this is me being picky

I need to apologize because I did not take any pictures when I was in NYC this past week. Shame on me. It simply never occurred to me to take my camera out of the camera bag.

Our show @ CMJ in NYC went extremely well, following a GREAT show at the Social in Orlando, FL. The venue—Fontana’s—isn’t exactly in the most attractive part of town—unceremoniously sandwiched between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. However, the venue itself was pretty cool, and surprisingly busy for a Tuesday night.

Because I’m me, I need to give my theatre review;) I apologize in advance if this seems overly-critical, but I take my theatre seriously!:D

I decided to go see RENT on Monday night. I went to the red Tkts office in South Street Seaport to see if there were any 50% off tickets available. By the time I got to the office, the only tickets available were for RENT or Chicago. I really wanted to see Lea Salonga perform in Les Miserables, but unfortunately that show is dark on Mondays, the only possible day I could have seen a show.

The leads of this RENT cast (for the roles of Mark, Roger and Mimi) definitely weren’t as strong as the previous show I had seen last summer, when Matt Caplan, Tim Howar and Antonique Smith filled those roles. The other actors (for the roles of Collins, Joanne and Angel) however were phenomenal. They each brought humor and likeability to the roles that I hadn’t seen before. Unfortunately, I felt pretty neutral about Maureen—typically my favorite character! Her voice was kind of annoying, as opposed to Maggie Benjamin and Haven Burton, the only other Maureen’s I’ve seen live. Her performance of Over the Moon was probably the most unique I’ve ever seen though, so I have to give her kudos for that.

I realized the difference—the last time I saw RENT in NYC, it was Matt Caplan’s last night playing Mark. So the crowd was full of Matt Caplan fans, and there was an electricity in the air the moment Roger (played by Tim Howar) stepped foot onstage to tune that famous guitar, and Matt injected some extra energy and “last hurrah” into his performance. His humor and weird, screwball energy and intelligence just brought so much to the role. I don’t think I ever truly appreciated the role of Mark until I saw Matt Caplan play him. (side note, if you pay attention, Matt Caplan is one of Jude and Max’s buddies in the “With a Little Help From My Friends” sequence in Across the Universe)

I couldn’t help but compare this Mimi actress to Antonique Smith, my favorite Mimi to date. Antonique’s vocals blew me away, especially in Another Day and Goodbye Love. Her voice was raw, emotional and expressive. Her interpretive ability and emotional range is incredible. I saw Antonique perform once and I still remember how amazing her voice is. The Mimi actress I saw this past week sounded too trained and she didn’t seem to portray the vulnerability of Mimi. Even her Out Tonight dance kind of bothered me. I always saw Mimi as being sweet and sexy with a hint of a fun and wild side, without being dirty, and this actress seemed to skip sweet and move right on to dirty which I didn’t necessarily appreciate. This is why I appreciated Rosario Dawson’s interpretation of Mimi in the film version: even though her vocals weren’t the most versatile, her ability of as an actress brought a certain sweetness and vulnerability to the role.

This Roger’s voice was actually great, just as good as Tim Howar, just minus the intensity. I remember I wasn’t crazy about Tim’s interpretation of Roger’s character, just because Tim plays Roger with a lot of anger and a lot of emotional walls. I just really loved Tim because his vocals are incredible and he did some creative, surprising things with his voice, in a role where I’ve gotten used to Adam Pascal’s vocals because of the soundtrack. This past Roger (Declan--I forgot his last name) made him more of a brooding, tortured soul, which is how I always pictured Roger to be.

I noticed that—especially with Mark and Roger—the humor overall did not play well with the crowd. I will allow that I noticed that this audience had a lot of older audience members, and not so many crazy RENThead fans like the last time I watched the show. So that probably made a difference in the energy of the crowd. With a tough crowd to respond to and with, I’m sure it probably made it harder on the actors. I’m pretty sure this cast lineup is new, so maybe the chemistry and energy will develop more as they learn to gel more, but I am just glad that I paid half-price for these tickets.

If only I’d gotten to see Lea Salonga perform in Les Miz…L

Okay, okay now I am just being whiny;)

news media differences

I don't have a ton of time to blog at the moment so I apologize. But I was reading Al-Jazeera's website about Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has become a household name in the U.S. ever since his infamous speech at Columbia University.

However, I initially found out about the incident after I read about it in this article while sitting in the lounge of Washington-Dulles Airport, waiting to board the airplane in the Washington Post.

Same event, two completely different perceptions.

Just makes you realize how distorted the media is, and how riddled everything is with agenda.

Recently, I've taken to reading BBC and Al Jazeera and balancing it out with CNN and occasionally Fox News...(Oddly enough, my preference for CNN over Fox News has nothing to do with my political leanings, only my preference for web design and aesthetic.) Also, I feel like an old person now, because I am now a regular NPR listener.

Or I was, before my commute got so short;)

I remember I got steaming mad at CNN a few weeks ago when it failed to provide a timely report of a bombing at a busy market square in Iraq that killed more than 200 people. The BBC of course immediately posted the event as a top story... I was reading it by 8a.m. that morning. CNN didn't get around to posting the story until mid-afternoon! Some silly entertainment news about Britney Spears had pre-empted it. By the time CNN did post it, it was as a tiny article in the Middle East section. You wouldn't know it was there unless you regularly checked Middle East News.

Granted, Britain is 6 hours ahead of the U.S., but CNN never sleeps. It's their job to provide the most up-to-date news.

At the very least, the different perspectives on these various news sources are very revealing of various cultures and their priorities.

Anyway, if you have time, take a look at the articles. The differences are quite telling.

Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L’Engle—one of my most favorite authors of all time—died of natural causes earlier this week. Although I was momentarily sad and shocked when I heard the announcement on NPR, it almost seems an insult to lament the loss. She lived a long, meaningful, creative life and died peacefully. What more could a person ask for?

I am simply going to take this moment instead to remember and celebrate her life and works.

I always found her novels to be rather insightful into the condition of humanity. One of my favorite quotes (also listed on my facebook profile) is uttered by Aunt Beast in A Wrinkle in Time: "We do not know what things look like, as you say," the beast said. "We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing."

In A Wind in the Door, Blajeny constantly asks Meg “What is real?” There is a deep human need to look beyond empirical evidence, even beyond reason itself at times to discover what is reality. Even Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.”

And of course, love has always been a main theme running throughout L’Engle’s novels, with love ultimately overpowering and overshadowing evil.

I always loved the sense of interconnectedness that the whole universe had in L’Engle’s novels, from the galaxies of stars burning light years away, to the well-being of our mitochondria at the cellular level. The battle between good and evil finds no corner of the universe untouched or unaffected. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, a tribal boy, a young Puritan settler, a Civil War vet, a mad modern-day South American dictator, are all deeply connected by free will, choosing light over darkness, good over evil. And although the immediate effect of such decisions seems monumental only to the one making the decisions, the ramifications of each choice ultimately have an effect on the fate of humanity. The consequence of each young man’s choice unquestionably “echoes in eternity.”

L’Engle puts these reluctant heroes in these fantastic, otherworldly experiences, and seems to declare that we are all caught up in something larger than ourselves and there is simply no escaping it. The question is not whether or not we’re a part of the story—we most definitely are—but rather how we choose to participate in it.

the tragic fate of Aragogette

It has been an exciting—albeit moribund—week here at Lake Hart. (This is turning into Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet… seriously)

First of all, Aragogette perished yesterday at the hand of Pedro the Maintenance Guy. After putting up an admirably staunch fight against her impending doom, the pressure washer inevitably got the best of her. After her beautiful web was decisively Aguamentied, she fell two stories, and her egg sac suffered the same fate. To add insult to serious injury, Pedro lowered his mechanical crane and decisively—nay, maliciously—squished her with his workboot.

Watching their mother meet such a cruel end, I felt compelled to rescue the orphaned egg sac as it lay forlornly on the sidewalk, probably the result of some idealistic notion planted in their by E.B. White himself.

Of course I didn’t want to touch it, so Carrie and I merely chipped it Tiger Woods-style into the bushes using first and umbrella and then a stick. So we probably did more damage to an already damaged egg sac. But at least my conscience is clear.

Then today, I passed a mostly-dead grey fox lying in the middle of the quad, on top of the freshly-trimmed Astroturf (Or whatever it is they cover the lawn with these days). I surely hope the fox was not Wentworth! But the reason I noticed it was the trio of buzzards that congregated near the corpse-ish fox. Then the maintenance compadres came by once again to dispose of the body in a black garbage bag. Carrie and I were amused at the disappointed buzzards, who actually looked quite bewildered at having their potential meal so casually stripped away from them.

So… you just never know what’s going to happen at "the Office."

(Cue the Scrantones……)

an apology to the arachnophobic....

There’s a banana spider living outside of our office window.

We’ve named it Aragogette, after Aragog from the Harry Potter books. The suffix has been added for obvious reasons.

I know that it’s probably a mistake to name a living thing, because I always inevitably end up attached to the named thing. Working at this office affords many opportunities to get attached to animals. For example, there is a rather large armadillo that often meanders around the quad. Naomi has named him Fitzwilliam. And I have dubbed a rather dashing grey fox that is seen skulking about on campus to be Wentworth (And bravo to you Jane Austen fans, as you’ve undoubtedly picked up on a pattern here…) Also, there was a family of four sandhill cranes that used to stalk the fields, named Harv and Marv by Karen. Carrie and I named their two babies (never figured out what a baby crane is called) Stuff and Nonsense, but then we’re pretty sure a gator got a hold of either Stuff or Nonsense, since the family was reduced to three. Unfortunately, the name just doesn’t sound as great with either Stuff or Nonsense missing. Plus we’re not even sure which one got nabbed by the gator.

In short, we get rather attached to the wildlife that we see here at work. It’s kind of pathetic, until I think this is probably something Jim and Pam would do at their workplace and suddenly I don’t feel like such a loser;)

After consulting Wikipedia, I was pretty sure that the spider was a female, because she seemed a lot larger than the other dozen spiders we’ve seen hanging onto webs between the trees that line the sidewalk leading from the parking lot to the office entranceway.

And that suspicion was confirmed when I arrived at work today to see that Aragogette’s egg sac tucked away in the corner of the building.

I sure hope she makes it, because yesterday the maintenance guy Pedro was power washing the windows and he came awfully close to Aragogette’s stomping grounds. Five windows away.

I never thought I would actually be on a spider’s side.

But I guess I am!

Oh and in case you haven’t heard about the sprawling, hundreds of yards-long and wide communal spider web in Texas… check out this link. Crazy.

Sorry if you don’t like spiders. They still creep me out. I am pretty sure I hate them.

Just not Aragogette.

And maybe Charlotte too...

Lessons Learned

There seem to be several themes running through my life as of late. This advice, these words seem to be casually interwoven into conversations I’ve had, films I’ve watched and books I’ve read recently, so I figured I’d share them.

Lesson #1 – Emotions are neither good nor bad, only the reality of where I am. A good friend of mine recently wrote to me, “where dealing with your emotions is concerned, just not to judge yourself--not to limit or gauge your feelings or decide whether they are trustworthy. Of course they aren't. And of course, you know, they are. Just be willing to feel whatever comes along…”

Somewhere in the past few years of my life, I somehow subconsciously learned that “emotions are bad,” mostly because they tended to get me into more trouble than they seemed to be worth. So somewhere in the past couple of years, I became this logical, overanalytical person who—while well-protected and preserved and perhaps a bit wiser—had forgotten how to be in the moment and create and feel—even if it hurt.

This may be why I haven’t been able to write a decent song in six months.

Lesson #2—Just do the next thing. Take one day at a time. I seem to remember Christ saying the exact same thing while teaching His famous Sermon on the Mount. The reality of those words rings so much truer for me right now. The big picture may inspire and enervate, but it can also drain and make despondent. Sometimes it’s better just to not concern myself with things I have no control over, and to simply make do with the things I can make choices about.

Lesson #3—Prayer changes things: mostly me. I am sick of people decrying the “church answer.” I have the right to say that, because I used to be one of the church answer’s most vehement opponents. However, I can’t even tell you how many countless times this bare fact persists in presenting itself to me: prayer is powerful and absolutely necessary if anything—especially me—is going to change. The most useful thing about prayer is that it gets the focus off of my own problems and agendas and allows me to lean into the Father and unknowingly become selfless. Because as we all know, the moment you become aware that you are being selfless is the moment that you’ve lost it again.

But faithful, earnest prayer automatically puts us in a proper posture of humility and mystery and connectedness before God. Prayer is not a religious exercise…it’s a passionate discipline that positions ourselves where we ought to be. Where we are meant to be.

Lesson #4—Serving other people also changes things: mostly me. I am discovering again and again how ineffably lazy and self-absorbed I am. Being attuned to other people’s needs and doing the right thing to serve and help people is the best way to learn how to love. Just doing it. Nike was right.

Lesson #5—Acting on fear is a subtlely self-destructive way to live. This is more of a process, rather than a lesson. I don’t think I’ll ever truly learn this lesson, only chip away at it for years to come. Acting on fear is the kind of thing you learn to do day by day until it becomes instinctive. And then we adults have to spend the rest of our lives unlearning fear and moving toward honesty.

It is fitting that the first thing Adam and Eve did when they made a mistake was that they fled. Out of fear. To hide. Human beings like to hide from one another. Fear of loss, fear of being found out, fear of being completely seen, fear of death… this subtle fear drives so many of us, but it’s so subtle that we don’t even realize it half the time.

I didn’t mean to end on that downer. But I suppose the counter-lesson would be...

Lesson #6—I want to live a free life. By free, I don’t mean unlicensed, unrestricted, and do whatever I want kind of life. That kind of uninhibited freedom, I have learned, is not freedom at all. And I’m actually starting to believe that.

I mean the kind of freedom that is based on the values of this kingdom that God is supposedly establishing… a freedom that is not afraid to try and fail, to forgive, to trust, to move forward, to hope. That kind of freedom.

Dear Frankie review

It’s been awhile since I did a (real) film review (HSM does NOT count), but this one was so unexpectedly compelling that I simply had to share.

I saw a little-known film called Dear Frankie last night. I always saw the preview for it on my Finding Neverland DVD, and wanted to see it. It’s about a mother and her boy Frankie, who faithfully writes letters to his father, whom he believes is sailing on a ship called the Accra. The mother Lizzie—played by Emily Mortimer—intercepts these letters and writes him back twice a month. Suddenly, Frankie discovers his father’s ship is about to dock in their home port at Glasgow, and so his mother hires a stranger—played by Gerard Butler of Phantom and 300 fame—to stand-in for his absent father.

It seemed like such a simple plot device, but there were a lot of beautiful moments in the film. One thing I appreciate about foreign-made films is the faith that so many of the directors apparently have in the intelligence of the audience. Foreign films tend to be a bit more cerebral. Everything is understated, layers of character—like in a good painting—are subtle and implied, never spelled out. The cinematography was both lovely and delicately unassuming, a breath of fresh air after all of these popcorn flicks and three-quels this summer. I am so over summer blockbusters at the moment.

Also… I hardly ever cry in movies. I am not a chick-flick kind of girl, and I am definitely not a cry-during-a-chick-flick kind of girl either. But this film did me in. It has the emotional resonance and payoff of Finding Neverland, but none of the imaginative detours (And also no Johnny Depp). However, the casting was absolutely superb. The kid Frankie is certainly the heart of the film, and his vulnerability and indefatigable hope that he conveys is pretty amazing. The mother is surprisingly sympathetic—you would think, “C’mon, she’s just lying to her kid!”—but her motives and emotions are so much more complex than that and Emily Mortimer made her totally believable. And of course Gerard Butler’s scruffy ruggedness decked out in his black leather jacket certainly more than makes up for any supposed Depp-deficiency ;)

And Scottish accents are always a plus.

But if you’re in the mood, go out and rent or buy Dear Frankie. It’s a simple, beautiful human story.