Yeah. See that? That’s why you should come see our Midsummer.

So for all of last week, I probably got 4 hours of sleep per night, Sunday through Thursday. That’s 20 hours of sleep total, stacked up against a supposedly necessary 40. Yeah. Half as much sleep as you’re supposed to have. Needless to say I spent all day Friday being stupidly punchy. It was worth it though - we opened the show last night, and I have to say, it’s the smoothest opening night yet. We had one sort-of serious costume issue that Alyssa was able to fix in easy enough order, and things were very, very calm, generally. I’m very impressed with us, actually - with our cast and crew - things are basically setting themselves up without us having to supervise every aspect of it, which is great. So now we will be doing it again tonight (Saturday shows are always easier) and again tomorrow for the matinée . . and for two more weekends afterward.

But right now I’m going to veg out with the cats. I got some sleep today and it’s nice to just sit and stare.

So last night at Sally’s wine tasting, I received a parting hug from a guy whose name I sadly am totally unable to remember (sorry nice ponytail guy with the Mormon family!) who said, “I need to give you a hug! You tell great stories!” He may have been drunk, but it made me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever used this here blawg to chronicle some of my funnier experiences.

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Two things today:

1. This American Life. Yes, hippies listen to it. But you should, too, and even if you don’t take it up as a habit, you should at least listen to the latest show, The Audacity of Government. And then whenever someone whines about how Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are going to be SO BAD FOR AMERICA, make them listen to this so that they understand just want in the sam hill has been going on in up in this place for the last eight years. And then you can feed them a big ole plate of crow.
2. Amber’s newest baby, the Sex 2.0 Convention.
   

   Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? These questions, and many more, will be addressed within a safe, welcoming, sex-positive space.

   Respecting the confidentiality and protecting the identities of participants who wish to maintain a degree of anonymity will be a top priority at Sex 2.0.

   When? April 12, 2008
   Where? 1763~A Deviant Place of Decadence, 1763 Montreal Circle, Tucker, Ga., 30084 (directions)
   How much? $10 until February 17; $40 until March 28; $50 after March 28.

   At Sex 2.0, everyone is a participant rather than a passive attendee. This is YOUR event!

   With the drama club stuff, there is no way that I can get out there - I will be up to my ears in sewing on April 12, but YOU should go. Tell me how it goes.

(Yes, that’s the title of an episode of This American Life.)

So, we’re currently working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s interesting. First of all, Alyssa and I have probably 80-90% of the ready-to-wear stuff that we are going to buy already purchased, and that’s putting clothes on a lot of the cast. Amazingly we still seem to have some money. Apparently we are more bargain-conscious or else stuff is just cheaper. Whatever. I’ll take it either way. Everything is looking good, costume-wise; we just have a lot of sewing in front of us.

There is one thing, though, that we did not really anticipate - although I suppose we should have done - and it’s presenting a set of problems that we’ve not really dealt with before. When we did Love’s Labour’s Lost, Twelfth Night, and Merry Wives we were dealing with shows that are either not much done, or else mostly read rather than performed by our average actor. Even with Much Ado there was a sort of willing suspension of whatever people thought - I think because we had such a strong, clear, unwavering, death-grip of a vision for that one. With Midsummer, we are definitely running into the fact that this is a well-loved and often-performed show. There have been two instances of, in the one case, a joking statement that we were going to make Shakespeare cry, and another, “Well, I’ve always seen this done X.” I’m not sure how to explain it, but there are basically two underlying tenets of our Shakespeare faith at work here:

1) We are in the business of making Shakespeare cry - tears of joy. The three of us have a deep love and respect for these texts, if not out of English-Majortude, then out of our deep and abiding geekery. We are also all products, more or less, of a liberal arts education, and we are constantly going back to the text, re-reading it, re-thinking it, coming at it from another angle. We examine and keep or discard conventions as we feel they best serve the play. Which leads me to #2.

2) We do not stand on convention. You’ve seen it done before? Great. Forget it. File away your memories of Patrick Stewart (as Macbeth) and Kevin Spacey as Richard II as great performances, but don’t take their portrayals as the Gospel of the text. It’s not. If Shakespeare is really all that and a bag of chips (and we think he is) then his work can survive being updated, it can survive being transported. It will more than survive a translation, it will thrive in it. Shakespeare’s work is not timeless because we venerate it in a tiny ossuary - it’s timeless because, if you will forgive the analogy, it’s a living document, much like the Constitution. To stand still with the text is to let it die.

None of this is to say that there is no value in an historically accurate performance, but that is not what we are in the business of doing. Someone needs to be doing it - The Globe in London does it very, very well (I saw King Lear in the rain there in 2001, and it was incredibly awesome), and locally we have the Shakespeare Tavern and Georgia Shake doing a great job with authentic performance. It’s not what we do. We’re going to have to keep confronting these two issues throughout the rehearsal process in this show. It’s not that people are wrong or unimaginative - on the contrary, when they step out of the box they are showing that they are the awesome actors we think they are - but people have got to let this stuff go. As difficult as any of the other shows have been on their own merits, I think that overcoming this particular difficulty, getting people out of the echo chamber of Dead Poets Society and every other portrayal of Midsummer they’ve ever seen, will be the hardest directorial challenge the three of us have faced to date.

Jonathan Raban gets it right:

Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world.

Read the whole thing. Long but worth it.

So around this time last year Alyssa and I started planning our friend’s baby shower with the assistance of one of her friends we’d never met before, Becca. Baby showers and wedding showers are interesting events in that they always feature two things for sure (well, three): a woman who’s celebrating, a cake, and chicken salad. So, in the spirit of the season of impending babies and marriages (the most popular time of year to get married, for some ungodly reason, is June), I offer up the very well-received Chicken Salad recipe that Alyssa weaseled out of her mom. I’ve done it for one or two other parties since, and people always love it!
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Barack at American Dream Pizza in Corvallis, OR

Originally uploaded by Barack Obama.

Babies love him. QED.

So today we had a cleaning service in. I had asked around for recommendations, and settled on the service that two friends of ours use, which is a local small business, Go Express Cleaning, which is run by the very lady who will come out and clean your house. After my initial inquiry I screwed around, went out of town, and I think actually considered NOT doing the cleaning service thing, but when we started rehearsing again and I watched my house go downhill, again, at the speed of light, I decided it was worth it.

So our first cleaning was today. I swear to you, this lady cleaned stuff that I didn’t know was dirty. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she bathed my cats. My house smells like Murphy’s Oil Soap and lemons and I didn’t have to do a damn thing but write a check, and dammit, that is freaking awesome. Like Amber expressed a while back, I was ambivalent about getting a cleaning service. Not because I was teetering on the edge about the morality of it - I know not to hire the big companies, I know what that’s a bad idea and why it’s not putting my money where my big, fat liberal, latte-sipping mouth is, but because I feel like I should be the housekeeper my mom was.

I then thought about that ideal. My mom. The Housekeeper Extraordinaire. . . . . and I realized that mom spent at least half, if not 3/4 of the day on every single Saturday within my living memory cleaning our house. Even when I was old enough to help, and I did help, it took up all of the morning, and then if we went grocery shopping, part of the afternoon, too. And then I decided, that is not how I want to spend my time. I know how to clean. I know how to clean well. I own scrubbing agents that require gloves and I can clean the everloving crap out of a floor, but I don’t want to. I want to go to rehearsal, make and find costumes, spend time with my husband and my friends. I don’t really want to clean my house at all, other than I want it to be clean. So now I’ve contracted with this cleaning service and I’m already so happy I could dance. Now we can do home improvement - together - rather than me cleaning the house while Thomas works on the project du jour. I can do minimal cleanup during the week and keep it acceptable, all the while knowing when my next cleaning will be.

It’s divine. This is going to be the best money I spend all month.