Karen says

Trouble me, disturb me with all your cares and you worries.
Trouble me on the days when you feel spent.
Why let your shoulders bend underneath this burden when my back is sturdy and strong?
Trouble me.

Speak to me, don't mislead me, the calm I feel means a storm is swelling;
there's no telling where it starts or how it ends.
Speak to me, why are you building this thick brick wall to defend me when your silence is my greatest fear?
Why let your shoulders bend underneath this burden when my back is sturdy and strong?
Speak to me.

Let me have a look inside these eyes while I'm learning.
Please don't hide them just because of tears.
Let me send you off to sleep with a "There, there, now stop your turning and tossing."
Let me know where the hurt is and how to heal.

Spare me? Don't spare me anything troubling.
Trouble me, disturb me with all your cares and you worries.
Speak to me and let our words build a shelter from the storm.
Lastly, let me know what I can mend.
There's more, honestly, than my sweet friend, you can see.
Trust is what I'm offering if you trouble me.


"Trouble Me" by 10,000 Maniacs (Natalie Merchant)

Loss

BECCA
(After a beat) Mom? (NAT looks up at her.)

NAT
What.

BECCA
This feeling. Does it ever go away? (Beat.)

NAT
No. I don't think it does. Not for me it hasn't. And that's goin' on eleven years. (Beat.) It changes though.

BECCA
How?

NAT
I don't know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around -- like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: "Oh right. That." Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometimes it's kinda ... Not that you like it exactly, but it's what you have instead of your son, so you don't wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn't go away, which is...

BECCA
What.

NAT:
Fine... actually. (They're silent for a couple beats. BECCA nods a little. She goes back to work. So does NAT.)

(The lights fade.)

From David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole.

I'll never say no to you

I'll never say no to you,
Whatever you say or do,
If you ask me to wait for a lifetime.
You know I'll gladly wait
For a lifetime or two
Just to look at you.

I'll smile, when you say "Be Glad,"
I'll weep if you want me sad.
Today is tomorrow
If you want it so.
I'll stay or I'll go,
But I'll never say no...

From The Unsinkable Molly Brown by Meredith Willson, so beautifully sung by Harve Presnell on the cast album with which I grew up.

Jack Webb did have a sense of humor after all

I was listening to the Big Broadcast last night and during an episode of Dragnet wherein Det. Joe Friday goes undercover to arrest a Heroin dealer* there is a scene set in a bar. The "background" music was actually pretty foreground so it was hard not to pay attention to it. All was worth it, though, when I figured out that the piece was an instrumental version of "I've got you under my skin."


*Height of weirdness - listening to Jack Webb's voice refer to heroin as "H."

Now I really want one

Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter

Caramel Chew

There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.

Your move

"Your Move" by Yes which includes the best advice ever written into a rock song.

I've seen all good people turn their heads each day
so satisfied I'm on my way.
I've seen all good people turn their heads each day
so satisfied I'm on my way.

Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life.
Make the white queen run so fast she hasn't got time to make you a wife.

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and its news is captured
For the queen to use.
Move me on to any black square,
Use me any time you want,
Just remember that the goal
'Sfor us to capture all we want, anywhere,
Yea, yea, yea.

Don't surround yourself with yourself,
Move on back two squares,
Send an Instant Karma to me,
Initial it with loving care
Don't surround
Yourself.

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and
its news is captured
For the queen to use.
Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit didda.
Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit
Didda.

Don't surround yourself with yourself,
Move on back two squares,
Send an Instant Karma to me,
Initial it with loving care
Don't surround
Yourself with yourself.
Don't surround yourself.
Send an Instant
Karma to me. Don't surround
yourself.

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and its news is captured
For the queen to use.
Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit didda.
Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit didda.

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and its news is captured.

Another good reason

Whenever I go to a restaurant that has a gluten-free menu I make sure to ask for one - even though I have probably already decided what I'm having - because it's not a bad idea to keep the staff aware that they have customers who appreciate and use those menus. It also reminds the wait staff that I'm probably not going to want crutons on my salad.

Having seen this article in the Milwaukee Business Journal, however, I now know that it will also let everyone who needs to know that I'm "in the house."

Built into a Bonefish Grill food register is a button that reads “food
allergies” that alerts the kitchen staff that they’re preparing a meal for a patron with dietary restrictions. All dishes are made from scratch, allowing chefs to eliminate or substitute individual ingredients. Kitchen and wait staff receive in-house training on food allergies.

At the restaurant

My dinner companions (and the waitress): You're sure you don't want an appetizer?

Me: Nope. I'm saving myself for dessert. Which is like saving yourself for marriage, only harder.

The Olympian I am rooting for

Amy Yoder Begley. Amy is a middle and long distance runner competing in Beijing this year who has Celiac Disease. She's blogging about the Olympics on her website and for the Fort Wayne* Daily News. Here's a snip from an entry from a few days ago:

The cafeteria seats 5,000. I can't eat there due to my wheat and gluten allergy (Celiac Disease). The village did get a lot of complaints about not having wheat and gluten free foods so they just added some yesterday. However, they do not prep it gluten free, so I still can't eat it. I have to eat at the USOC camp they have set up for us 20 minutes from the Village. I am not complaining though, I prefer safe food over convenience!

She's competing in the 10,000 meter on August 15th. Go, Amy!

*Fort Wayne, Indiana - the proud home of Maj. Frank Burns.

A life in the theater

Shriekback's description of rehearsing at Silver Spring Stage....


In a jungle of the senses
Tinkerbell and Jack the ripper
Love has no meaning, not where they come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully correctly wrong

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

We feel like Greeks, we feel like Romans
Centaurs and monkeys just cluster round us
We drink elixirs that we refine
from the juices of the dying
We are no monsters, we're moral people
and yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendour of our achievement
Call in the airstrike with a poison kiss

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home

How bad it gets, you can't imagine
the burning wax, the breath of reptiles
god is not mocked, he knows our business
Karma could take us at any moment
Cover him up.....I think we're finished
You know it's never been so exotic
but I don't know, my dreams are visions
We could still end up with the great big fishes

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home

Who'll stop the rain?

I will. By sending a castmate this e-mail:

(I'm making this offer so that it will stop raining.)

Let me know if you'd like to be picked up at the Metro for rehearsal.

The centre cannot hold

On my mind as we start "Dinner with Friends." I don't know exactly why yet.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Karen and Gabe (#2)

I sat down beside her. The unpaid phone bill was as good as anything else to talk about; we no longer needed to say aloud what we were saying to each other underneath. In all our life together, we had taken goodbyes casually, and hellos, too. A lot of people mistook it for not caring. It was perhaps too much the opposite. We needed each other like bees and honey.

From Smokescreen by Dick Francis

Karen and Gabe, not Beth and Tom (#1)

Since we had left London, she had developed an added strength which one could only call serenity, and although she could on occasion lose her temper as furiously as I could, her foundations were now built on rock.

A lot of people in the film world, I knew, thought my wife unexciting and my home life a drag, and expected me to break out in blondes and redheads, like a rash. But I had very little in common with the sort of larger-than-life action man I played in film after film. The films were my work, and I worked hard at them, but I didn't take them home.

Charlie snuggled beside me under the duvet and put her head on my chest. I smoothed my hands over her bare skin, feeling the ripple deep in her abdomen and the faint tremble in her legs.

"O.K.?" I asked, kissing her hair.

"Very..."

We made love in the simple, ordinary way, as we always did; but because I had been away a month it was one of the best times, one of the breath-taking, fundamental, indescribable times which became a base to live from. Certainty begins here, I thought. With this, what else did one need?

From Smokescreen by Dick Francis

Gilbert & Sullivan's Flibbertigibbet

Which Character from 'The Yeomen of the Guard' are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Phoebe Meryll A flirt who has been raised among the soldiers at the Tower. Phoebe toys with the heart of her oafish admirer Wilfred in order to get what she wants. She desires the handsome Fairfax, and so takes every opportunity to be near him. In the end she is rejected by him, and due to her lack of discretion thereafter, she is forced into an engagement to Wilfred. “Were I thy bride, then all the world beside were not too wide to hold my wealth of love… But then, of course, you see, I’m not thy bride.” -Phoebe Meryll Phoebe Meryll 65% Sergeant Meryll 60% Colonel Fairfax 55% Jack Point 50% Wilfred Shadbolt 45% Leonard Meryll 45% Sir Richard Cholmondeley 45% Elsie Maynard 40% Dame Carruthers 30%

As it's me, it'll probably be a laugh line. Or lines.

Karen: Why were you so quiet tonight?
Gabe: What? What do you mean?
Karen: When Beth was telling us. You were so silent.
Gabe: I wasn't silent. I was shocked. I was stunned.
Karen: You let me do most of the talking
Gabe: That's not unusual. (She swats at him.) Hey! No, I mean it, you do do most of the talking.
Karen: I do not.
Gabe: Yes you do. You generally have more to say on any given subject than I do. That's why we work well together. You talk, I write, you edit me.


From Dinner with Friends by Donald Margulies