Wisdom from the streets.

What I've learned lately:

I'm a "white bitch" with "nice titties."

Everything they do is so flamboyant.

I LOVE MAD MEN.
Oh my god, I love Mad Men.
It just makes me want to SET MYSELF ON FIRE!

Text message I received today:

"I am about to break Zeus's balls."




Equal to that:

Last night, there was a man on the subway playing a medley of "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess and the theme songs to "The Flintstones" and "The Addams Family"... on the melodica.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

PAUL NEWMAN DIED!

:'(

The key to what?

I'm watching this to drown out the sound of my landlord scraping paint and grunting in the kitchen. I suggest you watch it, even without grunting landlord.

(Thanks to Jeffry for the link/blowing my mind yet again.)

Huggin' necks, shakin' hands.

What do we want?
NYCADS!
When do we want it?
NOWCADS!

Mmmm....right. NYCADS is the New York City All-Day Singing (as certain readers of this blog already know, I have a fondness for acronym-izing anything that I can, including but not limited to WTTAN).

Anyway, the singing extravaganza was this weekend, and what a good time it was. Never a dull moment. The singers started rolling into town on Friday, and come Friday afternoon, my apartment was hosting a plain-dressing woman (part of the River Brethren...sect? Faith? I don't know. They're sort of like Mennonites. I hope no one googles River Brethren and gets directed here and leaves me nasty comments) and Matt, the maker of a documentary on Sacred Harp. Aldo and I rounded out this odd quartet and spent a few hours sort of entertaining... I went to work until midnight and then slept at Emma's in E. Wburg, as my bed was being slept in by an out-of-town guest (and kickass lady), Judy. I miss what was apparently a really exciting and good singing school taught by Richard DeLong and Judy Caudle. Whatever.

Saturday morning: I was supposed to get to the singing at 9, as I was head of the 'welcoming committee' (I AM very welcoming) and had to set up nametags and registration cards and such. Ryan was going to be my second, so we made plans the night before to coordinate our travel so neither would have to endure the long G-train ride alone; we took matters into our own hands and decided to ride bikes. We met at the Graham stop at 8.20 am and took off. I was a little apprehensive because I'm so out of shape and didn't really trust that I could get there unscathed, but Ryan was confident in our combined ability. Let it be said that he has an actual bike that he rides all over-- as opposed to mine, which is thirty years old and weighs about fifty pounds and is constantly falling apart in different ways. Things went just fine until we got to Fort Greene and I got a FLAT TIRE. That's never ever ever ever happened to me, in all my years of riding bikes, ever. Fuck you, Fort Greene! After three minutes of ranting, we took notice of the time, renewed our vigor by thinking of all the singing that awaited us, and started trudging towards Hicks Street. After five minutes, Ryan gently suggested that it might be faster if he carried my dead bike and I rolled his. Sadly, he was right. I am, in the words of Sven Ugendugen, a 'puny weakling.' We made several wrong turns, sweated and cursed a lot, but got to the church only fifteen minutes after our desired time of arrival...dirty and sweaty and discombobulated. It was a very unexpected 'adventure,' to say the least.

The singing was really great. Dinner was lovely, with more than enough food. Ollie Stokes was honored that I made a coconut cake with him in mind, and ate about six pieces. Greg was given a farewell card, at which point I got teary-eyed and had to think about something other than him moving, or now, the fact that as I write this, he's halfway across the country. I don't like that one bit. Afterwards there was a lot of cleanup, then a listening party for Matt's new CD, and a little composium, at which I was starting to get a little post-singing hysterical and was of no use to anyone. Then we spent half an hour tying my dead bike onto the roof of Greg's car so I wouldn't have to take it on the subway, which was amazing. So much chivalry in one day; I should have bike disasters more often. (I can't neglect to mention a previous Herculean effort when another gallant maneuvered the cumbrous Schwinn up the narrow tenement staircase of my building. It proves my point again!)

More jollity followed later-- eating street food/trying to keep up with Matt Hinton's hilarious sense of humor with Justin, Ben, and Ryan; playing stupid games and putting on wigs; lots and lots of geeking out; Sacred Harps dorks drinking. Blah blah blah. Slept at Emma's again, and managed to see her for all of five minutes.

Sunday was the monthly singing at St. Bart's, which, like last year, was populated by a lot of holdovers from the All-Day, which was terrific. Justin and I led "Sweet Affliction," which contains the words "In the floods of tribulation/While the billows o'er me roll..." Lauren maintains that I said "While the 'dillos o'er me roll" and the (cutest ever) image of armadillos curling up and rolling over me while I'm sleeping was born. Things wrapped up, and as Hugh McGraw says, we were all huggin' necks and shakin' hands. Greg left for good. Lauren, Ryan and I went to drink our sorrows away at Jimmy's Corner, and then at her house with Jesse and Judy. Sacred Harp gossip, geeking out, drinking, until midnight. Sometimes I am slightly overwhelmed by how weird and wonderful my life gets when I'm Sacred Harp singing.

But now, the party's over; Greg's in Oregon, Jesse and Lauren are back in Troy, the Boston gang is long-gone.

I guess I had other stuff to talk about, but this is pushing it. I'll stop here, with this admonition from the hallways of St. Bart's.

I dunno

Things I might have forgotten to talk about:

1) My play, We Things That Are Now (or 'WTTAN' for the BUSTAMFOP crowd) is getting a (having a? receiving a?) reading at La Mama in the early months of next year. I'll let you know more about it when I know more about it. Craig is going to direct it.

2) I just got cast in a play. Uh, sort of. I'm trying to stop talking down everything I do, because it's a terrible habit and I have the feeling that it makes me really boring to be around. So I'll just say: It's a play that some ladies wrote to celebrate the bicentennial of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. I play a handful of different characters in different scenes from the history of the church. The coolest thing is that I'm in one where I talk about Lowell Mason, who was the choirmaster or whatever for a while. He wrote/arranged a lot of familiar church tunes, most notable "Blest Be The Tie That Binds," which I actually sang this past Sunday. He also has a bunch of arrangement credits in the Sacred Harp.

3) Slinky Calhoun is on FIRE! People have started buying our shit. Which sounds ridiculous, but it's somehow true. Does anyone need a cross-stitched bangle? Anyone?

4) I know I didn't forget to talk about this, but; my apartment is like a funhouse right now. A really, really unfun funhouse with squirrels in the ceilings and dulcimers in unexpected places.

5) The New York City All-Day Singing is this weekend, kicking off with a singing school on Friday night at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, continuing with the all-day sing on Saturday from 9.30-3.30, and stampeding, hoarsely, into Sunday for the monthly sing at St. Bart's. If you're reading this and think you might want to come to any of those things, even if just for an hour or two, please tell me, because I'd love for you to come.

6) Related, this past Sunday, a bunch of singers acted as the choir for Plymouth Church sort of as a favor to them, sort of to say hello and thank them for letting us use their church for our singing. Here's us, after the service, dressed up. I like the shadow of the pointing finger on the column on the left side of the picture. (It belongs to a statue of Henry Ward Beecher.)

That's Greg, Inga and Sylvester, Diane, Violet, Anna, Justin, Nancy, Aldo, Sarah, Dean and Rachel, Anna and Ian, Ryan, and me! (Three Annas. Whaaaat?)

Verdict, plus squirrels.

After 24 hours of melodramatically wondering where that thing came from (the 'poem,' not the squirrel), boring several friends with exhaustive speculation, and reading it a million times--I guess I'll say that though I'll never know for sure, signs point to me having written it. These signs include the giant rat, the name Henry, the fact that it is bad, and its overwhelming sentimentality.

Enough about that.


The squirrel, for those of you who are interested, got into that little rotting cage of wood because our old, 'sick' (read: negligent! Am I a bitch, or what?) landlord ripped our roof/ceiling apart about three weeks ago and hasn't been back to fix it since. It was ok for about a day, and then all this rubble started falling from the ceiling. Now I know that it's because creatures have been running around above my head. Awesome.

MEET MY NEW ROOMMATE.

can you see him?

Trance?

Apparently I spent large chunks of senior year in a coma, or drunk, or living as someone else...I don't know. I am sifting through all these files I have in a folder marked "Henry and Clara," and trying to see if there's anything worth recycling as I crack WTTAN (that's "We Things That Are Now") open again in earnest....and most of them are so unfamiliar to me that it is surreal. Not only do I have no recollection of ever seeing them before, but I literally cannot conceive of having written them.

The weirdest thing, though, is some sort of poem that is stuck in between two rough scenes in a file called "to send ben." (As if the title doesn't reveal how old it is, the date says 7/2006. Wowza.) I have NO idea where it came from. I know I didn't write it. But I just have no idea where it came from. I assume the inclusion of the name 'Henry' in it was one of the reasons I noticed it; a Google search is fruitless. I have absolutely no idea. I suppose there's a chance it could be from the novel "Henry and Clara," but I don't think so. I read it over and over and am totally, completely puzzled and weirded out. The line about the rat is something I could have written, because that happened to me once. And the line about the three-legged dog is feeling really familiar. I don't fucking know! It's making me feel really insane.

Anyway, here it is. You don't know what it is, do you?

We went to the Albany Fair

And we went into the Tent of Wonder and Horror

Saw the horse-hair bearded lady and the Tartar with his head drilled full of holes

A three-legged dog; he mostly lay in the corner

A rat the size of a pig- I think it was not actually a rat

A sword-swallower covered in tattoos

But at the end, a pair of girls

Who looked to be embracing

Arms around each other tightly, so tightly, that one couldn’t turn her head to look out of the window she sat behind

Stitched together, flesh sewn to flesh, like a cruel joke made real by the punishing hand of an unkind God

My heart broke for them

To never be apart from another

But as I looked I thought

Might I like to be so with my Henry?

If I had to be so

It would be him I would choose to be knit up with

To never part, never look away

I realized I was wrong

I looked at the girls and could see only the love that they shared

That was keeping them together

Without their love, they could walk away from each other in an instant

My friend Matt and I had the extreme displeasure to work on a show last season that was a huge piece of shit, done by unfriendly, untalented people-- the best kind of theatre! Hooray! Anyway, I just got an email from another theatre with an ad for said show in it. I shared it with Matt, and this is what he had to say:


"HOLY SHIT!!! Who let that unbearable woman back on stage. We should go and demand comps and then throw tomatoes and taunt her and then maybe that awful stage manager will be there and then we can kick her ass and maybe then she’ll smile and then I can find that lighting designer and I can kick his ass and then we will take that stupid directing couple and we can throw them off the roof of the annex and then __________ will be no more and that idiot ________ will at least have an interesting story to tell. OH man. That was a really long sentence. Its just how I feel."

And I couldn't agree more.

All's Faire

My halcyon days of ghost-blogging for The All-For-Nots are at least temporarily on hold (as is the show)...so go watch All's Faire! Some of the same hooligans are responsible for it.

this week

sort of blows. no, it definitely blows.

Also this:

This real-life Pikachu was the only thing that could make me smile during a particularly black period this evening. Let it do the same to you.