Shipwrecked & Comatose

In December 2019, I had the opportunity to audition for the Harrison Players production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert .  I decided not to audition.  I had finished the Bedford Community Theater’s production of The Addams Family a month earlier, and I didn’t have the energy to audition for another musical.  Besides, I didn’t see myself in Priscilla .  It didn’t seem like a good fit for me.  It seemed like a show for younger actors.  I also wasn’t sure if my voice and general vocal repertoire was a good match for the music in the play.   There are other theater groups in the area.  I was sure I could find something to audition for in the spring (although auditioning outside of Harrison has brought more failures than successes in recent years). Well, we all know what happened in the spring of 2020.    Theater was out of the question for everyone.  I missed it.    I missed performing. Some people get into performing b...

This post contains spoilers I read The Handmaid's Tale sometime back in the early 1990s.  From what I have read regarding Margaret Atwood's reason for writing the book, she was inspired by Iran.  She wanted to imagine how a secular country could adopt theocratic policies and how that would play out.  The fact that she set the book in the United States rather than her native Canada speaks volumes about how outsiders view the US as a place where such a government could take power. When I read the book, the Religious Right had completed its stranglehold on the US government.  Ralph Reed had a visible hand in politics and  Congress was touting its racist and Christian-biased Contract with America .  Reading The Handmaid's Tale sent chills down my spine.  I could see such a tragedy happening here.  A religious group had fulfilled its goal of taking over a major US political party and who knew where its agenda would lead? Most conservative criti...

"It's traditional." "It's always been done this way." If you want me to support your cause, you will never use these phrases with me.  I believe tradition can be more of a hindrance than a help.  Rigid adherence to tradition is a potential impediment to true progress.  If humans always stuck to the belief that things should be done one way because they have always been done that way, we would all still be living in trees.  Everything changes and moves forward and most of the time humanity is the better for it. This doesn't only apply to the big issues.  It also applies to the small ones.  Pop culture needs to be refreshed and reinvented too sometimes.  If it didn't we would all still be watching vaudeville and the Keystone Cops and wondering why were were bored with them. The grand tradition of Dr. Who deserves a face lift as much as any institution.  For the uninitiated, I will clarify that Dr. Who is a TV show that began in 1963...

I know this post is a bit late as the announcement was made shortly after Season 5 aired its last episode, but I still want to comment on it.  The upcoming 6th season will be the last season of Downton Abbey . I hate to see it go, but I understand why it has to. Is Downton Abbey still the hottest British import since Paddington Bear or has it jumped the shark?  That depends upon whom you ask.  Americans still can't get enough of it, and that includes me.  I know I love the gorgeous costumes and scenery and how it brings me into a world that is like nothing I have ever experienced or will experience. I'm not the only American who is fascinated by the world of Downton Abbey .  Even the wealthiest among us have probably never experienced living in a home where everyone dresses formally for dinner and food is served by an army of footmen.  Today's maids aren't required to stay out of sight of the master of the house.  We're not bound by the manners an...

I know I came quite late to the party on this one, but I recently read Gone Girl . I also managed to avoid all of the hype before I read it, so I really didn't know much about the story other than it was a very dark and strange story about a woman's disappearance. (Spoilers ahead) Once I read it, I found it a fun, if somewhat disturbing, story.  It sucked me in pretty quickly.  If you are unfamiliar with the book, I'll give a short synopsis of how it flows.  Protagonist Nick comes home one day to find his wife Amy missing with a few signs of a struggle.  He becomes the main suspect in her disappearance.  The chapters alternate between Nick's discovery of evidence against him, and Amy's diary entries.  The diary talks at first about her deep love and devotion for Nick, but then takes a frightening turn as she begins to worry that he is a danger to her.  As the story progresses, Nick becomes a much less sympathetic character.  We learn that sinc...

Last week I watched The Theory of Everything .  At first I enjoyed it.  I felt the movie was a bittersweet love story that humanized someone I merely saw as a scientific icon.  I had known very little about Stephen Hawking's personal life before I saw the movie.  I had known he was married, but not to whom, or how many times.  Shortly before I saw the movie I read that Jane Hawking eventually divorced him due to burnout, but that was the extent of what I knew. I was discussing the movie with my family and the accuracy of the story came up. My mother mentioned that Hawking would eventually marry his nurse Elaine Mason.  This was completely glossed over in the movie.  It is never mentioned in the brief epilogue at the end of the film, which gives a rosy, happily-ever-after picture of Hawking's and Jane's post-divorce life.  In real life, Hawking left Jane for Mason.  This is not stated outright in the film.  Their parting scene does invo...

I have always considered myself a sci-fi/fantasy nerd, but I say that conditionally.  I am not one of those nerds who feels the need to automatically love any and all sci-fi and fantasy that comes my way.  Yes, I was a Lost geek.  I am obsessed with Red Dwarf .  I can also quote entire passages of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . There are also times when my tastes are completely out of step with the rest of the nerd world.  As much as I say I love Star Trek ,  the beloved original series is probably my least favorite version (and I never watched beyond the first two episodes of Enterprise ).  In a similar vein, I have watched all of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica , but never watched the original.  I never watched Firefly, Serenity, or Stargate .  I was accused of not being a nerd at all because I never saw The Matrix .  I only watched about half of Avatar before deciding it was predictable and dull and sent the DVD back to...

Want to know how to make yourself Public Enemy #1 these days? Be someone who doesn't like Glee. If you don't like Glee, you're out of touch, mean, and just plain weird. Clearly there is something wrong with you. I'm sure in my case it's also the perception that I'm just a pretentious, TV-hating, twit. That's true to some point. I am a member of the Kill Your Television crowd as well as a BBC geek who generally doesn't like much mainstream TV, but it's not as if I reject all of it out of hand. Remember I was a huge Lost geek and The Office is perpetually in my Netflix queue. I was more than willing to give Glee a chance. Everyone* kept telling me how great it was and how much I would love it. As a singer and performer myself (okay, a very medicore singer and performer but I do love performing) it seemed like my kind of show. I put the first season in my Netflix queue with great anticipation. ‎In the beginning it I thought it had a lot...

Since I originally posted this two years ago, it seems that vampires have not gone away. They have become bigger and bigger and more ubiquitous. Can I tell you how SICK AND TIRED I am of vampires? If I see another vampire drama on TV, I think I'll gladly offer up my own neck to the next vampire who wants to bite me. I wish I could figure out where this vampire obsession comes from. What's it all about? Why are vampires, scary, hideous, ugly, undead beasts, so sexy all of a sudden. Can't we put some kind of moratorium on vampire entertainment? No more vampire movies, comics, books, or TV shows for another 10 years. How does that sound? Unless you're Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore of course. Then you can write about vampires all you want because it's actually funny when they write about them. ************************************************************************************* It seems the Twilight movie and the books upon which it was based ...