I'm not going to improve upon the comment that I read about this video earlier today, so I won't even try. Here is this year's entry for the PR Award, aka the Pete Rose Award, and if you know why we're calling it that, then you know:
Not much happening in the Nyetverse today - it's Teacher Appreciation Week, which means little more than a bunch of random markered up posters plastered all over the hallways and a breakfast spread in the faculty lounge. Plus, we get to go to Vinny T's this Friday for appetizers and beer / wine, but we are NOT allowed to bring our Pippen/Jordans. The financial wranglings of educational institution continues to baffle me. On the plus side, the cooler members of the faculty are going candle-pin bowling after the brouhaha, so that will be sweet.
Last night we (iF, Grin, SWAT-Goat* and I) hit up a new Mexican place around the corner. And it was good. Greasy style Tex-mex, a little bit, and the salsa was watered downa dn the margaritas not salty enough, but aside from that, excellent. I had a gigantic plate with lots of beans, cheese and rice. Excellente.
* - Speaking of the SWAT-Goat, Beck's car was still in the shop as of this AM, so I took the train into Natick. When I took it back today, Ali was nice enough to let me borrow her Accord so I didn't have to walk home the 5 miles from the train station. Holla Girl. And for the record, the reason that "Prettiest" (for this entry only) is becoming "Specialest Weaponest Andest Tactickest" is that Ali, finding herself locked out of her apartment in the cold, kicked her door in. Destroyed the lock and everything (though the bolt is still in place). I saw the boot used; it's large and in charge. And given the great success of Ali's hit comedy "That's Ali!," we're pretty sure that she has the star-power to launch a secondary Action-Drama called "SWAT-Goat," which if nothing else will feature a Heidi-cam from-inside-the-apartment shot of Ali busting in her door as its intro. Heidi, incidentally, is her dog.
And lest I forget to mention it, Benjamin shared a story in which he won $17.45 on a one dollar bet and then promptly lost $45 later that night on a hand of poker. Reno, NV, is dangerous.
S0 a good weekend - Beck and I chilled for a lot of it, and took in a fair number of Weeds episodes, a show that is fast becoming awesome. I also finished Baseball Between the Numbers and am well on my way (40 pages left) to finishing Michael Lewis's The Blind Side. Reviews will follow.
That's it until inspiration strikes...
Monday, February 12, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Women, Wallace, and Wow
The iF* and I headed down to the Nut on Friday night to watch a pair of one-act student productions, an actor-vehicle tour de force called "Women and Wallace" and a test-anxiety comedy called "This is a Test."For some reason my addled brain thought the shows started at 7, so when Beck got home from the clinic we rushed down there and grabbed Chili's, only to discover we had an hour to kill... so we drove over to Wellesley and drank a coffee at Peet's. Solid. Headed back to the Black Box Theater at The Nut, a side stage and intimate performance setting adjacent to the auditorium proper. After introducing Beck to a few miscellaneous parents (Grace's) and teachers (Madames Sand and Wilson, our French dept. extraordinaire), we sat down in the front row of the stadium seated Black Box to take in some culture. Remember that we were in the front row, because this means we were often 3 feet and never more than 15 feet away from the action. The action.
*(I am jumping on Karen's suggestion that Beck gets a reprieve from her more ferrous-based nickname and temporarily gets to join her family in the iNickname department as iFiancee. Last night we tried to think of a way she could maintain this nickname after a certain significant date, and she tried to pull something like "WiFe." Not only does this odd nickname looks like a chemical equation for a metal video-gaming system (Wii Fe), it also would have to be pronounced "WeeFay," which just makes her sound like a Borat line, like "Doo yu lyke my WeeFay? She's berry nice, berry nice." In other words, enjoy "iF" while it lasts).
My advisee Jon is playing the lead role of Wallace in WaW, the play directed by my awesome student and generally seventh level human being Danielle. I had heard that Jon was very talented, and all my jokes about ladies love cool jones yesterday aside, this guy around campus is the real LL Cool J. To say the very least, the guy owns the rumors. Jon is just amazing; this role bounces around a lot between intensity and sorrow, insecurity, weakness, reckless boldness, snide anger and comedy, and Jon nailed all aspects. Beck and I talked about the fact that some actors are very good but are obviously trying very hard; Jon is great, butter and natural as can be. I can't say enough great things about him as an actor - he was fantastic, an oddly enough, against the backdrop of an intense performance and often dark dramatic role, his top notch comedic timing stood out. I normally eschew giving people's full names here for all the obvious Sign-O-The-Times reasons, but Jon Victor - keep an eye out for this guy, he has got "It" in a big way.
So the stage is very small, minimalist set with chairs lining both sides of the room and a set of black-painted boxes in the middle that in typical minimalist fashion served multiple roles in the play - couch, coffee table, bed, park bench, etc. The play is framed by a number of pieces written and delivered in monologue by the lead Wallace. It starts with Wallace as a six year old delivering an ode to his mother and her peanut butter and banana sandwich making ability; Jon is enthralled by his mother, a small but vital role played by the otherworldly striking Britton. Wallace leaves for school on top of the world, but in a scene that made my heart plummet runaway elevator style (Britton and Danielle did an incredible job with this, the lighting, blocking and timing all conspired to deliver an emotional gut punch that set the tone for the entire show), Wallace's mother commits suicide with a kitchen knife. Wallace returns home from school that day to find his mother lying on the floor and a suicide note that reads "cremate the parasite." His life is set in motion. But during the scene change, mom does not exit stage left, but sits in the shadows on the left side of the stage. All of the women who Wallace encounters in his life, actually, do not exit the stage but sit on its side, serving as physical reminders of Wallace's path. Very cool blocking touch.
The remainder of the show consists of Wallace's attempts to deal with this traumatic jolt to his childhood and specifically with how his mother's death affects his relationships with women. And only women; Wallace is the only actualized male character in the play (though his father is referenced occasionally). The play traces these relationships - the first is a classic lunch-trading encounter a few days after his mother's suicide; the bubbly schoolgirl Victoria, played over-the-top to perfection by Sophie, has all the natural curiosity about boys and kissing and Wallace's mom's suicide that you would expect, but Wallace is a far cry from handling this. Actually, his lack of ability to handle it seems barely different from any 6 year old boy's ability to handle a member of the opposite sex; this scene was endearing in its subtle portrayal of the fact that other than some overt observations made by Wallace about his dad NOT disappearing after making him a sandwich, Wallace isn't really capable of manifesting the trauma yet, nor does he grasp what has happened. Their encounter ends in hilarious "Cooties!" fashion, and it is notably Wallace who rejects the advance.
We also see Wallace with his grandmother, a recurring character sharply played in highly stereotypical Jewish fashion by Alexa. This is another example of the height of performance that is the norm at the Nut; "stereotypically Jewish fashion" sounds like a dig, and at 99% of high school plays, it would be. But Alexa draped the role with subtle asides , touches, and snappy timing that made the role not only uproariously funny, but touching as well. She's Wallace's surrogate mother, and serves as his home base for questions and attempts to deal with his own life story; she also notably tempers Wallace's fickle temper with ease. She pops up again and again throughout the play and serves to ground the lead character, but manages to do so in a decidedly un-afterschool special fashion. She, too, was great, and her use of real-props - plates of cookies, milk glasses, etc. - brought a warmth to a mostly empty stage. She also delivered some of the more poignant lines - unlike the psych office (see below), her advice to not "blame your mother until you die" comes off as heartfelt and natural, and gives punch to the major moral theme of the show.
If the show had a weak spot, it was in the scenes between Wallace and his psychiatrist. I would not attribute this to the actress, Kathy, nor the director; the psychiatrist's part just seem odd and strangely written. She did not really *act* like a psychiatrist; Wallace is initially sent to her by his father because he is breaking glassware as a means of dealing with his emotional turmoil, and he later seeks her out to deal with some of his own confusion in relationships. But in both scenes, the psychiatrist serves as an inconsequential recipient of what barely amounts to a conversation, and is actually just more monologues that push the narrative along. My main problem with the scenes is how taken aback and rendered mute the psychiatrist is by Wallace's forceful personality, especially later int he play when she basically cowers before him. Kathy did a great job of portraying the clinical neutrality required of a psychiatrist and the real terror that the playwright wanted her to express. I just didn't find this as real as the bulk of the play was: sure, Wallace is in many ways a damaged human at these points in his life, but his place int he damaged human continuum is not something that is so extreme that a psychiatrist would be baffled by it. Unfortunately, a lot of the self-exegesis of the exact nature of Wallace's turmoil is revealed in these scenes, and they ring a little hollow. Case in point: I thought Wallace's descriptions of his breaking glassware to deal with his pain in his essay was much more powerful than the same description from his stand on the couch speech in the psychiatrist's office. The shrink's office did contain the scene where Wallace overtly confronts his mother and her death, and even tries to re-imagine his life had he stolen her knife. And this scene drilled the "accept yourself, work in the now and don't dwell on the past" aspects of the play (though it did so in a less graceful fashion than the grandmother scene mentioned above). But, I think, they could have taken place independent of the somewhat cliched psych-office visit.
And now, the part of the show that has the students abuzz: the kissing plus. Since so much of this is about Wallace's feelings about women, it is completely natural that his mother's death would slide into his early kissing and sexual experiences. And I would put a HUGE emphasis on natural - it would have been very easy for all of these scenes to have come across as awkward or unfeeling, but every one was pulled off sans anything awkward or childish; this was first rate professional work, and given the hormonal situations these teenagers are overcoming, it makes their accomplishment in this regard all the more impressive. Big kudos to the director for maximizing the power of these scenes, making them solidly emotional, frightening, heartwarming, and let's not forget, FREAKING hilarious. Wallace's interactions with the women (and his dialog, for that matter, which grew perfectly more adult as he progressed through his life) escalate in strength and desperation. His first-kiss encounter in middle school with Victoria, the same girl from the sandwich scene, turns from an awkward , do-we-really-have-to-do-this into scary eagerness in a heartbeat; he scares off his first "love." His second, an out-of-control alcohol-aided messy attempt at romancing the smart valedictorian (Sarah, played with cool dignity by Logan) of his school, goes from moving too fast to a pathetic attempt at apology; he ends the scene literally on his knees, blaming the moon for its failure to help him win her heart.
Oh, and then there's something I'll describe as "THE SCENE," and as I mentioned with the Borat film, there are some things my retina unfortunately cannot unsee. This in NO way because the scene was bad, or that it will traumatize me in anything near the same way 10 minutes of naked Borat wrestling with a fat naked man did. This is because it was a sex scene involving Grace!
A little background: Grace is an impossibly cute, sweet, lovely and soul-crushingly sincere and heartwarming sophomore from last semester's Alg. II class. She came in really struggling and disliking math, but we worked together on it a lot throughout the semester and she worked her butt off and did very well in the course. Her parents are awesome; they appreciated me and did great stuff like call the administrators to let them know what a good job I was doing, and called me for advice on what courses she should take and the like. In short, great family and great girl, definitely the type of person who makes all aspects of the job worth it. Furthermore, we serve the role of in loco parentis for all of our students, and I would definitely help anyone who needed anything, but with Grace it's not a vocational obligation - I feel wholly responsible and I owe it to her parents to ensure her well-being as much as I can. If anyone so much as laid a finger, etc., they would have a very angry Texan on their hands indeed. I get the feeling I would be the type of daughter's father who the boys would dread meeting.
So in this play, we find Wallace in his freshman dorm with Lili (played by Grace), a senior dancer who is VERY eager to deflower young Wallace (Grace's dad summed up the role as "slut." Her dad!). I can't even describe how awesome and funny this scene was; between Wallace's fumbling, Lili's intense, writhing and dancer-stretching Mrs. Robinson act, and some wickedly smart dialog, the whole scene of them talking pre-act was funny enough. That part of the scene ends when Wallace claps to turn off the lights, and everyone in the audience is applauding at the brilliance. But it's not over. Oh, no, no. With the house lights more or less out, Lili and Wallace have some quite believable simulated sex on stage, further riddled with hilarious dialog. The entire venue is pretty much exploding with laughter at this point. Laughter at the real funniness of the scene, but also, let's face it, the audience is at least fifty percent teenage, and they are watching their peers simulate sex on stage! Did I mention that Jon's mom and both of Grace's parents are in the audience? And did I mention that we are in a very small, intimate theater setting, so they are probably a whopping twenty feet from their faux-copulating offspring? Hello awkward.
So great acting could be summed up as that which makes you forget that there are actors up there. Um, in this scene, I did not forget. And I can't imagine what Grace's parents were feeling at this point (actually, Grace has been in productions like Hair before this, so this wasn't here first foray into on-stage seediness. Plus after the show, her mom delivered the BRILLIANT line, "As long as it's it's simulated, I'm okay with it."). And Grace, as Beck noted, was (um, Understandably!) nervous about this scene; you could see her carotid pulse pumping at 180 from across the room. But to everyone's credit, they pulled it off and then some - quintessentially professional, hilarious, heartfelt, and all of that, all in a context they had ever reason to crack in. So, damn - Grace was outstanding, and has all kinds of potential to be one of these brilliant comedic actresses - Gilda Radner readily comes to mind. But all of that said, I still spent the entire time dumbfounded with the willies.
Now let us never speak of this again. :)
The show ends with Lili disappointed in Wallace; she passes him off to her younger sister Nina (played well by Nina - this was a sympathetic role that could've devolved to wet-blanket girlfriend, but she carried herself well and, in the end, convincingly dropped into hate-fueled anger), with whom Wallace falls deeply and honestly in love. But with his residual pain from mother, he cannot trust her fully, so he cheats on her - and after some soul-searching, decides to tell her. She reacts violently, but ultimately comes back, leaving Wallace to reject his notion that women will always desert him.
I took a little bit of issue with this tidy ending to the play; again, not something the actors or director could have done much with, but I found it to be a little over-the-top Hallmark. The brutal truth is that there will be no curtain-closing resolution, that no matter how much one can get over it and move on, that pain will always exist. I much more appreciated the earlier-mentioned aspect, that life shapes you and you shape it. I would rather focus on this idea and less on some fantasy-based notion that everything is going to be alright.
That said, great, great show. This was a top level performance, and with all apologies to Clark theater people (my brother, really, not the ones who went on to illustrious reality show careers), this was far and away the best high school theater I've seen. Having that level of talent collected in one institution is nothing short of incredible - and let's keep in mind that these heights were achieved by a *student director.* I can't say this enough - big, big congratulations to Danielle; you pulled off something tremendous.
And not to short it - the later show, This is a Test, was excellent and very, very funny as well. It's lead, Austin, pulled off his own tour-de-force of paranoid, frenetic anxiety that was sidesplitting. My SASI student Josh played a hilarious send up of evil, pretentious teachers everywhere. SO it was great, too, but I was just blown away by WaW.
*(I am jumping on Karen's suggestion that Beck gets a reprieve from her more ferrous-based nickname and temporarily gets to join her family in the iNickname department as iFiancee. Last night we tried to think of a way she could maintain this nickname after a certain significant date, and she tried to pull something like "WiFe." Not only does this odd nickname looks like a chemical equation for a metal video-gaming system (Wii Fe), it also would have to be pronounced "WeeFay," which just makes her sound like a Borat line, like "Doo yu lyke my WeeFay? She's berry nice, berry nice." In other words, enjoy "iF" while it lasts).
My advisee Jon is playing the lead role of Wallace in WaW, the play directed by my awesome student and generally seventh level human being Danielle. I had heard that Jon was very talented, and all my jokes about ladies love cool jones yesterday aside, this guy around campus is the real LL Cool J. To say the very least, the guy owns the rumors. Jon is just amazing; this role bounces around a lot between intensity and sorrow, insecurity, weakness, reckless boldness, snide anger and comedy, and Jon nailed all aspects. Beck and I talked about the fact that some actors are very good but are obviously trying very hard; Jon is great, butter and natural as can be. I can't say enough great things about him as an actor - he was fantastic, an oddly enough, against the backdrop of an intense performance and often dark dramatic role, his top notch comedic timing stood out. I normally eschew giving people's full names here for all the obvious Sign-O-The-Times reasons, but Jon Victor - keep an eye out for this guy, he has got "It" in a big way.
So the stage is very small, minimalist set with chairs lining both sides of the room and a set of black-painted boxes in the middle that in typical minimalist fashion served multiple roles in the play - couch, coffee table, bed, park bench, etc. The play is framed by a number of pieces written and delivered in monologue by the lead Wallace. It starts with Wallace as a six year old delivering an ode to his mother and her peanut butter and banana sandwich making ability; Jon is enthralled by his mother, a small but vital role played by the otherworldly striking Britton. Wallace leaves for school on top of the world, but in a scene that made my heart plummet runaway elevator style (Britton and Danielle did an incredible job with this, the lighting, blocking and timing all conspired to deliver an emotional gut punch that set the tone for the entire show), Wallace's mother commits suicide with a kitchen knife. Wallace returns home from school that day to find his mother lying on the floor and a suicide note that reads "cremate the parasite." His life is set in motion. But during the scene change, mom does not exit stage left, but sits in the shadows on the left side of the stage. All of the women who Wallace encounters in his life, actually, do not exit the stage but sit on its side, serving as physical reminders of Wallace's path. Very cool blocking touch.
The remainder of the show consists of Wallace's attempts to deal with this traumatic jolt to his childhood and specifically with how his mother's death affects his relationships with women. And only women; Wallace is the only actualized male character in the play (though his father is referenced occasionally). The play traces these relationships - the first is a classic lunch-trading encounter a few days after his mother's suicide; the bubbly schoolgirl Victoria, played over-the-top to perfection by Sophie, has all the natural curiosity about boys and kissing and Wallace's mom's suicide that you would expect, but Wallace is a far cry from handling this. Actually, his lack of ability to handle it seems barely different from any 6 year old boy's ability to handle a member of the opposite sex; this scene was endearing in its subtle portrayal of the fact that other than some overt observations made by Wallace about his dad NOT disappearing after making him a sandwich, Wallace isn't really capable of manifesting the trauma yet, nor does he grasp what has happened. Their encounter ends in hilarious "Cooties!" fashion, and it is notably Wallace who rejects the advance.
We also see Wallace with his grandmother, a recurring character sharply played in highly stereotypical Jewish fashion by Alexa. This is another example of the height of performance that is the norm at the Nut; "stereotypically Jewish fashion" sounds like a dig, and at 99% of high school plays, it would be. But Alexa draped the role with subtle asides , touches, and snappy timing that made the role not only uproariously funny, but touching as well. She's Wallace's surrogate mother, and serves as his home base for questions and attempts to deal with his own life story; she also notably tempers Wallace's fickle temper with ease. She pops up again and again throughout the play and serves to ground the lead character, but manages to do so in a decidedly un-afterschool special fashion. She, too, was great, and her use of real-props - plates of cookies, milk glasses, etc. - brought a warmth to a mostly empty stage. She also delivered some of the more poignant lines - unlike the psych office (see below), her advice to not "blame your mother until you die" comes off as heartfelt and natural, and gives punch to the major moral theme of the show.
If the show had a weak spot, it was in the scenes between Wallace and his psychiatrist. I would not attribute this to the actress, Kathy, nor the director; the psychiatrist's part just seem odd and strangely written. She did not really *act* like a psychiatrist; Wallace is initially sent to her by his father because he is breaking glassware as a means of dealing with his emotional turmoil, and he later seeks her out to deal with some of his own confusion in relationships. But in both scenes, the psychiatrist serves as an inconsequential recipient of what barely amounts to a conversation, and is actually just more monologues that push the narrative along. My main problem with the scenes is how taken aback and rendered mute the psychiatrist is by Wallace's forceful personality, especially later int he play when she basically cowers before him. Kathy did a great job of portraying the clinical neutrality required of a psychiatrist and the real terror that the playwright wanted her to express. I just didn't find this as real as the bulk of the play was: sure, Wallace is in many ways a damaged human at these points in his life, but his place int he damaged human continuum is not something that is so extreme that a psychiatrist would be baffled by it. Unfortunately, a lot of the self-exegesis of the exact nature of Wallace's turmoil is revealed in these scenes, and they ring a little hollow. Case in point: I thought Wallace's descriptions of his breaking glassware to deal with his pain in his essay was much more powerful than the same description from his stand on the couch speech in the psychiatrist's office. The shrink's office did contain the scene where Wallace overtly confronts his mother and her death, and even tries to re-imagine his life had he stolen her knife. And this scene drilled the "accept yourself, work in the now and don't dwell on the past" aspects of the play (though it did so in a less graceful fashion than the grandmother scene mentioned above). But, I think, they could have taken place independent of the somewhat cliched psych-office visit.
And now, the part of the show that has the students abuzz: the kissing plus. Since so much of this is about Wallace's feelings about women, it is completely natural that his mother's death would slide into his early kissing and sexual experiences. And I would put a HUGE emphasis on natural - it would have been very easy for all of these scenes to have come across as awkward or unfeeling, but every one was pulled off sans anything awkward or childish; this was first rate professional work, and given the hormonal situations these teenagers are overcoming, it makes their accomplishment in this regard all the more impressive. Big kudos to the director for maximizing the power of these scenes, making them solidly emotional, frightening, heartwarming, and let's not forget, FREAKING hilarious. Wallace's interactions with the women (and his dialog, for that matter, which grew perfectly more adult as he progressed through his life) escalate in strength and desperation. His first-kiss encounter in middle school with Victoria, the same girl from the sandwich scene, turns from an awkward , do-we-really-have-to-do-this into scary eagerness in a heartbeat; he scares off his first "love." His second, an out-of-control alcohol-aided messy attempt at romancing the smart valedictorian (Sarah, played with cool dignity by Logan) of his school, goes from moving too fast to a pathetic attempt at apology; he ends the scene literally on his knees, blaming the moon for its failure to help him win her heart.
Oh, and then there's something I'll describe as "THE SCENE," and as I mentioned with the Borat film, there are some things my retina unfortunately cannot unsee. This in NO way because the scene was bad, or that it will traumatize me in anything near the same way 10 minutes of naked Borat wrestling with a fat naked man did. This is because it was a sex scene involving Grace!
A little background: Grace is an impossibly cute, sweet, lovely and soul-crushingly sincere and heartwarming sophomore from last semester's Alg. II class. She came in really struggling and disliking math, but we worked together on it a lot throughout the semester and she worked her butt off and did very well in the course. Her parents are awesome; they appreciated me and did great stuff like call the administrators to let them know what a good job I was doing, and called me for advice on what courses she should take and the like. In short, great family and great girl, definitely the type of person who makes all aspects of the job worth it. Furthermore, we serve the role of in loco parentis for all of our students, and I would definitely help anyone who needed anything, but with Grace it's not a vocational obligation - I feel wholly responsible and I owe it to her parents to ensure her well-being as much as I can. If anyone so much as laid a finger, etc., they would have a very angry Texan on their hands indeed. I get the feeling I would be the type of daughter's father who the boys would dread meeting.
So in this play, we find Wallace in his freshman dorm with Lili (played by Grace), a senior dancer who is VERY eager to deflower young Wallace (Grace's dad summed up the role as "slut." Her dad!). I can't even describe how awesome and funny this scene was; between Wallace's fumbling, Lili's intense, writhing and dancer-stretching Mrs. Robinson act, and some wickedly smart dialog, the whole scene of them talking pre-act was funny enough. That part of the scene ends when Wallace claps to turn off the lights, and everyone in the audience is applauding at the brilliance. But it's not over. Oh, no, no. With the house lights more or less out, Lili and Wallace have some quite believable simulated sex on stage, further riddled with hilarious dialog. The entire venue is pretty much exploding with laughter at this point. Laughter at the real funniness of the scene, but also, let's face it, the audience is at least fifty percent teenage, and they are watching their peers simulate sex on stage! Did I mention that Jon's mom and both of Grace's parents are in the audience? And did I mention that we are in a very small, intimate theater setting, so they are probably a whopping twenty feet from their faux-copulating offspring? Hello awkward.
So great acting could be summed up as that which makes you forget that there are actors up there. Um, in this scene, I did not forget. And I can't imagine what Grace's parents were feeling at this point (actually, Grace has been in productions like Hair before this, so this wasn't here first foray into on-stage seediness. Plus after the show, her mom delivered the BRILLIANT line, "As long as it's it's simulated, I'm okay with it."). And Grace, as Beck noted, was (um, Understandably!) nervous about this scene; you could see her carotid pulse pumping at 180 from across the room. But to everyone's credit, they pulled it off and then some - quintessentially professional, hilarious, heartfelt, and all of that, all in a context they had ever reason to crack in. So, damn - Grace was outstanding, and has all kinds of potential to be one of these brilliant comedic actresses - Gilda Radner readily comes to mind. But all of that said, I still spent the entire time dumbfounded with the willies.
Now let us never speak of this again. :)
The show ends with Lili disappointed in Wallace; she passes him off to her younger sister Nina (played well by Nina - this was a sympathetic role that could've devolved to wet-blanket girlfriend, but she carried herself well and, in the end, convincingly dropped into hate-fueled anger), with whom Wallace falls deeply and honestly in love. But with his residual pain from mother, he cannot trust her fully, so he cheats on her - and after some soul-searching, decides to tell her. She reacts violently, but ultimately comes back, leaving Wallace to reject his notion that women will always desert him.
I took a little bit of issue with this tidy ending to the play; again, not something the actors or director could have done much with, but I found it to be a little over-the-top Hallmark. The brutal truth is that there will be no curtain-closing resolution, that no matter how much one can get over it and move on, that pain will always exist. I much more appreciated the earlier-mentioned aspect, that life shapes you and you shape it. I would rather focus on this idea and less on some fantasy-based notion that everything is going to be alright.
That said, great, great show. This was a top level performance, and with all apologies to Clark theater people (my brother, really, not the ones who went on to illustrious reality show careers), this was far and away the best high school theater I've seen. Having that level of talent collected in one institution is nothing short of incredible - and let's keep in mind that these heights were achieved by a *student director.* I can't say this enough - big, big congratulations to Danielle; you pulled off something tremendous.
And not to short it - the later show, This is a Test, was excellent and very, very funny as well. It's lead, Austin, pulled off his own tour-de-force of paranoid, frenetic anxiety that was sidesplitting. My SASI student Josh played a hilarious send up of evil, pretentious teachers everywhere. SO it was great, too, but I was just blown away by WaW.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
QUICK!
One, congrats to Frank on getting accepted to the PhD. program in Illinois. You rock.
Ugh, that was a bad one.
Two, boo-urns to the Subaru, who required a towing tonight but will be fixed in the morning. This destroyed our evening (though we still managed to watch last night's LOST).
Three, if you're up for some funny reading, check some of the student comments on the sasi blog. Some have some great things to say, others, well... just take special note of the spelling.
Four, I know I haven't written about anything this week; this because it has been largely uneventful. Beck and I have hit the gym twice at 6 in the AM. That's intense.
Five - tomorrow we are headed to my student Danielle's directorial debut. Danielle is the school government president, a great actress, a great student and essentially an amazing human being - funny, sweet, serious and mature when necessary, but more than anything heart on her sleeve sincere about all that she does. She even stops by and chats even though she's not in my class this semester! Anyways, she's been hellaciously stressed out about her show's debut, so wish her luck and send good vibes her way. I'll let you know how it goes down tomorrow...
Six - It was pointed out to me that in my picture it looks like there's some kind of rifle pointing at my head. Not quite - this photo was taken by my friend Ian (pronounced Eye-un) in the basement of an apartment near the Tufts Medford campus; hence the general darkness. The light in the upper right corner is the back corner of a low hanging running lamp that's over a pool table (actually, a Beirut table, but now we're just splitting hairs)(as if you knew what a Beirut table was, anyways). The lamp apparently had some ornate flourishes on its side, which is why that looks like a trigger if you are prone to such morbid thoughts. There you have it - this week's entry for most boring paragraph on the blog.
Rock Laaaaahhhhobster...
Ugh, that was a bad one.
Two, boo-urns to the Subaru, who required a towing tonight but will be fixed in the morning. This destroyed our evening (though we still managed to watch last night's LOST).
Three, if you're up for some funny reading, check some of the student comments on the sasi blog. Some have some great things to say, others, well... just take special note of the spelling.
Four, I know I haven't written about anything this week; this because it has been largely uneventful. Beck and I have hit the gym twice at 6 in the AM. That's intense.
Five - tomorrow we are headed to my student Danielle's directorial debut. Danielle is the school government president, a great actress, a great student and essentially an amazing human being - funny, sweet, serious and mature when necessary, but more than anything heart on her sleeve sincere about all that she does. She even stops by and chats even though she's not in my class this semester! Anyways, she's been hellaciously stressed out about her show's debut, so wish her luck and send good vibes her way. I'll let you know how it goes down tomorrow...
Six - It was pointed out to me that in my picture it looks like there's some kind of rifle pointing at my head. Not quite - this photo was taken by my friend Ian (pronounced Eye-un) in the basement of an apartment near the Tufts Medford campus; hence the general darkness. The light in the upper right corner is the back corner of a low hanging running lamp that's over a pool table (actually, a Beirut table, but now we're just splitting hairs)(as if you knew what a Beirut table was, anyways). The lamp apparently had some ornate flourishes on its side, which is why that looks like a trigger if you are prone to such morbid thoughts. There you have it - this week's entry for most boring paragraph on the blog.
Rock Laaaaahhhhobster...
Anthropological Excursions into Highly Cliched Tombs, Or
How My Pink-Shirted Friend Braved a Non-Representative Gathering of the 1996 Clark High Graduating Class
It seems to have been the touching that bothered him most. The touching.
"All these girls, these dolled up, hot-looking, married girls, they all just kept, you know, touching me," brave soul Mike NTPB reported. "Putting a hand on my arm while they introduced me to their husbands, holding my hand for minutes at a time while telling me their let's-catch-up stories. I just didn't get it - I mean, who touches people? For the first hour I was there I thought all the women, husbands in tow, were flirting with me."
Many years of living on the hardened East Coast, with its cold-bundled quick-walks and downward-turned lines of sight, have caused Mike to forget the customary pleasantries of the gentile Southern Belle. In as much as people from Texas can be called Southern, and that these particular women could be called belles. Just kidding ladies! The fact that Mike mistook this for flirting is unsurprising: this is, after all, the Casanova who once was suspended from school for "passionately kissing a female student (this was no peck on the cheek)," the man who brought Clark itself to a grinding halt with his rose-giving antics, and the man for whom the normally difficult crossing of social lines, from manly football player to heart-bearing drama kid, was a mere flick of a switch: his romance runneth over. I am quickly realizing the perhaps unfair expectations I may be creating for one let's call her Karen H (no wait, too obvious, etc.) given the impending loom (doom?) of Feb. 14, aka Black Wednesday. So forget all that romance stuff; the closest Mike has come to being a loverboy is humming "Everybody's Working For the Weekend." Expect nothing; be surprised by the something you get. (Did I make the save, Mike?)
So the female touching was just a Southern custom of familiarity and kindness, not the wink-wink nudge-nudge wanka wanka hey-how-you-doin' that Mike initially thought. Not that Mike would have acted anyways, especially given the aforementioned notable Vacekian absence. I kid, Karen, I kid. Mike did manage to snap these shots of some of the party attendees, so red-blooded males let the drooling begin (and womenfolk of the average orientation, you get to check out the married Lunke and the unmarried chunky, David G). Here goes:
That's Kim on the left, the promised "9 Then, 11 Now," meaning that in a strange twist, we wish that we "Knew" then what Is now. Or something. I don't even really know Kim, so I probably shouldn't be making such crass comments, but so it goes. And that's Heather in the red; she was my TopCat wonsuponatime which meant that she made spirit posters for me before games (those raunchy Friday Night Lights-style "spirit favors" were not present in my little corner of the world back then, but given my status of popularity / enlightenment, other football studs may have been receivers; I can't pretend to know such things). Heather was always quiet but very cool and sweet; she's actually someone I remember from back in the day quite fondly. Your awwwws and smirks are simultaneously noted. According to Mike, she owned the room and beamed with confidence, which does give a little glow in my memory banks - I'm honestly glad that Heather seems happy. Next is Rachel, about whom I remember Jack Squat, and next to her is Devin, who was a friend of Mike's whom I didn't know well. She is perhaps most famous for one of the most sequined, body-hugging / revealing prom-dresses I ever had the pleasure of encountering then or since; its color was called, quite presciently, "Viagra Blue."
Well, that's clearly Mike NPTB on the right there, and that's the illustrious Kim Lytle in the middle, a cool gal cheerleader from the day who made pouty lips pretty in the pre-Jolie era. And next to her is... Mike's going to laugh his arse off at me, but I swear her name is Angela or something but then I'm thinking that I cannot remember for the life of me what Stacey Rudd looks like, so it may be she. Sorry, your host has failed you, but I trust Mike to come to the rescue on this one. Another reason I didn't attend: my inability to remember names would have led to a lot of searching-for-nametag bustline staring, and regardless of how the hand-holding cultural practice is accepted, that one, I fear, would not be taken well. What you don't see in these pictures is the menacing cowboy husbands standing guard.
That's Miguel and dance-studio owner Lindsey White; she too was an exceptionally sweet gal and a drama kid taboot. She married the brother of a country star. 'Sall I got.
That's Mike with Amber; she's now shorter haired and more brunette than back in the day. She was over the top cool; we had 10th grade science together and we used to hang out and play with her kitten Ashby. These are the types of details you don't get at CNN. Amber now does something that I don't remember but also has skydived over a hundred times. This is very, very not surprising if you know her.
And finally, the men of note:
That's Mike with husband / caddy of a PGA champion golfer Tyler Lunke. Tyler is a way back childhood friend; we played baseball, basketball and tennis and such together before his life took a turn to Clark's seedy underbelly in 1992 and he joined the golf team. Tyler was a great guy; another miscellaneous fact is that he was the first among us to learn the road geography of San Antonio. He was thinking in terms of loop 410 when I was still on my driveway shooting baskets. He's now working for a golf company in some capacity.
That's David Gutzman, filling out the old reunion adage of "everyone either looks more or less the same or looks like they consumed a small village." Dave played basketball with us way back when, but after freshman year, I think, also went to the dark world of golf, but now enjoys his favorite sport, beer. David in my brain, however, is mainly notable because one of my best friends in high school, Marisa, had a crush on him the size of a, well, a small village, and David did not pick up on this until way too late. She moved during our sophomore year and maybe spent the last couple weeks of that cavorting with Mr. Gut. The Zman has no clue what he missed; she was a fantastic gal.
(Oddly enough, despite the fact that I know that she works as a TV producer out in CA, I cannot find a picture to share. But she produces a show that features Jerry Rice as a co-host and she was recently nominated for an emmy. Sweet! Double oddly enough is that if you google "marisa silvas," one of the few hits you get is my own blog on the old site. Wack).
So those are the visual elements of Mike's dig. What else did we learn? The average rich white male suburbanite from Clark continues to be rich white and male, meaning that the Wheel in the Sky rule is still in effect, and all the womenfolk were married with children. That's probably another Southern / East Coast difference. Old bandmate (band as in HS band, not as in my famous Rice band CSDH) Alice Kelly was in attendance and specifically asked Mike about me and to say hi; Mike thinks he smelled a smoldering HS crush which as I told him "makes me like Elvis on a much, much smaller scale." What can I say, ladies love cool jones. Jim Gray remains a gregarious nice guy, though he apparently answered Mike's question of "are you happy?" with a sarcastic, "oh yeah, living the dream." Cliff Kuang wrote for the Economist for a while and still acts weirdly - he apparently dodged having his picture taken all evening for some reason. I'm thinking something in the vampire-mirror continuum. Cam Banks confirmed a rumor; Brandon Goertz denied one; both of the rumors are PG-13 so i won't ruin their respective political careers here, but Cam's answer was an emphatic "Hell yes" and Brandon's was a "No, but that does sound like something I would have done." Please note that the literary technique I am practicing here is called "alienating the reader."
Zane Hamilton is married and doing well in some computing job. Okay, now I'm boring even myself! And I knew these people!
So I have a theory on these types of reunion things, and it's largely that had I wanted to stay in touch with these people or had they wanted to stay in touch with me, one of us would have made a bigger effort. There's too much to think about without worrying about whether the "Beautiful People" of Clark's Yesteryear remain "Beautiful People." I know that Mike NTPB doesn't share this opinion - of course not, he went to the reunion. And though his efforts at touring Ex-girlfriend lane were at least partially thwarted, I'm sure he had a good time. But if we are going to be this dynamic duo, I am leaving all shmoozing duties to Mike, because I frankly don't have the stomach for it. So we applaud you, NTPB: you represented the football team, the drama department, and the general Clark intellectual elite brilliantly. So here's a toast to you, and a hearty potential terrorist bomb that turns out to be a light brite (emphasis on the extended pixelated middle finger) to anyone who dared utter the phrase last weekend, "You're a teacher? But you were so smart in high school..."
Mike and Nyet: souls still intact.
Addendum: So here's some news I in my pop culture ignorance recently became aware of:
Whose gorgeous headshot is that, you ask? That's Jessica Holcomb, small scene (and utterly pointless bimbo-role filler) star of Miss Congeniality and starred-as-herself cast member of The Bachelor (2002). And, to round out the resume, she also played an uncredited role as a cheerleader in Varsity Blues and has a law degree from UT.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???
Before we even get to that, Miss Holcomb's importance to the story of Nyet cannot be underestimated. She transferred from a small town called Pearsal to our middle school in 8th grade; I, with newfound confidence gained in the school of hard knocks aka the Duke Talent Identification Problem, was under the mistaken but esteem-boosting impression that smart guys could be sexy. Plus I had this weird notion in my head that starting for all the sports teams, playing in the band and jazz band, acing my honors courses, etc., would somehow label me as a catch. So when the breathtaking skinny blond from small town Texas showed up in the band hall that August morning, I pounced (read: I actually talked to her, which if you know anything about my current talking-to-stranger habits and my then Cool-Hand-Luke steadiness around pretty girls, was a feat of no-small order). I should have known better; I had after all had the initial lesson of fickle woman drummed into my thick skull at Duke that summer (thanks a lot, Angela Carpenter, and yes I do remember your name though you don't mine). But I was smitten, over the top, bad. But the unusual thing about this, by middle school standards, was that I was not smitten from afar; Jess and I became great friends and confidants and all that stuff, and there was over the top kinds of chemistry there. I may have been a middle school boy caught in a hurricane of hormones, but even I didn't need a weatherman: we dug each other, big time spark-wise. So after a couple of months of brushing hands and long afterschool talks, I finally gathered the courage to ask her to "go with me."
She said she would get back to me.
While this is a moderately better response than "go where?," it's not by much, and indeed, I should have known better (with a girl like you). Something bad was about to happen; in the rewound movie version where I don't have to cringe through the scene in exacto repeat, I pull some kind of evil, revenge, teenage girl crushing act like saying "just kidding; you thought I was serious? Damn." So something bad does happen; despite our obvious personal connection, Jessica consorts with her circle of female friends, who by this point in the year are not the band peeps she initially hung out with but *those girls.* The same ones who later became cheerleaders in HS; the same ones, you might guess, who tend to do things like show up to high school reunions.
(It should be noted that there is a Freaks and Geeks episode that mirrors this eerily - new, pretty and awesome girl comes to school, falls in with the geek crowd, and they get about a week to hang out with her before she is subsumed into her proper place among the Beautiful People. It's the apex of endearingly awkward television; check it out).
So the popular club holds some tribal council and by their evil druid ways decides that I am not cool enough to be gone with. But this decision is not passed to the masses quickly; Jessica instead avoids me entirely for the next two days, making the decision seem up in the air (when we all knew better). Meanwhile the whole school knows, thanks to the poppers that be, that my heart is sitting out on a plate just waiting to be eaten; even Mr. Montogmery, my history teacher who looked like Randy Johnson, found it necessary to ridicule my foreboding plight in front of the class. Damn, teach, that's cold!
The next day i find this note in my locker, written in red and delivering the inevitable no. It doesn't mention the supreme court decision that caused Jess to arrive at this answer, it just includes this weird story about how at her last school she dated the quarterback and she was the head cheerleader and it was just so perfect and we would just never have that. Yes, the (melo)drama career really took everyone by surprise. Thankfully, though I don't know if he even remembers this, Mike edits the note in black, correcting not only the grammar and punctuation, but emphatically pointing out which parts are the most dumbassed. My friend Chris even wrote a revenge style punk-blues song called "Honeycomb" that we played together; I still know it on my guitar today. So the pickmeup from the dudes (trustable) saved me from the womanly evil wiles (genetic), and despite the devastating levels of heartbreak that one endures when someone who you feel honestly close to sends you to a subcommittee , I managed to survive to other days to develop other, less tragic Pollockian crushes. And if I remember correctly, Jessica and i eventually got to the previous pattern of friendship later that year - never the same, of course - but I remember helping her deal with a Brad Sekula crush and I may have even gotten a "just friends" slow dance out of the whole shebang (though that dance was not to Stairway to Heaven). But the seed was sown; I guess this part of the story illustrates a little bit of the source of my distrust of the in-crowd.
Flash forward three years to junior English, when Jess and I get assigned to the same Moby Dick project group. We hadn't talked much through high school, but I think I can safely sum up her angle as "playing up the ditz factor" (Mike, please verify). And she continued to be a big moron during our whole group's work together; her contribution to the project involved reading off some quotes on MD she had dug up as fast as possible without putting any thought into them whatsoever. So I'm not exactly crying over our lost time together, but then there are moments in the group time where she drops the act and just is, and she's a really beautiful person, aside from the physical, and it's really amazing to see someone for real like that, especially again, and especially after our non-contact over several years. There was nothing romantic about it - I had well learned the lesson by that point, plus I was chasing a senior girl at the time and, you know, eyes on the prize. But there were the moments, and despite all the typical BS of high school, even the unattainable show their soft bellies (note - this was 1995, and not the navel-laden fashion mire of these times; the belly was metaphorical).
So after all of that background, now the punch - she graduated from UT Law? And she's acting, and pulling in some otherworldly salary I'm sure. And all in all pretty set. So on the one hand, I'm jealous plus, I'm driven dagger-wielding insane just upset that someone can behave like that for so much of their existence and the universe does nothing in terms of lightning bolt retribution. And it's a wish-pain-on-your-enemies anger, and it's embarrassing but horribly real. But then I know she obviously worked hard, at least at the law, and deserves it. And then there are the calming moments of just how great she could be, and maybe she snapped to at some point in college and this is all just. So on some level it's all okay, and plus, it's not like I have to see her on a daily basis. On top of all of this, though, is the weirdness of googling your middle school crush and reading blogs of how hot that Jessica Holcomb girl is on the Bachelor. Woah - celebrities aren't supposed to be real.
And neither are high school people. At least the ones I've left behind, or at least especially the ones who weren't all that real to me when we actually were in high school. Maybe that makes me a jerk; could be, I hear ya. But I wasn't one of the beautiful people so I can't really answer the question how it felt, and the answer to what they're up to now is boring anecdotal gossipy crap. I'll always be genuinely happy that people I've known are doing well, and I wouldn't really actively root for their pain - even the heart-crushing Jessicas seem to win me over in the end. SO yeah, I'll never lose affection for the people and things that went before, but I'm not about to travel back to see the ones I haven't even bothered keeping up with over the years to hear their where they're now stories, stories, just stories.
It seems to have been the touching that bothered him most. The touching.
"All these girls, these dolled up, hot-looking, married girls, they all just kept, you know, touching me," brave soul Mike NTPB reported. "Putting a hand on my arm while they introduced me to their husbands, holding my hand for minutes at a time while telling me their let's-catch-up stories. I just didn't get it - I mean, who touches people? For the first hour I was there I thought all the women, husbands in tow, were flirting with me."
Many years of living on the hardened East Coast, with its cold-bundled quick-walks and downward-turned lines of sight, have caused Mike to forget the customary pleasantries of the gentile Southern Belle. In as much as people from Texas can be called Southern, and that these particular women could be called belles. Just kidding ladies! The fact that Mike mistook this for flirting is unsurprising: this is, after all, the Casanova who once was suspended from school for "passionately kissing a female student (this was no peck on the cheek)," the man who brought Clark itself to a grinding halt with his rose-giving antics, and the man for whom the normally difficult crossing of social lines, from manly football player to heart-bearing drama kid, was a mere flick of a switch: his romance runneth over. I am quickly realizing the perhaps unfair expectations I may be creating for one let's call her Karen H (no wait, too obvious, etc.) given the impending loom (doom?) of Feb. 14, aka Black Wednesday. So forget all that romance stuff; the closest Mike has come to being a loverboy is humming "Everybody's Working For the Weekend." Expect nothing; be surprised by the something you get. (Did I make the save, Mike?)
So the female touching was just a Southern custom of familiarity and kindness, not the wink-wink nudge-nudge wanka wanka hey-how-you-doin' that Mike initially thought. Not that Mike would have acted anyways, especially given the aforementioned notable Vacekian absence. I kid, Karen, I kid. Mike did manage to snap these shots of some of the party attendees, so red-blooded males let the drooling begin (and womenfolk of the average orientation, you get to check out the married Lunke and the unmarried chunky, David G). Here goes:
That's Kim on the left, the promised "9 Then, 11 Now," meaning that in a strange twist, we wish that we "Knew" then what Is now. Or something. I don't even really know Kim, so I probably shouldn't be making such crass comments, but so it goes. And that's Heather in the red; she was my TopCat wonsuponatime which meant that she made spirit posters for me before games (those raunchy Friday Night Lights-style "spirit favors" were not present in my little corner of the world back then, but given my status of popularity / enlightenment, other football studs may have been receivers; I can't pretend to know such things). Heather was always quiet but very cool and sweet; she's actually someone I remember from back in the day quite fondly. Your awwwws and smirks are simultaneously noted. According to Mike, she owned the room and beamed with confidence, which does give a little glow in my memory banks - I'm honestly glad that Heather seems happy. Next is Rachel, about whom I remember Jack Squat, and next to her is Devin, who was a friend of Mike's whom I didn't know well. She is perhaps most famous for one of the most sequined, body-hugging / revealing prom-dresses I ever had the pleasure of encountering then or since; its color was called, quite presciently, "Viagra Blue."
Well, that's clearly Mike NPTB on the right there, and that's the illustrious Kim Lytle in the middle, a cool gal cheerleader from the day who made pouty lips pretty in the pre-Jolie era. And next to her is... Mike's going to laugh his arse off at me, but I swear her name is Angela or something but then I'm thinking that I cannot remember for the life of me what Stacey Rudd looks like, so it may be she. Sorry, your host has failed you, but I trust Mike to come to the rescue on this one. Another reason I didn't attend: my inability to remember names would have led to a lot of searching-for-nametag bustline staring, and regardless of how the hand-holding cultural practice is accepted, that one, I fear, would not be taken well. What you don't see in these pictures is the menacing cowboy husbands standing guard.
That's Miguel and dance-studio owner Lindsey White; she too was an exceptionally sweet gal and a drama kid taboot. She married the brother of a country star. 'Sall I got.
That's Mike with Amber; she's now shorter haired and more brunette than back in the day. She was over the top cool; we had 10th grade science together and we used to hang out and play with her kitten Ashby. These are the types of details you don't get at CNN. Amber now does something that I don't remember but also has skydived over a hundred times. This is very, very not surprising if you know her.
And finally, the men of note:
That's Mike with husband / caddy of a PGA champion golfer Tyler Lunke. Tyler is a way back childhood friend; we played baseball, basketball and tennis and such together before his life took a turn to Clark's seedy underbelly in 1992 and he joined the golf team. Tyler was a great guy; another miscellaneous fact is that he was the first among us to learn the road geography of San Antonio. He was thinking in terms of loop 410 when I was still on my driveway shooting baskets. He's now working for a golf company in some capacity.
That's David Gutzman, filling out the old reunion adage of "everyone either looks more or less the same or looks like they consumed a small village." Dave played basketball with us way back when, but after freshman year, I think, also went to the dark world of golf, but now enjoys his favorite sport, beer. David in my brain, however, is mainly notable because one of my best friends in high school, Marisa, had a crush on him the size of a, well, a small village, and David did not pick up on this until way too late. She moved during our sophomore year and maybe spent the last couple weeks of that cavorting with Mr. Gut. The Zman has no clue what he missed; she was a fantastic gal.
(Oddly enough, despite the fact that I know that she works as a TV producer out in CA, I cannot find a picture to share. But she produces a show that features Jerry Rice as a co-host and she was recently nominated for an emmy. Sweet! Double oddly enough is that if you google "marisa silvas," one of the few hits you get is my own blog on the old site. Wack).
So those are the visual elements of Mike's dig. What else did we learn? The average rich white male suburbanite from Clark continues to be rich white and male, meaning that the Wheel in the Sky rule is still in effect, and all the womenfolk were married with children. That's probably another Southern / East Coast difference. Old bandmate (band as in HS band, not as in my famous Rice band CSDH) Alice Kelly was in attendance and specifically asked Mike about me and to say hi; Mike thinks he smelled a smoldering HS crush which as I told him "makes me like Elvis on a much, much smaller scale." What can I say, ladies love cool jones. Jim Gray remains a gregarious nice guy, though he apparently answered Mike's question of "are you happy?" with a sarcastic, "oh yeah, living the dream." Cliff Kuang wrote for the Economist for a while and still acts weirdly - he apparently dodged having his picture taken all evening for some reason. I'm thinking something in the vampire-mirror continuum. Cam Banks confirmed a rumor; Brandon Goertz denied one; both of the rumors are PG-13 so i won't ruin their respective political careers here, but Cam's answer was an emphatic "Hell yes" and Brandon's was a "No, but that does sound like something I would have done." Please note that the literary technique I am practicing here is called "alienating the reader."
Zane Hamilton is married and doing well in some computing job. Okay, now I'm boring even myself! And I knew these people!
So I have a theory on these types of reunion things, and it's largely that had I wanted to stay in touch with these people or had they wanted to stay in touch with me, one of us would have made a bigger effort. There's too much to think about without worrying about whether the "Beautiful People" of Clark's Yesteryear remain "Beautiful People." I know that Mike NTPB doesn't share this opinion - of course not, he went to the reunion. And though his efforts at touring Ex-girlfriend lane were at least partially thwarted, I'm sure he had a good time. But if we are going to be this dynamic duo, I am leaving all shmoozing duties to Mike, because I frankly don't have the stomach for it. So we applaud you, NTPB: you represented the football team, the drama department, and the general Clark intellectual elite brilliantly. So here's a toast to you, and a hearty potential terrorist bomb that turns out to be a light brite (emphasis on the extended pixelated middle finger) to anyone who dared utter the phrase last weekend, "You're a teacher? But you were so smart in high school..."
Mike and Nyet: souls still intact.
Addendum: So here's some news I in my pop culture ignorance recently became aware of:
Whose gorgeous headshot is that, you ask? That's Jessica Holcomb, small scene (and utterly pointless bimbo-role filler) star of Miss Congeniality and starred-as-herself cast member of The Bachelor (2002). And, to round out the resume, she also played an uncredited role as a cheerleader in Varsity Blues and has a law degree from UT.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???
Before we even get to that, Miss Holcomb's importance to the story of Nyet cannot be underestimated. She transferred from a small town called Pearsal to our middle school in 8th grade; I, with newfound confidence gained in the school of hard knocks aka the Duke Talent Identification Problem, was under the mistaken but esteem-boosting impression that smart guys could be sexy. Plus I had this weird notion in my head that starting for all the sports teams, playing in the band and jazz band, acing my honors courses, etc., would somehow label me as a catch. So when the breathtaking skinny blond from small town Texas showed up in the band hall that August morning, I pounced (read: I actually talked to her, which if you know anything about my current talking-to-stranger habits and my then Cool-Hand-Luke steadiness around pretty girls, was a feat of no-small order). I should have known better; I had after all had the initial lesson of fickle woman drummed into my thick skull at Duke that summer (thanks a lot, Angela Carpenter, and yes I do remember your name though you don't mine). But I was smitten, over the top, bad. But the unusual thing about this, by middle school standards, was that I was not smitten from afar; Jess and I became great friends and confidants and all that stuff, and there was over the top kinds of chemistry there. I may have been a middle school boy caught in a hurricane of hormones, but even I didn't need a weatherman: we dug each other, big time spark-wise. So after a couple of months of brushing hands and long afterschool talks, I finally gathered the courage to ask her to "go with me."
She said she would get back to me.
While this is a moderately better response than "go where?," it's not by much, and indeed, I should have known better (with a girl like you). Something bad was about to happen; in the rewound movie version where I don't have to cringe through the scene in exacto repeat, I pull some kind of evil, revenge, teenage girl crushing act like saying "just kidding; you thought I was serious? Damn." So something bad does happen; despite our obvious personal connection, Jessica consorts with her circle of female friends, who by this point in the year are not the band peeps she initially hung out with but *those girls.* The same ones who later became cheerleaders in HS; the same ones, you might guess, who tend to do things like show up to high school reunions.
(It should be noted that there is a Freaks and Geeks episode that mirrors this eerily - new, pretty and awesome girl comes to school, falls in with the geek crowd, and they get about a week to hang out with her before she is subsumed into her proper place among the Beautiful People. It's the apex of endearingly awkward television; check it out).
So the popular club holds some tribal council and by their evil druid ways decides that I am not cool enough to be gone with. But this decision is not passed to the masses quickly; Jessica instead avoids me entirely for the next two days, making the decision seem up in the air (when we all knew better). Meanwhile the whole school knows, thanks to the poppers that be, that my heart is sitting out on a plate just waiting to be eaten; even Mr. Montogmery, my history teacher who looked like Randy Johnson, found it necessary to ridicule my foreboding plight in front of the class. Damn, teach, that's cold!
The next day i find this note in my locker, written in red and delivering the inevitable no. It doesn't mention the supreme court decision that caused Jess to arrive at this answer, it just includes this weird story about how at her last school she dated the quarterback and she was the head cheerleader and it was just so perfect and we would just never have that. Yes, the (melo)drama career really took everyone by surprise. Thankfully, though I don't know if he even remembers this, Mike edits the note in black, correcting not only the grammar and punctuation, but emphatically pointing out which parts are the most dumbassed. My friend Chris even wrote a revenge style punk-blues song called "Honeycomb" that we played together; I still know it on my guitar today. So the pickmeup from the dudes (trustable) saved me from the womanly evil wiles (genetic), and despite the devastating levels of heartbreak that one endures when someone who you feel honestly close to sends you to a subcommittee , I managed to survive to other days to develop other, less tragic Pollockian crushes. And if I remember correctly, Jessica and i eventually got to the previous pattern of friendship later that year - never the same, of course - but I remember helping her deal with a Brad Sekula crush and I may have even gotten a "just friends" slow dance out of the whole shebang (though that dance was not to Stairway to Heaven). But the seed was sown; I guess this part of the story illustrates a little bit of the source of my distrust of the in-crowd.
Flash forward three years to junior English, when Jess and I get assigned to the same Moby Dick project group. We hadn't talked much through high school, but I think I can safely sum up her angle as "playing up the ditz factor" (Mike, please verify). And she continued to be a big moron during our whole group's work together; her contribution to the project involved reading off some quotes on MD she had dug up as fast as possible without putting any thought into them whatsoever. So I'm not exactly crying over our lost time together, but then there are moments in the group time where she drops the act and just is, and she's a really beautiful person, aside from the physical, and it's really amazing to see someone for real like that, especially again, and especially after our non-contact over several years. There was nothing romantic about it - I had well learned the lesson by that point, plus I was chasing a senior girl at the time and, you know, eyes on the prize. But there were the moments, and despite all the typical BS of high school, even the unattainable show their soft bellies (note - this was 1995, and not the navel-laden fashion mire of these times; the belly was metaphorical).
So after all of that background, now the punch - she graduated from UT Law? And she's acting, and pulling in some otherworldly salary I'm sure. And all in all pretty set. So on the one hand, I'm jealous plus, I'm driven dagger-wielding insane just upset that someone can behave like that for so much of their existence and the universe does nothing in terms of lightning bolt retribution. And it's a wish-pain-on-your-enemies anger, and it's embarrassing but horribly real. But then I know she obviously worked hard, at least at the law, and deserves it. And then there are the calming moments of just how great she could be, and maybe she snapped to at some point in college and this is all just. So on some level it's all okay, and plus, it's not like I have to see her on a daily basis. On top of all of this, though, is the weirdness of googling your middle school crush and reading blogs of how hot that Jessica Holcomb girl is on the Bachelor. Woah - celebrities aren't supposed to be real.
And neither are high school people. At least the ones I've left behind, or at least especially the ones who weren't all that real to me when we actually were in high school. Maybe that makes me a jerk; could be, I hear ya. But I wasn't one of the beautiful people so I can't really answer the question how it felt, and the answer to what they're up to now is boring anecdotal gossipy crap. I'll always be genuinely happy that people I've known are doing well, and I wouldn't really actively root for their pain - even the heart-crushing Jessicas seem to win me over in the end. SO yeah, I'll never lose affection for the people and things that went before, but I'm not about to travel back to see the ones I haven't even bothered keeping up with over the years to hear their where they're now stories, stories, just stories.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Just Another...
Cool Monday. IF and I hit the gym at 6:30 in the AM and got a pre-day workout it, which was very cool; I ran, she ellipticaled. I made the brilliant decision of wearing my shorts to the gym - it was 8 degrees with a windchill of 0 K when we left the house this morning, so the post-run sweaty Nyet / frigid air combination was less than awesome. As Ringo might say, "I've got blisters on my nipples."
I headed down to the 'Nut for a day that should have been 50 minutes long a grew into a beast with meetings and the like. They were hella productive, but still, 'twas lame. My class itself involved me chewing them out for not doing the blog assignment, and then leading a pretty decent discussion on reliable and unreliable sources. Fun times in there, and I have them reading a DFW essay this week - given the high ESL content of my class, that may have been a bone-jarring mistake. But we'll see.
I eventually left the campus, heading back into the snot-freezing New England winter. I had some time to kill, so I headed to the Framingham Library to pick up some music and a bunch of books - I'm dumb, I know - but I will now force myself to read said books int he next couple of weeks. It's a sports departure, just to give you a preview.
Oh, and what music did I pick up? A couple of Prince albums. Why? Because of this, that's why:
Best Halftime Show in a loooooong time. Prince, you rock my face. Seriously, this was spectacle of the highest order but totally appropriate, and no malfunctions either, unless you consider the blatant use of guitars as phallic symbols to be malfunctory. More on the SB itself in a bit.
So one of the books I got is Baseball Between the Numbers, one I've been meaning to grab for a while now. And funny enough, the library had it listed under one "James Click" as a primary author. no... it couldn't be, could it?
Actually, I knew very well that it could, given Mr. Click's sports-numbers obsessions reported in years past by one Mike NTPB. So I called up the Mike to confirm, and indeed, this was true. Awesome! This is the most humble shout out to James, who was a great friend of Mike's at Yale - living the dream man, and that is fantastic. I look forward to reading your articles, and will rip you to shreds if necessary on this here blog which, given its readership of probably no more than 20, will cause you to lose something approximating no sleep. Seriously, homes, congrats. That is good stuff.
The call to Mike was awesome, too, because it allowed us to catch up on james's hijinks, his recent trip to SA for our CHS '96 reunion, as well as give each other notes both on our greatest art debate and our classes. SWEET! This is awesome, and if I were slicker, I could probably write this into a resume as some kind of interscholastic collaborative course design program. (Note to self: do that). Regardless, the convo was awesome - I've always felt like Mike and I bring a lot to the proverbial table and balance each other really well in terms of optimism / pessimism, real politics / theoretical background mumbo jumbo (I'm the latter on both counts, as if you didn't know), but it more or less always brings my geist back into alignment to have a good chat with him. And a good chat we did have; T-mobile be damned, we talked quite a bit. And yes, IFfy, I will cover that part of the bill.
More notes - Mike gave a hilarious account of the ill-attended HS reunion, which I will post as promised, but only AFTER he provides me with photographic evidence. the reason for this largely has to do with a string of quotes like "She was a 9 in high school, but she's an 11 now." That meat-market and clearly irony-laden comment is clearly not to be taken seriously. (But, red-blooded male readers, that previous sentence was to avert all XXs' attentive eyes, the blog equivalent of a shouted "Look! Over there! McDreamy!"; fear not, NTPB and I do not throw around the term "11" lightly, and so you should be now duly enticed. We're talking football post-game party Vacekian levels of excitement, so don't miss it).
(Previous joke will only be gotten by NTPB, but it is so, so worth it. Ah, Miguel, I cry for you, too; the lesson is, gather ye rosebuds, or Carpe Jamie, whichever version you prefer).
The oddest thing of all of this is that on the Monday after the SB, Mike and I talked that long and did not once mention the Super Bowl. WOAH! Clearly our intellectual stature has grown (or our athletic one has shrunk, it having been recently been exposed to the cold ocean). So that was nuts. As for my take - who cares! It was a tremendously exciting first quarter followed by something of an extended yawn; I think the Colts RB's deserved the MVP way more than Peyton pretty boy (if for no other reason to discourage further endorsement deals - it's not a good Porn unless it's a Peyton Porn, etc.), and as I've been saying all season, Rex Grossman is TERRIBLE, and not to get all emotion-aspect on you, but it just looks like he couldn't care less about the whole spectacle. Which you can't really blame him for, given this year's commercial output. I will, though, give props to
The Blockbuster Mouse
Garmin Navigation Maposaurus
Budweiser Dog With Spots
Emerald Nuts
And maybe the Jay-Z commercial
(And of course, the GoDaddy commercials, you crazy 11-obsessed males, you). Not really.
That's about it; it's dinner time here. I'll leave you with one of my favorite Onion articles and the brief instruction to read the comments of past entries for lots of insight from the readership, especially Karen, who continues to kick all of your collective asses.
I leave you with... Laser Cats 2:
I headed down to the 'Nut for a day that should have been 50 minutes long a grew into a beast with meetings and the like. They were hella productive, but still, 'twas lame. My class itself involved me chewing them out for not doing the blog assignment, and then leading a pretty decent discussion on reliable and unreliable sources. Fun times in there, and I have them reading a DFW essay this week - given the high ESL content of my class, that may have been a bone-jarring mistake. But we'll see.
I eventually left the campus, heading back into the snot-freezing New England winter. I had some time to kill, so I headed to the Framingham Library to pick up some music and a bunch of books - I'm dumb, I know - but I will now force myself to read said books int he next couple of weeks. It's a sports departure, just to give you a preview.
Oh, and what music did I pick up? A couple of Prince albums. Why? Because of this, that's why:
Best Halftime Show in a loooooong time. Prince, you rock my face. Seriously, this was spectacle of the highest order but totally appropriate, and no malfunctions either, unless you consider the blatant use of guitars as phallic symbols to be malfunctory. More on the SB itself in a bit.
So one of the books I got is Baseball Between the Numbers, one I've been meaning to grab for a while now. And funny enough, the library had it listed under one "James Click" as a primary author. no... it couldn't be, could it?
Actually, I knew very well that it could, given Mr. Click's sports-numbers obsessions reported in years past by one Mike NTPB. So I called up the Mike to confirm, and indeed, this was true. Awesome! This is the most humble shout out to James, who was a great friend of Mike's at Yale - living the dream man, and that is fantastic. I look forward to reading your articles, and will rip you to shreds if necessary on this here blog which, given its readership of probably no more than 20, will cause you to lose something approximating no sleep. Seriously, homes, congrats. That is good stuff.
The call to Mike was awesome, too, because it allowed us to catch up on james's hijinks, his recent trip to SA for our CHS '96 reunion, as well as give each other notes both on our greatest art debate and our classes. SWEET! This is awesome, and if I were slicker, I could probably write this into a resume as some kind of interscholastic collaborative course design program. (Note to self: do that). Regardless, the convo was awesome - I've always felt like Mike and I bring a lot to the proverbial table and balance each other really well in terms of optimism / pessimism, real politics / theoretical background mumbo jumbo (I'm the latter on both counts, as if you didn't know), but it more or less always brings my geist back into alignment to have a good chat with him. And a good chat we did have; T-mobile be damned, we talked quite a bit. And yes, IFfy, I will cover that part of the bill.
More notes - Mike gave a hilarious account of the ill-attended HS reunion, which I will post as promised, but only AFTER he provides me with photographic evidence. the reason for this largely has to do with a string of quotes like "She was a 9 in high school, but she's an 11 now." That meat-market and clearly irony-laden comment is clearly not to be taken seriously. (But, red-blooded male readers, that previous sentence was to avert all XXs' attentive eyes, the blog equivalent of a shouted "Look! Over there! McDreamy!"; fear not, NTPB and I do not throw around the term "11" lightly, and so you should be now duly enticed. We're talking football post-game party Vacekian levels of excitement, so don't miss it).
(Previous joke will only be gotten by NTPB, but it is so, so worth it. Ah, Miguel, I cry for you, too; the lesson is, gather ye rosebuds, or Carpe Jamie, whichever version you prefer).
The oddest thing of all of this is that on the Monday after the SB, Mike and I talked that long and did not once mention the Super Bowl. WOAH! Clearly our intellectual stature has grown (or our athletic one has shrunk, it having been recently been exposed to the cold ocean). So that was nuts. As for my take - who cares! It was a tremendously exciting first quarter followed by something of an extended yawn; I think the Colts RB's deserved the MVP way more than Peyton pretty boy (if for no other reason to discourage further endorsement deals - it's not a good Porn unless it's a Peyton Porn, etc.), and as I've been saying all season, Rex Grossman is TERRIBLE, and not to get all emotion-aspect on you, but it just looks like he couldn't care less about the whole spectacle. Which you can't really blame him for, given this year's commercial output. I will, though, give props to
The Blockbuster Mouse
Garmin Navigation Maposaurus
Budweiser Dog With Spots
Emerald Nuts
And maybe the Jay-Z commercial
(And of course, the GoDaddy commercials, you crazy 11-obsessed males, you). Not really.
That's about it; it's dinner time here. I'll leave you with one of my favorite Onion articles and the brief instruction to read the comments of past entries for lots of insight from the readership, especially Karen, who continues to kick all of your collective asses.
I leave you with... Laser Cats 2:
Sunday, February 4, 2007
An apology for the winded nature of my recent writings, specifically for the aspect of that windedness which could be described as long
Penance in the forms of video and link:
First, impossibly great Canadian band The Aracade Fire playing a little impromptu acoustic, crowd-sing-along encore after a recent show. Enjoy!
Second, for balance, a video of the same song played in full orchestration, with a special added Bowie-nus:
The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels
Which one have you read? Notice that the "readers'" list is riddled with Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard entries. This both tells you which groups may have been doing a little ballot box stuffing, and also provides empirical proof that the same people who enjoy Scientology enjoy Ayn Rand.
Consider the Lobster
A fantastic read on animal ethics by your hero and mine, DFW.
The Financial Woes of Recording Artists
An insightful article on the finacnial side of the record industry, by oft punk in drublic Courtney Love (former wife of Kurt Cobain and lead lady of Hole)
Castle Smasher
A sweet game
Unusual articles at Wikipedia: pretty self-explanatory
Nomic
This is for nerds only - it's an account of a law-based game theory where inherent is the game is that you can change the rules as you go. Think of it as Calvinball for the college dorks.
Mythbusters
Every myth that's been busted or conirmed by the popular cable series.
That's it - thanks for your reading!
First, impossibly great Canadian band The Aracade Fire playing a little impromptu acoustic, crowd-sing-along encore after a recent show. Enjoy!
Second, for balance, a video of the same song played in full orchestration, with a special added Bowie-nus:
The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels
Which one have you read? Notice that the "readers'" list is riddled with Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard entries. This both tells you which groups may have been doing a little ballot box stuffing, and also provides empirical proof that the same people who enjoy Scientology enjoy Ayn Rand.
Consider the Lobster
A fantastic read on animal ethics by your hero and mine, DFW.
The Financial Woes of Recording Artists
An insightful article on the finacnial side of the record industry, by oft punk in drublic Courtney Love (former wife of Kurt Cobain and lead lady of Hole)
Castle Smasher
A sweet game
Unusual articles at Wikipedia: pretty self-explanatory
Nomic
This is for nerds only - it's an account of a law-based game theory where inherent is the game is that you can change the rules as you go. Think of it as Calvinball for the college dorks.
Mythbusters
Every myth that's been busted or conirmed by the popular cable series.
That's it - thanks for your reading!
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