Happiest People Ever

My friend, Nomi, sent me the link to this photo blog today. It's a very silly website but I had to laugh out loud when I saw that the guy sitting in the middle of this picture from the site (which you will find, suitable for captioning, in the June 10th entry) is our friend and Nomi's former roommate, Randy Lake wearing a burgundy shirt.

Cool Stuff: The Human Calendar

I offer you this link to On the Edge of Everywhere, the blog of Peggy, whom I met this past summer through my sister-in-law, Bethany. As someone who does graphic design and has to mess around with web design regularly, this is really impressive; I'm sure there's a trick with databases to making it at least somewhat easier, but it's still not something you can just throw together in a few hours. The author of the calendar, Craig Giffen, has an older, just as cool project, the humanclock.

BTW: Congratulations to Peggy's son, Charles, on being an Edward J. Bloustein Distinguised Scholar!

Blogging About Blogs: Peripatetic or Pathetic?

I've discovered a few interesting blogs that I've begun to follow, besides the ones already linked on this page. Before January, the only blogs I really read were ModFab and Show Showdown (when they reviewed one of our productions or one of my friends'—reading reviews is not my idea of a pastime: nothing personal, guys). Now that I'm part of the bos (yeah, I'm not typing it out—suck it!), I all of the sudden find myself a little more interested in what others are writing. Here are three that may ultimately be—and one that already is—included in my links:

Chocolate and Zucchini: I first saw her link when she won a blog award in February. The name is great and while I'm not someone who really enjoys cooking (I do it because I don't want to have to eat my own foot, basically), I've enjoyed the way she writes about cooking. Her recent post, Squeeze Cookies, is a good example: it's not so much about the cookies as it is her experiment with roasted flour. She's interesting, she writes well and she lives in Paris—the ultimate hat trick, in my book.

Italian Love Dream: I have no idea how these folks got my name: an invitation to check out the blog was in my PWP e-mail (which I don't use for the blog, addressed to someone at NYFA... I have no idea). But I'm interested in unusual, international projects and the sender began by saying "in this moment i'm at work for development an innovative multicultural integration projects." My first thought was, "Hey, my Spanish is lousy—but probably not worse than this Italian guy's English. He's making an effort, let's see what he's trying to say." I've looked it over, bookmarked an RSS feed to it and... I still don't know what he's trying to say. It's in Italian and a kind of English (yeah, glass houses, I know) but I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is: a performance mixing live performance and web video, I think. There's a lot of what I would call dramaturgical examples on the site, but maybe that's one of the points I'm missing. It's just not completely clear to me... but I'm still interested.

The Robin Hood Affair: Got this one from a link on the Italian Love Dream site. I've got a bad case of wanderlust at this point in my life, so I'm especially drawn to a young couple traveling the world. I think she began the blog as a diary for her friends but she's got me looking forward to her next post. A warning, though: the photos she posts are not very compressed, so the site is very slow on the download.

Never Trust Your Pet...: Finally, there's my friend in Chicago, Bob Fisher. He's in the middle of a revival of a play that he first began developing with PWP in 1997! I've enjoyed the insights he's offered into his process as a writer/director, the amazing artwork he posts as Favorite Thing(s) of the Week (this is my most recent favorite), and the cool Photoshopping he does on his production photos.

Oh, yeah, just so you know: I totally had to dictionary Peripatetic... Come on, you people should know by now I'm just not that smart.

“So, Mom took off for Alaska, huh?”

Last October, I went out to Los Angeles for a production of one of my plays at Theatre of NOTE. While I was there, I had an opportunity to sit in on a couple of classes that my friend, Lee Wochner, teaches at USC. It was Lee who said to me, shortly after we met and right after he saw a staged reading that I had directed, that it's great when you see the work of someone you like and you like the work, too. While I'd seen and enjoyed Lee's work as a playwright and director, I'd never seen him in action as a teacher. All I can say is, I wish I'd had professors that good when I was in college... and I had some pretty good ones. As an example, I point you to this post on his blog, which he used in class that day. Not being someone with those kinds of analytical skills, I find the people who have them most impressive.