It runs in the family*

It seems that the cat has a possible theater career ahead of him ...

Some friends and I started a tradition on Facebook called Foto Friday. The rules are pretty simple: take a picture on Friday and post it to your news feed and you're in! No pictures of, or pertaining to, the men's room are acceptable for Foto Friday. Anything else is generally fair game, although our offices do seem to figure in a pretty high percentage of the shots taken.

I wanted to take a non-office Friday Foto and I had a decent idea. I would take a picture of Pekoe and his (by the end of the workday) empty food bowl. So I brought the camera home from work and after the initial writhing through my legs to express his joy at my return, Peek and I headed into the kitchen. I took an establishing shot of the tragically empty bowl:



I then took a nice shot of Pekoe looking mournfully at me while standing next to the tragically empty bowl. The camera told me to change the batteries and shut itself off. Oh, well. Okay. I feed Pekoe and then went to the computer to download the images, but alas! The second shot didn't save because of the low battery.

New batteries were added to the camera and then Pekoe was informed that, as we had lost the original image, we would now need to recreate "Sad Pekoe at the Empty Food Bowl." So, to his obvious confusion, I picked up his food bowl and dumped all but a few crumbs of the contents back into the airtight plastic container that keeps the cat food reasonably fresh and reasonably unavailable to strew all over the kitchen.

I set the bowl down and like a trooper he resumed his previous position and looked up at me on cue.**



Note how he has arranged to show off his lovely green eyes to best effect, to minimize any "devil cat red eye," and yet to very clearly express "What's the with empty bowl? We feed cats here!"

And yet ... the director in me reviewed the shot (if Peek and I had been filming, I would have been "reviewing the dailies" or something like that) and decided that we needed one more take.

Pekoe had already wandered off to sniff and bat at things, two of his major occupations, but when summoned to the set, promptly hit his mark and was ready to go.



As can be clearly noted in the second shot The Artist built on his previous character choices for Starving Cat, adding in layers relating to his previous life as a stray. There is just a hint of the dichotomy between being grateful for being fed every day and fearing dependency on another for his basic needs.

I swear he takes direction better than some far more experienced human actors I've worked with.

All the material we needed was now safely in the can, as it were, so the food was replaced in the bowl and the The Artist was rewarded with a couple of Pounce.***


*Okay, just to clarify, I do not regard myself as Pekoe's "Mom." His staff, maybe, but not his mom. Or any other family member. But the title just seemed more euphonius than "It runs in the human/animal companionate relationship."

**The truly discerning (or truly anal, decide for yourself) will notice that the arragement of food particles lacks continuity from the establishing shot. I was working from memory. I did the best I could.

***Which is about as much as I been paid for theater in the past year, come to think of it.

Very very rare

See? It is possible to take a picture of me where I don't have my camera smile.

My alma mater, not my year

David likes to check out the antique photos on Shorpy. Today he sent me this one of the archery team, cheekily labeled "I'm With Cupid."

Montgomery Blair High School girls, 1935

Leta and Sara at Easter

We needed family pictures for the set of Taking Leave, so Mom let me root through a box of old snapshots and take this one (among others). I'm on the left and Sara, looking pretty much exactly like Daddy in drag is the cute blond on my right. I was six and Sara three. Although I've long outgrown the dress (thank goodness) and the hat (pity), I still have the cross.

We're standing on the steps of the house where we grew up and were probably impatient to not be standing there anymore. Mom would frame and focus pictures for what seemed like hours at a time and I suspect that when she got the prints back she had to ditch quite a few where we had the "take the pic - ture" expressions.

I like most of the snapshots from when we were very little but for some reason I particularly like this one. Maybe because it was taken at a time when Sara would still let me hold her hand.

Zooming in

Thanks to Silver Spring, Singular, I've been apprised that Google maps has updated their shots of my hometown. The previous pictures were from before a lot of the redevelopment took place, so looking at the old Google Maps image was a quick trip into the past.

Technically, I grew up one zip over in 20901, but for my purposes, Singular's search works just fine.

The first thing I did was zoom in really close onto my office and see that the back parking lot was pretty empty, so we know the picture wasn't taken on a work day;

The strongly western lean to the shadow indicates a picture taken it the morning;

Crusing north from my office to my church, I can see a nice full parking lot, so it's probably Sunday and the street parkers (like me) haven't arrived in full force, so it's probably before 10:00 am; and

The trees are pretty bare indicating winter or very early spring.

Respectfully submitted,
Leta for CSI: Silver Spring

PS - Peter..... Peter.... I can see your house from here.

The best bus ever!

If I lived in Lee County in Alabama, I would take this bus all the time. And right now I am considering changing my "About" text to read:

Take advantage of the Lee County Transit Agency’s (LETA) convenient bus schedule and routes. [...] It’s an easy, inexpensive and convenient way to travel. LETA is for anyone who needs transportation, wants to protect the environment, or wants to save money on gasoline costs. Whether you are traveling to work, to school, or to shopping areas across town, LETA will get you where you want to go!

Maybe this is what they meant in all those pop songs when they sang "you take me there," or "I'll take you there."

(Thanks to David.)

We clean up okay

Paula Prentiss, c'est moi

After having three consecutive directors ask me not to cut my hair, I have finally cut it. I convinced Chuck (my director for Anton) and Kendal (our hair and make-up designer) that Casey just needed shorter, less "processed" hair to look plainer than the dewey Lisabette or the TV-glamourous Holly.

This wasn't a hard sell because Kendel had her hands full creating separate looks for the three women playing men. All three of them have to make quick changes from one character to another, so the wigs and mustaches that they might wear have to be easy to get on and off and secure when they are on. I think that as long as the subtext to my hair was that it wouldn't require any help from anyone, it was going to be acceptable.

So I went to see Stephen, my hairdresser, and told him what I wanted. Stephen is also a director and theater hair designer, so all I usually have to do is tell him the charater I'm playing and when the show's set. I had had about four inches trimmed off after we closed Boy Gets Girl, but it was still pretty long. I told Stephen about Casey and mentioned that I'd like to look good in the 163 hours in the week when I wasn't on stage, and what could we do? Then I shut up and let him get to work. The first close of the scissors took off about 7 inches.

The result is your basic bob, slightly longer in the front than the back, and shorter than it has been since I was in elementary school. Because my hair is pretty thick, cutting off that much automatically makes it look fuller and gives it more volume. I can style it pretty easily and it's right for both New Yorker Casey and li'l ol' me. I love it. I wore a longer bob a couple of years ago that I called my "Cherry Ames, Student Nurse" haircut.

This one is my Paula Prentiss haircut. I don't have the bangs, but the length and general cut is right. It should be noted that this haircut is so good that the engineers and accountants I work with have complimented me on it. More than once. One cast member told me that I now looked too young and pretty to play Casey (I thanked her and asked her not to repeat that where Chuck could hear her.)

In fact, I'm considering using this photo of Ms. Prentiss the next time I'm asked for a headshot. The percentage of headshots that actually look like the the people they are supposed to depict is small enough that I have no moral qualms about this at all. None. My hair looks like hers, so who cares if her cheekbones are incredible and mine, uhm, aren't. And, oh yeah, she has brown eyes and I have grey eyes. And she seems to be in black and white, but I can fake that at auditions with the right wardrobe.

And besides, like David (and Ann-Margret*), she attended Northwestern, so maybe I can impress him that way.

*And, like David, but not like A-M, she graduated. Of course, it should be noted that A-M was busy making Bye-Bye Birdie, her 3rd movie, in the year in which she would have graduated. I'm just sayin'.

How to decorate a set

An e-mail I sent to my Dad the other day --



Below is a link the press photos for "The Cocktail Hour." If you look carefully at the last picture (the cast gathered around the piano), you can see my high school graduation picture (the one on the left) and your mother's picture (the one on the far right). Hidden behind my graduation picture is one of yours & Mom's wedding photos with all the grandparents.

This is the second show that I've done at the Stage that needed family pictures, so this is also the second show that all three pictures have been in. In fact, it was the need to dress the set for "Independence" that got the wedding photo and your mother's portrait framed, which I'd been meaning to do for years and had never gotten around to. For "Independence" we also had Mom's, Sara's, and my baby pictures, which used to hang in Gram's house. Aunt Dotty gave them to me after Gram died and they usually hang in my bedroom.

By pure coincidence, the colors used on the walls in "Independence" matched the tinting in your mother's portrait (a kind of dusty yellow and sage green), so it looked completely at home there.

I pretty much hate every picture of me, so I hate these press photos, too, but I really enjoy having real pictures of my family on the set.


http://www.ssstage.org/PressKit/index.php

Pictures of me that I don't hate

I generally don't like pictures of me, but here's a strip that either Mom or Aunt Dotty took back in the day. The top row is Sara and me playing in the backyard. The bottom row is pretty self-explanatory. And anyone who doubted how much Sara looked like Dad, well, see for youself - it's Charlie Jr. We must have been around six and three when these were taken because we moved to the Sutherland Road house a few weeks before Sara turned three.

One day I will find a photographic genius who will be able to get rid of the water stain (or whatever it is) and blow these up and then I'll frame them and hang them on the wall. I'll probably even turn the one with the tree in the right direction.

And I think that the next time I'm asked for a headshot, I'll use the last one on the right. Even though most people would say that the first one on the left is much more typical. (I am so put upon.)

Leta & Sara way back when

Hello, "Hello"

So I've finally acquired Picasa and Hello and like most techno-shy people I was driven to it by the pressing need to share pictures. (I understand that porn drives a lot of technology gains, but I'll bet Mommy blogging and that sort of thing is at least a secondary or tertiary driver.) Anyway....

At the cost of only a couple of hours of my time, I am now able to document the history of David's Henry V beard. Unfortunately for him, this is not the most flattering picture ever taken of David, but it beats the heck out of the one I caption "Stoner David." So let's all just be grateful for small mercies.

When he sent me this picture Dad also sent some other pictures from Thanksgiving (Thanks, Dad!!), but they won't post. I just get a grey block. Fortunately, I date the technically enabled, so perhaps David can help me post the pictures of Dad &Audrey, Bruce (my brother-in-law), and my simply gorgeous nieces and nephew. (No, really. Objectively, they are gorgeous.)

The beard - as you can all now see - is coming in nicely and we are edging out of what I call the Simpson's beard phase: Itchy and Scratchy.