I spent much of this week moving into two different offices.
One move was fairly simple. I’m back at Mid-Range Campus for one class this semester, and I’d been assigned to bunk with a tenured professor in his office – the same colleague who gave me his office last year, except that this year he was back from his administrative position and teaching full time. We were going to alternate days, except that he ended up needing to be there on my days too. It turned out that there was space in the adjunct corral a couple of doors down, and if I moved in there it would allow him to have his office back full time.
This seemed reasonable to me.
The whole process took all of about fifteen minutes. As an adjunct, I have learned to live light on the land. I got a new key, moved my two canvas shopping bags’ worth of stuff (tea kettle and related supplies, miscellaneous papers, etc) two doors down the hallway, and got set up. I’ve actually got more space now since the adjunct market is in steep decline in Wisconsin, a state whose current regime’s unremitting hostility to the very idea of education has, not surprisingly, resulted in teacher shortages across the board and catastrophic budget cuts heralding further reductions in the future. In an office set up for as many as four adjuncts, there are only two of us. And I’ll be gone by mid-May.
I’m just going to enjoy it while it lasts.
The other move was a bit more complicated and heralds a new era in my professional life, though one foreshadowed by everything I just wrote.
I have been very fortunate to have found full employment as an adjunct for the last three semesters, but if you’re in this field you know that this is a fragile and generally temporary state. Even the normal ebb and flow of things conspires against stability, and a political climate that regards an educated and informed populace as a threat to be eliminated only makes that instability greater. But education matters to me and I’d like to stay in the field despite all that. So I’ve been applying for other, more student-service-oriented positions for a while now, and this month I was hired for one down at Home Campus.
How I managed to survive the interview process I’m not sure. I’ve never been good at interviews.
But I am now employed, and I will start as soon as they have conducted all of the background checks necessary to confirm that I am not some kind of violent criminal likely to take over the nearest bird sanctuary in the name of ideology and greed. This may not happen until late next week – the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly, even for someone whose most serious brush with the law was a speeding ticket twenty-three years ago – but I took the opportunity to go in on Friday and set up my new office.
Yes, I get an office. A whole office just for me! One that I don’t have to share or give back in seventeen weeks, assuming that I actually do well in this new job and they don’t pitch me over the side as dead weight. I’m going to do my best to make sure that said pitching does not happen.
I have been sharing an office elsewhere on campus for a while now, in that temporary adjunct sort of way, and it seemed like a good idea for me to transfer all my stuff from there to the new place before I actually had to get in there and work. This took less than ninety minutes. What can I say? Living light.
Now all I have to do is decorate the place.
So it will be a new start for me, even as I am still teaching classes when I can. I'm multi-talented. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Boo-ya!
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Chick Magnet
We’re back in the chicken business.
For the last several years Lauren has been part of the 4H poultry project, which is why we have a slowly growing flock out at our friend’s barn just west of town. Right now there are two roosters – who seem to get along just fine, oddly enough – and five hens, and they provide most of the eggs and absurdity that we need to get through the days.
But you can’t show the same chickens two years in a row, according to the 4H folks, so every year we invest in new chickens.
Kim and Lauren came home today with six chicks. There are three Speckled Hamburgs, two Dominiques, and one Blue Rosecomb Bantam, which is the tiny one in the middle. Bantams are kind of useless as far as egg production goes, unless you're interested in a 45-egg omelet that fits in a regular-sized frying pan and feeds one, but we figure Rosie will like her, assuming she survives her term as the designated floormat for the other chicks. Chickens are not the most thoughtful animals.
Right now they’re living in a red plastic bin in our living room, where it is warm and dry, and they’ll stay there until they’re big and hardy enough to shovel off into the barn. We’re not even scofflaws now that the chicken ordinance has passed here in Our Little Town, and I suppose there is even an outside chance that we’d put up a chicken coop in our backyard, though you can’t keep roosters and at least one of the chicks is probably a rooster – you can’t tell at this age – so that might not be worth the trouble. But we could.
There will likely be more chickens coming at some point. You’re allowed to show up to six different birds, I believe, though only two from each breed. So more chickens. And there will be turkeys as well. More chicks, more birds, more, more, more.
There is a reason Lauren insisted I write a blog post with the title this one has. We just attract these things.
Right now the main issue is to keep the chicks warm enough in the winter and fenced off from prying cats, who see them as mobile snacks rather than future ribbon-winning projects. You’d think the cats would be used to it by now, but that assumes that they can hold a thought in their heads from one year to the next and that theory crashes and burns once you get to the word “thought,” really. The “one year to the next” part is just there for comic effect. As long as we can keep the chicks warm and cat-free we’re probably okay. Chickens are much sturdier creatures than turkeys, oddly enough, so they’ll survive until there is a conscious decision to make them not survive.
Speaking of which, we’ve had chicken for dinner for the last two nights.
Because that’s how we roll.
For the last several years Lauren has been part of the 4H poultry project, which is why we have a slowly growing flock out at our friend’s barn just west of town. Right now there are two roosters – who seem to get along just fine, oddly enough – and five hens, and they provide most of the eggs and absurdity that we need to get through the days.
But you can’t show the same chickens two years in a row, according to the 4H folks, so every year we invest in new chickens.
Kim and Lauren came home today with six chicks. There are three Speckled Hamburgs, two Dominiques, and one Blue Rosecomb Bantam, which is the tiny one in the middle. Bantams are kind of useless as far as egg production goes, unless you're interested in a 45-egg omelet that fits in a regular-sized frying pan and feeds one, but we figure Rosie will like her, assuming she survives her term as the designated floormat for the other chicks. Chickens are not the most thoughtful animals.
Right now they’re living in a red plastic bin in our living room, where it is warm and dry, and they’ll stay there until they’re big and hardy enough to shovel off into the barn. We’re not even scofflaws now that the chicken ordinance has passed here in Our Little Town, and I suppose there is even an outside chance that we’d put up a chicken coop in our backyard, though you can’t keep roosters and at least one of the chicks is probably a rooster – you can’t tell at this age – so that might not be worth the trouble. But we could.
There will likely be more chickens coming at some point. You’re allowed to show up to six different birds, I believe, though only two from each breed. So more chickens. And there will be turkeys as well. More chicks, more birds, more, more, more.
There is a reason Lauren insisted I write a blog post with the title this one has. We just attract these things.
Right now the main issue is to keep the chicks warm enough in the winter and fenced off from prying cats, who see them as mobile snacks rather than future ribbon-winning projects. You’d think the cats would be used to it by now, but that assumes that they can hold a thought in their heads from one year to the next and that theory crashes and burns once you get to the word “thought,” really. The “one year to the next” part is just there for comic effect. As long as we can keep the chicks warm and cat-free we’re probably okay. Chickens are much sturdier creatures than turkeys, oddly enough, so they’ll survive until there is a conscious decision to make them not survive.
Speaking of which, we’ve had chicken for dinner for the last two nights.
Because that’s how we roll.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Give Us a Verse, Drop Some Knowledge!
I spent some of my morning writing poetry.
I don’t usually do that. For one thing, I’ve always had the sneaking feeling that poetry ought to rhyme and I’ve never had any facility with rhyming things and not having them sound like a fifth-grade graduation speech. Plus, honestly, reading rhyming poetry bores me to tears most of the time. You have to be really, really good at that sort of thing to make it worthwhile for me.
There are only so many Doctor Seusses in the world.
For another, I've never been much of a fan of older alliterative models of poetry – the kind of lays and odes that litter Tolkien’s work, for example, most of which I just skip over because I know the important plot points they contain will be explained below – and while the snarky haikus that you see online can be entertaining, especially if Godzilla is involved, I tend to wear out on them fairly quickly.
I do like limericks, though, because most of them are funny. Poetry has an awful tendency to take itself far too seriously and after a while you want to track down the poets responsible, get them good and drunk, and ship them to Vegas just to lighten them up a bit. Limerick writers seem, as a group, to have already done that. Or perhaps they are still doing that. It depends on the limerick.
There is a reason why the “London Times Limerick Contest” joke is one of my favorites. And no I’m not going to repeat it here.
Limericks generally avoid the "taking yourself too seriously" problem. It's hard to find anything serious that rhymes with "Nantucket," after all. I prefer poems that like that, although sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands in that regard. A friend of mine once pointed out that nearly all of Emily Dickinson’s work can be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” for example, and that fact still brightens my day. Try it sometime:
“Because I would not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.”
Doesn’t the music add a layer of levity that ol’ Emily probably could have used?
As for free verse, well. Poetry that does not rhyme or have any real meter just strikes me as poorly typeset prose. You might as well write it down in paragraphs and be done with it. I’m good at prose, though, and to be honest my all-time favorite poet (Brian Andreas) falls squarely into this style of writing. If there is any kind of poetry that appeals to me as a broad category, I suppose this is it.
So consistency is not my thing when it comes to poetry, is what I’m saying here. They’re my tastes, after all. I reserve the right to like what I like and not like what I don’t, according to whim and mood, regardless of whether it rhymes or not or how seriously it takes itself.
I found myself at a meeting today, and as an exercise we were asked to come up with a number of items in five different categories, all under the general heading of “Where I Come From.” The “Family” category was easy – there weren’t that many of us when I was younger, and we were a tight-knit group. The “Food” category was similarly easy, since a great deal of our lives revolved around meals. That hasn’t changed, by the way, and that’s fine by me. The “Places” category was also fairly straightforward for someone who has always had a historian’s sense of place and time, though the “Items” category – things that defined your world back when – was a bit harder since I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house where things were both reasonably plentiful and not very emphasized. We tended to focus on people. The only category that I had trouble with was “Family Sayings,” not because I couldn’t think of any – my brother once put together a multi-page list of common expressions that we shared – but because none of the ones I could think of off the top of my head were really appropriate for a professional setting. What can I say? It was quite a list.
We were then asked to write a poem based on this, one that would address the general heading. The whole exercise, including brainstorming, took about fifteen minutes.
This is what I came up with. I have no illusions as to it being an anthology-worthy poem, but I rather like it anyway. It’s not bad for a fifteen-minute project.
---
I come from a small family in a large city
And grew up in a world that smelled like gravy
Which is red and goes on ravioli
No matter what people say.
There were places to go
Around my neighborhood on my bike
And in my mind through books and photographs
And the little globe that my grandmother would spin.
There were fires to put out
Metaphorical ones backstage
And real ones I went to on the back of a truck,
And there were things we said to each other that only we understood
Which is probably for the best.
I don’t usually do that. For one thing, I’ve always had the sneaking feeling that poetry ought to rhyme and I’ve never had any facility with rhyming things and not having them sound like a fifth-grade graduation speech. Plus, honestly, reading rhyming poetry bores me to tears most of the time. You have to be really, really good at that sort of thing to make it worthwhile for me.
There are only so many Doctor Seusses in the world.
For another, I've never been much of a fan of older alliterative models of poetry – the kind of lays and odes that litter Tolkien’s work, for example, most of which I just skip over because I know the important plot points they contain will be explained below – and while the snarky haikus that you see online can be entertaining, especially if Godzilla is involved, I tend to wear out on them fairly quickly.
I do like limericks, though, because most of them are funny. Poetry has an awful tendency to take itself far too seriously and after a while you want to track down the poets responsible, get them good and drunk, and ship them to Vegas just to lighten them up a bit. Limerick writers seem, as a group, to have already done that. Or perhaps they are still doing that. It depends on the limerick.
There is a reason why the “London Times Limerick Contest” joke is one of my favorites. And no I’m not going to repeat it here.
Limericks generally avoid the "taking yourself too seriously" problem. It's hard to find anything serious that rhymes with "Nantucket," after all. I prefer poems that like that, although sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands in that regard. A friend of mine once pointed out that nearly all of Emily Dickinson’s work can be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” for example, and that fact still brightens my day. Try it sometime:
“Because I would not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.”
Doesn’t the music add a layer of levity that ol’ Emily probably could have used?
As for free verse, well. Poetry that does not rhyme or have any real meter just strikes me as poorly typeset prose. You might as well write it down in paragraphs and be done with it. I’m good at prose, though, and to be honest my all-time favorite poet (Brian Andreas) falls squarely into this style of writing. If there is any kind of poetry that appeals to me as a broad category, I suppose this is it.
So consistency is not my thing when it comes to poetry, is what I’m saying here. They’re my tastes, after all. I reserve the right to like what I like and not like what I don’t, according to whim and mood, regardless of whether it rhymes or not or how seriously it takes itself.
I found myself at a meeting today, and as an exercise we were asked to come up with a number of items in five different categories, all under the general heading of “Where I Come From.” The “Family” category was easy – there weren’t that many of us when I was younger, and we were a tight-knit group. The “Food” category was similarly easy, since a great deal of our lives revolved around meals. That hasn’t changed, by the way, and that’s fine by me. The “Places” category was also fairly straightforward for someone who has always had a historian’s sense of place and time, though the “Items” category – things that defined your world back when – was a bit harder since I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house where things were both reasonably plentiful and not very emphasized. We tended to focus on people. The only category that I had trouble with was “Family Sayings,” not because I couldn’t think of any – my brother once put together a multi-page list of common expressions that we shared – but because none of the ones I could think of off the top of my head were really appropriate for a professional setting. What can I say? It was quite a list.
We were then asked to write a poem based on this, one that would address the general heading. The whole exercise, including brainstorming, took about fifteen minutes.
This is what I came up with. I have no illusions as to it being an anthology-worthy poem, but I rather like it anyway. It’s not bad for a fifteen-minute project.
---
I come from a small family in a large city
And grew up in a world that smelled like gravy
Which is red and goes on ravioli
No matter what people say.
There were places to go
Around my neighborhood on my bike
And in my mind through books and photographs
And the little globe that my grandmother would spin.
There were fires to put out
Metaphorical ones backstage
And real ones I went to on the back of a truck,
And there were things we said to each other that only we understood
Which is probably for the best.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
The Old Ball Game
Sometimes things just spiral out of control.
I’m between semesters now, which means I don’t have the pell-mell rush on Thursdays that I had all last year. And that means that, should I choose to do so, I could post a Throwback Thursday picture. Since today is my last Thursday before everything starts up again, I decided I’d throw one up on my Facebook page and then, as is my habit, write a post about it here that delved into some of the backstory. The whole point of photographs is to preserve stories, after all. If you don’t tell the stories attached to the photos, the photos become meaningless. I had to catalogue too many of those when I ran the historical society a few years ago. Stories are important. They need to be told.
So I found this picture buried in the family archives. I’d scanned it a couple of summers ago as part of that earlier project, and it seemed like a good one to share.
The short version is that this is the Cresmour A. C. base ball nine, a neighborhood sandlot team that played in South Philadelphia in the late 1920s or early 1930s, when "baseball" was still often written as two distinct words. I’m pretty sure my grandfather is the guy standing at the far right. That’s about all the information I thought I had on it.
Except that my grandfather also kept a small scrapbook where he pasted newspaper clippings from his baseball days, one that I could mine for cross-references. It turns out that he played on a bunch of these neighborhood teams – Penrose, Mayo, Passyunk Square, Kimball, and so on – mostly as a shortstop, but occasionally as a pitcher and once in a while as a second-baseman. Most of the guys on those teams played more than one position, and I imagine that it largely depended on who showed up that afternoon.
Cresmour was filled with Italian-Americans – Beltrante, Coliezzi, Cosenza, DeCarlo, Delia, Felizzi, Frangelli, Lampone, Menna, Nunzi, Oteri, Tomasco, Volpe, and so on – as befit the neighborhood where they played, though they did have a pitcher named Lopez and at one point there was a pinch-hitter named Daly who I am pretty sure was not Delia though sportswriters from that era were not the most careful people when it came to that sort of thing. Their home field was at either 20th or 26th and Patterson (the sportswriters weren’t all that careful about antecedents either). And once in a while my grandfather would be singled out in the two or three sentence clippings, mostly for his hitting.
Someday I will look up what, precisely, was a “bingle” in this context – there was a game where it was deemed noteworthy that he hit three of them, and the term crops up attached to other hitters as well – but my guess is that it is not a home run. My grandfather had the size and build of a contact hitter, and there is a reason Babe Ruth did not play shortstop.
None of the clippings have any information on them beyond the games themselves – final scores, personnel, box scores, occasionally a sentence or two if anything interesting happened at the game – and once in a while an invitation to other clubs to write to the manager (address provided) to get on their schedule. There are no dates and no indication of what newspaper they’re clipped out of, though given the duplication of clippings on certain games it is clear that there are several newspapers represented.
This was back when there were several newspapers in a city, kiddies. That used to happen before the media corporations ate the competition and the internet ate the media corporations, and it was a sign that people actually wanted to know what was happening in their world rather than simply have their prejudices confirmed in such a way as to polish up the nice shiny ideological bubble in which they live. It was a different era, in other words.
The down side to that kind of active and informed citizenry, however, is that it makes tracking down sources that much harder.
I thought I’d do a bit of googling and come up with some historical context in which to situate that photo and my grandfather’s story, have a nice little story, and be done with it. But having noodled around the internet for the better part of the day (and being suitably impressed by one sportswriter’s inclusion of the phrase “clinch the gonfalon” in his description of a neighborhood sandlot baseball game), it appears that information on Cresmour A. C. is going to be considerably harder to track down than I thought it would be.
Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.
I’m between semesters now, which means I don’t have the pell-mell rush on Thursdays that I had all last year. And that means that, should I choose to do so, I could post a Throwback Thursday picture. Since today is my last Thursday before everything starts up again, I decided I’d throw one up on my Facebook page and then, as is my habit, write a post about it here that delved into some of the backstory. The whole point of photographs is to preserve stories, after all. If you don’t tell the stories attached to the photos, the photos become meaningless. I had to catalogue too many of those when I ran the historical society a few years ago. Stories are important. They need to be told.
So I found this picture buried in the family archives. I’d scanned it a couple of summers ago as part of that earlier project, and it seemed like a good one to share.
The short version is that this is the Cresmour A. C. base ball nine, a neighborhood sandlot team that played in South Philadelphia in the late 1920s or early 1930s, when "baseball" was still often written as two distinct words. I’m pretty sure my grandfather is the guy standing at the far right. That’s about all the information I thought I had on it.
Except that my grandfather also kept a small scrapbook where he pasted newspaper clippings from his baseball days, one that I could mine for cross-references. It turns out that he played on a bunch of these neighborhood teams – Penrose, Mayo, Passyunk Square, Kimball, and so on – mostly as a shortstop, but occasionally as a pitcher and once in a while as a second-baseman. Most of the guys on those teams played more than one position, and I imagine that it largely depended on who showed up that afternoon.
Cresmour was filled with Italian-Americans – Beltrante, Coliezzi, Cosenza, DeCarlo, Delia, Felizzi, Frangelli, Lampone, Menna, Nunzi, Oteri, Tomasco, Volpe, and so on – as befit the neighborhood where they played, though they did have a pitcher named Lopez and at one point there was a pinch-hitter named Daly who I am pretty sure was not Delia though sportswriters from that era were not the most careful people when it came to that sort of thing. Their home field was at either 20th or 26th and Patterson (the sportswriters weren’t all that careful about antecedents either). And once in a while my grandfather would be singled out in the two or three sentence clippings, mostly for his hitting.
Someday I will look up what, precisely, was a “bingle” in this context – there was a game where it was deemed noteworthy that he hit three of them, and the term crops up attached to other hitters as well – but my guess is that it is not a home run. My grandfather had the size and build of a contact hitter, and there is a reason Babe Ruth did not play shortstop.
None of the clippings have any information on them beyond the games themselves – final scores, personnel, box scores, occasionally a sentence or two if anything interesting happened at the game – and once in a while an invitation to other clubs to write to the manager (address provided) to get on their schedule. There are no dates and no indication of what newspaper they’re clipped out of, though given the duplication of clippings on certain games it is clear that there are several newspapers represented.
This was back when there were several newspapers in a city, kiddies. That used to happen before the media corporations ate the competition and the internet ate the media corporations, and it was a sign that people actually wanted to know what was happening in their world rather than simply have their prejudices confirmed in such a way as to polish up the nice shiny ideological bubble in which they live. It was a different era, in other words.
The down side to that kind of active and informed citizenry, however, is that it makes tracking down sources that much harder.
I thought I’d do a bit of googling and come up with some historical context in which to situate that photo and my grandfather’s story, have a nice little story, and be done with it. But having noodled around the internet for the better part of the day (and being suitably impressed by one sportswriter’s inclusion of the phrase “clinch the gonfalon” in his description of a neighborhood sandlot baseball game), it appears that information on Cresmour A. C. is going to be considerably harder to track down than I thought it would be.
Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Observations on the Theater
Way back in the Mesozoic, when I was an undergraduate, I took a psych class called, “The Psychology of Drama.”
It was an experimental class, one that had never been offered before on that campus. The class was taught as a seminar and eventually it got picked up as a regular offering, though as a lecture class instead. Sometimes I wonder how much we had to do with that. We wore the poor professor down.
It was taught by the only faculty member on campus who had any involvement in the theater there, a faculty member whom you will notice was a psychology professor and not a theater professor. We didn’t even have a Theater Department. I think you could, technically, major in theater, but it was a text-based concentration within the English Department and not anything that had anything to do with actual staged productions. We were entirely student-run when it came to theater. There were eight or ten major student drama groups, depending on how you counted and when, as well as a whole bunch of one-off productions every year, and I was one of the dozen or so students who did lighting, moving from show to show and feeding off cast parties like locusts. Once every other year, this professor would direct a play.
His plays were considered very desirable productions to work on among us theater types, but I never did get a chance to do so. The first time he directed a play when I was a student was before I really got involved in theater on campus, and the second time he got sick and canceled it. So the class was my only shot at working with him on something theater-related, and since I was also a psych major it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would sign up for it the moment it hit the catalogue.
The professor was a kind man who had lived in this country for decades but still spoke with a pronounced German accent, as perhaps all psychologists ought to do. My clearest memory of him happened at the end of the semester, when I had run into a conflict that forced me to choose between the group project assigned for that class and a commitment I had made to a friend to run the lighting board for a production of Hair. Doing both was not possible. I hemmed and hawed about this for a few days, once that realization set in, and then I finally just called him at home and explained the situation. There was a pause when I finished. “Vell,” came a soft voice after a few moments, “you do vot you tink iss right.” “Thank you,” I said, and then I hung up the phone, bailed out on my group project, ran the lighting board for the show, spent the 72 hours immediately after the cast party frantically working on the final paper for that class, and got the only A+ for a final grade that I ever received as an undergraduate.
I didn’t even know they gave those out.
The class itself was a bit of a wash, though. I learned a great deal, but I was outnumbered. There were maybe fifteen people in that class, and they were almost all – including the professor – focused entirely on the front-of-house side rather than the backstage side where I and one other student in the class lived. It became, in other words, a class that really should have been entitled, “The Psychology of Acting and Directing,” which to my mind was very much not the same thing as “The Psychology of Drama.” This technician felt there was a bit more to be explored than that.
As the meme I saw go by on Facebook recently put it so succinctly, actors without technicians are naked people emoting on a dark, empty stage, while technicians without actors are at the bar. Where was the psychology of the backstage stuff?
And more importantly, where was the audience in all that? To me, the audience is the most psychologically interesting part of the theater, and the class addressed them only glancingly. In particular, we never explored what I felt was the single most important psychological question about the theater:
Why is one group of people willing to watch a second group of people pretend to be a third group of people?
This to me is the central riddle of the theater. We take it for granted that people will be interested in theater – or movies, or television, since it’s all drama when you look at it this way – and we focus on how to make them more interested, with scripts and blocking and sound and lighting and so on, but we forget to ask why those people are there at all. We should ask, though, because without the audience there is precious little point to theater.
I never did get an answer to that question, by the way. I still don’t know.
So while the class spent the semester arguing over the merits of this or that acting technique, in self-defense I spent a great deal of time writing up my own observations on the theater – things I had learned over the years. I had been dragooned into backstage work in high school and many of my favorite times had been spent there. I’d worked for most of the various drama groups on campus as an undergraduate, and would go on to work backstage for community theaters, other university theaters, and, briefly, professionally. Even back then I’d seen a few things that seemed worth writing down.
Not that anyone could read them, of course. My handwriting wasn’t any better then than it is now, and I do remember at one point having to tell my roommate, “No, that doesn’t say ‘weasels.’ It says ‘headsets.’” Although weasels are inherently funnier than headsets, so perhaps I should have gone there instead. It is difficult but not, after all, impossible to imagine scenarios where weasels would become relevant in a theatrical setting.
Eventually I ended up with a list entitled “101 Observations on the Theater,” each observation complete with commentary and typed into legibility. Hey – it got me through the class.
Tabitha has now been pulled into the orbit of her high school’s theater groups, which – among other things – made me drag out that old list recently. Many of the things that had struck undergraduate me as either funny or profound seemed to middle-aged me to be a bit cringe-worthy, frankly. There are still a few things on it that I thought were worth passing along, though. Plus I’ve had a few experiences since then that perhaps deserved a place on a new and revised list.
So I went back and picked out the ones that I felt were worth preserving, polished up a few others that had potential once the cringing stopped, and added a few more to reflect current knowledge. It’s a shorter list now, but perhaps a better one.
---
1. Why is one group of people willing to watch a second group of people pretend to be a third group of people?
2. The audience doesn’t catch most of the good stuff. This is why the tech crew seems to be laughing in all the wrong places.
3. You either know your audience or you don’t get to have one.
4. There’s deep, and there’s digging a hole.
5. Never complicate the simple more than the simple will bear. Never simplify the complicated more than the complicated will allow. This is, in essence, a judgment call.
6. You never know what an actor will do until you get them in front of an audience. Some blossom, some wilt, but none are quite the same as they were in rehearsal.
7. There is a world of difference between reading a script and acting.
8. The ability to ad-lib through long stretches of what isn’t quite supposed to be happening is a prized skill on both sides of the stage.
9. Technicians mostly talk about past shows. Actors mostly talk about this one.
10. Sometimes the only reason a show gets produced is because the technical crew thinks it would be an interesting challenge.
11. Good tech work, like a good butler, is invisible. If the audience spends its time looking at the tech, something is wrong.
12. Mistakes happen in bunches.
13. Five competent people is all you need, which is good because a lot of times it’s all you’re likely to get.
14. Nobody’s organizational system is like anyone else’s organizational system, though most people have at least one.
15. Things are where they are because that’s where they get put. Don’t ask for more explanation and please put things back there when you are done so the next person can find them.
16. When in doubt:
a. On scenery – paint it black and nobody will notice.
b. On sets – nail it down and tell scenery to paint it black.
c. On lighting – fuzz it, gel it warm, and add it to the wash.
17. If you look like you know what you’re doing, nobody will question you.
18. When all is said and done, final creative control rests with whoever does the last bit of work. In lighting, this is known as “board-op’s prerogative.”
19. It’s a good musical when the audience leaves humming. It’s a great musical when the tech crew dances.
20. Light repels actors.
21. If there’s no glare in your eyes, there’s no light on your face.
22. Actors regard blocking as a suggestion. Lighting designers regard blocking as a map of where the light needs to go. Often these perspectives can be squared, but not always.
23. Audiences occasionally blink in unison. This usually bothers the director much more than the lighting crew.
24. Gobos get hot more quickly than you think they will.
25. Anything that runs through the lighting board belongs to the lighting crew.
26. Most problems in lighting can be resolved by asking three simple questions: a) Is there a lamp in it? b) Is it plugged in? and c) Is it turned on? Save the fretting for the real problems.
27. The mere fact that the lighting board can handle a given wattage doesn’t necessarily mean that the theater’s electrical system can actually provide that much wattage.
28. Dancers are only graceful onstage. No matter how often you explain to them that the lighting instruments on the offstage booms are a) heavy, b) sharp, and c) hot, you will still have to refocus them after every show.
29. There are times when the lighting crew, like the Secret Service, must be prepared to take the bullet for the good of the larger cause. Audiences are much happier thinking that the lighting went wrong than they would be if they knew that the actors just skipped four pages of the script.
30. By the time the show closes, all the lighting designer can see are dark spots.
31. The best part of headsets is the running commentary.
32. There is a way that lighting cables want to be coiled. It is not the way you want the lighting cables to be coiled.
33. People who screw around with equipment during shows get pitched off the catwalk.
34. Beware of set designers with bandages.
35. If you screw up the set, screw up symmetrically.
36. In a pinch, a hammer is as good as any other tool.
37. There is no reason to use building-code-quality construction for a set that is only a backdrop, especially if it has to be moved during the show.
38. The ideal running crew member can see in the dark, walk without a sound, lift up the set with one hand and carry china service for twelve with the other without chipping a cup.
39. Know where the safe spots are on stage. Lighting designers are often very optimistic people when it comes to how many instruments the grid can actually support, so if you hear anything while you’re onstage dive first and ask questions later.
40. If you’re caught onstage while moving pieces of the set, have the grace to bow when you’re done. The audience appreciates a good sport.
41. Have sympathy for the costumer – it’s the last vestige of the sweatshop economy.
42. For those who think that theatrics are confined to the stage, there is always load-in.
43. Load-in is where you discover that what you want is not what you have, what you have is not what you need, what you need is not what you can deal with, and what you can deal with is not what you want.
44. It takes a lot less time to tear down a show than it does to put one up.
45. The show isn’t over until strike is over.
46. All diets and nutritional care are suspended during production week.
47. Opening night is usually the final dress rehearsal. As long as it’s not the first dress rehearsal you’ll probably be fine.
48. A show has never opened that didn’t have wet paint on it somewhere.
49. A sense of humor will get you through just about anything.
50. Never underestimate the ability of a cast and crew to change just about everything on a moment’s notice.
51. Stopping the show to ask if there is a doctor in the house is not as fulfilling as the movies make it sound.
52. When a show is good enough, people will give you time, effort, results, and diseases beyond your wildest imaginings.
53. The greatest moment in theater is when the house lights fade to black to begin the show, for then all things are possible and magic still exists.
54. Periodically, in the midst of all the confusion, everything clicks and you just have to sit back and watch.
It was an experimental class, one that had never been offered before on that campus. The class was taught as a seminar and eventually it got picked up as a regular offering, though as a lecture class instead. Sometimes I wonder how much we had to do with that. We wore the poor professor down.
It was taught by the only faculty member on campus who had any involvement in the theater there, a faculty member whom you will notice was a psychology professor and not a theater professor. We didn’t even have a Theater Department. I think you could, technically, major in theater, but it was a text-based concentration within the English Department and not anything that had anything to do with actual staged productions. We were entirely student-run when it came to theater. There were eight or ten major student drama groups, depending on how you counted and when, as well as a whole bunch of one-off productions every year, and I was one of the dozen or so students who did lighting, moving from show to show and feeding off cast parties like locusts. Once every other year, this professor would direct a play.
His plays were considered very desirable productions to work on among us theater types, but I never did get a chance to do so. The first time he directed a play when I was a student was before I really got involved in theater on campus, and the second time he got sick and canceled it. So the class was my only shot at working with him on something theater-related, and since I was also a psych major it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would sign up for it the moment it hit the catalogue.
The professor was a kind man who had lived in this country for decades but still spoke with a pronounced German accent, as perhaps all psychologists ought to do. My clearest memory of him happened at the end of the semester, when I had run into a conflict that forced me to choose between the group project assigned for that class and a commitment I had made to a friend to run the lighting board for a production of Hair. Doing both was not possible. I hemmed and hawed about this for a few days, once that realization set in, and then I finally just called him at home and explained the situation. There was a pause when I finished. “Vell,” came a soft voice after a few moments, “you do vot you tink iss right.” “Thank you,” I said, and then I hung up the phone, bailed out on my group project, ran the lighting board for the show, spent the 72 hours immediately after the cast party frantically working on the final paper for that class, and got the only A+ for a final grade that I ever received as an undergraduate.
I didn’t even know they gave those out.
The class itself was a bit of a wash, though. I learned a great deal, but I was outnumbered. There were maybe fifteen people in that class, and they were almost all – including the professor – focused entirely on the front-of-house side rather than the backstage side where I and one other student in the class lived. It became, in other words, a class that really should have been entitled, “The Psychology of Acting and Directing,” which to my mind was very much not the same thing as “The Psychology of Drama.” This technician felt there was a bit more to be explored than that.
As the meme I saw go by on Facebook recently put it so succinctly, actors without technicians are naked people emoting on a dark, empty stage, while technicians without actors are at the bar. Where was the psychology of the backstage stuff?
And more importantly, where was the audience in all that? To me, the audience is the most psychologically interesting part of the theater, and the class addressed them only glancingly. In particular, we never explored what I felt was the single most important psychological question about the theater:
Why is one group of people willing to watch a second group of people pretend to be a third group of people?
This to me is the central riddle of the theater. We take it for granted that people will be interested in theater – or movies, or television, since it’s all drama when you look at it this way – and we focus on how to make them more interested, with scripts and blocking and sound and lighting and so on, but we forget to ask why those people are there at all. We should ask, though, because without the audience there is precious little point to theater.
I never did get an answer to that question, by the way. I still don’t know.
So while the class spent the semester arguing over the merits of this or that acting technique, in self-defense I spent a great deal of time writing up my own observations on the theater – things I had learned over the years. I had been dragooned into backstage work in high school and many of my favorite times had been spent there. I’d worked for most of the various drama groups on campus as an undergraduate, and would go on to work backstage for community theaters, other university theaters, and, briefly, professionally. Even back then I’d seen a few things that seemed worth writing down.
Not that anyone could read them, of course. My handwriting wasn’t any better then than it is now, and I do remember at one point having to tell my roommate, “No, that doesn’t say ‘weasels.’ It says ‘headsets.’” Although weasels are inherently funnier than headsets, so perhaps I should have gone there instead. It is difficult but not, after all, impossible to imagine scenarios where weasels would become relevant in a theatrical setting.
Eventually I ended up with a list entitled “101 Observations on the Theater,” each observation complete with commentary and typed into legibility. Hey – it got me through the class.
Tabitha has now been pulled into the orbit of her high school’s theater groups, which – among other things – made me drag out that old list recently. Many of the things that had struck undergraduate me as either funny or profound seemed to middle-aged me to be a bit cringe-worthy, frankly. There are still a few things on it that I thought were worth passing along, though. Plus I’ve had a few experiences since then that perhaps deserved a place on a new and revised list.
So I went back and picked out the ones that I felt were worth preserving, polished up a few others that had potential once the cringing stopped, and added a few more to reflect current knowledge. It’s a shorter list now, but perhaps a better one.
---
1. Why is one group of people willing to watch a second group of people pretend to be a third group of people?
2. The audience doesn’t catch most of the good stuff. This is why the tech crew seems to be laughing in all the wrong places.
3. You either know your audience or you don’t get to have one.
4. There’s deep, and there’s digging a hole.
5. Never complicate the simple more than the simple will bear. Never simplify the complicated more than the complicated will allow. This is, in essence, a judgment call.
6. You never know what an actor will do until you get them in front of an audience. Some blossom, some wilt, but none are quite the same as they were in rehearsal.
7. There is a world of difference between reading a script and acting.
8. The ability to ad-lib through long stretches of what isn’t quite supposed to be happening is a prized skill on both sides of the stage.
9. Technicians mostly talk about past shows. Actors mostly talk about this one.
10. Sometimes the only reason a show gets produced is because the technical crew thinks it would be an interesting challenge.
11. Good tech work, like a good butler, is invisible. If the audience spends its time looking at the tech, something is wrong.
12. Mistakes happen in bunches.
13. Five competent people is all you need, which is good because a lot of times it’s all you’re likely to get.
14. Nobody’s organizational system is like anyone else’s organizational system, though most people have at least one.
15. Things are where they are because that’s where they get put. Don’t ask for more explanation and please put things back there when you are done so the next person can find them.
16. When in doubt:
a. On scenery – paint it black and nobody will notice.
b. On sets – nail it down and tell scenery to paint it black.
c. On lighting – fuzz it, gel it warm, and add it to the wash.
17. If you look like you know what you’re doing, nobody will question you.
18. When all is said and done, final creative control rests with whoever does the last bit of work. In lighting, this is known as “board-op’s prerogative.”
19. It’s a good musical when the audience leaves humming. It’s a great musical when the tech crew dances.
20. Light repels actors.
21. If there’s no glare in your eyes, there’s no light on your face.
22. Actors regard blocking as a suggestion. Lighting designers regard blocking as a map of where the light needs to go. Often these perspectives can be squared, but not always.
23. Audiences occasionally blink in unison. This usually bothers the director much more than the lighting crew.
24. Gobos get hot more quickly than you think they will.
25. Anything that runs through the lighting board belongs to the lighting crew.
26. Most problems in lighting can be resolved by asking three simple questions: a) Is there a lamp in it? b) Is it plugged in? and c) Is it turned on? Save the fretting for the real problems.
27. The mere fact that the lighting board can handle a given wattage doesn’t necessarily mean that the theater’s electrical system can actually provide that much wattage.
28. Dancers are only graceful onstage. No matter how often you explain to them that the lighting instruments on the offstage booms are a) heavy, b) sharp, and c) hot, you will still have to refocus them after every show.
29. There are times when the lighting crew, like the Secret Service, must be prepared to take the bullet for the good of the larger cause. Audiences are much happier thinking that the lighting went wrong than they would be if they knew that the actors just skipped four pages of the script.
30. By the time the show closes, all the lighting designer can see are dark spots.
31. The best part of headsets is the running commentary.
32. There is a way that lighting cables want to be coiled. It is not the way you want the lighting cables to be coiled.
33. People who screw around with equipment during shows get pitched off the catwalk.
34. Beware of set designers with bandages.
35. If you screw up the set, screw up symmetrically.
36. In a pinch, a hammer is as good as any other tool.
37. There is no reason to use building-code-quality construction for a set that is only a backdrop, especially if it has to be moved during the show.
38. The ideal running crew member can see in the dark, walk without a sound, lift up the set with one hand and carry china service for twelve with the other without chipping a cup.
39. Know where the safe spots are on stage. Lighting designers are often very optimistic people when it comes to how many instruments the grid can actually support, so if you hear anything while you’re onstage dive first and ask questions later.
40. If you’re caught onstage while moving pieces of the set, have the grace to bow when you’re done. The audience appreciates a good sport.
41. Have sympathy for the costumer – it’s the last vestige of the sweatshop economy.
42. For those who think that theatrics are confined to the stage, there is always load-in.
43. Load-in is where you discover that what you want is not what you have, what you have is not what you need, what you need is not what you can deal with, and what you can deal with is not what you want.
44. It takes a lot less time to tear down a show than it does to put one up.
45. The show isn’t over until strike is over.
46. All diets and nutritional care are suspended during production week.
47. Opening night is usually the final dress rehearsal. As long as it’s not the first dress rehearsal you’ll probably be fine.
48. A show has never opened that didn’t have wet paint on it somewhere.
49. A sense of humor will get you through just about anything.
50. Never underestimate the ability of a cast and crew to change just about everything on a moment’s notice.
51. Stopping the show to ask if there is a doctor in the house is not as fulfilling as the movies make it sound.
52. When a show is good enough, people will give you time, effort, results, and diseases beyond your wildest imaginings.
53. The greatest moment in theater is when the house lights fade to black to begin the show, for then all things are possible and magic still exists.
54. Periodically, in the midst of all the confusion, everything clicks and you just have to sit back and watch.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Poetry Spam
I have been spammed with poetry. It's like a poetry slam, but only one letter off. There are fewer beatniks, but more potential fraud.
I’ve had the same email address since at least 1997 (possibly longer, but that’s the oldest saved message I could find), which means that it’s out there on the web. All of the various harvesters have harvested it. All of the spambots have it archived. It’s there.
This has never been a problem for me, as I find spam to be more amusing than irritating. There was a long period back in the early part of this century where spammers had a program that would assign random names to their addresses so it would look like the emails had come from an actual person instead of a machine, though who would name their child “Snowball Q. Dromedary” I don’t know. Somewhere I have a list of about five hundred of those names, because they were funny and I had the time to do it back then.
I do have a spam filter on my email, as otherwise it would simply be unmanageable. And the email server has a spam filter of its own that alerts me to the presence of myriad diverted messages every so often and invites me to examine them. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. They go away on their own if I ignore them. Sometimes that filter misses them and they get sent to me, and if they make it past my spam filter then they show up in my inbox. When that happens I mostly just delete them.
They’re not hard to identify, really. Anything in Chinese or Russian is a big tip-off, for example, as are most messages with subject lines IN ALL CAPS. And when I open one, I pretty much know what to expect. There will be an offer of some kind – either a link to click or a product to explore. There will be graphics, since in order for them to work the message has to send a ping back to the original server to get the graphic to load, which tells the spammer that someone opened their message. There will be outlandish claims and offers too good to be true. Apparently that Nigerian businessman has found someone to take care of his millions, as he hasn’t written in a while. I kind of miss him.
All this is why the poem was so odd.
It came from a clearly made-up address. The first part was simply the first part of my own email address (a common tactic), and the second part, after the @, was no domain I’d ever heard of. But the subject line promised me a poem and I thought, “Why not – it’s been a long day.”
There were no offers inside. No links. No websites.
There were no graphics to alert the spammer that I’d opened the message.
Still no word from my Nigerian contact.
All there was inside was the entire text of Gray’s Elegy, one of the more well-known poems of the Romantic period and one I hadn’t run across since I left college. It’s kind of nice.
I’m not sure what purpose was served by this.
There may have been a new mechanism I don’t know about that has alerted the spammer to the fact that I’ve read this. I may well be inundated with new spam, which would change my email in-box not one iota really.
Or maybe it was just a poem floating about the ether and landing on me.
I think I’ll go with that, on a grey winter day. It seems to fit.
I’ve had the same email address since at least 1997 (possibly longer, but that’s the oldest saved message I could find), which means that it’s out there on the web. All of the various harvesters have harvested it. All of the spambots have it archived. It’s there.
This has never been a problem for me, as I find spam to be more amusing than irritating. There was a long period back in the early part of this century where spammers had a program that would assign random names to their addresses so it would look like the emails had come from an actual person instead of a machine, though who would name their child “Snowball Q. Dromedary” I don’t know. Somewhere I have a list of about five hundred of those names, because they were funny and I had the time to do it back then.
I do have a spam filter on my email, as otherwise it would simply be unmanageable. And the email server has a spam filter of its own that alerts me to the presence of myriad diverted messages every so often and invites me to examine them. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. They go away on their own if I ignore them. Sometimes that filter misses them and they get sent to me, and if they make it past my spam filter then they show up in my inbox. When that happens I mostly just delete them.
They’re not hard to identify, really. Anything in Chinese or Russian is a big tip-off, for example, as are most messages with subject lines IN ALL CAPS. And when I open one, I pretty much know what to expect. There will be an offer of some kind – either a link to click or a product to explore. There will be graphics, since in order for them to work the message has to send a ping back to the original server to get the graphic to load, which tells the spammer that someone opened their message. There will be outlandish claims and offers too good to be true. Apparently that Nigerian businessman has found someone to take care of his millions, as he hasn’t written in a while. I kind of miss him.
All this is why the poem was so odd.
It came from a clearly made-up address. The first part was simply the first part of my own email address (a common tactic), and the second part, after the @, was no domain I’d ever heard of. But the subject line promised me a poem and I thought, “Why not – it’s been a long day.”
There were no offers inside. No links. No websites.
There were no graphics to alert the spammer that I’d opened the message.
Still no word from my Nigerian contact.
All there was inside was the entire text of Gray’s Elegy, one of the more well-known poems of the Romantic period and one I hadn’t run across since I left college. It’s kind of nice.
I’m not sure what purpose was served by this.
There may have been a new mechanism I don’t know about that has alerted the spammer to the fact that I’ve read this. I may well be inundated with new spam, which would change my email in-box not one iota really.
Or maybe it was just a poem floating about the ether and landing on me.
I think I’ll go with that, on a grey winter day. It seems to fit.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
News and Updates
1. It’s cold here in Baja Canada. After a December that felt like May and a first week of January that felt like October, it is clearly winter now, with highs in the single-digits Fahrenheit and sub-zero lows. I’ve got my teakettle and my warm clothes, however, so I’m prepared.
2. It’s hard on the chickens, though. Poor ridiculous things. We go out there every day to check in on them and retrieve the eggs (sometimes too late – one froze through on us the other day and cracked open). They’ve got heated water bowls and a pen full of things to bunker down into, though, so they should be fine.
3. Somewhere back there I hit the magic half-century mark. We didn’t do much about it, which was what I wanted. On the actual day the four of us went out for what has become my traditional birthday dinner at the local barbecue restaurant. And when we were in Philadelphia we stayed in for the even older traditional birthday dinner of ravioli with my family, a routine that stretches back to when I was in high school or possibly even before. There was also a flourless chocolate cake, and we included Tabitha in the celebrations since she had a birthday in there too. Food, family, and good times. That’s what birthdays are to me now. I like it that way.
4. When my dad turned fifty, I was a college graduate. My oldest is in 10th grade. For some reason, this fact sticks with me.
5. Last night was the band concert down at Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, and I got to see Lauren do her percussion thing. She did a very nice job of it, and even had what amounted to a couple of measure-long solos where you could hear only her playing. Well done, Lauren – I’m proud of you.
6. Lauren’s concert meant that I missed the final State of the Union address from President Barack “Zero Fucks Left To Give” Obama. I understand it was good, as I would expect from him – he’s one of the three post-WWII presidents whose oratorical skills transcend their politics (along with Kennedy and Reagan), and he has a solid record of achievement in the face of mindlessly rigid partisan opposition to back up his words. He’s been one of the better ones, really.
7. If you think of it as financial planning, then the lottery is clearly a tax on people who are bad at math. If you think of it as entertainment, however, then it’s just an expense that you budget for, much like going to a movie. Every once in a while I throw in my couple of bucks and buy myself two or three days of conversation about what I’d do with all that money – I could do it for free, as a friend of mine pointed out, but having at least a random chance of winning gives those conversations an edge. And at this stage of my life, I can afford a couple of bucks for that.
8. I’m not really sure I want to win $1.5 billion, though. That kind of money is a full-time job and then some, and a fairly impermeable barrier to most kinds of normal life. So if by some fluke I do end up winning, won’t I be in for some strange times?
9. I should clear out the remains of last semester before this semester really gets going. Right now my office is stuffed to the gills with paper and there are things I’d like to locate that are currently somewhere in the archeological record. But that is a thankless task that benefits nobody but myself, which means that putting it off is surprisingly easy.
10. It’s hard to get things done when quite literally everyone responsible for getting those things done is no longer employed at the place where things need to get done. #thanksgovwalker
2. It’s hard on the chickens, though. Poor ridiculous things. We go out there every day to check in on them and retrieve the eggs (sometimes too late – one froze through on us the other day and cracked open). They’ve got heated water bowls and a pen full of things to bunker down into, though, so they should be fine.
3. Somewhere back there I hit the magic half-century mark. We didn’t do much about it, which was what I wanted. On the actual day the four of us went out for what has become my traditional birthday dinner at the local barbecue restaurant. And when we were in Philadelphia we stayed in for the even older traditional birthday dinner of ravioli with my family, a routine that stretches back to when I was in high school or possibly even before. There was also a flourless chocolate cake, and we included Tabitha in the celebrations since she had a birthday in there too. Food, family, and good times. That’s what birthdays are to me now. I like it that way.
4. When my dad turned fifty, I was a college graduate. My oldest is in 10th grade. For some reason, this fact sticks with me.
5. Last night was the band concert down at Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, and I got to see Lauren do her percussion thing. She did a very nice job of it, and even had what amounted to a couple of measure-long solos where you could hear only her playing. Well done, Lauren – I’m proud of you.
7. If you think of it as financial planning, then the lottery is clearly a tax on people who are bad at math. If you think of it as entertainment, however, then it’s just an expense that you budget for, much like going to a movie. Every once in a while I throw in my couple of bucks and buy myself two or three days of conversation about what I’d do with all that money – I could do it for free, as a friend of mine pointed out, but having at least a random chance of winning gives those conversations an edge. And at this stage of my life, I can afford a couple of bucks for that.
8. I’m not really sure I want to win $1.5 billion, though. That kind of money is a full-time job and then some, and a fairly impermeable barrier to most kinds of normal life. So if by some fluke I do end up winning, won’t I be in for some strange times?
9. I should clear out the remains of last semester before this semester really gets going. Right now my office is stuffed to the gills with paper and there are things I’d like to locate that are currently somewhere in the archeological record. But that is a thankless task that benefits nobody but myself, which means that putting it off is surprisingly easy.
10. It’s hard to get things done when quite literally everyone responsible for getting those things done is no longer employed at the place where things need to get done. #thanksgovwalker
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