PHEEEEW!

So, last week, as I'm sure you remember I posted about the most amazing play ever written and how my wife devised this play and how everyone should see it cause it's super good and ground breaking and something that you won't see around here any time soon.

Well, here's the thing:  I lied.

It's horrible.

no, just kidding, but could you imagine?!  I'm on my blog all like, "My wife's play sucks eggs! DON'T SEE IT!"  That would be super 'kward.

But here's the thing: I lied...or rather, I didn't know.  You see, when I posted last week, well, I hadn't seen it. How could I?!  It opened on Wednesday, I'm not magic! And so when I was pitching that YOU should see it, well, I was just being supportive, ya know, but I had no idea if this experimental, student written, high risk, wildly expensive (not Phantom expensive, but it blew the budget for my last ward road-show out of the water...'course that was 15 years ago and with the economy what it is...) play would be good, bad, fine, adequate, reasonable, turbulent, riveting, or dumb...I just had no idea.   But that didn't stop me.

I saw it this week.

Lisa Clark can tell you, as the spouse of a Director, you sorta only hear how things are crazy and what's hard and what's not working.  And Lisa Clark can tell you, any supportive spouse smiles and says, "That's just theater, honey.  It's always wild and scary and then, it's wonderful...or at least, fine."

But I gotta tell you, I was sacred.  This was a huge HUGE project and all that stuff I said about it being "experimental, student written, high risk" that's not me being funny...that's the real story, and what's worse my wife willingly laid her delicate neck on the chopping block in taking on this albatros and there were nights we both were lying in bed in the dark with four wide eyes playing out the flopping of this play.  SO OF COURSE I WAS SUPPORTIVE! What else was I going to be?!

I saw it this week.

I had a sick feeling in my stomach, I mean, at this point what was I going to do?!  I suppose I knew the songs, if things got real bad I guess I could jump up and lend my silky tenor to the cause, but even then what would it help?  Sure, people's lives would be changed by the gorgeous sound coming from my throat, but the real problem would be the same; I can't be there every night.  And so I hunkered down in my seat determined not to jump in unless a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y necessary.

When I was younger it was my greatest fear that I would marry a girl who thought she could sing.  I could just picture her enthusiasm and always trying to get us "gigs" to sing together and I would have to stand next to her and watch her with her eyes closed leaning right up against the pitch but never quite getting there.  And what could I do?!  I would have to love that tone deaf dope and so I would stand next to her and a try not to make eye contact with the grimacing faces in the audience.

However, my real wife does not want to sing duets with me.  She'll sing in church and has sung in a choir or two and, best of all, she sings to our kids, but she has a reasonable awareness to her vocal talent, just as I do...now where was I...oh yes, I was tamping down my golden godly voice to support the play...

The play... It was spell binding.  It was captivating.  I was both spellbound and captivated. The show is so good! It's all just storytelling, different people, different stories, spell binding, captivating, good.

But that's not what I want to write about (though you should click here and get yourself tickets before they are all gone...it closes and is gone forever on Saturday) what I want to write about is how hard it is to be married.  At first it's not hard, at first it is wonderful and easy and then after the 'at first' part, you move to the next part...what is that? And how long does that last? Until the 'last part', I guess.  So somewhere in that not beginning and not the ending you start to forget that this person sleeping next to you is this amazing creature, who is filled with hopes and aspirations and you start to see them as the person who forgot to throw your underwear in the dryer.  I know, I know, you still know that they are amazing, but you make them amazing for stuff they do around the house or their smile or how after all these years they still like you, and that IS amazing.  But you forget about the time before when you were two separate people and wanted to take on the whole world and you were pretty sure you would be done with that by 30 then you could retire and live off your interest because, really, that's all you need, you've never been greedy.

Anyways...I guess what I saying is that this week I got to see my wife accomplish something amazing and hard and thought provoking and new and it bubbled into this world through her brain and I was so proud and it reminded me of what an amazing person as a person she is and not just as my wife or the mother of my kids or housekeeper or science teacher or moral compass or pageant winner or party hostess or costume designer or sex goddess or short order cook or doctor MD or doctor PhD or pep talker or protector or comedian or Scattergories player or or or or...

Turns out, even with out my help, she is still amazing.

And I was amazed.  

     

You Gotta See This 2...or Too!

If you are following us on FB (that's what the cool kids call Friend Book) then you know I have sort of already pitched the following pitch, but this is my day to blog and I can shove any propaganda down any throat I want to, whether it be Democratic Bangs or my son's pink bib, so today is my day and your throat is reading this, so I choose to scream at you, "See this play!!"

Here's the deal, and it's a real deal and worth reading about and even more worth seeing.  So there is this theater group out in Brooklyn...that's NYC, kids, not your neighbor's 6-year-old (anyway that would be Brookelhynne, one of the O's is silent, but the other still makes the long O sound) and they do, what they call, "Investigative Theatre." What this means is that they pick a subject and then head out to NYC and they interview total strangers on that subject, they then scurry back to what I can only imagine is their red brick warehouse loft where they spend hours upon hours lounging about draped over chaise loungers eating cheeses and spouting off scenes, songs and monologs with their eyes rolled to the back of their heads playing bongos to the Katie Thompson version of "Eternal Flame."  (Believe me, I've written a play in New York, that's how you do it...never mind, you could never understand.)  So they take the interviews and create a play based on the stories they collected, sometimes a song, sometimes a monologue, however the thing comes to life.  Once, they went out and asked people to tell them about something they had lost.  They got lots of answers; a watch, a water bottle, keys, a mother, a friendship, hope, faith, pants.  And they created a play called "Gone Missing" using real people's real stories.

Out here on the other coast, (Provo, Utah) my wife, who knew of their work, was inspired to pitch an idea (last year) to bring out the Brooklyn Theatre Trope (they have a name, it's 'The Civilians') to BYU and have them workshop with students their methods of creating theater, then set those students loose on Provo and find out what Provo people had lost.

It was a good pitch.  It was a thought-out pitch. It was not, however, a pitch that was ever supposed to become a play.  But BYU was very excited about the idea and they snatched up Lindsay and her pitch and loaded her with resources and time and said, "Let's see it".  That was a year ago, and after some amazing collaboration with some amazing people at the school the finished product is something incredible.

The night begins with a cutting from the Brooklyn show, "Gone Missing"; Provo actors tell the stories of New Yorkers' loss.  Then you get 15 mins to do your business and get back to your seat for the second half of the show, "The Cleverest Thief."  This is the product created by BYU students after interviewing Provo losers (as in, those who have lost something).  Seeing the shows side by side is such an effective way to see both the similarities and differences between a New Yorker and a Provote (trademark pending).  There is music in both and "The Cleverest Thief" has what they are calling a "Lost & Found Orchestra" where the students make music using everyday found objects.

One of the best aspects of the show is that the students chosen were not theater students.  Because they would be creating a show from nothing they reached out to Playwrights, Animators, Graphic Designers, Songwriters, even the Mathematics and Film departments.  The end result has such a different feeling from what actors would present to you--don't be fooled, there are actors mixed in, it is a main stage show after all--but, after a semester of creating a play from interviews, it came to the  Playwrights, Animators, Graphic Designers, Songwriters, even the Mathematicians and Film Students to become the characters they had created. For some of them, this will be their first performance, but then, they were the ones sitting in a room hearing these stories first hand, they are not trying "Become" or "Create" they are just being what they saw, telling you the stories that were told to them.

A woman in Provo lost her hearing.  When she decided to have children there was push back, "What kind of mother could you be if you can't hear your children?" "Is that really fair to a child?" "What if they need you?"  In a filmed moment in the show, when children are playing in the snow, there is no sound as they play, no boots crushing snow, no snow suit swooshing, no screaming, no laughing, or rather, no sound of all those things happening. Then, just out of frame there is pain, and someone is hurt, the soundless mother is holding the camera and her daughter comes to her for help.  It's just a moment, one of thousands in their lives, but with a small brush of a mothers hand, her child is comforted and regrouped and rejoined. Somehow, she did it, she mothers without hearing. And we learn her loss, while defining, was not finalizing.

I love stories. I love new ways to tell them, I love different peoples version of the same story, and this show explores many ways to tell a story.  You love stories, too. You come to this blog, and likely others, to hear them.  I hope, this week or the next, you find yourself sitting in that quiet theater seeing stories of people you will never meet and of those you who may already know.

At the very least you will leave with a story of your own to tell.  



For ticket information click here: The Most Amazing Show on the Planet.            

One Upping Ken.

Ken thinks he has the corner on cute meets because he and Katie met when I was a freshman, but have I got a tale for you:


It was the spring of 2003 (Ken had 6 kids by then...maybe more, maybe less) and I was doing improv in a little club in a tiny suburb of LA called, Provo Utah.  I was younger and thinner but just as funny, my eyes just as blue and my front tooth just as fake.  I don't remember the first time I saw Lindsay, but she does, but you have to understand that she was SO FAR out of my league that my mind didn't even think to hold on to that moment.  As a mid-attractive man there are women that you see who are at your level and you mind spins off into the eternities and crates a whole fiction of what life would be if you were to fall in love.  My mind did no such thing when I met my wife, certainly my mind spun a filthy web of debauchery, too indecent to blog about here, (that's for my other adult blog, tableandsinglepot) but that was all my mind was ever doing at 24 so why would it hold on to this one perfect moment.  Anyway she says I picked her up and spun her around.  Who knows?!  Why?! This must have been right at the end of my 'Spinning Strangers' phase...it was only, like, two weeks.

So no, I don't remember the first time we met. I do remember our first dinner...well she was actually having dinner with Brett but she sat across from me and I was transfixed.  But again, she was out with Brett and Brett only dated (and eventually married) wildly stunning women (He only married one wildly stunning woman)...he was much broodier than me...and taller. But then summer came and with it magic.  It was all very fast and tremulous and passionate and fraught and wild and there was a phone call to my district manager to transfer to the Pasadena store and then we were signing a lease and then we were forcing her mother to plan the wedding back in Utah and forcing my mom to pay for the HUGE luncheon (we wanted to save the reception money for our honeymoon, so we utilized the 'Grooms Parents pay for the Luncheon' and invited 200 people and then flew off to Puerto Vallarta.

But then...

After that...

Everything went quiet, or rather, calm...

After the most romantic and passionate summer of any summer ever lived by anyone.  We settled, or rather, landed on the first year of our marriage.  And the soft gold dust of LA landed, or rather, settled on our skin.  And we traded our midnight independent movies for 5 o'clock homemade dinners on our balcony, just the two of us, face to face and the whole year, still, stays gold and edge-blurred and perfect.  We had found each other against all odds, my mid-attractiveness and lower middle intelligence and her staggering beauty and insatiable mind not withstanding, we found each other.  It was not in either of our plans but then, one day, it was only ever going to be just like this:

or this...

and this...

or this... 

now this...

And I will love her forever.

You Gotta Hear This...

So there's this fantastic group that Lindsay heard on NPR (yeah, yeah), and that I then heard on the Anthropologie soundtrack and came home all in a tizzy about. They are The Puppini Sisters, and they are delightful.

The Puppini Sisters formed after Marcella Puppini watched Les Triplettes de Belleville, an animated film whose primary characters include, among others, a group of women that sing tight, 40s-style harmonies, à la The Andrews Sisters. So, in the spirit of cross-cultural collaboration, this nice Italian girl found herself a couple of cute Brits and they started singing terrific cover songs, taking hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s and redoing them in what they call "tight, crunchy harmonies." They also do some older standards such as "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," but their covers of songs from later eras are the best. My favorite is a Big Band "Heart of Glass," originally done by Blondie. You can find it here: Heart of Glass. They also do a wicked rendition of I Will Survive.

Although each of those songs has remarkable and undeniable merits, my wife's favorite is their cover of Kate Bush's 1992 stunner, "Wuthering Heights." Bush's song is, of course, based on the gothic romance of the same name, and the music and vocals are apropos of such bizarrely spooky material. In fact, the video for the song leaves you wondering if you are witnessing a woman truly possessed by wily, windy demons or whether you, the listener, are on the receiving end of an elaborate hoax. Seriously, watch it. It's like nothing you've ever seen before.

I know, right? Can you believe it? What the eff is she doing, swirling around on those wily, windy moors, like a heather-hopping sprite beclothed in fire? It is just so strange. I mean, is she serious? Who knows, but I bet that's what Topher looked like in his modern dance class, don't you?

Anyway, my wife would say that regardless of the absurdity of Kate Bush she loves this song, but I think her undying devotion to the song is actually because of the havoc it plays with my sense of realism. She once did her best impression of the song (complete with wavering falsetto and unearthly, come-hither eyes) for Katie and me, (Katie whose now literally on Broadway) . For those of you who know how much it takes to get her to sing, this ought to explain just how much she adores this song.

So, back to the Puppini Sisters: they do a cover of this song wherein they pep it up and lose all the gothic eeriness, imbuing it instead with a shiny brightness. It's like the sisters went into Kate Bush's cobwebbed old mansion of a mind, opened all the curtains, dusted the furniture, mopped the floors, put some flowers out, and invited Cathy's ghost in for a nice cuppa tea and to dish about that nasty yet lovable Heathcliff from down the lane. I'm crazy about both versions, because they are each so distinctive, and each is somehow wonderfully archaic and contemporary at the same time. So without further ado, enjoy The Puppini Sisters singing Wuthering Heights. I so hope you like it as much as I do.

Ahh, Summer.

Let me ask you, is there anything better then being in the sun with a clean body of water to cool off in?  I mean really, what is better?  I do love the Spring, when the whole world has been dead and then it slowly wakes and you remember things like: Flowers, Kindness, and Dirt. I also love that first good snow, and it means the Holidays are coming and you remember things like: Fire Places, Seeing your Breath, and Warm Woolen Mittens.  And then in the Fall, that first cold snap and you finally get to pull out your sweaters from under the bed and you get to remember things like: Red and Gold and Purple.  But the Summer... even now Josh is up at a Lake reading book after book like a chain smoker lights her cigarettes, Chris is off exploring streets in London that he hasn't found yet, Ken is waxing one thing or another, and I? Well,  I've been watching The Wonder Years on Netflix. I started with Season 1 Episode 1 and I love it! Winnie Cooper, Fred Savage and the kid that my brothers all told me I looked like during my teenage years:

(I did not wear glasses...however, even I can see a resemblance. )

So, I love it. I love how in most sitcoms that revolve around School, the summer gets cut out; that's of course because the series airs during the school year and takes the summers off, but not The Wonder Years. Each season (and I've made it through four) they pay the correct homage to the Summer months filled with all the lazy days, odd jobs you end up doing, the distance that grows between you and your school friends, and how close you get to the kids on your street. Was there ever a better time in life than Summer Vacation when you were young?

My wife is a Summer Girl. She was born in early August, which sealed her fate.  She was a lifeguard and a diver when she as a teen. She was blonde and tan from May to October only because that is what the sun did to her, it took all her translucence of winter and made her glow. Her favorite holiday is still the 4th of July, though she still finds Christmas a reasonably enjoyable day, and she loves rodeos and fireworks.  There is this scene in Brokeback Mountain (which I'm sure you haven't seen because it's gay) where The Joker goes with his wife, the girl with short hair, to watch the fireworks, and the sky is so big and full of light and the crowd seems so small sitting on the yellow grass, their necks stretched fully to take it all in, and I imagine that's what the inside of my wife looks like.  Like Summer. She wrote about it here  she is an amazing and talented writer so I hope you click over and read it. She is a Doctor after all and you feel fine about reading posts written by five dopy dads, so go on, give it a shot... Here's that link again:

Summer Swan Song

Happy Summer.