Mostly Theatre
Mar. 13th, 2022 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreCelebrity Death Watch: Lindsey Perlman was an actress, primarily on soap operas. David Boggs co-invented Ethernet. Gary Brooker was the lead singer of Procol Harum. Charlie Taylor was a Hall of Fame football player for the Washington Redskins. The Amazing Johnathan was a magician and stand-up comedian. Judith Pipher was an astrophysicist who pioneered the use of indium antinomide (InSb, pronounced “insby”) for infrared detection. Sheila Benson was the film critic for the Los Angeles Times during the 1980’s. Dick Versace was a basketball coach and sportscaster. Andy Remic wrote science fiction. Richard C. Blum was a businessman who was married to former Senator Dianne Feinstein. Veronica Carlson was an actress in horror movies. Kenneth Ellerbe was the Washington, D.C. fire chief. Mary Coombs was the first female commercial computer programmer. Ike Delock pitched for the Red Sox in the 1950’s. Authorine Lucy was the first African-American to attend the University of Alabama. Johnny Brown played the building superintendent on the sitcom Good Times. Walter Mears was a journalist for Associated Press. Tim Considine was an actor who played Spin in Spin and Marty and Frank Hardy in The Hardy Boys. Mitchell Ryan played Burke Devlin on Dark Shadows. Yuriko Kikuchi was a dancer and choreographer. Emilio Delgado played Luis on Sesame Street. Pete St. John was an Irish singer-songwriter. Traci Braxton was an R&B singer. Donald Pinkel developed a cure for childhood leukemia. Sally Schmitt cofounded the French Laundry, a very upscale restaurant in the Napa Valley.
Paul Farmer cofounded Partners in Health, which built clinics in various places in the developing world, e.g. Haiti and Rwanda. He was truly a revolutionary, pioneering programs to address, for example, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains tells (part of) his story. (I first learned about Farmer from Kidder’s book Strength in What Remains which has to do with one of the people he mentored.) A lot of people talk about changing the world. Paul Farmer was someone who really did.
Charles Entenmann brought Entenmann’s bakery products to supermarkets. Entenmann’s was a staple of my household when I was growing up. We always had their donuts and coffee cake. I particularly liked their cream cheese cake which is, alas, no longer made.
Sally Kellerman played Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M*A*S*H. She was replaced by Loretta Swit for the TV series.
William Hurt appeared in numerous movies, including Altered States and Body Heat. He was nominated for Oscars several times and won one for best actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman.
MIT Death Watch: Larry Young died back in August, but I just learned that. He was an aero/astro professor who specialized in the impact of sensory systems on spaceflight. He taught part of a biomedical engineering class I took as an undergraduate. That class was memorable for our getting to do various lab experiments involving visual-vestibular interaction. I particularly remember a helicopter simulator in which seeing a projection of moving stripes convinced people the simulator was rotating, even though we knew perfectly well it was completely still.
Daphne’s Dive: I saw this play at Signature Theatre a week ago Wednesday. It was written by Quiara Alegria Hudes, who is probably best known for writing the book for Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights. Anyway, the story involves a group of people who hang out at the titular bar. Daphne owns the bar and adopts a young girl named Ruby, who has been badly abused, though we don’t learn some of the details until the end. The other characters include her sister, Inez, her politically-connected brother-in-law, Acosta, an artist named Pablo who uses other people’s trash as inspiration, a gentle biker named Rey, and a performance artist named Jenn. The play is somewhat about Ruby growing up, but more about the relationships between the characters, who form an intentional community. Think of it as a sort of LatinX Cheers. I like character-based humor, so I really enjoyed seeing the evolution of these people over the 20 or so year span of the play.
Dinner and Cake: This was a reading of a new play, also done by Signature Theatre (on Monday night). While there was a live audience, I watched the livestream instead. The story, by Tuyet Thi Pham, has to do with a young woman who is hired to translate during a dinner in which an American couple is meeting their daughter-in-law’s Vietnamese parents. Let’s just say that the American couple are pretty clueless, down to not having learned how to pronounce the daughter-in-law’s name correctly. (And, really, Thuy is a pretty common Vietnamese name.) The most interesting aspect of the play is that the first part has the words spoken by the Vietnamese couple in both Vietnamese and English. The second part has supertitles for the English translations. And the final part is untranslated, though it is not difficult to get the gist of what is really said vs. what Mylinnh says they said. I thought it was interesting and I’d like to see a full staging of it some day.
Masala Art: I went to Arena Stage on Friday night and had dinner with two friends at Masala Art, an Indian restaurant near there beforehand. I got a drink called a Belgravia, which the menu claimed had Tanqueray gin, cucumber, ginger, and elderflower. Frankly, the cucumber completely dominated the flavor, which is the least interesting of those ingredients. As for food, I generally stick to vegetarian dishes at Indian restaurants and had something called baingan mirch ka salan, which is baby eggplant and jalapeños in a peanut and sesame sauce. It was okay, but not as spicy as I expected. It came with rice. We also got naan, which was the best part of the meal. There is better Indian food for less money at other places, but it was convenient.
Catch Me If You Can: We were at Arena Stage to see Catch Me If You Can, a musical adaptation of the movie about Frank Abnegale, Jr., a con man who impersonated an aircraft pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. The play is focused on two things - the impact his parents (especially his father) had on him and the relationship between him and the FBI agent who is trying to catch him. The creative team was Terrence McNally (book), Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Whittman (lyrics) with choreography by Alejo Vetti and costume by Alejo Vetti. I don’t normally mention costumes, but these were pretty notable, starting with Mondrian-inspired ones that set the era, and continuing through clothes with a money theme, and reaching the pinnacle with a Pan Am plane. The choreography was also over the top. As for the music, it wouldn’t make my list of great musical scores, but was nicely jazzy and the lyrics were reasonably witty. (By the way, Shaiman and Whittman are probably best known for Hairspray.) Both Christian Thompson (as Frank Abnegale, Jr.) and Nehal Joshi (as Special Agent Carl Hanratty) were excellent. Overall, it was an enjoyable show and worth going to Southwest D.C. for.
Other Stuff: I’ve also spent lots of time on genealogy, storytelling (including going to a couple of virtual swaps), and board games. I am still in the depths of living room archaeology, which has turned up things like an iTunes gift card that I must have gotten at a Yankee swap at a holiday party at work. Or, on second thought, it might have been a birthday present from a friend. And I saw the movie, Cyrano, too.
Paul Farmer cofounded Partners in Health, which built clinics in various places in the developing world, e.g. Haiti and Rwanda. He was truly a revolutionary, pioneering programs to address, for example, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains tells (part of) his story. (I first learned about Farmer from Kidder’s book Strength in What Remains which has to do with one of the people he mentored.) A lot of people talk about changing the world. Paul Farmer was someone who really did.
Charles Entenmann brought Entenmann’s bakery products to supermarkets. Entenmann’s was a staple of my household when I was growing up. We always had their donuts and coffee cake. I particularly liked their cream cheese cake which is, alas, no longer made.
Sally Kellerman played Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M*A*S*H. She was replaced by Loretta Swit for the TV series.
William Hurt appeared in numerous movies, including Altered States and Body Heat. He was nominated for Oscars several times and won one for best actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman.
MIT Death Watch: Larry Young died back in August, but I just learned that. He was an aero/astro professor who specialized in the impact of sensory systems on spaceflight. He taught part of a biomedical engineering class I took as an undergraduate. That class was memorable for our getting to do various lab experiments involving visual-vestibular interaction. I particularly remember a helicopter simulator in which seeing a projection of moving stripes convinced people the simulator was rotating, even though we knew perfectly well it was completely still.
Daphne’s Dive: I saw this play at Signature Theatre a week ago Wednesday. It was written by Quiara Alegria Hudes, who is probably best known for writing the book for Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights. Anyway, the story involves a group of people who hang out at the titular bar. Daphne owns the bar and adopts a young girl named Ruby, who has been badly abused, though we don’t learn some of the details until the end. The other characters include her sister, Inez, her politically-connected brother-in-law, Acosta, an artist named Pablo who uses other people’s trash as inspiration, a gentle biker named Rey, and a performance artist named Jenn. The play is somewhat about Ruby growing up, but more about the relationships between the characters, who form an intentional community. Think of it as a sort of LatinX Cheers. I like character-based humor, so I really enjoyed seeing the evolution of these people over the 20 or so year span of the play.
Dinner and Cake: This was a reading of a new play, also done by Signature Theatre (on Monday night). While there was a live audience, I watched the livestream instead. The story, by Tuyet Thi Pham, has to do with a young woman who is hired to translate during a dinner in which an American couple is meeting their daughter-in-law’s Vietnamese parents. Let’s just say that the American couple are pretty clueless, down to not having learned how to pronounce the daughter-in-law’s name correctly. (And, really, Thuy is a pretty common Vietnamese name.) The most interesting aspect of the play is that the first part has the words spoken by the Vietnamese couple in both Vietnamese and English. The second part has supertitles for the English translations. And the final part is untranslated, though it is not difficult to get the gist of what is really said vs. what Mylinnh says they said. I thought it was interesting and I’d like to see a full staging of it some day.
Masala Art: I went to Arena Stage on Friday night and had dinner with two friends at Masala Art, an Indian restaurant near there beforehand. I got a drink called a Belgravia, which the menu claimed had Tanqueray gin, cucumber, ginger, and elderflower. Frankly, the cucumber completely dominated the flavor, which is the least interesting of those ingredients. As for food, I generally stick to vegetarian dishes at Indian restaurants and had something called baingan mirch ka salan, which is baby eggplant and jalapeños in a peanut and sesame sauce. It was okay, but not as spicy as I expected. It came with rice. We also got naan, which was the best part of the meal. There is better Indian food for less money at other places, but it was convenient.
Catch Me If You Can: We were at Arena Stage to see Catch Me If You Can, a musical adaptation of the movie about Frank Abnegale, Jr., a con man who impersonated an aircraft pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. The play is focused on two things - the impact his parents (especially his father) had on him and the relationship between him and the FBI agent who is trying to catch him. The creative team was Terrence McNally (book), Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Whittman (lyrics) with choreography by Alejo Vetti and costume by Alejo Vetti. I don’t normally mention costumes, but these were pretty notable, starting with Mondrian-inspired ones that set the era, and continuing through clothes with a money theme, and reaching the pinnacle with a Pan Am plane. The choreography was also over the top. As for the music, it wouldn’t make my list of great musical scores, but was nicely jazzy and the lyrics were reasonably witty. (By the way, Shaiman and Whittman are probably best known for Hairspray.) Both Christian Thompson (as Frank Abnegale, Jr.) and Nehal Joshi (as Special Agent Carl Hanratty) were excellent. Overall, it was an enjoyable show and worth going to Southwest D.C. for.
Other Stuff: I’ve also spent lots of time on genealogy, storytelling (including going to a couple of virtual swaps), and board games. I am still in the depths of living room archaeology, which has turned up things like an iTunes gift card that I must have gotten at a Yankee swap at a holiday party at work. Or, on second thought, it might have been a birthday present from a friend. And I saw the movie, Cyrano, too.
