fauxklore

The metro can be
efficient when there is no
track work. Like today.

I got to Union Station about an hour before my train and stopped at McDonald's to buy a bottle of water. Harry Shearer had a running joke about Santa Monica being the "home of the homeless" and that description definitely applies to the Union Station Mickey-D's.

The train to NY was fine, except that the wi-fi was not working. (It was not my ineptitude. They made an announcement.) The Long Island Railroad worked as well as ever, too.

Mom gave me the quick disaster tour of town. I then helped her change an ink cartridge in her printer, made her reset her facebook password and will try to teach her how to use her cell phone in a while. On the plus side, there was NY pizza for dinner (and a long wait for delivery).

Further proof I am a bad daughter is that, on seeing several boxes of stuffing mix on the dining room table, I asked Mom if she is planning to stuff an emu.

This is mostly the theatre-going part of my catching up. But, first, a couple of other items.

Baseball: The Nationals had a mid-season deal to get tickets for three games (one each n July, August and September) and a cap for about $45. So I braved the Fourth of July tourist crowds and went into the city to see them play the Giants. The game was an exciting one, with the Nats winning 9-4. I had some issues, however, with my seat, as it was right behind one of the protective pieces of plexiglass, leading to annoying reflections blocking my view at times.

Celebrity Death Watch: There are lots of celebrity deaths to report. Doris Sams played baseball in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which inspired the movie A League of Their Own. There may be no crying at baseball, but there is at funerals.

Nora Ephron wrote amusingly bitchy feminist essays, along with some movies. I didn’t always agree with her, but her work was usually interesting.

Lonesome George was the last Pinta tortoise, so his death also means the extinction of his sub-species. I saw him when I went to the Galapagos. He looked sad, but I think tortoises inherently look sad.

Andy Griffith was, of course, most famous for his TV performances as the sheriff of Mayberry. I once went to Mt. Airy, North Carolina (his home town) and ate lunch at a diner that had dishes named after the characters from his show. By the way, unlike most tourists, my interest in the town had to do with two of its other residents. It was also where Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins, settled.

The celebrity death I most want to highlight was that of Richard Adler. With Jerry Ross (who died at a young age of pneumonia), he co-wrote The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Anybody who knows me at all, knows why the latter is among my favorite Broadway musicals. (Note that the Red Sox are playing four games against the Source of All Evil in the Universe this weekend.)

First You Dream: Speaking of musicals, I saw First You Dream at The Kennedy Center a couple of weeks ago. This is a revue of Kander & Ebb songs, without any particular narrative and with very little dialogue. It was enjoyable, largely because of some excellent performances, notably by Matthew Scott and Heidi Blickenstaff. I particularly want to note Scott’s performance of the Hungarian bit from “Cell Block Tango.”

There is some incongruity, however, as the songs are taken out of context. For example, I suspect that most of the audience had no idea that “Go Back Home” (from The Scottsboro Boys) is sung in the musical by a teenager who has been sentenced to death for a rape he didn’t commit. Similarly, the selections from Kiss of the Spider Woman gave no indication that they are sung by a political prisoner.

Still, the songs are enjoyable in and of themselves and I admit to having particularly liked a few unfamiliar songs I don’t actually know the context of. Some highlights include “Ring Them Bells” from Liza with a Z, “Military Men” from Over and Over and “I Miss the Music” from Curtains. (Okay, I do know the context of the latter – and I also know that the show was completed by John Kander after Fred Ebb died, making it particularly poignant.) The greatest show-stopper was “Boom Ditty Boom” from 70, Girls, 70), which was an incredible showcase for Karma Camp’s choreography. I really need to be more familiar with this show, since the description I’ve read of it sounds quite entertaining. (And I also like the song “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup,” which is from it.)

I will also admit to disliking the title song and feeling hit over the head with its message, but that was a minor flaw in an otherwise enjoyable evening.

The History of Invulnerability: All I knew about this play at Theatre J was that it had to do with Superman creator Jerry Siegel and how he (and artist Joe Shuster) were pretty much screwed over by Harry Donenfeld and National Allied Publications. There’s actually a lot more to David Bar Katz’s play, including a provocative Holocaust story, involving a young boy in Auschwitz-Birkenau whose smuggled comic books leave him fantasizing about Superman rescuing him. The structure is a conversation between Superman and his creator, which also brings in Siegel’s estrangement from his real-life son. Is Superman Siegel’s true son, a god, or a golem?

Given the complexity of the play – and the shocking moments in it – I am loathe to write a lot of details about what happens. I will say that I found myself saying, “wow” out loud at the end of the first act and having more mixed reactions when the play ended. Those reactions were both entirely due to the Holocaust sub-plot.

All in all, I’ll recommend it for what it has to say about creativity and the response to being a powerless outsider. I can also commend the performances, especially by David Deblinger as Siegel. But be aware that this is a dark and disturbing piece, not a light romp through the comics.

The Music Man: Finally, I saw The Music Man at Arena Stage on Tuesday night. I had a bit of frustration with the box office as I had bought the ticket via Goldstar and the guy at Will Call initially gave me a balcony ticket for The Normal Heart instead and I had to actually argue with them (showing my receipt) to get what I had paid for.

Anyway, there aren’t any real surprises in this production. It’s familiar material, intended to balance the season budget with a sure-fire blockbuster. Kate Baldwin is excellent as Marian the librarian and Burke Moses is a competent Harold Hill. I do have two complaints about the production. The first is the modernization of the costumes, which is an annoying anachronism. (Marian wearing trousers? No.) My bigger issue is having left out the overture. It is bad enough that so many musicals are written without overtures nowadays. Why delete them from shows that are intended to have them? Especially since they are often a good way to get the laggards in the audience to shut up.

The most thrilling moment in the production, by the way, came at the end of the curtain calls, when the doors opened and an actual marching band came in, playing “76 Trombones.”. They do not, apparently, do this every night. I heard that the band in question was from New Jersey and in town for the Fourth of July parade the next day.

Note to self: check Nationals schedule before going to Arena Stage, as the ballpark is one stop away from the theatre. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with metro crowding when I go to ballgames. But that is the subject of another rant.

A Very Brief Transit Rant: The Washington Post has a transit columnist called Dr. Gridlock. His repeated advice to people who complain about Metro annoyances is to tell them just to drive. That’s like criticizing people who want to improve public schools by telling them to send their kids to private school.

My biggest complaint, by the way, is about riders who won’t let people off before they board the trains. Hence, this haiku:

Basic courtesy
Is all too rare among those
Who ride on metro.

I really didn't intend to go so long without posting here, but life has been hectic.

Celebrity Death Watch: My notes on who to mention go back to Harry Morgan, who had a truly distinctive, immediately recognizable voice. I watched M*A*S*H regularly as a teenager and remember being sad when Col Potter's plane disappeared on his way home.

The literary world offered up the losses of essayist Christopher Hitchens and of Russell Hoban, who wrote some children's books but who I associate primarily with Riddley Walker. The political world has one sad death (Vaclav Havel, bridging the literary world) and one less sad one (Kim Il Jung). The more obscure deaths are those of Jerry Robinson, who created The Joker, and of Erica Wilson, who wrote needlework patterns.

The death I most want to highlight, however, is Cesaria Evora. The "barefoot diva" of Cape Verde had a phenomenal voice and brought a lot of attention to the traditional music of that nation. She was certainly one of the reasons I want to go there. (There are others - Cape Verdeans played a major role in the whaling industry and, hence, New England.) I'm sorry I never got to see her perform live.

Three Sighs for Transportation: I came home from an errand to discover that the right front tire of my car was flat. I'd gotten new tires in April and, thanks to the warranty, that meant getting it fixed at Sears would be nearly free. They told me it would be "an hour and a half to two hours." I came back after two hours (having had breakfast and picked up a couple of things at the adjacent mall) and they hadn't even started on it. In the end, I was there four and a half hours. Sigh.

I've also had a few occasions recently to take the red line of the metro. Single tracking before 9 p.m. on a weekday is annoying. I thought the argument for the weekend shutdowns they've been doing is that they would then not have to single track to do repairs. Sigh.

I also had a frustrating Amtrak trip to New York, with power problems that made the train about an hour late. The delay was not as annoying as the fact that there were no lights while they were doing repairs (at Baltimore). Sigh.

Work: The project that will never end hasn't.

New York: My trip to New York at the beginning of the month was for my 35th high school reunion. The gathering was small but it was good to see the people who were there. I also used the time to do two Volksmarch events in New York City. The midtown walk was, in general, predictable but pleasant enough. The Chelsea / Greenwich Village walk was more interesting, particularly as I had never actually been on the High Line before. It's a good thing I was time constrained as the route passed the Strand Bookstore, which is always potentially dangerous to my budget.

Theatre: I can't go to New York and not go to the theatre. So I saw The Book of Mormon on Broadway. It was lively and funny, albeit a bit crude. It did push some of my buttons about how Africa is portrayed in pop culture, but that is to be expected. I'll also suggest that it is a very bad idea to take a child under about age 15 to see this. But I highly recommend it for thick-skinned adults. (If you liked, say, "Avenue Q," you will enjoy this.)

On a related note, I saw Cannibal: The Musical at Landless Theatre. (It is related via Trey Parker, who also co-created South Park.) There is some lively music and some funny moments (particularly involving the encounter with the Indians) but it was a bit overdone. It turns out, by the way, that Parker got his history mostly correct, but I was still disappointed not to hear a reference to Alferd Packer having eaten the Democratic majority of Summit County.

On a very unrelated note, I saw Billy Elliot at the Kennedy Center on Friday night. As I said on Facebook, it was a good 2 hour musical but is, unfortunately, 3 hours. There is somewhat too much talk for the amount of music. And most of the music is unremarkable. I do think "Solidarity" is powerful and effective and both "Deep Into the Ground" and "He Could Go and He Could Shine" are well done. The piece I hated was "Angry Dance," largely because the volume was so high that my ears were actually ringing through the intermission. The dancing (by Kylend Hetherington the night I saw it) was notable, particularly in the dream sequence when Billy dances to Swan Lake with his older self. But the real show-stopper was Cynthia Darrow as Grandma, an earthy woman indeed.

Finally, I saw Hairspray at Signature Theatre yesterday. I had seen this on Broadway some years ago and wondered how it would be in this much smaller space. The answer is that Signature did their usual excellent job. The songs are catchy, the book is reasonably funny, and the performers looked like they were having fun. So was I.

MAD: There was a talk by Al Jaffee and Mary-Lou Weisman (who wrote a recent biography of him) at the DCJCC on Thursday night. His life was definitely not what one might have expected, having been brought from the U.S. back to her Lithuanian shtetl by his mother when he was 6 and living there until he was rescued by his father six years later. The High School of Music and Arts changed his life - and MAD Magazine made him famous. At age 90, he still writes "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" and does the fold-ins. I feel privileged to have been able to enjoy s much of his work.

I have an unexpected weekend free, so here's another catch-up entry.

Free Weekend: I had planned to go to Staunton for a VASA board meeting and stay overnight to do a Volksmarch today. The board meeting got cancelled. My condo is grateful for the attention.

Commuting: I've had a few annoying metro moments lately, suitable for haiku. Let's start with Friday's fun at Crystal City:

This morning, doors would
not open because the train
overshot platform.

I had been on time, but that extra stop to the airport and trip back made me late. I'd also had that extra stop earlier the week but had nobody but myself to blame:

It is bad enough
when I'm absorbed in reading
and miss my station.

Which is why it is a good thing I live at the end of the line. Except when the worst fellow passenger ever is also going to Vienna:

He took up four seats
then lit up a cigarette -
also needed bath.

Game theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma (a classic problem in game theory) came up at a meeting I was at on Thursday. It gave me an opportunity to point out that neither approach to it (both of which are valid) is entirely satisfying. Pareto died in exile and Nash spent much of his adult life hospitalized for schizophrenia.

Work comment of the week: One of my colleagues referred to a meeting as having been held in "one of those big sleeper conference rooms."

Disease trivia of the week: Armadillos can transmit leprosy to humans. I never did trust animals that think they need armor.

Books purchased: I took advantage of being at Dupont Circle on Friday night to do some book shopping. I found a book of Yiddish folk tales at Second Story Books (which is mostly a used book place). And I bought John Pollack's The Pun Also Rises at Kramerbooks, as well as Old Jews Telling Jokes which will make a reasonable Mother's Day present.

Theatre: The reason I was at Dupont Circle was to see National Pastime at the Keegan Theatre. This was advertised as a musical about a fictional baseball team, which is right up my alley. The show was reasonably entertaining, but nothing brilliant. The plot, such as it is, involves a struggling radio station in Iowa in 1933 which tries to save itself by making up a baseball team, whose games (in Europe to keep anybody from trying to go to them) they will have exclusive rights to broadcast. It works fine - until a reporter from Life Magazine wanders by. There are a couple of love stories woven in. One involves the person behind the scheme (the owner's daughter who happens to be a big shot lawyer from Chicago) and the station manager. The other involves the primary baseball reporter and the woman who does traffic reports and such. He doesn't act on anything until one of the thugs, hired to pretend to be a ball player and do on-air interviews, makes a move on her. Then he takes revenge by killing that player in the next game.

A lot of the humor comes about because the two guys doing the broadcasts don't know anything about baseball. So, for example, they don't understand the symbols for the positions when they cover the first game and say things like say things like x is at C and y is P-ing on the mound. And they take it too literally when the station manager throws a suicide squeeze into the script later on.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of little things that are distracting. It's hard enough to believe two adult American men in 1933 are that ignorant about baseball. It's even harder to believe that a woman lawyer would be able to run everything in that era. (And, really, to have her wearing a pants suit in much of Act 1? No.) There are plenty of anachronisms and errors. The team schedule, for example, makes no sense in that era of limited air travel. A radio station in Iowa (which is west of the Mississippi) could not be named WZBQ. And the flags everyone waves in a scene about how great being an American is were current ones, with too many stars. These are nits, but all of this could have been solved with competent editing. Just because it's a musical doesn't mean you don't have to do your homework.

I've been continuing the clean-out of the recipe files. In addition to being a good way to procrastinate on other housework, it has turned up a few things worth trying. One was a green chile and cheese casserole that was sort of like a crustless quiche. It was okay - better reheated over the next few days - but not exciting enough to replace other things I make with similar ingredients.

The weather turning cooler turns my thoughts to soups and I made pumpkin soup yesterday. This involved cutting off the top and hollowing out a small pumpkin (about three pounds) and filling the interior with layers of toasted French bread and Swiss cheese. Cream gets poured on top of that, with pepper and nutmeg to season. Then it's baked at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for a little over 2 hours. The recipe didn't say to do this, but I put it on a pie plate, which was a good thing since the cream boiled over a little. You scoop out some of the pumpkin flesh with the cheese and cream when you eat it. This was pretty tasty, but not really worth the amount of work and time involved. I think I'll save my French bread and Swiss cheese for onion soup in the future.

After having my soup supper, I braved the metro to go to the Voices in the Glen Scary Stories concert. It was slightly challenging to get into he Vienna station, which was packed with people returning from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. (I am, by the way, glad that I did not attempt to go to this, as the people I know who did never made it onto the mall due to the crowds.) Apparently, large events on weekends don't cause trains to run more often. Combined with the track work on the Red Line, I got to Takoma just a little bit before the concert started.

Bill Mayhew started things off with a nice little jump tale, followed by a seasonal joke. He really should have had more time. He was followed by Jane Dorfman telling "Mary Culhane and the Dead Man," which she does very well, making this one of the highlights of the evening for me. She also told a local legend called "The White Dog." Ralph Chatham finished off the first half with excerpts from a novel by Jack Vance. This didn't really work for me, because there were too many things happening to keep track of mentally. I should note that, in my opinion, literary stories often suffer from the differences between written and spoken language. Ralph told well - but the material just isn't the sort of thing I can listen to well.

After a break for cookies and cider, the evening resumed with Anne Sheldon telling the English folktale, "Tibb's Cat and the Apple-Tree Man." She followed that with the other highlight of the show, a Robert Frost poem called "The Witch of Coos." It was definitely not what I was expecting from Robert Frost and was wonderfully creepy. We moved from creepy to just yucky with Tim Livengood telling "The Dissolving Rat." Finally, Margaret Chatham told Jane Yolen's "Mama Gone" (a literary story which does tell well, because Jane Yolen understands oral language) and "How to Turn Into a Witch."

All in all, it was a nice mix of stories and a fun evening, worth putting up with metro's inefficiency for.

I went to the other end of the region on Sunday and did another Volksmarch, this time in Frederick, Maryland. It's still a great town for walking - lots of interesting architecture, historical signs to read, and so on. The stretch through the Mount Olivet Cemetery (where Francis Scott Key and Barbara Frietchie among others are buried) was the only part of the walk I wasn't crazy about, but that was mostly because of the heat.

And I did yet another Volksmarch on Monday. This was the least interesting - through Rock Creek Park and Parklawn Cemetery. (Yes, I am trying to finish up the cemetery special program, which ends at the end of June.) Most of the route was on the hiker / biker trail through the park, which is fine, but was the same coming and going. There were too many bicyclists whizzing past, which is a bit scary. On top of that, the stretch through the cemetery had little shade and the day was scorchingly hot and humid, even earlyish in the morning. So it was not a particularly enjoyable walk.

In the evening, I went to Theatre J to see "Headscarf and the Angry Bitch." This is Zehra Fazal's one woman show about being a Muslim woman. It's structured as a series of "lectures" (with musical accompaniment) that gradually reveal her conflicts about her religious and ethnic identity. For example, she complains about the Christmas season and the lack of Ramadan songs, which she remedies with a ditty to the tune of "Little Drummer Boy." But then she takes things in an unexpected direction ("I lost my virginity on Ramadan...") Some of that was very funny, but there were other times I thought she was trying too hard to be shocking. For example, she explains the prayer times in Islam (complete with an alarm clock in the shape of a mosque). But then she goes on to say that she won't do anything five times a day - well, except one thing or, as her song goes, "the only thing I'd do 5 times a day is you." I also had some issues with the structure of the piece, which was gimmicky and could have benefited from a stronger narrative line. So, overall, it had some funny material and entertaining moments, but wasn't as satisfying as I'd hoped. That's a pity, since she brought up good issues about identity conflicts - issues which are really universal.

By the way, I did end up just walking to the Vienna metro and the shuttle bus link between West Falls Church and East Falls Church worked reasonably well. Apparently, metro can handle some sort of irregular operations. It's just the normal day to day stuff they screw up.

Just because I haven't done this in a while and I am in the need of a wee bit of creativity.

Electronics are
being stolen on metro -
Don't use them near doors.

That is the advice on a poster about thefts of cell phones and music players and the like. One has to wonder if the person who wrote that advice has ever actually taken a metro train at rush hour.

There will be no trains
between East and West Falls Church
the next three weekends.

This is related to construction work for the metro extension towards Dulles. ("Towards" not "to" since they have only funded the first phase, through Tyson's to Reston.) They will have shuttle bus service, but it is still a pain. I will probably just drive to Wolf Trap (for A Prairie Home Companion) tomorrow night but I need to go into the city Monday evening (which will still be without service since holidays count as weekends on the metro). I may decide it is easiest to drive to East Falls Church.

Fares will be rising.
Adding "peak of the peak" fares
makes driving cheaper.

There's the catch-22 of fare increases. When you make it too pricy, people drive instead, so metro ends up with even more shortfalls.

The Travel & Adventure show was today (and continues tomorrow) at the Convention Center. It's potentially dangerous to my budget, but it is a usually a good source of information. However, this year's offerings were fairly thin. There was some good information and I collected brochures on Ethiopia (since I am contemplating the Omo Valley) and on some West African festivals (as I have wanted to go to the Festival in the Desert for quite a while), as well as a few other things. But there were far fewer exhibitors than usual. And, for some mysterious reason, the travel show was combined with some sort of real estate show. I can understand the people selling vacation homes, but I really don't grasp why the gutter cover people were there. Or the Mahatma rice people, for that matter. I ran into a friend who also complained about the reduced size of the show. Very disappointing.

On the cultural side, Kajal (the woman who teaches my Bollywood dance workout class) was there. I missed her group's performance, however, since the metro had been troublesome. Or to put it in my more normal metro complaint medium:

I don't understand
why they can't offload just the
car with broken door.

Not that that would really have helped since it was the car I was in that had the door which wouldn't close at Clarendon, but still ...

1) I am intrigued by what news stories do and don't get major headlines. I'm surprised the Stewart Nozette case isn't getting more news. He is a former NASA scientist, who tried to sell classified data to Israel. Except it was the FBI and not the Mossad who contacted him. I don't think this will be another Pollard case, though, since it seems Nozette was seeking money, while Pollard acted on ideological grounds. (I also think that's why the parts of the Jewish community who think Pollard got too heavy a sentence are wrong, but that's a separate subject.)

2) Tuesday was the last day of the Crystal City farmer's market. It's been very convenient having it right outside my office and I'll be happy when it starts up again in the spring. In the meantime, I stocked up on Stayman apples.

3) Somebody is turning "The Man WHo Mistook His Wife for a Hat" into an opera. Just as I believe that mental illness is not a good subject for musical comedy, neurology does not seem like promising material for opera.

4) My list of things to write about here includes the word "exposure," but I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. In case I happen to ask about the string of numbers on the next page of my planner at some time in the future, it was a document number and Andy's fax number for me to send it to.

5) I managed to save myself about $130 on a trip to San Francisco in December by buying the ticket at exactly the right time. I love it when I get the last seat at the discounted price.

6) The metro had a little service challenge yesterday morning:

Amtrak fire at New
Carrollton this morning screwed
up the Orange Line

and then there is the usual behavior of fellow riders to write haiku about:

Someone should offer
a seat to the woman who's
holding a baby

(If I'd had a seat, I'd have offered it to her, of course.)

7) Go Phillies! (I am blaming last night on Pedro having had a cold.)

8) I vaguely remember putting my cell phone down somewhere when I came home on Sunday evening. And I remember thinking that wherever I put it was a bad idea because I would have trouble finding it again. Sure enough, I have no seen it since. If it doesn't turn up by the end of the weekend, I'll call to get it replaced.

9) An interesting tidbit from the new issue of Technology Review - in 45 BCE, Julius Caesar banned private vehicles from the center of Rome during daytime hours to try to reduce congestion.

10) This song is stuck in my head from my Bollywood dance class Wednesday night, so I thought I'd try to inflict the earworm on others. Unfortunately, it's the steps to an entirely different dance that are stuck in my head with it. (The choreography we did to it is not the same as the movie clip.) If you are wondering why there are so many blondes in a Bollywood movie, the film is apparently set in Miami.

In the course of doing a wee bit of desk unshoveling, I stumbled across some metro haikus I never posted here. These go back to June, but are really pretty timeless for us weary commuters.

Waited twenty-three
minutes for train whih should
run every five. Damn!

The indoor voice is
apparently not taught to
children nowadays.

I also have the obligatory cryptic notes to myself. Surprisingly, I recognized a sequence of digits written on one scrap of paper as a frequent flyer number. I can more or less figure out what I meant by things like 24-28 and 1-5 for Festival, and I actually just realized that it was the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I am reasonably sure I know what I was supposed to tell Vic and I think I actually did tell him. But I have absolutely no idea who Ben Regngert might be and why he is associated with 19 x 19 foam board.