Drinking Mochas Makes My Kidneys Feel Better

Philly Fringe Continues!

2011-09-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Rep Theatre in Philadelphia is producing my short play "Supplies" in their Fringe show, as part of "Girl on Gurl" - a, quote "pairing 6 female playwrights with 6 female directors in an estrogen-induced salute to GURL POWER." When they asked for submissions, they wanted plays to encompass all aspects of the female experience, so I sent one about murderesses and one about ponies. They picked murder, so take from that what you will.
(image source)

We got a nice shout out in the City Paper -

"Pair female playwrights with female directors and what do you get? One wifebeater, one torched husband, and one boyfriend shown the door for violent behavior (including fly-swatting). And that’s just in the first 30 minutes."

The torched husband? Totally my play. It always makes me happy when my piece gets into the tag line.

"Supplies" came out of an exercise in the Horizon Theater Apprentice Company where we took inspiration from "News of the Weird" pieces. Supplies stemmed from two pieces, one detailing an Autralian woman's accidental burning of her husband (it's okay, she only meant to torch his junk), and a Texas man who let his "friends" set his prosthetic leg on fire. "Supplies" is about a hardware store that caters to exactly that clientele and what happens when a possibly innocent bystander steps in.

Hmm. I wonder why most of my ten minute plays end in murder. Comic murder!

Yikes.

Anyway, apparently it's working, because Shelterbelt Theatre in Nebraska has picked up "Supplies" for their Shelterskelter Halloween show in October. Hooray! My Cornhusker state debut!

In the meantime, the Philly Fringe show has a few more performances this weekend, and for those of you not in Philadelphia, you can hear a podcast with some of the other playwrights involved, or catch a video of "Fly Away" another ten minute play in the show. It's all the phun of philly phringe, but p(h)ortable.

Then there was a Hurricane

2011-08-31T05:56:00.001-07:00

It's very cute to look at how excited and naive I was several days ago. Because pretty much immediately after I posted that, Hurricane Irene was upgraded from "eh, whatever" to "a big giant deal." All Fringe events over the weekend were cancelled. All events over the weekend were cancelled. Many flights were cancelled, including my flight and back-up flight.

So, I rolled into town Tuesday afternoon, instead of Friday night, giving me 2 and a half days instead of a glorious weekend.

But, I got here in time for this!

The First Annual Truffle Hunt New Play Festival!

That I opened!

With my play!

That I wrote!

About Mastodons!

And I had some lovely friends come out of the woodwork, both Lynbrook and Carleton people, and had a lovely time with them.

And I get to see it again tonight.

So, take that hurricane! You can't ruin everything.

Truffles and Mermaids

2011-08-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

This is going to be an awesome week.

Not only do I get to see The Average-Sized Mermaid and several other cool shows in the New York Fringe Festival ...

(awesome mermaid photo by Joe Wehry, by the way)

.... but I ALSO get to see one of MY OWN shows at the first annual Truffle Hunt New Play Festival. I am tremendously excited. I've had some great emails with the director, the other playwrights look awesome, and the readings are taking place at a super-delicious looking gastro-pubby place called 61 Local. Microbrews, new plays, and fun young artists who call themselves "Piglets" - I am so in.

They've been doing a series of blog posts profiling playwrights in the festival, and I've finally made it on!

A Few Highlights:

What are you most proud of in terms of your work as an author?

I'm most proud of the fact that I'm still working. I've written at least a play a year since I was 15. Not all of them are super awesome, but I learn something new with every story I take on. I think there are a lot of people who have wonderful, beautiful ideas, but they don't always follow through with them. I do not want to be one of those people, so I try to keep something on the back burner of my brain all the time. I think a little part is terrified that if I stop working, I won't be able to start again, so I try and keep that little part busy so it doesn't scare itself. And because of this fear-driven, shark-like impulse for motion, I've written politically charged sex farces, violent short plays, semi-autobiographical storytelling pieces, children's plays, romantic comedies, post apocalyptic speculative fiction, and this delightful piece about a misfit mastodon. I can't wait to see what I get to do next and the great people I'm going to work with.

If you could've written any play (instead of the shmoe who did write it) what play would it be (i.e. Glengarry GlenRoss)?

I would love to take on some Chekov, because nothing is as beautifully absurd as Russian misery.

If you couldn't write, what would you most like to do?

I would like to knit a working tank from steel wool and marshal amazing parades around the world. It would probably shoot bubbles.

Yeah. I like to think I walk that fine line between pretentious and crazy. Maybe?

Check out the whole thing here. And if you're in Brooklyn next week, like a wonderfully unexpectedly large number of my friends, come and see the Truffle Hunt at the 61 Local! AND the Average Sized Mermaid, which closes tomorrow!

More pictures forthcoming, I assure you!

Baby Beluga

2011-08-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

This completely made my night.

Apparently beluga whales like mariachi, or at least this one has a particular weakness for Yellow Bird, but then again, who doesn't?

"A Watery Delight"

2011-08-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

We're a little more than halfway through the run of The Ugly Duckling and the responses have been amazing. As amazing as this photograph of the dancers in the swan pas de troi(taken by Mark Winter)

Wendell Brock at Arts Critic ATL gave us a positively stunning review:
laywright Rachel Teagle infuses her telling with lots of funny business, contemporary references and a streamlined trajectory of the journey of the Ugly Duckling (Andrew Crigler). Ugly encounters a gaggle of wild geese led by a showman named Captain Hooks, who claims to be the “loosest goose this side of the ’Hootch” (Will Shuler). Among Hooks’ entourage is a funny-talking Canadian named Alberta (Emma Jackson). Instead of spending time in the home of an old peasant woman with a hen and pussycat, Ugly is adopted by a snarky Cat (Ben Isabel) and Chicken (Jessica Miesel), loosely based on celebutantes Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. Riffing on Hollywood’s penchant for odd baby names, the fashion terrors christen the duckling “Bookcase.” Naturally, they read him the riot act.

Clowdus has said he was moved to do this piece by the national conversation around bullying. Indeed, there is much talk here about Ugly “going through a phase,” something he’ll “grow out of.” Such are the code phrases that society uses to dismiss budding homosexual behavior. In the opening sequence, the narrator instructs us that nature is a mirror of life; when the water grows still, we can see our shapes in it. This story, then, is a reflection of the evanescence of life, a forever-shifting kaleidoscope of vanity, narcissism, shadows, light, trickery, transformation.

And the new Atlanta Theater Fans website loved it too, and even gave me a little nod, namely "Those slightly older (but still young at heart) will enjoy playwright Rachel Teagle’s witty banter and sharp cultural references."

Even the Danish American Consulate gave us a shout-out. The Danes do love their Hans Christian Anderson, as do we.

Speaking of Hans Christian Anderson, Jessica Fleitman's The Average Sized Mermaid" is gearing up for the New York Fringe. If you can't make it to the show, there's a way to support the production with a donation online or by purchasing their MER-chandise. Get it? I've seen a lot of our high school friends step up and support her, which is really wonderful. Go Jess Go!

This week also marks the beginning of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. I'm sure I'll be wistfully paging through the website a lot for the next week. Anyone planning on going? Let me know when you see something wonderful.

And speaking of wonderful things - in September, I'm heading up to New York to see the Truffle Theatre Company's Truffle Hunt New Play Festival featuring my play "The Impracticalities of Modern Day Mastodons." They've got a neat Production Blog so expect some forthcoming cross posting.

Carl Nelson Was Missing

2011-07-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Carl Nelson is nuts.

That's the first thing most people would tell you, and anyone who spent time around him would agree: Carl Nelson is absolutely nuts. He was an inferno of ideas, of energy, of wacky voices, and crazy characters and comics and art and everything. Carl Nelson is nuts. And he's brilliant.

We went to college together, and he was in Minneapolis for a few years after, then he disappeared to one of the Dakotas, and I was afraid I'd lose him, as he was not internet-able, and being both nuts and brilliant, was tough to keep a hold on.

But he has re-emerged. With a beautiful tumblr full of sketches and paintings and comics, and other evidence of a nutty brilliant person working his butt off.

Go see for yourself.

One of my favorites is a short comic called Blind Spot, a lovely little semi-sci-fi tidbit.

Go ahead, you can go read it.

I'll wait...

...

Sigh.

In other news, The Ugly Duckling opens tomorrow. was profiled in the Sunday edition of the AJC with a nice lovely picture of everyone underwater. And, as my mother pointed out, I was the only playwright cited by name, and I quote: "And playwright Rachel Teagle is penning a new adaptation of the classic that will include pop culture references to Brangelina and Neil Patrick Harris, plus characters based on Paris Hilton (a chicken) and Nicole Richie (a cat).*"
(*Although technically, Cat and Chicken are based on the Olsen twins, specifically these Olsen twins, but whatever. Close enough!)

We open tomorrow. I am nervous and excited. I hope no one drowns or gets eaten by fish.

New and Exciting Things

2011-06-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Hey Puppies and Kittens!

After a long blog break, I am back with exciting news that I will list for your reading pleasure.

1 - I successfully completed the Horizon Theatre Apprentice Program, and came out with lots of new scripts, new friends and contacts, and the memory of the artistic director's face during my play as a man made love to a couch on his stage (that was a fun script). Incidentally, if anyone wants to produce a sweet little one act chock full of dream sequences, tantric mime,and a very sensual couch, let me know. I even wound up writing another robot play, to replace the first robot play I almost wrote for the joint stock project. Maybe I just really miss Ben Egerman.

2 - The Milburn Stone Theater in Cecil County Maryland produced Covert Operations as part of their Emerging Artist(s) Project. I didn't get to see it, but it did get a nice little review in the Stage Partners newsletter. I was compared to Sid Caesar. I can die happy.

But I won't, because I've got too much cool stuff to do, like:

3 - Serenbe Playhouse's THE UGLY DUCKLING, directed by Brian Clowdus, choreography by Joanna Brooks and text by Me!
We go into rehearsals later this month and I can't wait. The cast is set, the script is done, the director's ready to go, the choreographer's in a cast...

Yeah. Whoops. But she's got a plan, and she's tough as nails, and now one of feet is a club.

Plus the promotional pictures are gorgeous, see?

They're taken by Loran Hygema who also shot the gorgeous firelight pictures of Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts last fall.

The show opens July 2nd and runs through August 28th.

And I just found out July's going to be a busy month in Rachel Teagle land, because:

4 - "A Pain in the Neck" has been selected as part of the Essential Theater's Bare Essentials Reading Series! Yep, the little Lesbian Vampire Play that could, (which had its first public reading at Bedlam two years ago) was selected as a finalist in their playwriting competition and thus gets an awesome staged reading. This one came out of the blue, and it was a lovely lovely surprise. Plus their synopsis is super cute: "Mina thinks her girlfriend might be cheating on her -- with a man, which would be bad enough, but he could also be a vampire, which would really suck. (Sorry.)"

And speaking of punny show descriptions, a certain New York friend of mine, should be careful what she fishes for, because:

5- Jessica Fleitman's The Average Sized Mermaid is getting produced in the 2011 New York Fringe!! I am so proud of my wee little Jess Jess, and I can't wait to aggressively stalk the production merblog. Get your butts down there! August! 2011! Average Sized Mermaids! Yay!

There's more cool stuff coming (like Ben's new dark puppet apocalypse-a-ganza) but for now, I need to go sit in front of a fan and melt. I miss Hothlanta.

Hothlanta

2011-01-13T14:00:00.000-08:00

We're on Snow Day #4 down here in thew newly christened town of Hothlanta. You can even buy a t-shirt with an AT-AT Walker about to crush a Waffle House.

That's pretty much my life right now. I am that AT-AT Walker.

On Sunday night, we got about 6 inches of snow and since then, the city's been pretty much shut down as highways are reduced to ice skating rinks and everyone runs to Kroger to buy milk, chips, and biscuit dough. It was like a plague of terrified, disorganized locusts in there.

Immediately prior to the snowpocalypse, I was up in Roswell with my fellow Horizon apprentices watching Topher Payne's
Tokens of Affection at the Georgia Ensemble Theatre. If they ever clear the roads enough to un-trap you from your house, you should definitely make the drive. It's a very sweet, wise comedy that appeals to a wide audience without talking down. About half the audience in our Sunday Matinee were 70 year old women wearing fur coats, which was an experience in and of itself. Plus, the playwright has an adorable cartoon website, although we all agree his hair is much more impressive in person.

So, since then, I've been pretty much trapped in the apartment. I did end up working a little on Tuesday, but we closed early when rapidly dropping temperatures turned everything back into an icy death trap. So, I'm here. Nothing much to do but dance around with axes and teach the dog to salsa dance.

Or work on my super secret summer project and try very hard not to have Black Swan related nightmares.

More on that to come.

In the meantime, check out Serenbe Playhouse's first season video, in which I totally appear in postcard form, and fondly remember the days when you could actually have theatre outside.

Serenbe Playhouse Season One from Serenbe Playhouse on Vimeo.

November? Already?!

2010-11-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, October went fast.

Between working backstage on Horizon Theatre's Night Blooms, the Horizon Apprentice Company, and working on the Serenbe Playhouse remount of the Fringe show, I literally had no free evenings for the last month and a half.

It paid off though.

Night Blooms was not a backstage tech intensive show, so while waiting backstage. I re-read three books of Song of Ice and Fire (which, by the way he will never finish), Stephen King's Danse Macabre and half of "The Stand", and knitted a full blanket.

Yeah. A bit of downtime.

And last weekend, we did the awesome outdoor Atlanta Premiere of RTBiG, which was listed as "Best of the Big A" in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and under "Stockbridge Murder Events"(?!)
I made lots of people pay money to look at me and freeze, which was pretty great. It got down to 40 degrees on Friday night, which for Atlantans is just about absolute zero. Fortunately, I was next to a fire, so I didn't notice that it was super cold, despite being barefoot and in a wee little pretty dress. The moment I stepped away from the fire to exit, though, my body just about froze solid.

Loran Hygema of Together Portrait Studios took some lovely pictures, which I will now crib from his facebook page. As you can tell, this was awesome.

A shot of the lovely set, designed and executed by the incredible Brian Clowdus with manual labor support and fire safety tips(!) from my mom. He hauled those LED lights out into the middle of the woods in the pouring rain and not only did not electrocute himself, but also made it look beautiful. The platforms were covered with book pages and the space was surrounded by candles in mason jars and old books.

As the Goth Kid in the Winchester Mystery House:
"I see Eggs. I see...bacon. I see a hot beverage of some kind, hot cocoa... No! It's tea. Definitely tea. Oh my god. Sarah Winchester died while eating BREAKFAST."

"My mother looked from earnest, nine year old me, unicorn notebook and pen at the ready, and back to the clerk, who had just mistaken this nine year old for a fictional federal agent..."
"Hey, uh, 'Trust No One'?"
"The Truth is Out There."

"In a single step, every hair on the back of my arm stood straight up and I could feel something not quite electric course over my skin.
I took a deep, cold breath.
In another step, it was gone."

I love the fire in that last picture. What a beautiful experience and an awesome show. And now, I'm a Serenbe Celebrity. I get a lot of "Oh, yeah, you believe in ghosts, right?" which, I guess is a start.

First, small sustainable arts loving micro community, next, the world!

Actually, next is writing two plays in a month. All the other Horizon Apprentices are doing National Play Writing Month so I'd be a failure and embarrassment to all if I didn't follow suit. Never mind that we lost my lead actor in my apprentice play after I wrote the first half, so now I have to start a THIRD play this month.

I'm saddened by his departure for multiple reasons. First, he had to leave because of a job disaster, which is never good, second he was a great guy to be around and I wanted to hang out with him more, and third, I based my whole play concept around him playing a robot, which he would have been AWESOME at. But, someone else will have to write his robot play. Or, I'll have to find a way down the road to rope him into it again.

Before it disappears into the unfinished play folder, here are some little snippets that made me happy.

Premise - Shelley is a designer at a factory that makes sex robots. She's just brought home SAMMI (Socially Advanced Mechanical Module Innovation), a platonic companion model for her friend Gordon to beta test.

GORDON
He feels so real.

SHELLEY
We’re one of the leading innovators in responsive electronic skin, of course he feels real.

SAMMI
I am huggably soft. See?
HE EXTENDS HIS ARMS FOR A HUG.

GORDON
So, you just scavenged extra parts?

SHELLEY
Actually, I think he’s mostly discarded breast tissue.
NO ONE HAS HUGGED SAMMI. HE HOLDS HIS ARMS OPEN, GLANCING BETWEEN THEM
We’ll probably be working on an alternate formula, it tends to be a bit over-sensitive.
LEFT ALONE, SAMMI SADLY HUGS HIMSELF. IT MAKES HIM FEEL WARM AND FUZZY
But, you may be looking at the new face of personal robotic companions. I mean, not everyone wants mechanical sex butlers, and we thought the SAMMIs might be a good kind of introductory bot. Something friendly and non-threatening. Uncreepy. Or at least, less creepy than say The Naughty Marquise and her interchangeable hand flails.

Later:

SHELLEY
What? You always said you wanted to test the products.

GORDON
Yeah, the sexy products.

SAMMI IS CRESTFALLEN.

SAMMI
I apologize for my physical inadequacy.

SHELLEY
Great. Now his eyes are going to leak.

GORDON
You made a robot who can cry?

SHELLEY
It’s more like stress induced exhaust.

GORDON
That comes out of its tear ducts?

SHELLEY
Mostly.

GORDON
What?

And later still, after Shelley has left them alone. Gordon has spent several minutes teaching Sammi secret handshakes, only to discover he already knows them

GORDON
Why didn’t you say something?

SAMMI
I was having fun. And Shelley said to “humor you.”

GORDON
Did she now.

SAMMI
Yes. And that is a function I intend to perform to the fullest extent of my ability.
What do clouds wear under their shorts?

GORDON
What?

SAMMI
Thunderpants.
Get it?

GORDON
Yeah.

SAMMI
Good, because I do not.

GORDON
This is going to be a long night, isn’t it.

SAMMI
There are 7 and three quarter hours until the sun rises.

GORDON
Thanks Sammi. Thanks.

****

*sigh*

I'll miss Sammi. Maybe after I finish my other two plays due this month...

Sorry, Literature

2010-10-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

I spent most of Tuesday night abusing books.

For the show in Serenbe at the end of the month, we got the Emory Library to donate a bunch of the books they were going to throw out to use as set pieces and props. I drove the first load of books down this week and we're probably getting another carload coming up. In the Fringe show, my main prop was a piece of gray fabric, which became every single prop I needed, partly for stagecraft and art, partly because I needed to have a super portable show and I got the fabric for free.

Now I have CARLOADS of books to play with. CARLOADS! And I don't have to carry them all in a backpack everywhere I go. Oh the luxury...

It turns out there's a lot you can do with books. We threw them around and stacked them and knocked them over and, after a wee bit of trepidation, ripped pages out. It felt so evil and devious. Ripping a book?! WHAT??!

But once I had gotten my ingrained fear of pissing off the spectral elementary school librarians I fear haunt me, um, ripping pages out of books is super fun. Dangerously fun. Totally awesome. And now we've found a whole bunch of places where I get to rip stuff.

You know, for the stagecraft and the art and stuff.

But while we're talking about books, I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Belated Banned Books Week.

And if some of these titles are troubling, Huff Post has provided a convenient list of alternate titles for some frequently challenged books. For example, Harold Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," has been re-titled to "White People Ruin Everything." Apt, eh?

One book recently challenged was Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and the author wrote a lovely blog post about the banning of the book including an immensely moving poem based on reader responses.

And appreciating books makes me feel less guilty about ripping them up (and much less guilty about having so much fun ripping them up.

Hello Updated Trailer!

2010-09-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

Why it is good to see you, ATLANTA PREMIERE TRAILER. How have you been? Excited? OUTDOORS in the ACTUAL WOODS?! Full of LIVE BANJO PLAYER?!?!

Yup. I'm remounting the Fringe show. But not in a normal theater, like all the "cool kids" do. We're doing it in the middle of woods around a campfire. There may be cider.

And the gentleman responsible? Why, Mr. Brian Clowdus, head of the Serenbe Playhouse and currently gallumphing his way across the 14th street playhouse as Miss Texas in Pageant The Musical.

Fortunately for me, Brian is much nicer than Miss Texas.

Fortunately for you, Pageant is running through October 24th. So, you can see him tap in sequins, then let us fill your Halloween weekend with ghost stories and banjo and cider.

All good things.

President and First Tiger

2010-09-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

A dear friend recently started grad school in Southern California which is too far away from me. This friend happens to be a Calvin and Hobbes fanatic, so I made him his own tiger to go on philosophical adventures with.

I kind of heart it.

It was hard to pack up and give away. It's made out of t-shirt scraps mostly, with glove fingertips as ears. It's not totally accurate in terms of facial details, but it's cute.

I drew on the stripes with a sharpie.

I am not a very neat stripe draw-er.

Oh well.

He was sent on his way wearing his President and First Tiger paper hat for Get Rid of Slimy girlS. Although, as a Slimy girl(S), I am not 100% behind the mission of that particular organization.

One of the best parts of working on this has been going back through the comic strips online. The friend receiving his own Hobbes has the Complete Calvin and Hobbes leatherbound set. It's immensely bad ass. There's a dogeared copy of "Scientific Progress Goes Boink" on the shelf in my childhood bedroom.

I may steal it back.

I've been thinking about comics lately. I've always been a doodler, and I found myself drawing pictures in the middle of a monologue I was writing the other day. It's something to play with. I just wish I could draw well.

There are some fascinating storytelling opportunities in mixing image and text. Like the insanely nuanced panels of Alan Moore - the Mobius strip in Promethea? Dude! - or the comic timing of Jeff Smith's panels in Bone - and if you don't know how drawings can have timing, go pick that book up now - or the heartbreak of Maus or the epic of Sandman.

I had a comic book renaissance in college, or as I once said "graphic novel", although the distinction is less important to me now than when I was trying to be pretentious. I spent several weeks over Christmas break freshman year reading Sandman in a friend's basement and looking up the obscure mythology. I was shocked by how adult it all seemed - the darkness, the sophistication, Death's bad ass eye makeup. and it opened a whole new world of literature. I used my newfound comic book cred as a way to woo and win my dorky friends. So when we saw Ironman a few years back and Samuel L Jackson popped up as Nick Fury, I could say "OOH! Just like in Ultimate Avengers!!"

I thought this was a whole new part of myself at the time, but really it's always been a part of my life. I taught myself to read with Peanuts strips, I followed Foxtrot, Rhymes with Orange, Mother Goose and Grimm, and Robotman devoutly, I devoured the decaying stack of Classics Illustrated in the garage - looking at those pulpy covers still fills me with waves of nostalgia. (Thanks Comic Book Database for reawakening long forgotten memories, by the way.)

Well, nostalgia is a symptom of adulthood, which I guess I'm hovering near, despite what the New York Times may say to the contrary. Maybe I'll go read some more comics to compensate.

Meet Grayson

2010-09-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

There is a lovely new furry thing at the house.Her name is Grayson, which is not the best name for a dog, especially a girl dog, but we couldn't think of a new one and she seems to like it. We're transitioning her over to nicknames like Grace and Gracie and Gracecar in the hopes that when we find a better name we can teach it to her.

We adopted her from Animal Action Rescue in Decatur, who were very nice and helpful and relieved that she found a good home. They do adoptions at a PetSmart on Ponce de Leon and are wonderful.

We'd been thinking about a dog for a while, and had been stalking Petfinder.com until we found a little brown dog named Rocky that we were sure was perfect for us. He was old and lazy and snuggly and had the biggest, saddest eyes. So we drove out to the middle of nowhere to look at him, and he was cute and fat and very low key, but we just weren't sure. By the time we'd made the drive home however, we were sure that we had room in our lives for that little puppy with the sad eyes. So we called the rescue organization that evening only to find that someone had beat us to the punch. In the time it took for us to drive home, someone else had come in, fallen in love and taken him home. Grr.

But, clearly that had to happen so we could let this smiley mutt into our lives. She loves walks, snuggling, and playing with a super annoying talking rooster toy when we're trying to work late at night. Gracecar is awesome

For anyone else contemplating adopting an animal (which is totally the way to go), Petfinder is a really great site. You can search by species, size, age, whether they're housebroken/declawed, if they are good with kids or other animals, etc. It's super user friendly, and most of the rescue organizations in my area post on it. Plus, it's a quick way to get your puppy fix if Cute Overload is down.

I always like reading how carefully worded some of the descriptions are, I know our little miss was described as "sometimes unsure of other dogs," when in reality she perceives every furry beast as a direct threat to her beloved people and would gladly devour them as a token of her loyalty.

This McSweeney's piece REFRESHINGLY CANDID,YET ADMITTEDLY LESS TRADITIONAL, PET NOTES THAT MY NEIGHBORHOOD ANIMAL-ADOPTION CENTER WOULD PROBABLY FIND TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE: A COMPARISON. captures it pretty perfectly.

I got to visit the Brooklyn Superheroes Supply Shop which is secretly a 826 NYC tutoring center run by the bad asses at McSweeneys. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED prize for this, you can see his talk here. If that doesn't make you want to get up in the morning, you are clearly a killer robot, and Ben Egerman must thwart you.

The Afterglow/math

2010-09-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

Back home, back from Fringe, back to work, back to cleaning up the house, back to saying my name without people going, "Oh, you believe in ghosts, right?"

This festival definitely made me hungry to tour. Between Grind and Ben and Kurt I was a very jealous little solo performer indeed. Someday, my friends, someday. Although, RTBiG is getting its Atlanta debut in October at Serebe Playhouse in Palmetto, GA, so that's like a two city tour, right? I was just up there for a solo performance festival and there's a big picture of me in the box office window. It was simultaneously awesome and terrifying.

But for now, back to doing important things, like making my own Scott Pilgrim Avatar I look forward to nerding out about many future Edgar Wright projects. Also to yelling "I'm Bi-Furious!" and kicking someone in the throat with my ninja powers.

Speaking of important things, I have engaged in a blog war with Mr. Max. If he hasn't posted by this Wednesday, bombard him with pictures of animals in hats and humiliating comments.

NOMINATED!!!

2010-08-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

I was just nominated for Best Solo Performance at Fringe Famous. I am up against Amy Salloway of Entwined and Tom Reed of Bite Me Twilight both of which I've seen and both of which are excellent. So I'm going to get my ass kicked, but it's by amazing and wonderful talented people with kick ass shows, so I'm a thrilled little pumpkin just to be freaking nominated.

You can vote on all sorts of polls over there, so go and vote and stuff

Now I can brag on my postcards next year...

Pull Quotes (and Puppies)

2010-08-09T01:09:00.001-07:00

Reviews are coming in.

Here are some of the nice things people have said (and pictures of puppies):

Rachel Teagle is a returning favorite of mine for a reason. She's got a wicked sense of humor and she's not afraid to use it. But something I've learned from Rachel Teagle Believes In Ghosts is that she knows how to spin a yarn that'll raise the hair on the back of your neck as well as make you chuckle. These are spooky, as well as personal, stories even a skeptic can enjoy. Because Rachel acknowledges that it could all just as easily be nothing. But what if it isn't? - Matthew Everett, TC Daily Planet

Writer/performer Teagle has a wonderful way of creating a mood and defining a space - Eric Ringham, Star Tribune
She's a very confident performer and exceptionally fine writer who has created something special in her monologue about goose bump-inducing brushes with specters.
She suffuses the stories with evocative sensory details, breathing life into each encounter with the 18th-century redhead outside her apartment window or a visit to an allegedly ghost-designed house...Verdict: Must See- Rob Hubbard, Pioneer Press

And some snippets from the Fringe site

It can be a difficult task to keep people awake at a 10 PM show at the end of a long Fringe weekend, especially in a dark and quiet theater, but Rachel can do it because she is interesting, has excellent timing and knows her pacing. - Mark Long

Rachel obviously believes in herself as much as the ghosts, and I chalk up her performance as one of the most professional I've seen. - Kay Kirscht

Its delivery is natural and flawless, like a good friend sharing polished and precious stories from the past. - Elise Heise

I feel full of puppies. Thanks. And come see tomorrow night's show!

The Pioneer Press Liked My Show

2010-08-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

And I quote:

You wouldn't imagine this to be Rachel Teagle's first solo show.

She's a very confident performer and exceptionally fine writer who has created something special in her monologue about goose bump-inducing brushes with specters.

She suffuses the stories with evocative sensory details, breathing life into each encounter with the 18th-century redhead outside her apartment window or a visit to an allegedly ghost-designed house. She even composes and sings a murder ballad to appease the spirit who keeps moving things around in her kitchen.

In this involving piece, Teagle pulls off the rare feat of being both frightening and funny. VERDICT:Must see

—Rob Hubbard

Here it is on the website. Neat!

Meet My Guests! Kurt Fitzpatrick

2010-08-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

Funny story.

I had no idea who Kurt Fitzpatrick was when I asked him to be a guest for my show. Katherine Glover whose solo show I directed for the Minnesota Fringe last year, had met him in Fresno at the Rogue Festival and gently pushed him my way.

So I was relieved when I finally met him and found him funny and charming and talented.

Plus, as I have mentioned before, he's a vlog fiend.

Here's one he did while in line for my opening night:

So, come see him at Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts on Monday August 9th at 7:00 and catch his show, The Last Straight Man in Theater at Intermedia Arts in Uptown.

Meet My Guests! Laura Stratford

2010-08-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled and delighted to welcome Ms. Laura Stratford of Grind: the Musical to the Sunday August 8th show of Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts. I had the privilege of working with Laura a whole bunch while we were at Carleton, and I am SOOOO EFFING EXCITED to have her back, even briefly in my life.

In honor of her guest spot, I present a Laura Stratford/Rachel Teagle Collaboration Retrospective, courtesy of production stills I've stolen from Facebook.

When I was a sophomore I co-directed "Into the Woods" for the Student Musical Theater group (or SMuT because Carls love dirty acronyms)

I cast a baby Laura as The Baker's Wife. Here she is holding a fake baby and acting maternal as the character is wont to do.

Later, she would go on to star in a 24 Hour Play that Ben Egerman and I wrote entitled: "Flashenstein!"

She played simple village seamstress Charity Prudence Twatplucker, who befriended the Dr. Flashenstein's mostly-man, part-horse monster and got to kiss a lady at the end.

Good play.

I also had the distinct privilege of working with Laura on my Senior Comprehensive Exercise play The Love of the Nightingale.

Laura played Niobe, the old servant woman. She spent most of the play being sleepy and grumpy, then delivered a heart wrenching, gut punching monologue. The play has a super intense knife to the gut moment, and her character twists the knife.

The way we played her, Niobe was in an entirely different play than everyone else, and it's a tough and emotionally demanding role, and Laura fought through with lady balls of steel. I was so happy to have her on my team.

Now she's on the Midwest Fringe Circuit with a freaking musical she co-wrote. She is a big beautiful ball of talent and I can't wait for you all to find this out for yourself.

So, come to the Rarig Xperimental space on Sunday August 8th at 10:00 and catch the lovely Ms. Stratford doing something totally sweet. She's got some good ghosty stories and I can't wait to see what she's bringing you.

Opening Night and Twitter Envy

2010-08-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

(photo from Baron Dave Romm and filched from facebook)
The show is open. Actually open. And real people stood in line and sat down and listened to me talk.
Actually, like 65 people sat down and listened to me talk. And they had a good time and so did I. And it's open and out there and I even got my first review. Here's a snippet -

"Watching Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts was like sitting around a campfire listening to ghost stories. Except instead of your goofy friends, the tales are being told by a talented and gifted storyteller.

Mixing "real" ghost stories with a collection of original tales, Teagle succeeds brilliantly at exploring the full range of spectral tale-telling: Haunting. Scary. Nostalgic. Painful. Funny."

Four out of five kitties. Not too shabby. Not too shabby at all.

I can't get into the wireless at my billet yet, which is probably good, because I couldn't spend all night reloading the show page to obsess over reviews. But now I've found a coffee shop and can instead reload the #mnfringe hashtag ad nauseam. DAMN YOU TWITTER!! I once shunned thee out of foolishness and spite, but now I lurk and pine for my own 140 character soapbox.

Better leave it to the professionals though, like Mr. Rob Callahan, Nerd Extraordinaire, who got Neil Gaiman to tweet about him.

And I quote:

Rob: Do you suppose @neilhimself used to get nervous before a big, important, much-anticipated reading? (Not that I am, of course...) #mnfringe

Neil: @robcallahan am sure I will be terrified before Sydney Opera House reading tomorrow #mnfringe

Rob:@neilhimself Suddenly, my cozy little venue doesn't seem so daunting. Thank you for the perspective, and knock them dead tomorrow. #mnfringe

Dude.

Rob's show Idiosynchronicity opened opposite mine, so I haven't gotten the chance to see it yet, but I've heard many many good things. This guy is as awesome as his chic French collar. Here's his trailer, to pique your interest further...

Rob Callahan's Idiosynchronicity - 60 Second Trailer from Rob Callahan on Vimeo.

Plus, he said nice things about me on his blag. Which always makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Yay internets.

Now to set the rest of my schedule. I am preparing to have my heart broken.

I Be in a Podcast!

2010-08-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

At the Out of Towner Showcase, I ran into Joshua Humphrey of TC Theater Connection and we snuck into a hallway in Bedlam and recorded an interview which you can hear at this handy link!

They've got interviews with other sweet Fringe artists, and he's been podcasting like a fiend.

And speaking of fiendish new media types - Kurt Fitzpatrick is still vlogging up a storm. I finally got to meet him in person, and he looks a little different than I expected.

And so, it begins.

Opening in T minus nine and half hours...

Minneapolitan Once More

2010-08-04T07:32:00.001-07:00

I have officially arrived! I touched down in Minneapolis yesterday morning and spent the day teching the show, watching the opening bout of the National Poetry Slam and reuniting with all the awesome people I've missed. There are times when it feels like I haven't left.

Tonight's the out of towner showcase (that I am, of course, wait-listed for. Sad face.), and tomorrow I officially open. So far, Josh Humphrey of the TC Theater Connection podcast has twitted that he's going to see my show, and I think Ben's coming too (I really hope so, he's supposed to be the special guest), so that's at least two people, right?

Just found out that I'm listed in the Minnesota Women's Press, so, hopefully I'll have a lady-full show. Neat!

Dress Rehearsal

2010-08-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realized how nervous I was.
Creating your own show is pretty lonely. I'm used to having a bigger community to throw stuff at, and a little piece of me was scared that it had secretly sucked all along and I was too far in to notice.

But the verdict is in, law students, actors and dogs agree - thumbs up.

Phew.

They laughed, they gasped, they cheered. I even got a pretty tulip (that we put in this classy vase) They were very impressed with my use of prop (which I'm super excited to show off. Tee hee!) and we sat around afterwards swapping ghost stories and then hung out a bar and talked like Batman. It all felt good. I feel ready.

Now I need to finalize music, finish programs, and hopefully, put it in front of some more folks tonight.
Tech Tuesday. Showcase (maybe? silly waitlist) Wednesday. Open Thursday.

In the meantime, I've been listening to old bluegrass to get me in the right mindset and I've found some sweet stuff I'd love to share.

This is Dock Boggs singing "Oh Death."

The banjo is extra creepy because it's tuned in G modal, also known as Mountain Minor or Sawmill, the creepiest key known to man. Clarence Ashley is another great old timey bluegrass musician who played a lot of creepy Sawmill songs.

My favorite YouTube find though was this:

It's footage of the Coon Creek Girls playing at the Newport festival. She is going to set that fiddle on fire. Awesome. The Coon Creek Girls were an all girl string band started in the 1930s. As you can see, they kick ass.

Guest Performer Convention in Kansas City

2010-07-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

If you're at the Kansas City Fringe, you are a lucky person indeed, because the majority of the guest performers for my fringe show are performing there for you, and they're great.

So, go see the uncapitalizable phillip andrew bennett low in Descendent of Dragons, the lovely Laura Stratford in Grind: the Musical and the brilliant Kurt Fitzpatrick in The Last Straight Man in Theater

Plus, according to the internets, they're all hanging out together.

Grind's been prattling away about phil on their blog and phil's returned the favor on his production blog.

He even goes so far as to compare them to a young Ben Egerman and Rachel Teagle, "galloping into view with boatloads of enthusiasm, seizing hold of every opportunity as it arises."

That makes me feel both proud and old.

Now, Kurt and phil are apparently BFFs. They even recorded an adorable (and mildly disconcerting) video together, which I have graciously stolen from his YouTube channel. There's lots of good stuff there.

Plus, you've got to check out Kurt's blog, he's an intense vlogger and his website is spiffy to the point of shaming me.

Kansas City, you are a lucky city indeed.

Final Cuts - Ghost Hunters

2010-07-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

Another bit bit the dust today, probably the last major cut before I open in a week.

I've been dancing around the edge of running over the time limit, and after making bunches of piddly cuts, I really wasn't getting anywhere. So, it's time to bite the bullet and cut what was left of a scene I should have cut a while back.

So, here's your DVD-extra, a deleted scene from "RTBiG," in it's original extended version:

No one in the house, living or dead appreciated Ghost Hunters It seems neat, you know? The quest to find scientific evidence of manifestations beyond our concept of reality, but in practice it’s a pretty shitty hour of television This week on Ghost Hunters: Hey guys, we’ve gotten a report that this local building is haunted. Aural, visual manifestations, really great stuff. Good we’ll send out the team. DRIVING! Here we are at this local building. The staff hear ghostly footsteps coming from behind this corner CAMERA TILT And here is where a young art student flung herself from the roof onto a bed of spikes OPPOSITE CAMERA TILT Great, we’ll set up our equipment This measures electro-magnetic fields This photographs heat signatures this just lights up when you push buttons Then the hunting begins Hello? Is anybody here? If anybody’s here, if anybody is in here, please make a noise please please show me that you are here just make a noise any noise tap the table can you tap the table can you push on the table, knock over the table if there’s anybody in here, move the table, move the table like I do, move the table, can you move the table? I’m moving the table does it bother you that I’m moving the table, you don’t like me messing with your precious table, huh, then make a noise do something prove that you’re here mess with this table! (A beat.) What was that? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? (We go to commercial. The lights shift, Rachel grabs a glass of water. We hear a commercial break) [SOUND CUE – Ghost Hunters will return after these messages. Do You like Beer? Do You like Art? Then come on down to Bedlam Theatre – Fringe Central, and enjoy the finest Polish Fusion Food ever served in a Radical Theater Collective. Bedlam Theatre – The Perfect Capper to A Day at the Fringe And now, back to Ghost Hunters] Resuming the scene What was that? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT I don’t know, let’s check the digital voice recorder tomorrow. THE FINDINGS Hey, we had a really great time, this is a fascinating location. Now those phantom lights are actually reflections from car headlights bouncing off your hummel figurines (using flashlight) see? And those footsteps? Well, you’ve got some really fat possums up in the attic, like the size of small standard poodles or large teacup poodles. They’re pretty mad, by the way. But, here’s where it gets interesting. Last night, a member of our team was trying to capture some EVP, electronic voice phenomenon FLASHBACK I’m moving the table does it bother you that I’m moving the table, you don’t like me messing with your precious table huh FLASHFORWARD And he got something pretty interesting. Let’s have a listen. Can you roll that clip? (SOUND CUE - MUFFLED SOUND BITE) Let’s hear it again (SOUND CUE - MUFFLED SOUND BITE) Now what did that sound like to you? Yeah, that’s exactly what we thought. So, great location, we had some great stuff, but really I can’t say anything definite. GHOST HUNTERS!
The show opens in a week, tickets are available online. In the meantime, there's always my Fringey Trailer and the rest of the Fringe website to get your Fringey fix. I know I've been reloading the "In the News" section an embarrassing amount of times.

Plus phillip andrew bennett low is blogging again and. He's two entries in and he's already used barely printable slang. Way to go, phil!

Beyond blagging for the Twin Cities Daily Planet, mr. low will be our special guest performer for the Wednesday August 11 show! So, if you're one of the lucky folks in the X-Box that night, you're in for something creepy, wordy, mimey, and awesome.

Previews and Shilling for Votes

2010-07-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

HOORAY!!! The stars aligned and my video preview was in fact shown to real Minneapolitans at the Fringe-For-All Showcase. I got some very nice messages from Rockstar Storyteller and bad ass Amy Salloway whose one-woman show about the largest ball of twine also previewed at the event. Apparently it was a blast. You can watch videos of the previews at their youtube site and pretend you were there too!

And while you're in a video-watchin' mood, check out my trailer at the Fringey Awards. You can vote up to three times for your favorite trailer, and as I just posted mine this weekend, I am in a pretty dismal state. Please don't let the port-a-potties beat me. (Although, Dean Hatton and Kristen Stephen are kick ass mimes and I really really liked Dean's solo show two years ago, so really, it's okay if they beat me. They're awesome.) Still, check out the trailer and shoot me a vote or two or three if you dig it.

I've even embedded the trailer here, so you can watch it all big and lovely like, but you should still sneak over and vote for it

Oh, and I open in 15 days. EEK! HOORAY! EEK!

Blag Love!

2010-07-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

(from the brilliant xkcd, in case you live under a rock)

It's time to spread the Blog Love.

First of all, a big giant thank you to uber-blogger Matthew Everett who named Ben Egerman and I Returning Favorites in this year's Fringe. He is a blogging bad-ass, and has already generated more content than I know what to do with. He and his mother are a force of nature come Fringe time.

He's always been super supportive of Ben and I. We previously made him an appreciative and tasteful Panda Graphic, which I will let fly like a warm and fuzzy flag.

Bless you, Matthew Everett. May the Fringe bring many shirtless and attractive blessings to you!

Next, a big bear hug to Laura Stratford and all those other crazy kids over at Grind: the Musicalwho gave me a very kind shout out in her Production Blog. They have some kick ass content, including a flickr stream full of coffee ground shadow art and cavorting.

I have no such awesome flickr stream. Production photos are less exciting when they're all of you.

Sigh.

Oh, and by the way, I spent the weekend editing a one minute trailer for a certain online trailer contest. More to come soon...

Postcards!!

2010-07-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

There is now a box in my living room of a thousand small pictures of myself.

It's an odd feeling.

They do look lovely, I'm immensely pleased. Ben recommended hotcards.com and I thought they were awesome.

Look for these lovely things in Minneapolis coffee shops and bars near you!

A Visit to the Winchester Mystery House

2010-07-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

If fate smiles on me, you'll see this at the Fringe for All on the 19th. Somehow, I used all my luck getting a fringe slot and am now waitlisted for both showcases. The day job makes getting onto first come first serve emails difficult. But on the off chance that someone forgets to send in their disc, or there's a very selective fire, my little Fringe for All preview may play on the big fancy screen at the Ritz. In the meantime, you can watch it right here on this little teeny screen. (Or over at youtube, if that's more your style)

Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Click for tickets and showtimes!

Fringe Sneak Peek - A Southern Ghost Story

2010-07-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota Fringe Festival website is live! And my show is up and ready and looking swank. You can see show times, get directions, and even buy tickets.

I am quite excited.

And in my excitement, I have for you a small taste, an amuse bouche if you will, of the new show. It's the first part of the first piece, a little Southern Ghost Story to set the mood:

The Woman with the Camelia

(The lovely photograph below is from The National Archives' flickr account. It was taken by Matthew Brady in April or May of 2005)

Alfred and Doyle were not the smartest boys in the 2^nd Brigade of the 4^th Division of the 16^th Corps of the Union Army. But they were definitely the drunkest.
They were several mason jars into the batch of moonshine they’d uncovered on patrol a few days back. Alfred drained the last shaky swig and pitched his jar against a tree with a satisfying crash.

He was a smooth talking good-looking, blond-haired son of a bitch. He carried a letter from his wife in his pocket and a letter from her sister in the other. He turned his bleary eyes to the darkening tree line. “Shit.”

“What?” said Doyle, splashing a little acrid hooch down the front of his blue uniform. His left hand was in his left pocket, cradling the left hind foot of a once-lucky rabbit. The dense branches made his eyes play tricks on him and the moonshine was not doing him any favors.

“Nothing,” said Alfred. “Let’s keep moving.”

“We’re lost aren’t we?” said Doyle

“No. What do you take me for?”I take you for lost. We’ve passed this same tree four times.” Doyle put his hand on a broad oak, its branches slithering up through the sunset.

“You’re from New York City, ya dumb mick, the heck you know about trees?”

“I know enough not to walk in circles around them for an hour and a half.”
Just then, a high silvery laugh floated gently over the breeze, followed by a light, sweet scent. Gripping his rabbit foot tighter, Doyle slowly turned around. On the other side of the clearing, leaning languidly against a tree was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She wore a pale rose dress, the color of the last blush of twilight, with a large camelia blooming behind her ear. Her hair was red as copper and when she tossed it in the breeze, it rippled like flames.

“Now now boys, arguing won’t get you nowhere, not at this time of night.” The wind picked up the corner of her skirt, translucent in the fading light.

Alfred took off his cap and flashed his deep brown eyes and lazy smile. “We don’t mean to disturb you ma’am, but my companion and I are looking for our camp and we may have gotten turned around. I don’t suppose you could point us in the right direction?”

“Are you in such a rush?” Her skin was pale and almost seemed to shimmer in the dusky air. “Now, if you go right over that ridge you can see for miles in every direction, that oughta be enough to get your bearings. It’s downright stunning, the view.”

Alfred fixed her violet eyes in his. “Ma’am, I doubt it could be as stunning as the view we have right now.”

She laughed that silvery laugh. “Aren’t you a charmer? Your friend ain’t much of a talker, though is he?”

Doyle gulped, his eyes wide.

"He’s mute, ma’am,” said Alfred, gravely.

“That’s all right. Now, while you two fine gentlemen are getting your bearings, be sure to look for the moon blooming violets. Their scent is said to be a powerful love charm. I certainly wouldn’t say no to a bouquet, or two, and let’s see if we can find your camp first thing tomorrow?”

To find out what happens next, come see Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts at the 2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival

What? You've Got a One Woman Show?

2010-06-18T20:23:00.000-07:00

"Rachel Teagle’s new apartment is haunted. And she wants to tell you all about it.

She has always had a secret, nerdy interest in the supernatural, and moving to Atlanta with its decaying mansions and ever-present graveyards was like hitting the spectral jackpot. In this world-premiere solo show, she delves into her own haunted history: from California’s Winchester Mystery House to the disappearing cemeteries in Savannah. In exploring and conquering her haunted apartment, built on a Union Army campsite, Rachel discovers urban legends, murder ballads, unexplained phenomena and tales passed down from the women in her family who see ghosts. Through her discovery of the ghost in her apartment, Rachel explores many aspects of the super natural, from the spirit knocking of late 19th century mediums to the modern day ineptitude of “Ghost Hunters” on late night television. These stories range from creepy to beautiful to ridiculous and are told through words, music, and dance.

“Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts” is a wry journey through the supernatural with detours into the unexplained, the frustrated, and the ridiculous. I moved away from Minneapolis this winter, and this show is a great excuse for me to come back to this vibrant and wonderful city during one of its most dynamic arts events, the Minnesota Fringe Festival. I just couldn’t stay away. I love the Fringe. It’s the best part of my summer. And after writing and directing in previous festivals, I’m finally jumping in with both feet and producing a solo show. This show is for the true believers and snarky skeptics alike, from those who read spooky stories under the covers with a flashlight to those who’ve accidentally caught an episode of “Ghost Hunters” on late night TV. The Civil War in many ways resurrected America’s interest in the supernatural and the majority of popular mediums were women. As a woman who comes from a long line of women with weird supernatural experiences, I was fascinated and repulsed by historic attitudes towards spiritually sensitive women and those with even a slight feminist bent will find things to think about in the show. While one needs not believe in ghosts to enjoy the show, anyone who has been relieved to learn they were not alone will connect to these stories from below the Mason-Dixon line and beyond the grave.

A storyteller and comedian, Rachel’s previous Fringe forays include “Orange: A Farce (about terrorism)” and directing last year’s successful solo show “A Cynic Tells Love Stories.” “Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts” marks her debut as a solo performer and a triumphant return to Minneapolis after leaving for ghost-infested Atlanta last winter."

(Why yes, I did just turn in the online forms for MN Fringe and cut and paste it into a blog post. Hello two birds, meet one stone.)

World of Silents

2010-06-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I'm performing in Fly-By Theatre's World of Silents, a show based on personal narrative and silent film. I'm exciting to be actually acting onstage (although being a stage management robot who found God in The Annunciation...sort of was a very challenging and fulfilling role indeed), and I get to roll around on the floor and make sound effects and potentially make polio jokes.

It's a tough show to describe. It's an entirely company created show, which I don't think was the original intention, and it combines some silent film footage with moments in our lives where we lose our voices and lose control. It's movement heavy, which I'm starting to really dig, and the ensemble has been an enormous amount of fun to work with. I've learned heaps and heaps.

We're performing in the back space at 7 Stages this weekend (June 11-13) and we'd love to see your bright and shining faces. To whet your appetite, here's a clip of Clara Bow in It that inspired us in our process.

I can't wait for hat-grapes to make a comeback.

Mommy's Day

2010-05-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

Dear Mommy,

Today is your day. So I am going to fill it with things you like.

You like Puppies:

You like Giant Animals:

(especially when they eat people.)

You like Lost.:

And Spoilers.

I hope this Mommy's Day is filled with even more things you like. And the only people eaten by dinosaurs are on the SciFi Channel.

Lots and lots of Love,
Your baby.

(adorable panda photo from - World Culture Pictorial)

I found one with both Aaron and me in it, but I've got my eyes closed.

(from animaltalk.us)

PS: Mom - click on the blue underlined words, too. Have Monkey help you if you get confused. Welcome to teh interwebs.

Fringe 2010: Postcard Battle

2010-04-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember how I got in to the Minnesota Fringe Festival?

Well, now I have official dates and times for the show! OFFICIAL!

So, if you find yourself at the Rarig Center Xperimental space at the University of Minnesota at any of the following times, you'll see me doing an awesome show:

Thursday August 5th, 8:30pm
Sunday August 8th, 10:00pm
Monday August 9th, 7:00pm
Wednesday August 11th - 8:30pm
Saturday August 14th - 2:30pm

I'm pretty excited to be in the Xbox. I haven't had a show in Rarig before, and I've always been jealous of all the spillover they get. Oh, the Scrimshaws are sold out? Well, 2 feet away is something also awesome, how convenient!

Now all I need to do is make a show. The hugeness of which is now dawning on me. Eek.

To distract myself from all the work I need to do, I started working on the postcard. All the photos were taken on my cell phone at the Oakland Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Atlanta where visitors have been heard a ghostly "roll call" of the confederate dead. I tried to be clandestine in my picture taking, but I'm pretty happy with the quality. Go cell phone camera, go!

So, here's the dilemma, I've got two main images I'm kicking around. One in which I'm unnerved about all the ghosts and one in which I look cute. Thoughts?

That's my second working title. I first played around with something using the phrase "Southern Gothic" as I'm telling ghost stories and moving to Hotlanta stories, but it turns out that people who aren't huge nerd don't know what Southern Gothic means. I'm kinda digging "Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts" but am definitely wide open to suggestions. The show's about me moving into a haunted apartment and the ghost stories my friends and family have accumulated, and at least one recreation of an episode of Ghost Hunters.

For a secret preview, check out my first stand up show, because I'm totally thief-ing my Winchester Mystery House bits. Ghost stuff starts about 3 minutes in. Oh, and there's swearing. Yay College!

Covert Operations in New York

2010-04-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

These kids rocked it. I unfortunately couldn't get pictures with the other cast (cheesecake awaited) but I can verify that both sets of kids totally rocked it. Pictured are Rebecca, Jake, and Isaac from Group Carrot's "Covert Operations" and I and my small battalion of friends were immensely impressed with their awesome. There were martial arts flips, a secret spy handshake and a death scene that was about 9 times longer than it absolutely had to be, which was marvelous. In the other group, the brutal violent death scene got spontaneous applause. Thanks kids (and Turtle Shell Production Team)!

At 8 Minute Madness, the audience got to vote on the best production and performances. My battalion and I were more than happy to give our votes to Covert Operations (nepotism!), but as we were filing out into the wee little lobby of the theater, I snuck a peek at the person in front of us, and they had written simply this: "best - spy."

Well, that warmed my heart and was more than enough to keep me thoroughly pleased as we ran around the city (more on that later), and I read my program over and over and over on the plane.

Then I got home, and had this comment on a previous post -

"Isaac's dad again... but you can call me "Eric."

Just a note to fill you in, "Covert Operations" was voted best play in the 8 Minute Madness Playwrights' Festival, for young performers. Not coincidentally (again) Isaac Jin Solstein received the award for best performance.

Congrats all around!"

CONGRATULATIONS INDEED! An excellent job to both casts and thank you so much for acting the heck out of that piece. Thank you!

9 Seconds of Awesome

2010-04-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Turtle Shell Productions' 8 Minute Madness opens in New York, and my little play "Covert Operations" will be a part of the Youth Festival. I'm super excited, I will actually be jetting up for the weekend and spending time with One of my favoritest persons ever and seeing Tim Burton's exhibit at MOMA and maybe even seeing Donny Osmond in a bar like the last time I was in New York.
The festival sends out reports by email, which I am a huge fan of. Usually it's housekeeping stuff that doesn't really affect me, but every once in a while, snippets about my show come up and I can feel like I'm there in the room trying on hats and working on the sneaky entrances.

Today, we got this little video shot by one of the theater's interns. And there's totally 9 seconds of footage of my play. From 0:35 to 0:44. Not that I counted. Enjoy.

Ahem...

2010-03-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

Guess who's got a play opening in New York next month?

Why, that would be me. And all those other fine folks in the press release above. Yes, my ten minute play, former CHELSEA sketch "Covert Operations" has been revamped and will be performed in the youth festival of Turtle Shell Production's 8 Minute Madness. The script was previously produced in a slightly different form for The Northfield Arts Guild's Very Short Play Festival with the lovely actors pictured above. I actually didn't get a chance to see it, I think I was in another show the one night it performed, and if the stars are right, I may be heading up to that big shiny apple to check it out.

Hmm, every time a script of mine has been produced and I haven't been actively involved in the process, it's performed by kids? But if these New York kids are anywhere as awesome as the Red Bluff kids, this is going to rock.
See! Aren't they awesome? The stage blood and adorable bear nose - all them. It feels good to inspire the youth.

I recently joined The Playwrights Center, partly for access to their kick-ass opportunities list, and partly to keep tabs on my Workhaus Collective buddies, and I'm definitely going to try and submit more scripts around this year. I was particularly inspired by Centenary Stage's Mastodon Challenge and decided to write a short Mastodon play in a month. And open a show. And find a day job. And stop being a hermit in my apartment all the time.

I was actually making really good headway, and I was an interrogation scene and a mystical visitation away from actually finishing my Mastodon Play, when February 27th rolled around, and I had all day rehearsals for one show and performances for another all weekend and a brand new job and Doctor Who to catch up on, and I decided that I loved that Mastodon Play too much to vomit out an ending and let it out into the big wide world.

But next year? Oh, watch out. Here's a little nugget. Clearly I'm on a spy kick. This is the top of the second scene. Jess has recently turned into a Mastodon, and she's coming home to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend who has recently turned into a super-spy.

JESS
I’m home!
SHE NOTICES A LARGE AND PROMINENT BOUQUET
Hey, what’s with the—

CLINT (off)
I don't think I'd touch those if I were you.

JESS
What? The flowers?

CLINT SASHAYS IN WEARING A TUX AND LOOKING DAPPER.

CLINT
Those are no ordinary flowers. See this chrysanthemum? Looks authentic, right? But concealed within the stem is a small caliber poisoned dart invisible to the naked eye—
HE PUTS THE FLOWER TO HIS LIPS AND BLOWS. WE HEAR BROKEN GLASS FOLLOWED BY THE SOUND OF A CAT BEING SHOT WITH A SMALL CALIBER POISONED DART.
—but lethal at 20 paces. Pretty swell, wouldn’t you say?

JESS
Did you just kill a cat?

CLINT
Don’t worry. The antidote is in this lamp.
HE DROPS THE LAMP OUT THE WINDOW. WE HEAR IT SHATTER.
How was your day?

JESS
Fine. I ate a tree.

CLINT
Good for you.

So, "Dress-Up Trunk" is going on the back burner for a bit, as I get ready for The Annunciation...sort of and, hopefully, a trip up to visit a certain awesome playwright who I have not seen in far, far too long.

And don't worry, no cats are harmed in "Covert Operations."

House Cleaning

2010-03-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

This blog started as part of the New Media Roadtrip off-campus studies program in the fall of 2006. It was a big turning point in my development as an artist and storyteller and gave me access to paths outside the linear narrative, something that's been immensely helpful.

But now, this blog has changed and I think it may be time to retire the adorable South Park themed Sidebar with links to the other roadtrippers. So, I'll plop it here in the digital equivalent of a farm upstate where it has lots of room to run around.

Roadtrip: New Media NYC-Europe

Julian

Jeremy

Andy

Paul

Gracie

Caitlin

Kristen

Ollie

Karina

Terin

Boris

Jenny

Aaron

August

Stacy

Sarah

Julia

Andrea

Alissa

Susan

"Cynic" Goes Rogue

2010-03-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

Finally, West Coast fans of me (like my mom and brother and fake sisters) can get the Rachel Teagle they deserve! For the first time since high school, a production directed by me opens on the West Coast. That's right. Coming soon to a cow town near you, Katherine Glover's Fringe hit "A Cynic Tells Love Stories" humbly directed by yours truly.

I've gotten a few semi-harried phone calls from Ms. Glover as she prepared for the Rogue Festival in Fresno, including the arduous preparation for an interview at the crack of dawn that she had thought was for radio, but was actually for television.

Oops.

Don't worry, she did splendidly, as you can see.

She had a really strong opening weekend and an absolute blast with all the Fresnans. It seems a little incongruous to me that the same town where my 4H group picked up their swine has this kickass little theatre festival, but everyone who tours through there has nothing but glowing things to say about it. The audience is great and they are really welcoming to out of town acts. If I get the time and the balls, I may tour through there someday too.

It's kind of a neat time for me right now. I've got "Cynic" wooing the West Coast, I'm helping with a dance show here in Atlanta, and a short play of mine was just accepted into a festival in New York. Details to follow. Once I get the press release, I will do a little happy dance and show it to every single person I can find.

So, if you're in the area, definitely pop in. She's at "Million Two" and has three shows left - Thursday March 11th at 8:30, Friday March 12th at 10:00 and Saturday March 13th at 7:00. Make sure you stay and bug Katherine. Maybe buy her a cider, if she isn't hiding under the table...

Spam Theater

2010-03-07T05:31:00.000-08:00

I get a fair amount of spam, as I'm sure most people on the tubes do. Mr. X-Stitch recently pointed me to this awesome set of Spam-inspired embroidery. I was very glad I was not drinking anything as I clicked through the set, because it would have come right back out my nose. This is why I need to embroider. Also this. And this. But back to spam.

Recently, it seemed that two wayward spambots found each other right here in my rejected comments section.

One day in the midst of all the Japanese and Cyrillic posts where the only English word is Levitra, I come across this:

"hey guys! i'm fresh here. my name's alayna and i'm from Portland.

i like baking and baking friends. oops i mean making. hahah.

umm i want to create unusual friends! hopefully a true strong people like johnny bravo to
sweep me off of my feet and pick me up and vibrate me like a baby! (...just kidding!)
i think i like watching movie trailers more than i like watching movies
and i wish that people would condense all movies to 3 minutes on youtube.

if you hope for to send me a back rub down i can pay off it in jellybeans or uh.. nevermind.. i can pay you in jellybeans ONLY.

i'm a pretty noble person. i don't care about anything. except for myself.

it's wintry and cold here during the winter and most of the year, so how does a fit as a fiddle young lady stay|presentable?

i seldom get to go outdoors so i use spray tan. it works like demonic magic and it covers up whiteness.
so don't worry my cherry cheek friends (you don't have to lie and say that you put on too much blush anymore!) ok anyway.
i have planned boys swooning across me and let me tell ya.. i'm running| out of jellybeans wink wink sooooooooooooo"

Poor pale Alayna. Doesn't she know that Johnny Bravo is a cartoon and could never vibrate her like a baby? Also, what's up with the whole jelly beans as sexual favor currency thing? Maybe it's a Portland thing. You can ask A Portland Twenty-Something about it, but I don't know that even Ms. Reingold could make sense of poor Alayna's plight.

But then, only a few days later, I get this:

"Possibly the most useful sunless tanning products I've heard about are lotions and sprays containing dihydroxyacetone (DHA) as the active ingredient.

Apparently the sugar interacts with the dead skin cells, a color change occurs. This change as a rule lasts about five to seven days from the original application.

I'm just wondering if anyone can point me in the correctt direction as to the finest and cheapest option that's known to work. I really don't want to end up all Orange."

MY GOD! THEY WERE MADE FOR EACH OTHER!! Weird Sunless Tanning Fake Testimonials have found each other at last.

I wish Alayna and Orange a fond and happy e-life together. I bet these crazy kids are gong to make it. After all, if their fellow comments are any indication, they've got access to lots of lots of cheap Viagra.

Gold, please!

2010-02-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

DUN DUN dundunDUNDUN dun dun!

Behold! Olympic Glory is mine!

It was a little dicey there at the end. I managed to get all my creatures knit and stuffed, and I was feeling pretty confident Saturday night.

Then Sunday morning rolled around and I started putting on the finishing touches. The pattern had called for pipe cleaners to fill the dangly thing, but I decided I'd try to make it work without it.
Hmm. Guess not.

Then I realized I had bigger problems.

Dammit! I didn't have time for this.

I made the executive decision that I did not have time to run out and chase down pipe cleaners (as the nearest craft store is a good half hour away and I had to get to rehearsal), so I improvised. Using medium gauge wire and pliers, I made my own darn pipe cleaners, stuffed them in, and voila! Semi-posable sea creatures!

I gave the angler beady little eyes and angry eyebrows to make it more menacing.

The kraken only has 6 regular tentacles and 2 "grabbing tentacles" because I was running out of yarn. It's still bendable and stripey.

I made him with the last of the self patterning sock yarn I got last year.
Actually, I managed to make everything from stash yarn, which my wallet and I are quite pleased with.

And here's the whole crew, oral arm in tentacle in eye-stalk thing. I think they look very accomplished.

This weekend is your last chance to see Synchronicity's "Women + War" The lovely Ms. Lee, the other stage management intern kept a tumblr about the rehearsal process, you can check it out here for the inside scoop. If you're in the metro-Atlanta area, come on down to seven stages. It's an awesome show.

Plus the gal running lights is awesome. She made an anglerfish!

POST OF JUBILANCE!

2010-02-17T22:23:00.000-08:00

The lottery for the Minnesota Fringe Festival was tonight. About a year ago, I posted this sad post about the sad news that Questionable Company Theatre was drawn 100th on the waitlist. I even posted this sad puppy picture to represent my feelings:

But tonight, I am more like this puppy:

BECAUSE I GOT IN TO THE 2010 MINNESOTA FRINGE FESTIVAL!!! As a National Artist! AWESOME!!

I couldn't be happier if I had a large be-sprinkled cupcake. I'm as happy as a herd of stingrays

Now I just need to write that show...

In the meantime, I have made great strides on my olympic animals. The jelly fish is completely finished!

And the angler fish is just two eyes and a lure away from completion. Next stop, Krakentown.

Also coming up, Women+War opens this Friday at Seven Stages in Atlanta. We preview tomorrow and I am so excited to see what happens in front of a real audience. These ladies work their buns off, and if I may say so myself, the lighting board is operated beautifully (by someone who just got into Minnesota Fringe!)

Welcome! Bienvenue!

2010-02-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

I got home from tech last night and after screwing around on the internet for a while, I decided to check in on when I could start my Olympic knitting, so I could get my yarn set and maybe even swatch a tentacle or two. You know, be responsible.

Turns out, I was 4 hours late. Whoops.

Frantically, I grabbed the little ball of pinky stuff I found at a thrift store and some, oh, I don't know, gray fuzzy stuff I have scads of and frantically knittered away on a jellyfish bell. Two false starts later, I've got most of a jellyfish body done tonight, but no tentacles.

WHOA! Azerbaijan has amazing pajamas! They are pajamas, right?

Sorry about that, I'm watching the opening ceremonies off of nbc.com and could not resist the live-blog urge. It's a little frustrating not having real tv, because I really like having the Olympics on in the background when they're on, and now I have to search specifically for what I want to watch.

Oh, the Czechs have pajamas too, but Azerbaijan's are much better.

It's strange advantage and disadvantage to entertainment on demand. You can always find what you want, but you lose out on that serendipity of channel surfing. So, I don't know how much of the competition I'll actually get to see, because I'm at the mercy of nbc.com and what videos they chose to post. Oh well. I can always just watch Cool Runnings over and over again.

Knitting Olympics 2010

2010-02-11T06:30:00.000-08:00

Knitters are a wild bunch. Especially when you give them internet. Four years ago, a group of crazies decided to combine their love of cool olympic stuff and the making of warm wooly stuff and vowed to cast on and finish epic knitting projects between the lighting of the torch and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. They deemed it The Knitting Olympics, and led by the Yarn Harlot many knitters experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. And on the verge of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, it's on.

And so, I am jumping into the fray with what I have deemed a "Menacing Sea Life" set.I got this lovely book for my birthday, and I plan to make a jellyfish, an anglerfish, and a kraken.
This may be crazy. I haven't ever knit a little animal before, except the hamster I knit because my roommate got a real hamster and I was jealous. But hamsters don't have tentacles (usually,) much less squiggly oral arms or fangs or light up dangly things that catch smaller and more gullible fish. This should be tough. Maybe even too tough. After all, in Knitting Olympics there is no bronze or silver. There is only Gold or Failure.

If this goes well, next Christmas EVERYONE gets a menacing creature. There is no turning back.

Birthday Munchies

2010-01-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

It's a little tough to have a birthday so soon after moving to a new city. I've been blessed and spoiled with a plethora of easily accessible and awesome friends, and now it's just me and a super busy law student, and a bunch of people who are very close to being friends, but aren't quite there yet.

Sigh.

So, as so many have done before, I have decided to replace friends with food.

We started the day with birthday pancakes, chocolate raspberry pancakes to be precise. They were even personalized. These have an M because they are for Matt!

And these have a backwards, lumpy R because Rs are harder to write with pancake batter and I wasn't really thinking about how the letters would transfer.

For dinner, we had some lovely fresh beets from the natural market up the street. It turned the water a beautiful ruby red and our counter top a light, permanent pink.

They made a delicious salad with goat cheese, arugula and pistachios, based somewhat on this recipe. Man, I love that the internet now has reliable recipes. Also, I love that putting beets, arugula, goat cheese, and nuts in a bowl counts as a recipe.

The crock pot was kind enough to handle the main course, a delicious pot roast with garlic, black pepper and red wine. It's awesome how a slab of meat covered in garlic and black pepper becomes actual food after sitting around in something warm.

These garlicky and delightful meats owe a debt of gratitude to psuedo-knit blogger Crazy Aunt Purl's
Perfect Pot Roast Recipe. It was quite good, although we may have used a bit too much black pepper. The juice from the pot was used to make gravy for garlic mashed potatoes, and kicked butt. Hooray for crock pots!

And finally, the piece de resistance: The Cake.

Cakes have always been very important. Again, I've been spoiled with spectacular and awesome cakes most of my life, and I really like making interesting and creative cakes, like this Stewie cake I made for my baby brother's birthday:

Or this peacemaking cake I made for last Easter - a Jesus-Bunny.

It just wouldn't be my birthday without an awesome cake.

And Matt delivered.

Why, yes, that is a Dalek cake.

A Dalek cake with M&M Dalek bumps and Good & Plenty Dalek ears.

The top says "CELEBRATE" (Because Daleks only use verbs that end in -ate), and Celebrate we did.

Not bad for a first novelty cake, huh?

Especially when you consider some of the crap professional decorators put out. And as a birthday gift from me to you, have some more terrible, terrible cakes. Cake Wrecks makes my day brighter and full of inappropriate frosting. The last cake here made me laugh until I cried. Enjoy.

Top Eating

2010-01-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

As a loyal Top Chef-a-holic, I was thrilled to be in Atlanta, home of Tasty Food and Adorable Chefs! When my family was out, we made it a mission to try and eat our way through the Top Chef Restaurants.

We failed.

We saved the Woodfire Grill, home of Kevin Gillespie (pictured at right), for last, only to find that they are closed on both Sunday AND Monday.

Shoot, we said. At least we can go to Eno Restaurant, where Eli works? Right?

(picture from Six Characters in Search of a Blogger 's
Rankin Bass Christmas adventure. It's a neat blog!)

Wrong. Not only were they ALSO closed Sunday and Monday, Eli doesn't even work there anymore. Sigh.
But! Fear Not! We were able to complete at least part of our delicious mission, and it's always nice to have goals. You shall be mine, King of Pig, you shall be mine.

First up was Pura Vida (warning: website plays obnoxious music), owned by Hector Santiago. He was the first of the Atlanta chefs to go, but man, can he cook delicious food.

Pura Vida is a lovely restaurant, it's comfortable, friendly, and warm. Good date spot. Even better date spot when you hit their Happy Hour with $3 tapas(!)

We did not hit their happy hour, but we ordered 5 plates between the four of us and two desserts and it was quite affordable and mega delicious. I liked the tofu ceviche, which had strong and interesting flavors, and I tried to subtly take a picture of it, like a good blogger, but we quite frankly ate it too fast. Other delicous thngs were the asado de tira - beef shortribs, the "bbq" beef, which had the most delicious beef fat I've ever eaten, and el burrito, a chicken barbacoa burrito which didn't sound like anything special, but tasted freaking delicious. We were smart enough to order two desserts: churros with chocolate dipping sauce, and a chili chocolate creme brulee. We licked the dipping sauce bowl clean. It was undignified, but delicious.

If you're in the neighborhood, definitely drop in. I am so going back to Pura Vida and eating the heck out of those happy hour tapas.

We also got to check out Richard Blais' Flip Burger Boutique, where you can get liquid nitrogen milkshakes and a $39 burger made from Kobe beef and shaved truffles and foie gras that was coddled and sung to as it was gently massaged between a bun made of sunshine and dreams. Fine Dining Between Two Buns indeed.

We did not get that. I got the butcher's cut burger with caramelized onions and red wine jelly, Mom got the turkey burger with avocado and pomegranate ketchup, and Monkeyhead got an "rBQ," a burger with barbecued brisket on top. It was all quite tasty. They had a lot of interesting looking burgers and burger type sandwiches (shrimp poboyger anyone?), so I'd go back. The liquid nitrogen milkshakes were pretty good. The spicy chocolate mole was actually very spicy and quite nummy, as were the pistachio-truffle (mostly pistachio, less truffle), and the nutella and burnt mashmallow. They're weren't particularly liquid nitrogen-y, you are cautioned to let them stop smoking before you drink, but ours weren't smoking at all. Still it was fun. It's definitely trying much harder to be hip than Pura Vida, with loud music and open tables, and deceptively lightweight aluminum chairs. The ladies' restroom sign had little metal boobs.

Mr. Blais is also a really enjoyable writer. He does a column for the local alt weekly called and his guest blogs on this season's Top Chef were really informative and interesting, like "Top Gun", which delved into the power structure of a kitchen, or "Hands Up, Utensils Down,...low" where he breaks down all the nifty gadgets the Top Chefs get to play with, and how back in his day, they didn't have immersion circulators.

For more behind the scenes neat stuff, check out Lee Anne Wong's blog. A former "cheftestant," Lee Anne works as the Culinary Producer on the show, and she provides interesting insights into how the challenges are set up and what actually goes into making this a fair competition. I'm a sucker for behind-the-scenes glimpses, and she's kinda the ultimate in that for this show. Unfortunately for lurkers like me, she will not be culinary producing the show next season in order to go back into cooking. Good for her, I hope she finds a home somewhere she can feed me.

The Teagle has Landed!

2010-01-10T20:45:00.000-08:00

So, the whole "Hotlanta" thing is clearly a cruel, cruel hoax. That is a FOUNTAIN OF ICE, produced by the cruelly timed cold snap hitting the southeast just as I arrive from the frozen north. Granted, it is nowhere near as cold as what those stalwart folk in the great state of Minnesota are experiencing (negative double digits? double lame), and I acknowledge the bravery and stoicism of my northern brethren, but DAMMIT!! Somehow the cold has followed me. Fountain of ice? In HOTlanta? Distinctly NOT awesome.

Next week, temperatures here should go back up to a balmy 40 (hooray!) and I shall dance around in shorts, and pretend it's actually balmy.

So, I'm in, and safe, and tales of my recent adventures shall follow. After a two week road trip, a wedding (where they cut the cake with a sword!), a family trip to the coast, two pirate restaurants, several large IKEA pieces, and far too many FOUNTAINS OF ICE, the whirlwind frenzy of moving is subsiding.

And yes, Minnesotans, I miss you all. Now take your ice back.

Gingerbread Blues

2009-12-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in California, hundreds of cookie houses stand ready for decorating and devouring. Yes, the time has come once more for Gingerbread Partying of epic proportions.

I've missed it the last few years due to school and job, but I especially miss it now. The impending move has covered me in a thick cloud of nostalgia. As I frantically make Christmas presents and wonder how I possibly accumulated so many possessions, part of me just wants to grab a pack of gum and some smarties and make a gummi shark pit.

This is a re-post, but 'tis the season for nostalgia.

Here's "Gingerbread: The Making of the Madness", which documents the baking process

And "The Gingerbread Party: Sweet Chaos", shot at the actual event

A Gingerbread Helicopter was built. It was badass. Mega badass.

Craftster is running a Gingerbread House contest coming up, and they have some pretty sweet houses under their "Gingerbread" tag including Star Wars Gingerbread, Greats of Russian literature rendered in Gingerbread, and, of course a Gingerbread Whorehouse. Be forewarned, the Gingerbread Whorehouse is chock full of Gingerbread Whores. Don't say I didn't warn you. I made a Moulin Rouge house one year that was pretty awesome, but did not include genitalia molded out of starburst. There's always next year?

So, Happy Gingerbreading to all of you out in California! Decapitate an extra gummi bear for me!

More Panda Sandwich!

2009-12-08T17:37:00.000-08:00

Just in time for my final Panda Sandwich Show (there will still be Panda Sandwich, don't worry, it will just have less me in it) on December 15th, here are some videos from our September show - "Good Riddance, Summer"

First: Minnesota Public Radio with me and Heather Meyer

Finger Food with Ben Egerman, Heather Meyer, and John McConville

And finally, a Seasonal Love Song by all of us

Hope those of you in the twin cities can make it out to Kieran's Irish Pub on December 15th for "Apology Accepted," my last show with these lovely individuals before I leave for warmer climes. As you can tell, I'm going to miss them terribly.

Guest Posting at Minnesota Microphone and Mr. Butlertron

2009-11-28T21:41:00.001-08:00

I was strong-armed into guest blogging for Minnesota Microphone, a spoken word blog run by the irresistably charming Ink Tea, way back in September, and everything else finally calmed down enough that it got posted.

So, if you want a quippy recap of a poetry slam through the eyes of yours truly, check out "Baby's First Slam". The lovely photographs are by Kimberly Lesley.

I have the good fortune of finding myself surrounded by poets and storytellers lately, between my slam poet buddies, the Rockstar Storytellers, and tonight's Tellabration, I am itching to write more. The full length play and I are taking a break, so I've been flirting with poetry again. So far, I've got a love poem to buffalo wings, one about not being good at riding my bike, and the "apocalypse baby" poem I cribbed from my stand up. It feels good to play with words again.

In unrelated news, I made an AWESOME Halloween costume.

That's right off-beat animation fans! We were Principal Cinnamon J. Scudworth and Mr. Butlertron, assistant principal/de-humidifier, from MTV's obscure and short-lived cartoon Clone High where clones of famous people attend high school together. Students included Abraham Lincoln, George Washington Carver, Cleopatra, and JFK with appearances by Ponce de Leon, Marie Antoinette, the mutated DNA of Marie Curie and more! Like I said, obscure and short-lived.

The three people who got it were very impressed.

Here's a reference photo so you can see how great we are:

My Butlertron dress was a huge thrifted red t-shirt altered to look a magical cardigan sweater vest with scrap fabric for the shirt front and bow tie. The claws were made out of duct tape and cardboard in the car. It made the responsible consumption of beverages an exciting challenge.

I made the sweet antennae out of wire and cardboard, and when I flew back it set off the X-Ray machine. I said that it was probably my homemade robot antennae, and the TSA guy gave me a quizzical look and remarked that they did not see many homemade robot antennae come through here. I also attached duct tape wheels to my boots, which I have not yet removed. I secretly wear them to work.

I bet they make me walk faster.

Boy Howdy!

2009-11-18T22:51:00.001-08:00

Oops.

It has been quite a long time since I've updated.

Well, lots of stuff has happened. First the mighty Panda Sandwich Sketch Comedy troupe has been putting on a monthly show at Kieran's Irish Pub. We've also got a snazzy new website (designed by Ben with my adorable delicious Panda Sandwich graphics) at pandasandwichcomedy.com Our last show of our fall season is coming up on December 15th, namely Panda Sandwich Presents: Apology Accepted. (end first plug)

I also had a public reading of my first full length play, Pain in the Neck, a comedy about love, bisexuality and vampires. John Heimbuch of Walking Shadow Theatre directed, and he rounded up some really really awesome actors to read. I am always astounded by what good, thoughful, inventive actors can bring to text. They made me look smart and funny. In fact, one of those smart, funny actors (the ass-kicking Clarence Wethern) is starring in Walking Shadow's next show:Some Girl(s) by Neil LaBute which opens November 20th. (end plug #2)

I know what some of you are thinking. "Gee, that's all well and good, but I live in New York and don't care about your midwestern plugs."

Au contraire, my cultured and snobbish friends. My bestestbestestbestbest friend Ms. Jessica Fleitman has some pluggable stuff on the horizon as well. State of Play Theatre is workshopping her play The Average Sized Mermaid. There's a preview scene coming up on December 14th and an invited reading this weekend at the Dramatist's Guild, which I have no idea how to get invited to. Oh well. You can check here for more information about the project, plus a neat synopsis.

Oh, and the tag line? Be Careful What You Fish For.

I know. I miss her. Her puns make my heart vomit with joy.

Well, with that that delightful image in mind, I'd like to put out a peace offering, in order to make up for that long blog dry-spell. Thus I present to you a clip from Panda Sandwich's summer show. I now present DIVE BAR!: THE MUSICAL!*

*May contain beer drinking, sex jokes, and swears. Hi Nana!

Last Night of Pre-Fringe Appetizers!!

2009-07-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

(crossposted from Questionable Company Theatre)

Tonight marks the triumphant conclusion of Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy. So if you haven't yet tasted the endanger-licous-ness that is Panda Sandwich and the forbidden fruit that is WTF in the Garden of Eden, you should get your little behind down to Bedlam Theatre tonight and catch our very last Bedlam Performance.

We're also bringing back our fabulous "Bring Two - Get in Free!" deal we ran last year for Orange. If you think you can get 2 or more people to come see the show with you, email ben.egerman AT gmail dot com saying so, and we'll have a comp ticket waiting for you at the door!

This is a mega-sweet show full of mega-sweet people and we'd love to share our awesome with you. And for our closing show, I am offering free hugs to anyone who asks me. So come on down to Bedlam tonight at 7:30 for some laughs, some beer, and a hug from the Teagle-maister herself.

Photo Shoot!!

2009-07-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

(cross posted from Questionable Company Theatre)

Panda Sandwich

Photos from our shoot with photographer Serge Vaynshenk last week. Upon reviewing the pictures, apparently the theme was violence and homo-eroticism. What themes do you find? Leave a comment!

You can also see it in a sweet slideshow!

WE OPEN IN A WEEK!!! AAAAAH!!!! AAAAAAAH!!!

Come see us July 22-25th at Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis!

Come With Me...

2009-07-12T23:21:00.000-07:00

A musical interlude from Ben Egerman and John McConville, two members of Panda Sandwich Sketch Comedy, a group which also includes this pretty lady and other talented folks.

We're nine days from showtime (eeek!) and we'd love to see you there. We're the first half of a double-header that includes "WTF in the Garden of Eden" a short play by Adam Sharp and Bethany Simmons of "10.10 Post 9-11" fame. We run Wednesday July 22-25th at Bedlam Theatre on the West Bank in Minneapolis. The link above is also how you reserve tickets! Hooray!

You can even be Panda Sandwich's Facebook Fan because we're like that.

If you can't make it to the show, you can still support our efforts by donating to our cause. For any donation $25 and over, we will honor their generosity with a celebratory song or poem on the subject matter of their choosing. Shoot us an email at pandabox DOT info AT gmail DOT com. These sweet celebratory masterpieces will be posted on our blog, and probably cross-posted over here because I'm sneaky like that.

So enjoy our song, more content to come, and see our show in nine days (eek!)

What Kind of Sandwich IS a Panda Sandwich?

2009-07-04T22:08:00.001-07:00

Apparently, an ice cream sandwich, as evidenced by our logo. Maybe I just wanted ice cream. Maybe I'm not too good at rendering lettuce in Illustrator. Maybe it doesn't matter, because you're going to come see this show.

You see, Questionable Company Theatre along with Box Wine Theatre Company (of last Fringe's 10.10 Post 9-11, are presenting a double header of entertainment we call Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy over at the incomparable Bedlam Theatre on the West Bank. The first act will be sketch comedy from the aforementioned PANDA SANDWICH! a new sketch comedy group full of love, carnies, and musical interludes. And by love, I mean unicorns as thinly veiled metaphors.

After enjoying some of Bedlam's potables at the interval, Box Wine Theatre whips out "WTF in the Garden of Eden" a short play by Adam Sharp and Bethany Simmons, which features Russell O'Connell, previous featured on this blog brandishing nunchucks and middle-school dancing to "Take My Breath Away".

So mark your calendars - July 22-25th, show at 7:30, doors at 7. Ginormous after party following opening night with live music, a dj, improv, stand up, spoken word, and other awesome things.

Do you like awesome? Come to the show.

Wonder Woman and a Man in a Thong

2009-05-31T21:19:00.000-07:00

Back when I was better about keeping this blog, I kept a careful eye on the little site tracker at the bottom and noticed that a large number of people came across a particular post of mine because they searched for the title. They were probably very disappointed. (go ahead, click it. you know you want to...)

Anyway, this post title will likely generate traffic from similarly disappointed folk, but there's nothing I like better than disappointing people searching for distasteful things on the internet (ha!)

I just closed out a show last week with Bedlam Theatre's Ten Minute Community Play Festival and I was super proud of my hard working cast. I directed "My Name is Art" by Peter Snoad (blurb from a previous show of his here, a romp through a modern art museum that goes awry when Art himself shows up asking for donations.

Costuming for the show included embroidering Michaelangelo's David onto the front of a man-thong.

Talk about high art...

Below is the Cast looking adorable. These guys are great. This is the least obscene picture I took of the actor playing Art, and everyone who saw Set B (particularly from downstage left during the infamous scissor kick) really should have taken him out to a nice dinner first.

And now for Wonder Woman:

Uploading these pictures prompted me to empty my camera and I found this awesome knitting project I had almost forgotten about. Inspired by an impromptu dorky bonding session while assistant directing "Planting Shelly Anne" with the Workhaus Collective I knit the director a little Wonder Woman as a token of appreciation and it's gotta be the coolest thing I've ever made. I based it off of the Rock Star Dolls in the Stitch and Bitch Nation book with lots of titchy little changes as I went along. I've devoted an entire Picasa web album to the project, so you know I'm serious.

Knit Wonder Woman!

Who wants a Panda Sandwich?

2009-05-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

As chances of getting off the Fringe Festival waitlist grew slimmer and slimmer, Rachel and Ben began to forge their own path, in conjunction with their compatriots Adam and Bethany from Box Wine Theater.
Together, Questionable Company and Box Wine will present a double-header extravaganza at Bedlam just before Fringe featuring “WTF in the Garden of Eden” and the inaugural performance of a new sketch comedy group (created by the stalwart Ben and Rachel) Panda Sandwich!

Want in?

We want you, too!

Come audition for us! Details about the group follow. Email pandabox.info AT gmail.com to sign up!

Audition Dates/Times:

Monday, May 25th: 7:00-8:30 p.m. and 8:30-10:00 p.m. time slots.
Tuesday, May 26th: 7:00-8:30 p.m. time slot.
* Please plan on being at auditions for the full hour-and-a-half.

Callbacks:
Tuesday, May 26th: 8:30-10:00 p.m.

Audition Location:
Bedlam Theatre
1501 S. 6th St.
on the West Bank, Minneapolis

Audition Requirements:
-To schedule an audition please email pandabox.info@gmail.com with your name and preferred time slot.
-Please bring a resume and headshot if you have them.
-Feel free to bring in a scene or monologue that exhibits what you do best (2 mins max).
-Panda Sandwich: Be ready to think and write on your feet.
-Box Wine Theatre: There will also be readings from the script.

PANDA SANDWICH – THICK AND JUICY COMEDY
The Panda Sandwich Manifesto:
Panda Sandwich is a new sketch comedy group devoted to creating well-written, well-structured comedy with a group of awesome people. We’re looking for willing collaborators and good listeners who aren’t afraid to try new ideas and explore our collective ridiculousity.
-We believe that sketches are better when group-written.
-We like work that is witty and clever without being egotistical or self-important.
-We believe that a sketch is more than just a good idea, it needs to go somewhere.
-We love comedy that is loud, crass, dirty, vulgar, and ridiculous, but not just for the sake of being loud, crass, dirty, vulgar, and/or ridiculous. No shock without substance.
-We like comedy that is well-structured and surprising. Surprise us. Or else.
-And above all, comedy should be fun to make and fun to watch.
Panda Sandwich: Put us in your mouth.

BOX WINE THEATRE – WTF IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Box Wine Theatre is looking for 3 men and 1 woman for the satirical comedy WTF in the Garden of Eden, the Genesis they didn’t teach you in Sunday school. It’s the story of mild-mannered Adam in his journey to find the perfect companion, whether that be a girl, boy or other, and yearning to find out just WTF is wrong with the world. It’s a play for your inner blasphemer.
WTF in the Garden of Eden is also on the waiting list for the Minnesota Fringe Festival and need actors who could be available the run of the Fringe, July 30th through August 9th.
Cast of Characters:
Adam – Male: 20’s-30’s.
God – Male: Any age.
Lilith/Serpant/Archeoptrix/Cain: Female: 20’s-30’s.
Steve/Eve – Male: 20’s-30’s.
Box Wine Theatre: We’re cheap and we get the job done.

To schedule an audition please email pandabox.info@gmail.com with your name and preferred time slot. And if you can’t make it but still wish to audition please contact us and we’ll see if we can work something out.

Look, Ma! I'm a Real Comic!

2009-03-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

Here's my set for the Women Stand Up! Comedy Cabaret at the Bryant Lake Bowl a few weeks back. Much thanks and love to everyone who could make it out there. For those of you bummed out that you missed it or are dying to relive the experience, check out the sweet video.

Hooray!

And yes, in the freeze frame I am being a velociraptor.

Guess Where I'll be Saturday Night...

2009-03-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Women Stand Up!

A Comedy Cabaret
Presented by Eos Productions

Come and get it—brainy, gutsy, heartfelt humor! Revel with
witty women who speak their minds.
"Women Stand Up! A Comedy Cabaret" is a new hit regular series at the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater--a smorgasbord of comedy styles from the Twin Cities' top female comedians.
Performers run the gamut in experience and disciplines within the umbrella of comedy, including: stand-up comedians, improvisers, sketch comics, slam poets, singers, storytellers and a bit of everything in-between.

Each show is unique and features different performers.
March 14th Performers:
Linda Aarons
Karen Batdorf
Tracie Hodgdon
Jodie Maruska
Rox Tarrant
Rachel Teagle!!!

Bryant Lake Bowl Theater
810 West Lake Street, Minneapolis
http://www.bryantlakebowl.com
Reservations: 612- 825-8949

http://www.myspace.com/womenstandupcomedycabaret

I've got a stand up gig this weekend! So if you're in the Twin Cities come on down for drinks and laughs and me doing dinosaur impressions and telling filthy stories. Hooray!

I think I will be taping the whole show, so check back for video.

And if you can't wait, check out some of my previous shows on youtube! See you there...

Dude! We're on 3 Minute Egg! Sort of.

2009-03-05T12:28:00.001-08:00

The kick ass vloggers over at Three Minute Egg put together this lovely video from Theatre Unbound's 24 Hour Show that Ben and I were lucky enough to write for.

The scene we wrote entitled "How the Amazons Got Their Boobs Back" is featured fairly prominently - when the professor you see rehearsing a scene detailing how he stole the left half of their power or any scene with lots of women in togas is totally ours. Kudos to the actors and the directors who made it even better than we thought it could be.

Caligula Closes this Weekend!

2009-02-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

There are only a few performances left of Walking Shadow's mind bending production of Albert Camus' Caligula over at the Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis. I had the pleasure of seeing it opening night and hearing the lawyer-to-be next to me trying to parse out the insane logic of everyone's favorite mad Emperor. But whether or not you want to, you'll find yourself siding with Caligula more than you'd hoped possible in his quest to render life meaningless through the exercise of absolute power.

And making his professional debut as one of the adorably fascist guards and ill fated poets, is none other than my dear friend Mr. Russell O'Connell, previously seen on this blog brandishing nunchucks and middle-school dancing to "Take My Breath Away."

I'm sure he's thrilled I re-posted that one.

Lay On MacAwesome

2009-02-20T11:33:00.000-08:00

Stupid Shakespeare winning me over with his words.

I used to have a pretty lukewarm relationship with the bard, due at least partially to all the Shakespeare nuts running around drooling in iambic pentameter and giggling every time someone said coxcomb. (Get it? Penis joke.) Sure, he was good, but I was so over him.

But after glutting myself on the history plays during Henry V, I’ve developed a taste for his darker stuff. And reading the dread Scottish Play, a line in the second scene hit me square in the gut.

“For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name--
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix'd his head upon our battlements.”

Let’s read that again shall we:

“Till he UNSEAM’D HIM from the nave to the chaps
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.”

Ew.

Awesome.

EW!!

AWESOME!!!

That really paints a picture, you know. A disturbing, disturbing picture.

Just wanted to share that little tidbit from my day. Hooray for reading!

PS: Isn’t that text portrait awesome? This guy has lots of other neat drawings on his photostream. Hooray for flickr creative common searches! Hooray for the internets!

Lucky Number 100?

2009-02-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

Last night, the Minnesota Fringe Festival did their lottery to determine who will be performing next summer. Ben and I had two ping pong balls in, and we ended up being number 100 and 138 on the wait list.

That's right, our best number was 100. On the 161 person wait list. You can see the results here. We're Questionable Company Theater and Knife in the Back Productions.

But a lot of our friends did get in (hooray for you!) and we may find a way to do a show this summer after all. Still, it's really disappointing to not be officially in this year, because doing the Fringe last year completely rocked.

So, here's to hoping that a hundred shows drop out! Hooray!

Sigh.

Gendering Shelly Anne

2009-02-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

I was really shocked by the reviews of "Planting Shelly Anne" that came out, really knocked off balance. It isn't that the play is perfect and deserves no criticism, but the tone of articles has been dismissive, bitter, and downright cruel. And in a play whose focus is on women's narrative and exploring the deep impact of supposedly mundane stresses, a lot of it comes off as misogynistic.

A little googling can lead you to a couple of reviews, but the one that got me was this that deemed it a "whine-a-thon" and attacked the character and the playwright for being unable to deal with "dishwater problems." His biggest beef with the show was not the directing or the performances, but the scope of the story itself, that this narrative was not valid or worth his time.

But he wasn't the only one in the audience that night, and other audience members I've eavesdropped on, specifically female audience members who juggle children and housework and careers, find this narrative very valid indeed. These aren't just little domestic problems, this is a big part of their life. This play is essentially a woman's story, this is theater for women by women (and the splendid John Reidlinger, as the sole testosterone in the rehearsal room), which for the reviewer came off as a big whiny mess.

I'm too close to this play to speak objectively, but I really think this is a valid and moving piece of art. For those who have seen it, I encourage you to comment on these reviews and put your experiences out there too. Especially if you found yourself or someone you know in Shelly Anne and think telling the character to stop whining and finish her laundry isn't right.

Planting Shelly Ann Opens tonight!

2009-01-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

Tonight, at the Playwright's Center, Jeannine Coulombe's Planting Shelly Anne has its first performance, and if you're in the area, it's worth the trip to see this "very funny drama for anyone who has a to-do list." The play follows a dynamic woman as she deals with problems as mundane as laundry and as epic as global warming in a fast-paced, high stress world. Is our way of life sustainable, not just environmentally, but emotionally?

For the last few weeks, I've had the distinct pleasure of assisting the wonderful Kristin Horton in directing this funny, poignant show and I'm very excited to get to share it with audiences.

We've gotten some great press coverage so far. There's a lovely radio piece from MPR, an article in the Bridge, and this video from local arts vlog Three Minute Egg

Workhaus Collective is truly a unique company consisting of playwrights producing their own work. They rotate leadership positions and the playwright of the play they are currently producing serves as artistic director. It's an interesting model and it foregrounds the importance of the writer. But the collective is more than that and seeing how supportive and invested the other collective members have been to Jeannine's play shows why the structure works. These are working playwrights who made a space of their own to develop their work, and seeing the play develop and evolve through rehearsals will definitely help inform my process. As a playwright and director, it's great to see this work. And I'm thrilled that other people will be able to see the world we've made.

The show runs through February 13th at the Playwrights'Center and features a talented cast tackling multiple roles and a lead who will charm the pants off you. (Pants will be returned in the lobby after the show). Hope to see you there!

Knitting for Dorky Boys

2009-01-18T15:32:00.001-08:00

This Christmas, I decided to use my burgeoning knitting skills to outfit my friends with awesome. And among my friends are really really dorky boys. Boys so dorky, a mere scarf would not do. And I was too lazy to make too many mittens. No, these boy demanded much much dorkier presents.

The inspiration came when digging through my stash for scrap yarn and finding this ancient forest green acrylic of dubious texture. It was too itchy for anything wearable, but just about creepy looking enough to recreate one of my friend Max's most feared and revered mythological figures, great Cthulhu.

Awesome, I thought, and I searched far and wide for appropriate free internet Cthulhu patterns, of which there are many. But, I found that none of them really had satisfactory legs, and when I really thought about it, I couldn't remember what Cthulhu's legs looked like. Did he have legs? Were they just more tentacles?

Also, knitting legs is hard. And so are wings! Screw that! So, I got a little more creative. A trip to the Salvation Army yielded this lovely faux gold angel stocking holder.

So I made a few alterations.

And thus, the manteltop Cthulhu idol was born!
Behold its adorable tentacles and angry eyebrows!
Tremble at the hasty inscription on its base!

Feeling pretty cocky, I asked another friend to name anything and I would knit it for him. He requested a weapon. Oops. That's what I get for befriending black belts.
I decided a lasso would be cheating and that's not so much a weapon as an interrogation technique. And there are already enough gun cozies out there.

So, I knit him nunchucks!
They make him happy. And they have little pom-poms on the end, which makes me happy!
After all, what are nun-chucks without pom-poms?

These were actually pretty easy - it's just two rectangles with i-cord connecting them, knit in one piece and seamed, but don't tell Russell.

You don't want to mess with a man with knit nunchucks.

Bluefish Cove Revisited

2008-12-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

A dear friend of mine has been recently co-opted into a fundraising campaign for my alma mater. (Boy, that's weird to type that).
And in their most recent video, she talks about being in Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, a show I directed for a friend's senior thesis exercise in theater, and the clips made me really nostalgic.

Then I realized, wait a minute, I blogged about this before! And loyal blogosphereans, you've been left hanging! Did the set get finished in time? Could the actors pull this off? Was this show a success? Did we make everyone cry?
Well, the first part's a little dodgy. The set did get built, most of it, and there was probably some paint drying as the audience filtered in on opening night, but we had a beach house and a beach and it was lovely. As for the rest - yes. It was a beautiful show, the actors were amazing, and I have never sat in a theater so beautifully silent and rapt as the second to last scene of the show. Everybody cried. It was amazing.

And if you don't believe me, check out the video. We pop up about a minute and 18 seconds in, and the clips are short, but at least it should give you some closure.

And make some of you miss our dear lesbian beach colony. *sigh* I reposted my video below and it has a lovely little interview with the star (who has recently relocated into the twin cities! yay!) and features many of us looking remarkably young.

For those unfamiliar with the show,Last Summer at Bluefish Cove , written by Jane Chambers in 1981 was one of the first plays to depict happy gay people . These women were lesbians, but their characterization didn't end there and they didn't spend the whole play being tortured about their weird and incomprehensible homosexual desires and/or shooting themselves at the end. Instead, the play gives us love. Lil and Eva's new love for one another, Rae and Annie's old married love, the devotion and love Rita feels for Kitty the closeted doctor, the materialistic shallow love of Donna and her sugar momma Sue, and most of all the love and friendship these women all feel for one another. It was a blessing to work with this script, these amazing women's roles, and the spectacular cast. Thanks, ladies.

The Ikea on the River

2008-12-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday there was a matinee of Christmas Carol and the hub was filled with people dressed as Dickensian orphan children checking their facebook pages.

And that's just one of many surreal moment to come as I embark on my six month internship in the literary department of the Guthrie Theater. I'm about four days in and so far so good. I'm eager to see how this massive operation functions and secretly most excited about the comp tickets. Most of the work so far has been playing footnote tag between editions of Henry V and learning lots of ways to deprecate the French.

So far, my favorite dramaturgical tidbit involves not good King Harry, but his overseas counterpart, the King of France. Although overshadowed in the play by the Dauphin (who's actually a combination of three different dauphins, as they kept dying off during the campaign), King Charles VI or, wait for it, "Charles the Mad" is just obscenely fascinating.

After someone attempted to kill a close friend of his, he began having fits of, well, madness. He sometimes didn't recognize his wife or family, tried to kill his chamberlains when spooked by loud noises, thought his name was George from time to time. He also went through periods where he believed he was made of glass and would not let anyone touch him and he'd try to protect himself so he wouldn't break.

He was also, of course a party animal, and at a ball thrown by the Queen, he and some other Lords dressed as wild men in shaggy hemp costumes. Because of the clear fire hazard this posed in a pre-electric castle, the torch bearers were placed at the far ends of the room. Then the King's brother, who clearly took after him, burst in fashionably late, grabbed a torch and ran up to the dancers to try and see who they were.

Needless to say,it was a hot time in the old town that night.

I actually prefer the other miniature, below because the musicians are still playing, everyone looks so very unimpressed, and the little yappy dog is just making everything worse.

Stupid yappy dog.

Anyway, as everyone was running around on fire, one quick thinking duchess did what any good French aristocrat of the time would do and threw her skirt over one of the dancers, ostensibly to smother the flames.

The man she saved? King Charles VI. Four of the other lords died (oops). And the event is known as Le Bal des Ardents or "Ball of the Burning Men."

Dude. You can't make this stuff up. Hooray for research!

Freezing Rain: All the Discomfort of Rain without the Fun of Snow

2008-11-12T21:49:00.000-08:00

Oh man, I just found out that Hulu has Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Now I will never have to leave my computer.

Which may work out, I've got some catching up to do.

First, for those who followed Questionable Company Theater's Blog during Fringe, I've got a quick little wrap up post with some of our attendance numbers and a brief "Where are they now?" You can also find the elusive Quentin video referred to in the previous post. It contains what may be one of my favorite disclaimers.

And now for some exciting news. A while ago I submitted some scripts to a theater company in Red Bluff, California, and my one act "Muse" was selected to be a part of their Short Plays festival. MUSE is a reluctantly meta theatrical piece about a struggling writer and her less than helpful muse written while I was embittered with writing process and finally allowed to swear. So, when I was told that the local high school students would be acting in it, there was some editing to do. Oh, 19 year old me, dropping the F-bomb isn't the only way to be emphatic! I did have to cut some gems. and while it's a piece that works at the PG-13 level, there are a few lines ("Yeah and how nice it feels to have a real expletive deleted in my mouth") that couldn't quite survive the high school version transition. But even in its somewhat sanitized version, it's still a script I'm proud of.

I was lucky enough to be able to see a performance - it was a nice excuse for a family road trip - and that was an immensely exciting experience. I was nervous. So nervous. I ran back and forth to the bathroom three times before it started and again at intermission. As soon as the lights went down for the piece before, my heart started beating out of my chest. Then, it started.
It feels so good to make strangers laugh. I never want to stop. It was awesome. I was so proud of those kids. They even surprised me. Toward the end of the play, one of the characters turns into a bear and mauls someone offstage, as they should in every well-made play, and they couldn't find a good bear costume that he could change into quickly. So, someone drew a little nose and whiskers on him in eyeliner and then covered him in fake blood. There was a lot of fake blood. And it was pretty clear that they were super-excited about being covered in fake blood. And that really embodied the spirit of the show for me. Here I am with the cast (and their fake blood). Unfortunately the picture's a little off center, but from left to right we have some of Kellie, who played Character A and died very beautifully; all of Marissa, who played our hapless writer Lydia with great aplomb; Me, who is looking very happy to be there; Michael who played Character B, currently a bear, who made some great mauling noises; and Kaela who played the Muse with great delicacy and maneuvered through her massive monologues skillfully. I also got to meet Sadie, who played the Muse the second weekend and I'm sure she was awesome.

Many thanks to Barestage for being such gracious hosts. They're also very good about giving you back written comments on scripts you submit. When Ben and I sent in "Orange" they said - "Cannibalism may be a bit much for our audience." However, offstage bear violence seems to be just fine.

By the way, by posting this entry, I have obliged a dear friend of mine to update his blog. Consider yourself obligated, Mr. Evans. If he has not updated yet, please flood his last entry (which incidentally promises the return of said blog) with comments containing bad knock knock jokes. I believe in you, blogosphere.

Profiles in Orange Continue

2008-07-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

So I have this nasty habit of promising video blog series (see my Holiday Vlog "Series", which was an epic two videos long)

But! This time I actually did it! ha HA! Behold the continuation of the promised "Profiles in Orange" video series of cast interviews for our upcoming fringe show.On the previous post you can find the inaugural interview with Alex Higgin-Houser, who plays the uptight office manager and the less uptight Unabomber.

And here you can find the marvelous Ms. Sarah Duane, who plays the sexpot secretary and Baha'i tech girl. Sarah is a rising sophomore at Carleton College who is active in improvisational comedy. She's cute as a button. I personally fell in love with her from the moment she stepped onstage this fall as an insane prisoner making necklaces out of rat bones for arts and crafts. Ah memories.

And here is Naysan Mojgani, who plays Hal the job applicant and the mysterious Doctor Orton. Naysan graduated from Carleton in 2006 and since then, has been working in the theatre up in Minneapolis. He was an intern at the dearly departed Jeune Lune, and directed for Hardcover Theater's Dark Side of the Brothers Grimm and 3 AM Productions recent Romeo and Juliet. Naysan was one of my directing mentors when I was at Carleton, and it give me endless pleasure to boss him around now. I'm especially proud of the freeze frame.

And the fourth Profile will be forthcoming. It's about halfway edited on my laptop as we speak (type? read?). I just need to find an appropriate opening slide, as our final actor recently underwent painful surgery and the strong painkillers he had just finished taken are very very apparent in his interview. But he's getting better every day, and we should have a much happier and coherent Quentin when we open this Saturday.

So check out our company blog, buy your tickets, and come to the show!!

Another Fringe Vlog and Notes about Comps

2008-07-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

For your viewing pleasure, an interview with the venerable Alex Higgin-Houser, who plays multiple roles in our upcoming Fringe show. We'll be doing more of these "Profiles in Orange" so stay tuned!

For those lucky folks who are going to be around the twin cities from July 31-August 10, here's a link to show times and tickets for our sweet sweet show.

But without further ado, here's Alex!

I realize I haven't been particularly diligent about keeping up this blog, and for that I do apologize. Between my senior project, graduating, joining the real world and fringe-ing, there hasn't been much time for blogging.

But my senior comps show went incredibly well. We performed "The Love of the Nightingale" by Timberlake Wertenbaker, a powerful and beautiful and incredibly challenging script about the myth of Tereus and Philomele. For those less familiar with Greek Mythology (or unwilling to click on the wikipedia link above), Procne, a princess of Athens, marries Tereus, a king from the north and moves far from home. When she grows lonely, she asks her husband to bring back her sister, Philomele for a visit. But on the journey, Tereus is overtaken by lust, rapes Philomele and cuts out her tongue to silence her. The play implicates the silence of the community along with the actions of Tereus and ends with a call to question a society that would allow this to happen.

So it's a real happy-go-lucky piece, as you can imagine.

It was definitely an enormous challenge. I have much more experience with comedy, but even the most seasoned director would have their work cut out for them while navigating this partially classical, partially modern, completely inventive reimagining of the narrative. I used the same five talented actors to play both the male and female chorus, blurring the gender lines and combating some of the dated gender roles (women good men bad) of the 1989 script. My chorus was amazing, my leads were stellar, but the best part of all was putting this piece in front of an audience. Sexual violence and the prevalence of rape in our society is something that disgusts and terrifies me. And it's an issue that doesn't get talked about, especially not on our campus.

After each performance, we had a panel of faculty members and students from sexual violence prevention groups lead a discussion about the themes and ideas brought up in the play, and it was incredible. Every night, people found new questions to ask, new ways to interrogate the text, the performance, and the world around them. But the most rewarding part for me was seeing my actors become advocates. At first, they had the most questions, and they were eager to reconcile their experience within the fiction of the play with the reality of sexual violence. As the discussions went on, the actors started fielding more audience questions and using what they had learned to become informed activists to promote awareness of and prevent sexual assault in the community. I was so proud of them and thankful for the opportunity for dialogue, especially in conjunction with a play that is all about the destructive power of silence in a violent world.
But I think the best way to talk about this play is to let it talk for itself.

This is from Scene 15 - the first time Tereus sees Philomele after the rape:

TEREUS: Now I wish you didn't exist.

PHILOMELE: When will you explain, Tereus?

TEREUS: Explain?

PHILOLMELE: Why? The cause? I want to understand.

TEREUS: I don't know what to do with you.

PHILOMELE Me...

I was the cause, wasn't I? Was I? I said something. What did I do?

Something in my walk? If I had sung a different song? My hair up, my hair down? It was the beach. I ought not to have been there. I ought not to have been anywhere. I ought not to have been...at all...then there would be no cause. Is that it? Answer.

TEREUS: What?

PHILOMELE: My body bleeding, my sprit ripped open, and I am the cause? No this cannot be right, why would I cause my own pain? That isn't reasonable. What was it then, tell me, Tereus, if I was not the cause?

You must know, it was your act, you must know, tell me, why, say.

It was your act. It was you. I caused nothing.

And Procne is not dead. I can smell her on you.

(Pause)

You. You lied. And you.
What did you tell your wife, my sister, Procne, what did you tell her? Did you tell her you violated her sister, the sister she gave into your trust? Did you tell her what a coward you are and that you could not, cannot bear to look at me? Did you tell her that despite my fear, your violence, when I saw you in your nakedness I couldn't help laughing because you were so shriveled, so ridiculous and it is not the way it is on statues? Did you tell her you cut me because you yourself had no strength? Did you tell her I pitied her for having in her bed a man who could screech such quick and ugly pleasure, a man of jelly beneath his hard skin, did you tell her that?And once I envied her happiness with her northern hero. The leader of men. Take the sword out of your hand, you fold into a cloth. Have they ever looked at you, your soldiers, your subjects?

TEREUS: That's enough.

PHILOMELE: There's nothing inside you. You're only full when you're filled with violence. And they obey you? Look up to you? Have the men and women of Thrace seen you naked? Shall I tell them? Yes, I will talk.

And from Scene 8 - what I found to be the core of the piece:

What is a myth? The oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time.

And yet, the first, the Greek meaning of myth is simply what is delivered by word of mouth. A myth is speech, public speech.

And myth also means the matter itself, the content of the speech.

We might ask, has the content become increasingly unacceptable and therefore the speech more indirect? How has the meaning of myth been transformed from public speech to an unlikely story? It also meant counsel, command. Now it is a remote tale.

Let that be. There is no content without its myth. Fathers and sons, rebellion, collaboration, every twist and fold of passion, we have uttered them all. This one,
you will say, watching Philomele watching Tereus watching Philomele, must be about men and women. Yes, you think, a myth for our times, we understand.

You will be beside the myth. If you must think of anything, think of countries, silence, but we cannot rephrase it for you.

If we could, why would we trouble to show you the myth?

Fringe Video #2

2008-07-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

At last! The Long-Awaited Follow up to Adventures in Laryngitis, which incidentally "charmed the pants off" some Fringe staffers. Speculations as to the present whereabouts of said pants are widespread.

Anyway, come and join creative partner Ben and I on a tour of our beloved hovel/rehearsal space, and delve into the origins of "Orange"

Let's go!

For more details go to our show page on the Fringe Festival Website

More Stand Up!

2008-06-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

Voila! Behold more Stand Up Comedy from me! This was performed at the Cave last winter, and videos from the rest of Hilaricorps are forthcoming.

Part One:
The Vagina Monologues, Being a Senior at Carleton, People Getting Eaten by Animals

Part Two:
Dinosaurs, N*Sync, and Even More Dinosaurs!

New Vlog Endeavor/Minnesota Fringe

2008-05-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hey you crazy cats!

I've got a brand spankin' new video for all of you out there dying for the latest in all things Rachel Teagle. More of an update later, but as you can see from the video, I should probably get some rest.

Earlier today, I and my partner in crime Ben went down to Bedlam Theatre for not only their Ten Minute Play festival (which included "Flashenstein!" written by the two of us and quite splendidly put on) but also a Producer's Meeting for this summer's Minnesota Fringe Festival.

That's right, we've got a show in the Fringe. Sweet!

There will be periodic updates on the show (which is called "Orange") starting with this quick little video. Enjoy!

Moon Over Boofalo

2007-08-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

This summer has been crazy. Crazy difficult, crazy fun, and crazy fast. I am immensely glad that I got a chance to participate in bringing back the Uninvited Company and that it made such a positive impact on the community, and the people involved. I've definitely grown as an artist and a person and have made some friends I have no intention of letting go.

And now, I guess it's peaking with the opening of the show I directed, Ken Ludwig's Moon Over Buffalo. Because vlogging habits die hard, I made a video trailer. If you're around Northfield, stop by and check it out, the cast is stellar and works their collective asses off.

Not to mention how awesome the director is, of course.

Click To Play

UNCO returns!

2007-05-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

As finals approach, I find myself actively seeking out other things to do than study or work on my paper. Other things like working on publicity for UNCO, the summer stock theater company I'm doing, um, this summer.
You should check out our company blog here. It's just the company profile and cast lists so far, but as we actually get going, we hope to have a fair amount of material up.
UNCO's pretty cool. For those uninitiated to the Uninvited Company, groups of college students in Northfield, Minnesota have stayed at Carleton over the summer to put on plays for the townsfolk. But for one reason or another, after over thirty years of UNCO, a company was not formed last year, and Northfield was, sadly, an UNCO free zone.

It was widely assumed that this lapse indicated the end of the Univited Company for all time, but my buddy Hal Edmonson and I worked our butts off and now UNCO is back, seventeen Carleton students strong (For insurance reasons, we weren't allowed to bring students from St. Olaf into the company like before, but we hope to eventually bring back the Oles, as soon as we've gotten back on track).

So now we're back! And our first show is quite a doozy - Arthur Miller's searing indictment of the American war machine, All My Sons on Fourth of July weekend. We're basing the posters on World War II propaganda.
Here's

Here's a rationing poster that we liked the layout of.

And here's the poster we came up with. Yeah, I know, the factory is never explicitly named, and even if it were, it wouldn't be "Keller and Son," but it's kind of what Joe Keller sees it as, or as it could be.
Notice the ever-so-subtle upside down American flag.

Here's a really graphically strong pilot poster, which given the fate of Keller's son Larry, becomes a very powerful image.

And here's my budding photoshop skills.

So, if you're in or around Northfield, most definitely check us out. Ticket information at the website.

Rachel Stands Up! The Motion Picture!

2007-05-20T23:15:00.000-07:00

I love Ben. He was awesome enough to get this up.
And now for your enjoyment:

And, for those who want it a little bluer... Here's Benners!

Rachel Stands Up!

2007-05-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

I recently tried stand up comedy at school with a few of my friends, and after some wrangling, I think I've got a way to share it. It was kind of terrifying, but lots of fun. Ben took some video, I'll put it up once it's uploaded. Yay!

A great deal of the bit is devoted to the Winchester Mystery House, which if you're ever in San Jose, you may or may not need to go see.

So, without further ado...

My Stand Up!

So you click, then click download on the page it sends you to(instructions are mostly for my mother's benefit) the file's just titled by a bunch of numbers (65315528, to be exact), but it should play on iTunes. Hooray!

Also, my buddy Ben recently made a video for his mom for Mother's Day, and I have a special cameo.

Don't let the sentiment fool you, he's an evil, evil kid. As you can hear from his stand up...

Ben Egerman's Set

Building Bluefish Cove

2007-02-21T06:02:00.000-08:00

Click To Play

"Last Summer at Bluefish Cove" is a play by Jane Chambers about life, love, and loss in a lesbian beach colony. Supposedly, the show goes up this weekend at Carleton College, but the set is monstrous and far from being done. What do you do when you have an important message to get across but only half a space to do it in?

Why, you make a video about it!

This video was created for my "Creating Journalism" class.

So, for those of you concerned. No. I have not quite dropped off the face of the earth - I have been re-engulfed by the theater, and as you can see in the video, it's pretty engulfing. If you're around Carleton at all, definitely drop in and see the show, it's looking amazing. The cast is stellar, the script is really solid, and I swear, with the blogosphere as my witness, that the set will get build. Plus, how could it fail with posters like this?

Birthday Blog (sort of)

2007-01-31T18:09:00.000-08:00

This seems to be the year where everyone around me is starting to either figure out where they are going, or realize that they don't have a clue and panic.

It's fun. Gone is the "no one understands me and I am all alone in the universe with all of my raging emotions tearing me apart" angst, and here comes the "holy crap, I'm a real person and I have to be responsible for my own actions" angst.

But first, I had a fairly ridiculous party centered around one of my favorite Christmas gifts - the I-TATTOO a temporary tattoo pen with real vibrating tattoo needle action! (Also marketed under the name GR8 TaT2) It comes with some sweet stencils - scorpions, bulldogs, anchors, a guitar with "Rock!" written over it - just what the hard-core third graders pictured on the box or a bunch of overworked college students need to "get inked."

My co-party hosts and I decided this was a bring your own beard party, and if you did not bring your own (as these two clever New Media Roadtrippers did), we'd graciously draw one on you ourselves. It eventually devolved into everyone drawing on each other with washable markers. I got a pretty sweet flying heart thing drawn on my arm by Carleton's favorite cartoonist, Mr. Nelson.

I've actually really missed posting to this blog. I've been overrun with work and the awesome play I'm directing (Last Summer at Bluefish Cove by Jane Chambers, expect more on that later), and I miss making little videos and posting them and stuff. I'm a few Indian pop songs away from finishing one about my friend's mom teaching us how to make Aloo Parota, and I'll probably manage to finagle the podcasts I make for my journalism class into video blogs. Teehee! Sneaky! The one thing that discourages me are all the bizarre spam comments I've been getting lately. Anyone know how to stop them?

I should probably get back to enjoying my other birthday presents - a fresh blanket of snow and a nasty head cold. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of my friends middle-school dancing to "Take My Breath Away." Clearly, we're ready for the real world.

And Now: Thrilling Conclusion of the Gingerbread Saga

2006-12-26T13:57:00.001-08:00

And, because it’s a vlog about my family’s Holiday traditions, it’s late. Oh well. Now it’s a Boxing Day present. Or a New Year’s gift. Or just-because-you-are-who-you-are gift. Those are my favorites.

So another Christmas has come and gone, leaving only the traditional fortresses of presents my family builds. When my brother and I were younger, we’d build opposing present forts and battle. This year, Santa brought us foam swords, which we almost broke moments after discovering them. Good times.

We got our tree late this year. We always drive up into the Christmas tree farms in the mountains and hack down our own. Two years ago, I named the tree “Conan” because it was covered in adorable pine cones, and because we couldn’t bear to part with it, or take it out of the tree stand, we left him up all year on the patio, where he dried out into festive autumnal colors. Also, it irritated the heck out of my grandpa, which I suspect was part of my mom’s intentions (it’s not difficult to do). Once we had obtained a new tree the next year (we called it “Coney”), Conan was chopped into pieces and given a Viking funeral on Christmas Day. I found it a very satisfying tree experience, and due to the aforementioned laziness and our Christmas joy, we kept Coney in the backyard, too.

Once Coney had been dismantled and our new tree (Douglas) put in place, we began to hang the ornaments. This is our family’s least favorite Christmas task, because we have too many ornaments and pine trees are itchy.

The greatest of our ornaments, is of course, The Christmas Head.

I think it used to be part of a team of Christmas Carollers, but its Christmas Body has long been lost, and so the disembodied head is first to go up on the tree, and the first child to find it gets the honor of placing it. This year, the honor was all mine.

Notably amusing presents included a sweet Panda hat from Ms. Felix,
a “My Little Pony” Godfather Playset, and a stuffed, sleeping panda, so I can play “Panda-Cam” all the time!

Let me explain, I have been going into serious Panda-Cam withdrawal, since I’ve been without a fast enough connection to fully appreciate/load streaming panda video. But! With my stuffed sleeping panda, I can simulate the experience!

Wow! The Panda is sleeping!!

Oh. It’s still sleeping.

Wait! Crap, it moved. I missed it. Now it’s sleeping again.

Ta Da! Panda-cam, the wave of the future. There’s also a sweet widget for Mac users who need to be one click away from Pandas. Who, by the way, are no longer endangered. They’ve been updated to “protected status,” thanks to some creativity on the parts of Panda scientists. That particular article made my day.

But, enough about Pandas. Onto what Amsterdam’s National Treasure BicycleMark has dubbed “TeagVlog”

Check it Out

Enjoy! Happy Boxing Day!

Holiday Video Blog #1

2006-12-05T16:18:00.000-08:00

Watch the Video

It's that time of year again.

In my house, Christmas means dragging box after box of nutcrackers out of the attic, sneaking the batteries out of the singing santa wreath, and inviting several hundred people over to decorate gingerbread houses.

I managed to catch only the last wave of the insanity, but I managed to catch it on tape. This is the first in a series of videos about my family’s Christmas traditions. I’m hoping that some of my Roadtrip buddies are going to document some of their holiday traditions, too. (ahem, Jenny)

Also, this year we finally caved in and bought one of those light up animals to put on the lawn. Ours is a baby sea. His name is Clubby.

Enjoy the video!

Man, I really need a bear and an ice cream truck

2006-11-30T19:39:00.000-08:00

I first heard about the Borat movie during the Midnight Madness Snake-o-Rama showing of Snakes on a Plane. I was pretty excited; I'd seen Da Ali G Show on DVD, thanks to Benners, and Mr. Baron Cohen's work had come up in many a conversation about contemporary comedy, especially in its potential to reveal problems in society. Needless to say I walked into this movie with really high hopes, and I hate to admit it, but I was disappointed.

Parts were positively brilliant. As Sacha said in Rolling Stone, "Borat essentially works as a tool, by himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism.... I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'" My jaw definitely hit the floor at some of the things people confided to Borat (The rodeo? Holy Crapmonkies),and as a sheltered California girl, it's terrifying to see what people say when they think they're safe. That's when Borat was most successful for me: when he acts as a foil for seemingly ordinary people and shows how awful they truly are (see "Throw the Jew Down the Well")

The movie was less successful for me when Borat merely foiled himself. Part of the brilliance of the character is taking advantage of our cultural relativism, but as his behavior got more outrageous I started feeling more sympathy for his victims. I kept thinking, "What would I do if a guest handed me a plastic bag of feces?" and I wasn't sure I quite how I would have reacted. It felt to me like a lot of the movie got bogged down in sophomoric scatological humor (which I'm usually all for, believe you me), and the movie lacked the focus and sharpness I thought it was capable of.

A lot of contemporary comedy follows the Borat formula of assuming a character in order to get away with ridiculous things. I cite as my prime example the jackassery of Stephen Colbert, whose take on political punditry is one of my favorite things to watch. One thing that continually impresses me is how he manages to make his guests look good. I remember he was interviewing a scientist about global warming, kind of, and despite him asking the most asinine questions as loudly as he could, the scientist made some excellent points and very gracefully handled Colbert's jackassery. I'm not sure whether it's the writers or Stephen or that he just has really smart guests, but it's awesome. If you're one of the three or four people left who missed his performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, go here now. Before I saw that, I was fairly lukewarm on his show, but not only does this prove that Stephen Colbert has the biggest balls of anyone ever, but I started watching his program more carefully, instead of just not switching the channel after the Daily Show. Now I'm proud to be a member of the Colbert Nation. If I see Stephen Junior flying proudly in the big blue American sky, I'll gladly point him towards the nest waiting for him in the studio with the book of eagle porn underneath it.

I actually used some similar techniques in a documentary I made for my non-fiction film class my freshman year. I'll get it up on my blip.tv account soon. [EDIT: It's up now!] It explores the nature of truth in documentary through various interview techniques, cinema verite, and zombie Michael Moore. Hooray for assuming characters that allow you to do things you could never do as yourself!

Wired Fire

2006-11-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

So four days and a continent later, it’s hard to believe it all really happened. Did I actually play a giant game of late night tag across Manhattan? Or rip apart children’s toys to manipulate their circuits? Or obey the whims of iPod Shuffle right into the red light district, or even play on seesaws on the Berlin Wall? Did I gain an appreciation and understanding of contemporary art that I couldn’t have possibly obtained on my own? Have I stretched the limits of my creative potential and grown as an artist and storyteller? Did I survive the British abomination known as cheese salad?

Yeah, I guess I did.

The culmination of this wild new media ride was the creation of our final project and the near suicidal attempt to do a 24 hour film festival piece immediately afterwards. It was awesome.

Initially, Jeremy, Julian, and I were going to do a serial fiction podcast about a crazy cross-continental spy plot. It could have been cool, but due to the time restrictions of the trip and our desire to do more than shoot and edit during our time abroad; it was scrapped in London. And thus we took up John Schott’s plea for a VJ project.

VJ-ing, or video jockeying, is the manipulation of video images, usually in a club, to create an awesome visual experience. With the advent of new digital technology, it’s become possible to live mix visuals like DJs mix records. Well, sort of. We used Livid Union, a high end VJ software that uses a midi keyboard to mix short video clips or live cameras. We nixed the idea of doing a live show pretty early because we didn’t have the enough experience with the program or enough time to practice to make it good enough to be our final project.

I was initially pretty nervous: I don't have the audio skills of Julian, or the video experience of Jeremy. My real strength is story, and this was the first time I'd stepped outside of narrative to express myself. It was a pretty strange experience, to be honest. One of the things I'm proudest of is our audio track. I also hadn't really worked too much with audio, but I had collected some cool clips with my snazzy iPod recorder and I made some pretty sweet tracks with subway sounds. The awesome beat you hear toward the middle of the piece in the "subway techno" section was actually someone drumming on big plastic paint buckets and a trashcan. Julian put it all together and fortunately did a fabulous job, because despite listening to the track at least fifty times while editing, I never got tired of it.

The editing process itself was quite a journey. We had wanted to record our mix straight out of Livid Union, but due to either the bugginess of the program or the limited processing power of our many laptops, anything we tried to record directly was slow and choppy, and quite frankly unacceptable. Thanks to the sheer wizardry of Mr. Sairsingh and the helpful folks at the German Apple center, we ended up with a tangle of wires and laptops and cameras and cables that bypassed Livid Union's lameness entirely. After sifting all the video we shot into about 60 ten to twenty second clips, and sorting out far too many clips of flamingos (Jeremy went to the zoo), we took turns mixing and projecting and recording using Livid Union's digital effects banks. One important discovery was that even though Livid Union has tons of different effects, a lot of them are lame. In fact, we soon grew a little tired of the digital visual manipulations and started experimenting with the live camera instead. Pretty soon, one of us was typing on the laptop and using the iSight camera, one was holding the other camera and the third was editing with the midi keyboard. It was a truly collaborative experience. I think nothing shows this more than the shot towards the middle of the piece where Jeremy has the iSight in his mouth, Julian appears inside it and uses a key to "unlock" the potential of combination of digital and analog effects, while I turned on the effect with the keyboard. A lot of what we accomplished couldn't have been done without the cooperation with all three of us, and we had a lot of fun working together, which I think you can tell while watching the piece, especially when we made flamethrowers out of Old Spice deodorant and a lighter. There's nothing better than a final project where you can breathe fire.

It's been interesting showing this project to my family and friends. A lot of them have been thrown off by the fact that it's so, quite frankly, weird. One person said,"I can't say anything because I don't know what to look for." We get kind of hung up on this idea of "getting it" or finding some deep hidden meaning in everything. One thing I've learned on this trip is how to appreciate things without a clear meaning. Sometimes it's not about getting it.

With that in mind, don't be too worried about "getting it." Just enjoy it. Despite not setting out with a form a narrative, I think the piece evolved into the story of our journey in creating it. And I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Watch the Video

Adventures in Henna!!

2006-11-13T03:52:00.000-08:00

As promised, here is the video blog starring none other than the lovely Ms. Karen Borchert. It promises many shots of plant matter in my hair. I only wish I could have vlogged this in smell-o-vision.

Watch the Video

And I think you can download it for iPod here. But I could be wrong.

There's less than a day left in Berlin. I'm going to miss it.

Video Art and the Importance of Place

2006-11-13T02:31:00.000-08:00

Hot damn, that’s a lot of video art.

We went to Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum on Tuesday and saw a simply vast collection of projected video art. Two works that struck me were “As the Hammer Strikes” by John Massey, a recreation of a conversation between the artist and a hitchhiker on 3 channels, which dealt with misunderstandings and miscommunications in a really interesting way; and “Destroy She Said” by Monica Bonvicini, which cut together clips of women from European films in states of psychological distress in front of walls, and projected them onto two rough screens in a room with sawdust on the floor and exposed cables to emphasize the construction of the feminine cinematic identity. It really helped me, as a media student, to see such a variety of work in one place. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of video as an artistic medium and seeing them all together provided a really interesting context.

In a way, a lot of this trip has been about context. It’s very different to read and experience a work in its setting, in the story’s habitat. For example, I was having a fairly lousy time in London, but one thing that made me really excited was riding the tube and seeing the stop names that corresponded to Neverwhere, one of my favorite novels. I kept telling people about it (Holy crap! That sign says “Angel Islington!”), but no one else had read it. When a bunch of us went to Waterstones by the university, I bought myself a nice copy and it made the trip infinitely better.
Simply being in London made me read the book differently. It gave the work much more depth to have walked where the characters walked and seen what they saw. It was also very validating to have characters articulate what I had been feeling about the city. Like this: “Old Bailey remembered when people had actually lived here in the City, not just worked; when they had lived and lusted and laughed, built ramshackle houses one leaning against the next, each house filled with noisy people. Why, the noise and the mess and the stinks and the songs from the alley across the way (then known, at least colloquially, as Shitten Alley) had been legendary in their time, but no one lived in the city now. It was a cold and cheerless place of offices, of people who worked in the day and went home somewhere else at night. It was not a place for living anymore. He even missed the stinks.” We were staying in the business section of London and it was entirely cold and cheerless. The London we saw was the one Old Bailey lamented.

Also, I found Neil Gaiman’s blog which made me a very happy panda indeed. It feels almost intimate to be reading his personal journal, it’s like an extra look into his life; it practically makes us friends. Plus it’s a little extra Neil, which I’ll never turn down.

When I bought Neverwhere, I also bought “Berlin Stories” by Christopher Isherwood, the short stories on which the play “I am a Camera” is based, which inspired the musical Cabaret. Now I’ve been borderline obsessed with this musical since I read the script from the library freshmen year, but my efforts to see it or direct it have been consistently thwarted. Finally, my buddy Karen, who costars in my next video blog (Coming soon!) and is studying in Berlin right now, got the two of us tickets to go see it at Bar jeder Venuft and I was practically bouncing off the walls. Until we realized, after we silly Americans got our tickets, that it would be in German. Of which I speak only, uh, keine. None.

But, we went anyway, and I am immensely glad we did because it blew my mind. It was a small cast, about 12, with stellar choreography and costumes, and they used the space and the text in a way I really appreciated. They even used some of the same staging I imagined using. Because the actors were so physical and expressive and I have the play practically memorized, I followed the story just fine. It may have even been better, especially actually seeing it performed in Berlin. It really enriched the work.

I think that for me, part of the key to understanding a city and a space is to explore it through the stories of others. When we first came to Berlin, a bunch of us watched “Goodbye Lenin”, a film dealing with life in Berlin during and immediately after the wall fell. The film was fairly controversial when it was released because it showed people being nostalgic for the DDR. I have a really crappy sense of modern history (which I am completely ashamed of), and the film gave me a new look into a space and time I hadn’t experienced before. It was especially cool to have watched it before our bus tour and then walking around the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie (and Snackpoint Charlie, the convenience store across the way).

Long story short, I am having a fabulous time in Berlin, too much of a fabulous time to go out and be more consistent with my blogging (sorry!), but I’ll have some really cool catch up posts.

Look Ma, I'm a Vlogger!

2006-11-03T01:50:00.001-08:00

Guess what?!!?! I spent a good part of yesterday clambering around on the playground equipment outside our apartments with a camera and edited pretty much all of last night that wasn’t taken up by the wonderful dinner party Joe, Kristen and Jeremy threw (complete with delicious spaghetti, swing dancing, my chocolate fondue, and an exploding table and wine glass), and voila! I gots me a vlog!!!

By the way, if you’re looking for either a place to host your stuff, or a repository of other people’s stuff, check out blip.tv They’re a pretty sweet site and I just put the other videos on my blog up there, so check them out. In fact, today my movie "The Dead Menace" is on their "Don't Miss" list!!
But, first – my inaugural videoblog post - complete with Garageband soundtrack, one-handed camera work and a really cool shot of me going down a slide. Enjoy!

Watch the Video

Or watch it with Quicktime here

Ich bin ein Berliner...

2006-11-02T01:42:00.000-08:00

On our way back from a tour of Steim, a cross between a mad scientist's lab, a garage band, and an artist's colony, Julia and I stopped by a large Berliner stall and obtained bananen and appel bol Berliners, respectively.

However, delicious pastries are not the point of this entry.(see this entry for delicious pastry-related blogging)

Rather, I now find myself surrounded by a different sort of Berliners - the ones who decorate giant fiberglass bears and paint their entire bodies into flags for soccer. The ones who had apples and cookies waiting for us at our class and have an entire aisle devoted to chocolate in their grocery store. The ones with the most efficient IES we've found (not the coolest, no worries bicyclemark, but the most efficient) and most definitely the best apartments I've had the pleasure of making tea in. I hadn't realized how much I missed cooking until we moved in to a place with kitchens. Tonight, I'm making chocolate fondue.

But, with Berlin comes the end of our program, and the culmination of our work in digital art, which means I need to get my ass in gear for the final project.

And that is freaking me out. I'm working with Julian and Jeremy on some sort of VJ thing. At first we were going to do a live performance, then we realized we didn't have any time to practice, so we were going to do a 12-15 minute video using the Livid Union mixing tools and effects, but editing it in Final Cut, but after seeing so much cool live stuff, like Pipslab which blew my mind, the bar has been significantly raised. We're simultaneously inspired and frightened, or at least I am.

(picture by CultuurPodium)If music, theater, video had some sort of huge creative orgy, they would have somehow birthed the crazy Dutch artists of Pipslab. We saw a tape of a performance of "The Washing Powder Conspiracy" which was simply amazing. Their use of digital tools transcended the "holy crap that's cool!" aesthetic to the "whoa, that makes me think!" part that a lot of new media tends not to quite get to.

iPod Shuffle is the Devil

2006-10-29T10:45:00.000-08:00

As a way of exploring Amsterdam, our Roadtrip group was assigned a "mis-walk," where we navigate the city according to creative parameters. Susan and I threw ourselves on the mercy of iPod Shuffle. I’ve been fascinated by the “shuffle” feature since I became too lazy to choose my own music. It’s been a source of inspiration, frustration, and confusion. On occasion, Shuffle seems to be anything but random, choosing songs that are either perfect or perfectly inappropriate for the moment. We could only hope that Shuffle would be up to the challenge of guiding us through Amsterdam.
We started out at Leidseplein as it’s a central location and close to where we’re staying. If a song is happy or upbeat, we’d turn right, and if a song is sad or slow, we’d turn left, then walk in that direction until the song changed, at which point we’d go to the nearest corner and turn based on the next song. If there were strong thematic or lyrical cues in the song that related to our surroundings, we’d follow them no matter what the tempo of the song – such as the song “Heartbreak Hotel” would cause us to turn towards the nearest hotel. I’ll admit that we did try to stack the deck a bit – I added the song “Milkshake” by Kelis and “C is for Cookie” to Susan’s iPod just in case – but we were determined to acquiese to Shuffle’s demands.

It started out with some difficulty. Our fourth song ended while we were in the middle of a long block, where turning left would mean smashing into a building and turning right would mean jumping into a canal. We decided, instead, to turn and establish a neutral position (turning opposite to the direction you were walking) then continue as normal. This initially led us back the way we came, but as soon as we hit Leidseplein, Eve 6’s “Saturday Night” came on and we really started moving. We tried, as best we could, to walk in tempo with the music, so faster songs ended up taking us longer distances than slow ones and, because Shuffle is mean, or at least seems to play blocks of songs with similar tempos, we made three loops on our journey through Amsterdam, which ended at Dam Square at the "Roller Ghoster" carnival ride (pictured above).

For the most part, we relied on song tempo or mood to determine our direction, but we did have some interesting thematic cues that led us around: we followed the canals for “Pacific Theme,” went towards the warmer looking street for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and followed the tram for “Chariot” by Aaron Copeland. While “Milkshake” didn’t play, Shuffle still compelled us to seek out dessert. After listening to “Forgive Me, My Little Flower Princess” and hearing Susan talk about how John Lennon cheated on Yoko, we were feeling pretty down. When the next song, “Girlfren” by Modern Lover, was even more depressing, one of us jokingly commented that we’d need a pint of Haagen Daas to get weepy over if the depressing songs continued, lo and behold – we found ourselves in front of an ice cream store. We took it as a sign, and two chocolate-almond Magnum bars later, we continued our journey. Sadly, not all of our thematic cues were as delicious. Later in our walk, we found ourselves on the edge of the red light district. We thought, please, Shuffle, be merciful. Please, please, please be a sad song...

Shuffle played Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland.”

Thanks, Shuffle.

So we had no choice but to walk the gauntlet of scantily clad women in red-lit windows. Fortunately, we were far enough on the fringes that we were able to get out before Jimi stopped wailing.

We walked through Amsterdam for 26 songs, including two Bob Dylan songs, two by John Lennon, and a fourteen-minute Husker Du instrumental. It was definitely a new way to experience the city. I found myself listening much harder to the lyrics and paying close attention to my surroundings, trying to find meaningful connections. It’s interesting to contrast our iPod experience with that of a typical iPod listener. Usually, when you put your earbuds in, you’re trying to shut out the outside world, but we were trying to directly engage with it. Maybe if more people tried to connect what they were listening to with where they were, they too could find a personal soundtrack for the city and engage with it on an entirely different level.

Quest for Pie and Internet Growing Pains

2006-10-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

I am so insanely full of Dutch Apple Pie right now, and it is a marvelous feeling indeed. Before our class this morning, a few of us decided that we needed to partake in this particular pie while we were in town and thought that for lunch, we’d just pop around the corner where they had “Dutch apple pie” advertised in the window. However, as we were gathering ourselves outside the IES building, Marc Van Woudenberg from Xolo.tv, who spoke to our class about the personal publishing revolution, shook his head and drew a dot on Jenny’s map on the opposite side of the city. “That’s where you need to go if you want Dutch Apple Pie.”

Thus began our quest for pie.
I ended up singing, to the tune of “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, of course, “This is My Quest / For Dutch Apple Pie// We may never find it/ But dammit, we’ll try!”

There was more to the song, but I’ll spare you. Anyway, after much traipsing through some very pretty parts of Amsterdam, we came upon a little café called Winkel by Noorder Markt, and we sat out among the pidgeons and ate amazingly delicious apple pie with loads of whipped cream and a cold glass of milk. It was marvelous. When I get the pictures from Caitlin, I’ll pop them up. It promises to be adorable.
We’ve had a really wonderful last couple of days. Yesterday, we went to visit the Waag Society, a new media organization that meets in this castle and does a lot of really cool media stuff.One project that I thought sounded really fun was Frequency 1550, a mobile phone based scavenger hunt designed for a high school history class. As the students navigated through Amsterdam, they could see their progress overlaid on a medieval map, and were given tasks and challenges to do at different sites of historical significance. The student’s journey was based on a religious miracle that made Amsterdam a pilgrimage site in the 1500s. As I understand it, a priest was giving a man his last rites, but as he was dying, he vomited up the wafer. The priest then threw the vomit into the fire, as was customary at the time and low and behold, the host would not burn. So the Miraculous Vomited Communion Wafer that Would Not Burn was put in a box and brought to the local church, and there were many magnificent Processions in its honor. And, with the support and ingenuity of the Waag, students can process around, too. And learn!

Our group also got the chance to do short projects inspired by the Waag, and people did some very cool things. Jeremy and Joe made a silent movie, ; Sarah recreated the building with elements from pictures she took in the area surrounding it (much cooler to look at than for me to describe) and a group of us recreated Rembrandt’s painting “The Anatomy Lesson,” which was sketched and displayed in the building. John was the Doctor dissecting a computer. Terin was Hunchy, Susan was Redheady, Stacey was Stretchy, August was Lanky "TotallyNotPayingAttentiony" was none other than renowned vlogger Bicyclemark. I called my guy "Nauseous."

Today, as I alluded to in the pie anecdote, Marc from Xolo.tv dropped in to speak to us about personal publishing. As I'm sure you're unaware of from reading this ever-so-professional weblog, I'm very new to the world of self-published digital media, but I'm working on it. I'm actually pretty fascinated/repulsed/confused/excited by this crazy series of tubes, especially as a fledgling producer of independent media. I literally did a happy dance when I made the DVDfest zombie movie available for podcast. Talking with the vloggers today definitely inspired me to at least try to make quality, interesting stuff and put it out there. We're on the verge of a new era, and sure, the internet is still in its "fart jokes, people falling off of stuff, and cat puns" phase, but I do believe it has the potential to be something vibrant and beautiful and creative. *sigh*

Or maybe that's just the pie talking.

Also, in my attempts to understand who the heck is actually looking at this, would you (yes, you) mind leaving a comment? Just say how you found this, or where you're from, or whatever. It's just nice to know people are listening.

An Unfortunate Metaphor and Catch-Up Blogging

2006-10-24T03:19:00.000-07:00

A bunch of us were wandering through Leidseplein and amidst the stick jugglers and the one man drum bands, there was a large, plastic, hexagonal structure with a bunch of people standing on it with their backs turned. It took me a few moments to realize that this was a public urinal. A public urinal. At first I was kind of shocked, I mean, there are people peeing in the streets!

But then I realized that I had seen just as many people doing that in London and New York, except they were just doing it on a wall, instead of in a plastic port-a-potty with modest walled compartments and a collection system. I think this serves as an apt metaphor for Dutch politics - people are going to do it anyway, why not make it as safe and decent as possible?

In many ways, the Netherlands (not Holland, that’s only the upper third or so of the country), is the liberal ideal – people are given the freedom to make personal choices and the government tolerates it, but not in the way you tolerate wet socks on a rainy day, more of a live and let live tolerance. It’s almost like a big canal-filled liberal arts college, where everyone is assumed to at least tolerate everyone else’s choices to be “different.”

As long as they aren’t too different, that is.

We had someone come and speak to us about the Dutch culture, and one issue that’s huge is the interaction between the wider, liberal community and the religious Islamic community. Here’s an article from the BBC last March about whether the tolerance of the Netherlands has failed. The article cites as one of the possible reasons for Dutch-Muslim problems is that the nation has never considered itself a nation of immigrants, which the speaker mentioned several times.

I think that’s probably one of the only reasons the Netherlands as “liberal paradise” has worked this long: it had been a small, homogeneous nation. America is simply too big, in both size and variety of opinions for leftist regime of tolerance and legalization of just about everything to exist. The Dutch approach to government may be a bit like communism – it only works on a small scale with a controlled population. Communism works fine in small communes or on the kibbutzim in Israel, but with too many people and too many competing interests and beliefs, it falls apart.

Ach.

Apologies for the long post, by the way, but this is one of the first times I’ve had consistent internet access in a week, and by, golly, I’ve seen some blog-worthy things.

Like The Van Gogh Museum. I went with Susan, and we spent a good two and a half hours immersed in art not only from Van Gogh, but work of his contemporaries, and a very good photography exhibit.
A photograph that particularly struck me was “Florence, Italy” by Ruth Orkin, which depicts a woman walking down the street facing a gauntlet of men whistling and gaping at her. Her eyes are cast down, terrified, as she clutches her shawl to her bare shoulder. The little web image doesn't do it justice, but the original photograph was amazing.

Along with the photography, painting and Van Gogh, there was a large exhibit on Japan in the 19th century which included artifacts from Japan's first exhibition in the US in 1976 alongside some of Van Gogh's Japanese-inspired work. The most innovative part of the "Japanese Season" show in the museum was an exhibit designed by fashion duo (warning: very weird, but rather cool website)Viktor&Rolf, that explored the similarities and difference between Women in Tokyo and Paris in the nineteenth century. The exhibit consisted of drawings and paintings of women from the two countries as well as artifacts like fans, pillows, hairpins, and dressing gowns. It was set up like a room that was partially in Tokyo and partially in Paris, with windows that looked out on the skyline of each city, and a space in the middle where a performance took place on a regular schedule. It was really innovatively done, and the artifacts chosen were interesting on their own, but in the context of the other culture, I appreciated them on an entirely different level.

So, I guess I've been having a really interesting and very good time in Amsterdam so far. I can't believe that in a week, we'll be leaving for Berlin, which is an entirely different world. But, hopefully, I'll get internet between now and then and be able to post more adventures.

If Las Vegas and Santa Cruz had a baby…

2006-10-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

...I'd be in that baby right now.

That’s right folks, our wacky New Media Roadtrip has officially arrived in Amsterdam. The wireless connection where we’re staying is rather unreliable, but other than that I find Amsterdam really charming. We’re a bit far from central Amsterdam, but we’re smack dab in the middle of the museum quarter and right outside a gorgeous park with willows and branches and sculptures.

Unfortunately, I thought I left my camera in my room the day a bunch of wandered through the whole city, only to find it in the bottom of my purse as soon as we left the picturesque areas. I only managed to snap this one picture of a relatively unlovely canal. As I assume they say in Dutch “Whaaattevaar.”

On an only slightly related note, I’d never want to play Dutch Wheel of Fortune, because all you’d do is buy vowels.

Also, I hope you enjoy the new graphics on the sidebar. Much thanks to all those who helped me compose them, especially Tom, Andrea, and Caitlin (who’s very hard to make, by the way, and could probably use some suggestions on how to improve her icon) and all I coerced into picking shirts for me. If you want to make your own South Park type things go to this website. It’s definitely the best character generator out there and has the coolest hair options.

So, as you can see, I spent the limited online time I had very wisely and in an academic manner. A more intellectually engaging post and less South Park-full post coming soon.

---Edit---
Hmm. For some reason, the pictures aren't showing up in the sidebar,despite them appearing when I previewed my template changes. Don't worry, it's a work in progress and soon they'll be up and running. Sorry.

---Edit Again!---
So it turns out that the quotation marks in my code were in the wrong font. Go figure. Enjoy the South Park New Media Roadtrippers!

Oxford Adventures

2006-10-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

I haven't been quite as excited about London as I thought I would be. Our housing is in the stuffy, business part of town, which is dull, uninviting, and a far cry from NYC. The food is expensive, the people unfriendly, and overall, I just haven't been as enchanted with London as I thought I would be. Parts have been downright enchanting, like seeing five awesome plays and going to high tea at Fortnum and Masons (so many tiny sandwiches, so little time!), but overall, I've been less thrilled about London than I thought I would be.
So rather than spend another day in our hamster-scented rooms, a group of us took a day trip to Oxford. It was marvelous. It was ancient, as most of London is, but it was also lived in and vibrant. We went to Oxford Castle and forewent the expensive historical tour for free rolling on the grass. A rather worthwhile trade in my opinion.

One of the main reasons for our day trip was a pilgrimage to the Eagle and Child, the pub where CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein and other learned men with only initials for first names hung out. I was particulary impressed by the pub sign which, as you can see, features a large eagle carrying off a small child, presumably to eat it. The Inklings, the crew JRR and CS ran with, affectionately referred to the pub as "The Bird and Baby" but other nicknames include "The Bird and Brat" and "The Fowl and Foetus." We ate a suprisingly pleasant English dinner, checked out the Rabbit Room and talked about the Narnia books.
Had I not sent my larger memory card home accidentally, I could have posted all sorts of pictures of our adventures wandering through Oxford, sneaking into colleges, and checking out all the cool architectural bits, but alas, my camera can only take maybe 25 pictures without crapping out.

Fortunately, I managed to get a few pictures of the Clarendon Building which featured statues of the nine Muses by James Thornhill. For some reason, I found myself fascinated by this one statue on the corner. She has two masks in her hands and what looks like a head on a chain around her neck. Anyway, I felt some sort of weird connection to her, and through some careful googling, I've narrowed her down to either Melpomene, the muse of tragic poetry, or Thalia, the muse of comedy and playful verse. At any rate, she completely captivated me.

Other Oxford adventures included riding a bus through the lovely, fog draped English countryside and finding a human jawbone in an old cemetary.

Also, more American buildings, Carleton College in particular, need gargoyles.

Wow! A Conflux Video! How Timely!!

2006-10-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, so maybe the festival was, like, a whole city ago, but I've now got the awesome video from Stephen Lichty's performance for the Conflux festival in Williamsburg. The awesome music was made by my baby brother, who rocks out loud. If you're at his school and considering dating him, go for it. He's quite awesome.

It runs in the family you know.

I'll put a little linky-poo on the sidebar to download this to your iPod, but you can also watch the file with Quicktime

If there isn't a controller visible, just click on the white box and hit the space bar. At least that worked for me.

In other news, I saw three plays in three days and it was marvelous. More on that later, possibly.

Jolly Good Show

2006-10-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

Goodness gracious, it's lovely here.

The buildings and streets make you want to sing Mary Poppins songs all the time, which I do. The cathedral pictured above is not, however, the St. Paul's were the little old bird woman comes, but St. Peter's which is across the millenium bridge from the Tate Modern, where I spent a rather enjoyable afternoon.

That's Jenny in front of a Rothko piece, which is part of a series initally commissioned for the Four Seasons hotel. Rothko painted these somber, brick toned pieces designed to make the viewer feel trapped or walled in. The wall plaque in the gallery noted that he resigned his commission because of the tones of the paintings, but according to Wikipedia, my definitive source on all things snarky, Rothko is quoted in an interview with Harpers as saying his true intention with the Four Seasons piece is to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days."

I like Mark Rothko.

At any rate, the murals are now on display in their own dark little room in the Tate Modern,and man are they effective. I definitely felt walled in and trapped. If I were running the Four Seasons and this guy had shown up with these oppressive burgandy canvasses, I probably would have punched him. Or perhaps just pulled a "Cask of Amontillado," and been entirely poetically justified.

I was overall very impressed with the Tate. The works themselves were marvelous, but the way they were presented was particularly excellent. Not only did every work have a little context blurb by it, there were larger wall plaques giving historical context and a brief explanation of the larger movement the pieces represent. It made the experience much richer for those with scant art history backgrounds such as myself. The only thing that really disappointed me was that they weren't done installing the slides for the next exhibit going into the massive turbine gallery. Slides? Yes. Slides.

My two favorite exhibits were the last two we saw. One was a piece by Christian Marclay called Video Quartet. It was a four screen projection with scenes from different Hollywood films combined into this gorgeous visual and musical symphony. It was energetic and fun and lovely. It reminded me a bit of "A Movie" by Bruce Conner in its juxtaposition of initally unrelated clips into a new narrative. One of my favorite moments in Video Quartet shows a woman knocking on a door in one of the clips, then on the clip next to her, a couple listens at the door, as though the two movies are communicating to one another. It was inventive and marvelous. Bravo Mr. Marclay!

My other favorite exhibit was a room filled with Guerilla Girls posters. Holy Craps. I'm in the middle of this huge feminist awakening (see previous post) and it was so empowering to see people being smart and in your face about stuff that I cared about. I actually found the MoMA in New York really disconcerting because I found myself surrounded by female objects, but almost no female voices. It did seem like a woman's only place in the gallery was naked on the wall. It's something that I've noticed more on this trip than I have before in my life, maybe it's because of the queer theater class I took this last term, maybe it's because I've done a lot of introspection on myself as a woman, or maybe it's just because I'm surrounded by all this traditional art, but I find myself more and more aware of the lack of female voices in the world around me. Next time you're in a museum or reading the credits of a movie, notice how many are women. I, for one, was unpleasantly suprised.

Robo-Boobs

2006-09-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

When dealing with robots, there are two main questions.

1) When will they kill us?

and

2) Who are they trying to replace?

I'm not sure about the first one, but after spending time at the Wired NextFest today, the answer to number two is pretty clear: Women.

A group of us spent a lot of time early on in the robot section and the first thing we sought out were the Robot Ballroom Dance partners, blue and pink self-described "fem-bots" with itty little waists, oddly placed breasts, and inexplicable Mickey Mouse ears. They were designed to follow a waltz partner and sensors on the waist and arm tell them when to turn on the wheels hidden in their voluminous skirt thing. They were pretty disappointing overall. Make that very disappointing. The best part of the demonstration was the guy's silver denim tuxedo with built in cumberbund belt, which would have been pretty amazing on its own, but it just made the robots look lamer.

Across the way were smaller, but much cooler robots called Chroino who were designed to mimic a human gait. They move more naturally than other androids because of their flexible carbon-plastic exoskeleton and even center of gravity (at least according to the NextFest program I kept for reference). At any rate, these things were amazing, every joint was fluid, every movement looked somehow natural. We saw the slender white robot walk, and by walk I mean catwalk. This thing could strut its stuff, wiggling its little robot tush and shaking what its engineer gave it. We spoke to the designer and he said he based the movement on runway models. It's an interesting challenge and was very well executed, but in the context of some of the other robots shown, it could have some disturbing social consequences.
Look at this:

Girl Robots:

Boy Robots:

I don't understand this need to sexualize robots, particularly hypersexualizing the "female" ones. It's Minnie Mouse Syndrome - in order to distinguish genders you need to add extra things, like a bow and eyelashes to the female ones while leaving the male ones neutral or normal. Why do robots even need to be gendered?
Oh wait. I know why...

This is a graphic from the website of Kokoro, a realistic human "actroid" made by the same company who makes Hello Kitty. I really hope that "working girl" has different connotations in Japan.

Kokoro was at the festival and performed a traditional Japanese dance called "Girl with Wisteria." She was more like a Pirates of the Carribbean attraction than the interactive wonder-bot she was supposed to be (most of the robots exhibited were pretty buggy, maybe because most ran windows!), but still downright eerie. The promotional video listed her possible functions as stewardess, nurse, actress (well, at least an actress dressed as a French maid), nanny, and "the beautiful woman at the bar." Robot working girl indeed!
Anywhere we see realistic female androids, the inevitable sexbot question comes up. The videos of the actroid and her predecessors prompt user comments like "I'd hit that" or "who needs real women" or what they'll be able to do when the mouth can make more realistic shapes.

If this is the future, it's a huge step backwards into a place I know I don't want to go. I call for an intelligent feminist critique of robotic fetishism, perhaps accompanied by a metal bra burning. I'll get the soldering iron.