Now it's really summer

94.7 just played one of my favorite Jimmy Buffett songs! (And, of course, being the shallow thing that I am, my other favorite is the Jeopardy-answer "Fins." Of course, I also really do love "Why don't we get drunk and screw" but that's not all that deep or obscure, is it?)

And if you ditch the big warm bun and the cold draft beer, I can totally sign off on a burger Jimmy's way.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

Tried to amend my carnivorous habits.
Made it nearly seventy days,
Losin' weight without speed, eatin' sunflower seeds,
Drinkin' lots of carrot juice and soakin' up rays.

But at night I'd have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat.
Not zucchini, fettuccini, or bulgur wheat,
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat.

Cheeseburger is paradise.
Heaven on earth with an onion slice.
Not too particular, not too precise.
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.

I like mine with lettuce and tomato,
Heinz Fifty-seven and French fried potatoes.
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer.
Well, good God Almighty, which way do I steer
For my cheeseburger in paradise.

Heard about the old time sailor men,
They eat the same thing again and again;
Warm beer and bread they say could raise the dead.
Well, it reminds me of the menu at a Holiday Inn.

But times have changed for sailors these days.
When I'm in port I get what I need;
Not just Havanas or banana or daiquiris,
But that American creation on which I feed!

Cheeseburger is paradise
medium rare with mustard'd be nice
Not too particular, not too precise
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer
Well, good god Almighty which way do I steer

For a cheeseburger in paradise
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice.
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice
To get a cheeseburger in paradise;
To be a cheeseburger in paradise.
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.

Reading Plants

I really enjoy Ketzel Levine's stories on NPR and now they're hosting a blog that she's writing about plants. Clearly - and no surprise - she is more informal in a blog setting than on the air. My favorite paragraph from the first Talking Plants post:

I am no Pollyanna poster child for emotional equanimity. (Click here for the TP list of Preferred Pharmaceuticals. OK, I was kidding. Stop clicking.) But don't let a lifetime of anti-depressants fool you. I am a gardener. Are you a gardener? Gardeners do not put plants in the ground in the hopes that they will suffer and perish. Gardeners plant to see tomorrow.

So it looks like I have another to add to the blog roll.

Thanks to David for the formatting assist.

Like satisfaction, only different

Words to live by.

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

M. Jagger/K. Richards

It's time

I've got a couple of auditions this week and it's a good thing. I'm getting that itchy feeling in my palms that means that I need to go read for people.

It's sort of like Snoopy's stomach clock. I guess I've been sleeping on top of the doghouse long enough.

Unless no one casts me, in which case it's more like Charlie Brown and the kite. Or Charlie Brown and the football.

At least it's not like Linus and the Great Pumpkin. Let's be grateful for that.

Maybe this will work

You know how it goes. You update a form and distribute it, asking people to delete the previous version. Except that they don't. They keep using the old form which is exactly the sort of negligence that could bring American business to the point of total collapse. You redistribute the form and ask again but with no better luck.

We have a couple of forms here that have been updated a few times but some folks are just stubborn, I guess, and are always at least one version behind. Well, if they won't do their bit to save the American economy, maybe they'll cooperate in order to save the planet. Here's the e-mail I sent to a couple of folks yesterday:

Here is the most current [name of form deleted to be on the safe side] form. It's newer and shinier than the old one. It's a thing of beauty and a joy until we revise it again some time in the future.

Using the old form will increase global warming* and may possibly allow dangerous levels of both carbon and ozone, not to mention CFCs, to be released into the atmosphere. Using the new form will reduce our carbon footprint in the future.

Please dispose of the old form properly. Please use the new form.

If this doesn't work, I may have to take stronger action, although I don't know what that might be right now. Maybe I'll report them to the Department Homeland Security because using the old form doesn't help keep Americans safe the way that using the new form does.


*And you're probably wondering how a form that is an electronic document could have any kind of carbon emissions, but don't spend too much time thinking about that. Just nod and smile.

Solstice

Okay, there's this episode of I Dream of Jeannie, where Jeannie and Maj. Nelson were going to have their pre-wedding blood tests. No one thinks anything of it until either Tony or Roger asks Jeannie if her blood is weird in any way. "Oh, no, my blood is just like anyone else's. I have red corpuscles, and white corpuscles, and green corpuscles." And, of course, wackiness ensues.

I think that I have green corpuscles, too. I think that they're derived from chlorophyll or however that works. (I'm not clear on the biology here because I failed to pay sufficient attention in science class because I was "bright but would not work." Just ask my teachers.)

I like to be out in the sunshine. Much as I love "big weather" like thunder and lightening and driving rain or blizzards, I love to be out in the sunshine. If the weather is warm (around 80 degrees) and sunny and not too humid, it's lovely to be outside. The sun warms my skin, vitamin D gets made, and the whole photosynthesis thing kicks in. Eating outside, breathing real air instead of chilled air? Bring it on! Sunshine on my shoulders is like a good back-rub or something. I think I'm most relaxed when I've just slightly desiccated.

I don't know if this is because I have spent the last many years working in cold offices or if it's a throwback to my infancy when Mom would put me outside in my playpen and I'd get all peach colored, which back then was considered healthier than now. Like smoking.

When I was a child and a teenager all the red in my hair would come out in the summer. By September it was nearer auburn than brunette.

And I hate sunblock which feels like a coat of Latex paint. So it's probably just as well that I am the sort of bone-lazy person who doesn't get outside to play nearly as often as she should. And I've never been very good at tanning, so I didn't devote the hours to teen-age rotisserie that my sister did.

But I love to sit outside with a good book and a glass of ice tea, wiggling my toes in the sunlight and despairing that my legs will always be far too pale instead of, say tennis player brown. Because even when I play tennis, only my upper body tans. (Why is that? It's annoying.)

Like a lizard or a tomato plant, I store the sunlight so that I can use it later for energy. I mean, sunshine on my shoulders (yes, I am trying to stick that song in your head) makes me sleepy, but sunshine stored in my shoulders powers all that puttering that I like to do.

And I've had some odd tans in my life. Like the two or three years in college when I wore those cute canvas China flats every single day, winter and summer, and I got a tan on the tops of my feet but not my toes, not to mention the white strap line, which looked as though I had spent the day walking through dust. Or the years when I did 18th Century re-enactment and had a bronze glow on my face, my décolletage, and on my arms below the elbow, but was arsenic-white everywhere else.

Now, of course, I spend most of my free time in theaters, including on lovely, sunny Sunday afternoons, so I'm pretty Casper-y all over. Which is for the best, really, because I don't believe in purposely aging my skin. If I want to look older I could just squint until the crow's feet set, I guess, and why has that not caught on, I wonder?

That's for sure

Liza is a very smart woman who has written a lot of insightful things, but this one definitely is in my top 10 for "many relationships and most of my entire family would be different if we could pound this into our stupid heads and act on it instead of just thinking that it's true."

It is so important to try to find out what is going on in the heads of the people we care about, and telepathy doesn’t work reliably as a source of information.

Yet another reason why it's more important that Liza be able to marry than me.

On purpose

And while we were ordering food last night, one of the folks asked if the chicken tenders were breaded* This got my attention because it's usually the first question someone with CD asks, at least in the early stages of the learning curve. I wondered if my companion was recently diagnosed with the World's Most Boring Autoimmune Disorder, but then I saw that he was drinking a Michelob Ultra, which, while "low-carb" (2.6 grams) is still beer and thus is basically liquid poison (to be overly dramatic about it) to the gluten-free community, what with all that malted barley.

His order was for some kind of salad with no crutons and the penny dropped. He doesn't have CD. He's doing Atkins or South Beach or something similar. Some kind of voluntary exile into low-carb, no carb land.

I had forgotten that there are people who will do that by choice. They are ....weird.


*Answer: Of course they are. That's like asking if the cupcakes are frosted. If they weren't breaded, they would have been called "grilled," usually a CD "safe" word.

NVTA 2007

After the NVTA one-act festival awards last night a few of us went off to the 4 Ps for a "post game" drink/bite to eat. Sure, we all have food and booze at home, but then we couldn't do the always enjoyable "analysis" of the evening.

The upside of the awards was that - from what I heard about the shows I didn't see and what I remember of the ones I did - I think that the judges largely gave the right awards to the right shows.* Not 100%, of course, but that never happens. And the show that I loved a lot and thought was done excellently by all concerned copped some of the big awards, so I regarded spending $10 to get to applaud for them again as money well spent.

The downside was that the judges largely got it right and what's more fun than insinuating that the highly respected, volunteer judges who put in a hours and hours of work and generally find something positive to say no matter how wretched a show might be and who are taking those hours from their actual work lives as theather professionals, what's more fun than insinuating that they must clinically insane crack-addicted drunks and then trashing the horrible shows one hated that got a bunch of completely undeserved honors because now those untalented maroons are going to prace around like they just got Tony awards, not that they would know good quality work yadda, yadda, etc, etc.

Ahhh. Good times.

Anyway, we got settled in and ordered and because the 4Ps carries my favorite Scotch, I got to order m'self a Laphroaig (pronounced, La-froyg), a simply lovely, smokey, peaty masterpiece that should never be drunk any way except neat. Yummmmmmmm. (I first heard about it in a Dick Francis book and decided to try it and unlike some other things that I read about in books and then decided to try, the Laphroaig worked out very well indeed.) None of the ladies had ever tried the Islay Blesssing, so I passed mine around, creating a bond in us that may last for all time. The men were drinking beer, so we don't have a bond with them.

When I go the Maryland festival or the Eastern States, I don't know folks as well, so the socializing is always lighter, maybe more superficial. To really get into the fine print of these sorts of things, your local festival is the way to go. Like family reunions, it's much easier to raise the eyebrow to one's sisters and cousins about the in-laws than it is to one's third cousin-once-removed about yet another branch. Of course, it's safer to keep the subject of that sort of thing the long deceased reprobates who feature in the colorful stories, I guess, but who's going to do that?

Art and artistry may be the foundation of theater, along with dedication and teamwork, but the pillars are definitely the drinking, the flirting, and the gossip. At least they were last night.

*I know a lot of very talented people who participated in the festival and did not receive a bunch of nominations/awards. If you are one of them and read this, I think you're great, really great, and deserve all kinds of awards. Stupid judges. What do they know? A travesty, that's what it was. Just a travesty. Okay? Okay.

**Note: Of course, none of us would ever do that. Theater isn't competitive. Theater people are only kind and generous. And we can only admire the bravery and dedication that goes into putting on a show anywhere ever. Any snarky comments made at these sorts of gatherings should only be used for comarison purposes. This blog post should not be construed as recommending a particular course of action. Should you wish to do a post-show analysis, the advice of a competant professional should be sought.