane catastrophe (besides the whole "it could happen to you" part followed by the whole death part) is the amount of time it would take from the airplane breaking apart -- assuming you survive that -- to final impact. Do any physics brains want to do the math? Minutes, right? Holy shit, right? I would be too jacked with fear and adrenaline to do much beyond process the endgame stimuli. I probably wouldn't even unbuckle from my plummeting seat. Would I be conscious at the rapid loss of cabin pressure? I have no idea. The living can only speculate about the journey to death. When these news stories cause anxiety, I find this episode of This American Life comforting: Last Words

(yes, I know, air travel is a million times safer than driving a mile from my apartment blah blah blah)

lalala omg wtf haha

Whenever I'm having a bad day, I do two things.

#1) I think about all the words that mean "to spray with shit"

• bescumber
• conskite
• immerd
• ordurous
• sharny
• shitten

#2) I watch this 24 second clip of a guy singing and smoking (something) in the shower. I've been meaning to never ever post this YouTube video, but it has turned into my favorite thing on the Internet after Geoffrey posted it on his Facebook page.

Watch this clip a few times. Do not worry if you do not understand it. This is not a litmus test.


Study Guide Questions:

1. Why was this filmed and posted on the Internet?
2. What is he smoking?
3. Why is there shaving cream on his face when he is clearly not at the shaving point of his hygienic ritual?
   
4. At 0:17, our hero discovers the meaning of life. In 10 words or less, please explain the meaning of life.
5. No, really, what is he smoking?

This is almost as good as the literal video version of A-HA's Take on Me.

wendy and lucy

I'll keep this brief. Wendy and Lucy made my soul ache. I have a soft spot for stories about lonely, quiet drifters. Give that lonely drifter a dog that will, no doubt, wind up in trouble, and it kills me. Toss me on the junk heap, 'cause I'll be a wreck by the time the credits roll. The story is simple. Wendy is on the way to Alaska. Her car breaks down in Oregon, she has no money, she loses her only friend, Lucy the dog. Now what? Jesus, yeah, now what?

As a person who likes to travel independently, I had a visceral response to Wendy's story. I've never been in her situation. If I was in serious trouble, I have family I can call. But I could easily imagine myself in Wendy's shoes. The villains in this story are bad luck, bad decisions, and not enough money; the heroes are perseverance and the small kindnesses of strangers.

I've never been a big fan of Michelle Williams before, but her performance as Wendy is just right. It's sad and exhausting and hopeful. What's amazing about Wendy is just how unamazing she is. She's a young woman in a tough spot who is just wants to get her dog back.

this is why the internet was invented

One of the more weirdly specific, local interest blogs you will find: Rogers Park Cheetos is a photoblog that documents the occurrence of empty Cheeto bags in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago: http://rogersparkcheetos.blogspot.com/

Ever since I found this blog, I've started noticing Cheeto bag litter. It's EVERYWHERE.

Diversey Harbor: final weekend (sad trombone)

It's difficult to fathom how 844 people died within tens of feets (inappropriate English) from the edge of the Chicago River near LaSalle and Wacker; fathom the few fathoms of water it took to drown so many, and the mind flails and flops in the whirling fathoms of bafflement. On a Chicago Ghost Tour way back, I took a photo of this very spot. There were ghosts everywhere.

I'll be done shilling for the play Diversey Harbor after this weekend. We close Sunday May 10. I may hope to have more Diversey Harbor news at a later date, but for now, we'll stuff the stories into our battered steamer trunk, lug it up into the attic, and cover it with a bed sheet to protect it from the years and years of dust.

It's way too easy to make fun of Cleveland.