It’s Show Time

What would the media do without the corona-virus, Harvey Weinstein and the Democrats jostling for votes to become the candidate to oppose President Trump this fall? They’d have to fold up and crawl under their desks. Is there any news that isn’t bad news, or better put, scary news? The media thrives on crises.

Have you also noticed how shallow the reporting is? Lots of scare language but little substance. There are barely enough facts to understand anything, let alone feel you have the full story.

What’s happened to journalism? What’s being taught in these schools? I think they’re really in the entertainment business. There is no such thing as a well-balance piece about anything anymore except maybe how to dance the tango or make a plum tart.

And have you noticed how many journalists take their cues from Twitter quotes? Or video clips? Pretty soon I’m expecting some company to roll out a platoon of robots holding yellow legal pads and pencils stuck behind their ears to produce the news. They’ll be cheaper and more efficient in the long run. That is, if you don’t care about the facts.

Calvin says, “Take your cue from me. My nose is the daily paper. I learn everything I need to know there. You should do the same.”

 

It’s All About the Drama

“People are basically insane,” playwright David Manet says in a writing class I’m taking. “We miss a connection, we have an evil impulse that wants to lead us astray,” he goes on. “We live on the dark side and the cure is religion. Another word for religion is drama.”

Did I hear him correctly? Yes. Manet is a devoted Jew, and espouses his religion with conviction and fervor.

“All drama is failure and lies,” he says.

You can say that again. Story of my life.

“Don’t be boring,” he warns. 

How can you be boring if your life is full of drama? Everybody’s life is dramatic. It’s so dramatic Hollywood couldn’t invent it, I say. And since you’re the protagonist in your own story, make it good.

“Dialogue is just gossip,” he tells me. Now he’s talking. I’ve got enough for several books.

“Narration is the death of drama,” he continues. No wonder school is boring.

“The live audience in a play are idiots individually, but collectively they’re genius,” he says. “They paid you a compliment by coming to see your play. Drama helps them face the truth and they come for the truth.”

“Movies don’t challenge people, drama does,” he says. I’ve been saying that for years. To prove the point, just listen to a child explain away something he did, like break the TV screen with a baseball. It’s drama at its best.

Calvin says, “It’s drama for me when I go after a rabbit. My nose quivers, my body is on alert, and my singing voice takes over. Better than opera.”  

 

 

Sock It To Me

It was beginning to appear that her interesting face covered a most uninteresting mind. – Anne Perry

He would look at you as is he were really interested in all you said. He never seemed to be merely polite. It was almost as if he were half expecting you to turn out to be special, and he did not want to miss any opportunity to find out. – Anne Perry

Don’t mistake a street address for where you actually live. – Ruth Reichl

Art is what we call the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters,
what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist. – Seth Godin

“So was that the reason you left Herminia?” Miss Prim said.

He looked at her in silence for a few seconds, as if trying to guess what lay behind her question.

“I think you didn’t really love her,” she said.

“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said firmly. “I did love her. I loved her very much. But the day came, or maybe the moment, I don’t know, when I realized that she was asleep, whereas I was fully awake, absolutely, and totally awake. I’d climbed like a cat up onto a roof and I could see a beautiful, terrible, mysterious landscape stretching out before me. Did I really love her? Of course I did. Perhaps if I’d loved her less, cared for her less, I wouldn’t have had to leave her.”

“I thought the religious were closer to other people than anyone else.”

“I can’t speak for anyone else. I only know what it’s meant to me. It’s been my touchstone, the line that’s split my life in two and given it absolute meaning. But I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. It’s not easy, and anyone who says it is is fooling themselves. It was catharsis, a shocking trauma, open-heart surgery, like a tree torn from the ground and replanted elsewhere.

“And there’s something else,” he continued, “something to do with looking beyond the moment, with the need to scan the horizon, to scrutinize it as keenly as a sailor studies his charts. Don’t be surprised. My story is as old as the world. I’m not the first and won’t be the last. I know what you’re thinking. Would I turn back if I could? No, of course not. Would a newly awoken man willingly go back to the sleepwalking life?”

–         From The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

Calvin says, “Oh brother, what have you been drinking?” 

Snatched Conversations

“I just made up my mind to be cremated,” my 93-year old friend told me recently.

“Why not be buried?” I asked.

“I don’t want to rot in a box,” she said.

“Then consider being sprinkled,” I said.

“I cant swim,” she said.  

—

“My mother wasn’t a good cook,” my friend said. “So imagine my delight as a young girl when I came home from school one day to the aroma of stew simmering on the stove.”

“Did she surprise you with a home-cooked meal?” I asked.

“No, she was stewing meat for the dogs and I got a frozen dinner,” she said.

—

“I had a friend in college who slept in a bathtub,” Jules said.

“Why there?” I asked.

“Because we called him Mr. Machine and he had shifty eyes and I guess he had to live up to his name,” he said.

—

“It’s not brunch anymore,” said the hostess in the hotel dinning room.

That would make a good title for a novel, I thought. The story would center around a woman of social standing searching for the perfect brunch in her city in order to invite her best friends to join her and announce she was going to kill herself, except in the course of trying different dishes around town she falls in love with the cooking of an old-timer Parisian chef whose food awakens the passions in her life.

—

Calvin says, “You’ve fallen off your rocker.” 

 

 

 

Quotes on the Run

Overheard at a coffee shop:

My job is a major interruption to the work that most endears me: the contemplation of myself.

Self-forgetfulness is impossible. How can I forget the most provocative subject in the world? Me.

In a conversation:

Today’s marketing mandate: Give the public what they don’t know they need, and then create a market for it.

Alf’s wisdom:

Dead people don’t change lanes.

From author Anne Perry:  

It was beginning to appear that her interesting face covered a most uninteresting mind.

He would look at you as is he were really interested in all you said. He never seemed to be merely polite. It was almost as if he were half expecting you to turn out to be special, and he did not want to miss any opportunity to find out.

From author Ruth Reichl:

Don’t mistake a street address for where you actually live.

From screen diva May West:

It’s better to be looked over than over looked.

Vogue Taylors:
Ladies are welcome to have a fit upstairs.

Anonymous:

People who exercise just die healthier.

Calvin says, “Here’s another one: Dogs that don’t exercise daily die fat and fartsy.” 

Conversations on the Run #12

Everybody is hiding something – shame and fear are universal.  

The pug was so fat he looked like a caterpillar.

People want to improve their lives, but according to their own obsessions.

He has his own inner landscape that interests and amuses him.

Life is not your personal possession to do with as you please.

What is today will always be. Not so. You could die tomorrow.

Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.

You don’t have to believe everything you think.

Life creates a demand for wisdom.

Smearing paint on a canvas is an act of faith.

Don’t grow accustomed to the rubble around you.

Jesus is not a life coach.

Calvin says, “Here’s my quote – ‘Everyone should sniff the pee markings on the neighborhood trees to read the messages.'”  

 

 

 

Shakespeare with a Spin

We just returned from the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon where we saw four plays, two of which were from the Shakespeare canon. The Comedy of Errors was ridiculous, The Tempest was great. The other two were modern dramas full of angst and despair, the kind of thing I like because it’s kinda where I live. It also brings out the best in a cast.

Alf and I have been going to Ashland for 27 years now so you can imagine how many plays that translates into – yikes we should be experts, but we’re not. Acting companies muck around with the settings and costumes and even with some of the lines so every play looks and feels different from year to year. We’ve seen Julius Caesar performed in gym outfits, The Taming of the Shrew in a boardwalk setting (right picture), and Romeo and Juliet with a Mexican backdrop.  

This year an African-America cast did the Comedy of Errors (left picture) and the director set it in Harlem, so you can imagine the farce and mayhem on stage. The costumes were everything you’d expect to see in a Sunday church setting. Alf loathed it. I enjoyed the spin.

Our biggest adventure was missing out on the Groucho Marx play, The Cocoanuts. All the other plays were at 8 pm and I assumed this one was too, but no it wasn’t, it was a matinee, and we were at the mall shopping while Groucho was yucking it up with the audience. I could have kicked myself. We rushed to the box office, told them our plight, asked to be added to the next performance only to be told it was on the day we were going home. So Groucho came and went without us. “Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.” Alf couldn’t agree more.

Calvin says, “All those settings, all those new smells, why don’t you take me with you? I know the hotel takes pets. I checked online.” 

 

Overheard Conversations # 11

I haven’t posted my regular overheard conversations in a long time, so I’ve got a few.

Two young men walking down the street. One was pouring his heart out about a girl he was attracted to, but wasn’t ready to commit to. He didn’t ask his friend his opinion, but he got it anyway. “It’s like this. You can either buy the book or borrow it from the library,” he said.

A sign on the subway station wall:  

no mocking

no eating

no playing

Have you hugged your local reporter lately? No. Because there aren’t any, only idiots who can’t write a sentence, or give you the facts about a story because they aren’t there! They’re picking it up from a wire service, or worse, from Facebook.

Don’t trust a doctor who lives on pills.

A new study says that saturated fat won’t kill you. That’s because it was sponsored and paid for by the cows.

Don’t believe all the likes a picture or video gets. People in the Philippines get paid to click for a living.

Calvin says, “I overheard a conversation at the dog park. It went like this: Woof, woof, come back here, stop that, that’s nasty!”

 

Carry On As Usual

Overheard conversations in the office this week:

“I have a rat in the house I can’t get rid of.”

“Have you tried peanut butter in the trap?”

“Yep. The bugger shook the trap, turned it upside down, and scarfed up the peanut butter.” 

“Savvy rat.”

“I heard him in the living room wall while watching TV.”

“Coat the electrical wires from the outlet in peanut butter, and then turn on the lights.”

“I’ll set my house on fire.”

“But you’d get rid of the rat.”

—

“My cat is still spooked from the move.”

“So re-move him.”

—

“When the property management for my condo complex finds out we’re looking at other management companies, it will go over like a turd in a punchbowl.”

—

Calvin says, “I’ll sniff out the rat. I’ll pin it into a corner and bay my guts out. I’ll be so loud, the neighbors will think I’m being murdered.”

Conversations on the Run10

“…if it’s your happy color, go for it…”

“If the human body is 60% water, why do we need to drink so much of it?”

“When I go camping I like to get pickled under the pine trees.”

“I used to travel back and forth to Alcatraz when I was murdering people.”

“He looked like a dachshund without enough feet.”

“Triple layer of cultures, that’s what we are. Sounds like a triple ice cream cone smooched together.”

“Everybody has a story to tell, but not every story has an everybody to tell it.”

Calvin says, “Who talks like this? My head hurts.”