The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Conversations Real & Imagined: Brushes With Fame!

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    Detail from “Brushes With Fame!” by Steve Willis (scroll down link for bio).

    I once dated the guy who held Schwarzenegger’s cigar on that awful Christmas movie, I forget what it’s called. Man was he proud. Bo that is… I don’t think Arnold cared one way or the other…

    …

    Yeh, I worked at this deli in Chi-town where Bob Balaban used to come, nearly every day, I swear. The guy could eat. Pickles. Loved his pickles, had to have two or three with every sammich. And he could eat the biggest one’s we got, lotsa meat, lotsa sauce, that seemed to be his motto. Sammich-wise.

    …

    You ever touch Tom Cruise? Sister’s girlfriend used to do his nails, on the set of one of those Mission Impossible movies, and I guess the guy was cold. Dead o’ summer, this guy’s paw’s as cold as ice, man…

    …

    In the late 70s, I flipped off Madonna. That was back in Bay City, Michigan. It was her, too, Madonna. Cut me off on Euclid Avenue.

    …

    If there’s anyone I’ve ever met with a warm handshake, it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.

    …

    My wife and I decided we were going to go have brunch in Stillwater, because everyone keeps telling us we should. Oh, it’s so pretty, downtown is pretty, the bridge to Wisconsin’s pretty, the leaves, the rocks, all that. Well, we walk around, impressed I’ll admit, and we get to this little cafe. Looks good, think we’ll have some breakfast. So we go inside, and there’s Jessica Lange sitting there with Sam Whatsisname, the cowboy she’s married to. I elbow Sue and nod and she’s impressed, and we go to order our breakfast–it’s one of those places where you have to place an order, a cafe, not so much a restaurant.

    Anyway, the barista flips. I mean he flips. “Don’t you look at Jessica Lange!” he says, none too quietly, I might add. We both give him a look like he’s the nut that he is, and he repeats, almost yelling. “Do not look at Jessica Lange or Sam Shepard. They are members of this community and not here for you to gawk at!”

    So I told him we weren’t staring and he starts to bray some more and finally Jessica and Sam stand up and walk out, looking pretty pissed. Now the guy really goes off. “Look what you did! You drove out Jessica!” So Sue and I take off, not before I curse him out.

    As we walk out, Jessica Lange’s pulling her coat on and my wife bugs her eyes out at Lange and says “How’s that for staring!” Jessica, I have to admit, looked pretty bummed. Pff… you can keep Stillwater for all I care…

    …

    It was weird. For as much a fan as I am, I never met Walter. Even when he was in town for the Grumpy series. I always just missed him. I’d go into my favorite cafe, and the waitress would nod at an empty coffee cup and say, “That was Walter’s”. Damn. Then I’d go to the convenience store, right in downtown on St. Peter, and there’s be an empty can of cream soda. “Walter’s?” I’d ask. Sure enough. Or in the park, a pal would say, “See that guy?” “What guy?” “That one, with the… hell you missed it! Walter Matthau!” This kept going on and on and on and on, and finally, I just sat down one day in Rice Park and decided to wait until he walked by. Well, I only did that for about an hour or two, ’cause I realized it was pretty stupid.

    But you know, it’s like I sense his presence. I look at objects in town and wonder, did Walter touch that?

    …

    I think my sister sold Girl Scout cookies to the Coens. She’s got all her old receipts, I should ask her to look it up.

    …

  • Long Ago And Far Away, As Some People Would Say

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    Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders.

    People always referred to the pond as “brackish.” I don’t have a dictionary at hand –I am a refugee now, and am reclining in the backseat of my car at a fogbound rest area somewhere along the Mississippi in the American south– so I’ll have to take their word for it that the pond was brackish.

    It was a brackish pond, then, and the country around it was rough country, made difficult by stones, boulders, and prickly scrub brush. There was a lot of what I think you’d call rubble as well, or perhaps detritus. There was also a lot of junk left over from the lives of the people who used to live out there and had long since fled.

    Here and there you’d still encounter a weathered hut on stilts, and there were a bunch of ragged sheep wandering around in the rubble, most of them gone feral. I can tell you that a feral sheep is something to be avoided.

    There wasn’t much else to recommend the community, such as it was, and it was a brutal place to be a child. There were only a handful of kids in those days, every one of us an accident born to people who were old enough to be our grandparents.

    The men who remained had once been fishermen, before their lake evaporated from all the poisons pumped in there by the old munitions factory. The lake was long gone by the time I was a child, and the old fishermen would occasionally emerge from their homes and wobble along the lousy roads on bicycles. Most of the old men had long, flowing white beards.

    I do still remember the pond, though, and as I said, this pond had once allegedly been full of wonderous things; teeming with wonders, was what we were always told: mermaids –a whole extended family or tribe of mermaids– and some sort of mutant creation that was said to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent. Pond dragons, these creatures were called by the locals.

    The fishermen, bored by the loss of their livelihood, jigged every last one of those pond dragons out of the brackish pond and hauled them along the roads to be gutted and strung from clotheslines and rusty flag poles.

    I never saw any of the pond dragons alive, but I do still have a vague memory of the mermaids. Old women used to go to the pond to throw stale bread and popcorn to the mermaids, which would flop up onto the ragged shore and fight among themselves for the offerings. Most of them I recall –or perhaps recall hearing– were horribly obese.

    The idle fishermen, having exhausted the pond’s supply of dragons, and grown desperate and lonely from their spartan and solitary existence, turned their attention to capturing the mermaids, and began to trap, net, and wrestle them from the pond. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that these randy old bachelors made bathtub pets of most of the remaining mermaids.

    The pond, like the lake before it, eventually dried up completely, and the government sent in soldiers and heavy equipment one morning to enforce the long-ago-ordered evacuation of the land. Those of us who remained were loaded into trucks with our belongings and carted away to a relocation camp in the desert of Nevada.

    I escaped from that camp some years ago, but not before hearing the rumor that one of the original mermaids from that old brackish pond of my youth is now on display in a traveling carnival somewhere down south.

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  • I Am What I Am, But I Ain't What I Used To Be

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    I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder.

    The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children.

    Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could make music, could poke out each other’s eyes, could destroy a hundred lives, could start either a fire or a war that would last a lifetime.

    We didn’t exactly understand that, of course. There was no way we could know that there would come a day when one of us would find himself wandering the halls of a detox ward in hospital pajamas, shivering, his face a blister, a seemingly permanent grimace. Or that another of our old, happy neighborhood tribe, so afraid he would end up just like all the other people on the planet, would allow himself to become so different that he could no longer look even his closest friends in the eye.

    Couldn’t we all try to remember how magical we once thought our time in this world was going to be? How magical it once was?

    Do me a big favor: Take a good look around and tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?

    I’ll sit right here and wait for the fog to burn off, for the music to work its way back in, and for the words to once again start moving in me like a dance, like a dance that doesn’t even know it’s dancing.

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  • Hollywood for a Day

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    Fresh from the wire:

    Mark your calendars for Wednesday, May 3 and make a date with a curbside in St. Paul, MN: A Prairie Home Companion, the film version of our beloved (or not-so-beloved, depending on your tastes) public radio programme, will be making its “Minnesota Premiere” at the Fitzgerald Theater. What does that mean for you, ladies and gents? Why nothing more than the finest in stargazing. According to the friendly press agent:

    In addition to Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman, the following actors are expected to attend: Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. Others may join the event.

    You are, of course, not invited. But who says we can’t crush against security, ogle and wave and even scream with joy at the sight of Lindsay Lohan?

  • Cheese Parade

    of livestock and mold

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    Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise.

    French Brin D’Amour
    The “sprig of love” is a cheese made from Corsican sheep. The rind is encrusted in the aromatic herbs with which it spends three months curing. The juniper berries and rosemary give its pale ivory paste a floral flavor. It’s a pretty, pretty cheese. This is the cheese to come home to after a bad smelly cheese experience, a bad date or a bad marriage. It restores the faith.

    Chimay Bierre
    This cheese is washed with Chimay, the beer of Belgian monks. It’s a smooth cheese with nuttiness and a tart finish, but I kept thinking: Why aren’t I just drinking Chimay?

    Bellwether Farms San Andreas
    The sheep on this California farm have the San Andreas fault running right through their land. I expected the cheese to have a flavor of foreboding with a hint of grassiness and fear (you know how animals can sense forthcoming doom and all). And yet, this is an easy table cheese that is mild with a piquant finish. My three year old ate nearly the whole wedge.

    Tome Verte
    Fresh goat cheese is soft, lilly white and cuts the normal tangy nature of goat by more than half. This French version is coated in fennel, thyme and pink peppercorns which give it a nice herbal flavor. Don’t expect the richenss of aged cheese, instead think of a wind-swept meadow exploding with spring clover.

    Red Hawk
    This triple cream cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery in California is somewhat of a darling in the cheese world, garnering awards from the American Cheese Society left and right. Washing the rind provides the signature sunset-orange tint, but it also gives the cheese its smell. Stinky. Bad-celery-melting-in-my-veggie-drawer stinky. My first taste was overwhelmed by the stinkiness, making me think of creamy cabbage. But the second taste (after I had presumably primed my tastebuds) was mellower and creamy with a nice earthiness. I’m eating this with some Caymus Conundrum on Saturday when my sunny patio hits sixty degrees.

    Bleu des Basques
    A nicely balanced bleu from the French Basque region. There’s just enough saltiness to work with the tang, it’s full of character without having that overbearing ego. Be warned, when you bring the cheese to room temp (which you should do before eating) it might sweat a little due to the lovely fat content. Just keep it loosely wrapped in wax paper while it warms up, and never hold fat content against a cheese.

    All these cheeses can be found at Surdyk’s.

  • The happy soldier bears belligerent offspring

    Here’s something that pisses me off. I mean, it’s cool and all to be making monster trucks for the vulnerable soldier sect, but what irks me is how this fellow was originally thinking more along the lines of a pimped-out, rap star-style ride. And now of course, he’s making a killing off the war.

    Yes, I saw Why We Fight last week. And here we have some happy fluff about the military-industrial come to downtown Stillwater.

    Why We Fight went out of its way to illustrate the prophesy in Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex”-themed farewell speech–which strikes me as not an entirely difficult thing to illustrate. We’re surrounded by the corporatization of the military, even in a charmed, planned community on the outskirts of Stillwater. But there was another comment made in the film that struck a deeper chord, and I won’t be able to quote it verbatim.

    The filmmaker spent much time with a one Karen Kwiotkowski, a retired Pentagon intelligent officer who resigned (after twenty years of service) at the onset of the Iraq War, once it donned on her how officials were interested in manipulating intelligence. Late in the film she said something along the lines of not allowing her sons to serve in the military because the U.S. military, as she sees it, is no longer interested in fighting to preserve freedom. Rather, soldiers are fighting to further the Bush Administration’s imperialistic agenda.

    I have a photo album that my grandfather compiled after the three years he spent fighting in WWII. It’s a precious heirloom, made even more so because he painstakingly labeled and documented dates, places, even his moods. His little handwritten notes preserve something of my grandfather’s personality; so while I don’t remember him well (he died when I was eight), I feel as thought I’ve gotten to know him somehow by way of this book. He was an armorist so there are lots of pictures of old bombers. He got a picture of General Paton inspecting the troupes. He took pictures of obliterated cities. It’s a point of pride, and I like showing off the photo album.

    My dad fought in Vietnam on the other hand, and all I have of that is a picture of him playing a guitar outside his bunker and looking twelve-years-old (in truth, he was nineteen at the time). Of course, I got to know my father much better as a person, but we spoke very little of his wartime experiences. The first thing I did once I got to college was take a “U.S. History from 1950” class, mostly because I wanted to study the Vietnam Era. But still, my dad wouldn’t discuss it with me. And from the little we did talk, I was able to gleam that he didn’t fully understand the politics that had sent him there. He died of lung cancer in 1999. He was a non-smoker. Because he was infected with some sort of aggressive, small-cell carcinoma, his oncologist believed the illness to be related to pesticide exposure in Vietnam. And for what? That, of course, really pisses me off.

  • Double Feature

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    IT’S A WONDERFUL MENACE

    “Slither”, 2006. Written and directed by James Gunn. Starring Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, Tania Shaulnier, Brenda James, Don Thompson, and a boatload of b-movie mainstays.

    Now playing at local theaters and hopefully at every small town screen in America.

    There’s a reason why space aliens so often land in a hick towns. Having come from one of these dunderheaded hamlets, I can say with authority that the thought of battling with some kind of slimy creature was inspiring. For you folks who grew up in the cities, you’re missing out on the visceral thrill of these films. Movies with spaceships or meteors that crash into earth make you think that those woods around your house–which in reality hide nothing more than beercan-choked deer blinds, used condoms, and old tires–might in fact harbor a beast that’ll keep you awake at night. Which is better than falling asleep to David Letterman again.

    Slither is a part of this grand tradition, and I’m glad for it. I saw it with a loud and boisterous crowd and it reminded me of my moviegoing days from long ago. Back in the day, I used to waste many a Friday night at Mt. Pleasant’s Ward Theater with some schlock horror film. My friends and I would talk back to the screen, loudly and frequently. That’s one of the great joys of the movies–being able to voice your displeasure at a movie that suggests, say, that a young woman would willingly tiptoe down the rickety steps of a dark basement that is crawling with flies and smelling so putrid it makes her gag. That’s worth barking at, with a good chuckle.

    Slither has sprung, like the grotesque worms of the title, from the mind of one James Gunn, who is a product of the somewhat infamous Troma factory, the studio (if you can call it that) that produced buckets of cheap horror videos. Those films were awful, but Gunn–who wrote the very entertaining Dawn of the Dead remake–learned something along the way. For Slither is a b-movie masterpiece, a freak show so good it could have come straight from old Coney Island. It’s that scary, that awful, that hideous, and that much fun.

    The facts: A meteorite drops out of the sky one balmy autumn evening, plopping into the woods behind the hard luck town of Wheelsy. This is your typical small town, as I remember mine, and well rendered: bored folks, wealthy folks in their McMansions, oversexed folks who are looking for a quick screw, tired cops, and some bums and losers who look like they wish Diane Arbus were still around to snap their picture. Cheap bars and strip malls, ugly high schools and boarded up old stores. Michael Rooker plays one of the town’s wealthy studs who is rejected one evening from a little love by his social-climbing, though loyal, wife (Elizabeth Banks). Frustrated, he heads out into the woods with a girl he met later in a bar, finds the aforementioned meteorite, and gapes at a slug-like creature crawling on the forest floor. Which, of course, attacks him, shooting a slimy pin into his gut which turns him into a monster. As time progresses, he gets worse, grunting “meat” over and over, satiating this desire by disemboweling cats and dogs and cows and deer. And humans, of course.

    Things get progressively worse. Amazingly worse. People are eaten, filled to bursting with millions of gelatinous worms, attacked by said worms in bathtubs and churches, split in half by tentacles, burrowed into, feasted upon by the undead, and absorbed buck-naked into what looks like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and a giant squid. Among other horrible fates. Slither gives a nod to just about every cheap horror film ever made and between my wife and I we caught references to: Jaws, Beauty and the Beast, King Kong, every undead film in history, Cronenberg’s Fly and Rabid, the remake of The Thing, maybe A Streetcar Named Desire (the beast shouting “Starla!”), and–I can’t believe I remember this–John Carpenter’s unbelievably stupid Prince of Darkness. That one, for those not in the know, was the one in which Satan possessed people by spitting gunk into their gaping mouths. Which occurs in Slither with abundance.

    I’m certain there’s more: if you see this film, let me know what I missed.

    Slither is an outrageously gory and well-executed thriller, which made me jump and flinch throughout. Auteur Gunn knows how to take his influences and hang them on a solid plot with goofy but likeable characters, and while it’s a stretch to call a film with so many references original, it’s certainly as fresh as a newly killed cat. Like many of the great cheapies, Slither is full of odd conversations between b-movie stalwarts like the inimitable Rooker, future b-man Nathan Fillion (of Firefly fame), overcooked ham Gregg Henry, and Banks, doing her damndest to become the new Adrienne Barbeau.

    Slither will no doubt vanish in a month, nothing more than a dim memory from an evening of screams for kids and adults from Hicksville to Omaha. See it now while you can, in a rural, one-screen theater, with a long drive home past darkened cornfields and ominous woods.

    TOOTHLESS IN WASHINGTON

    “Thank You For Smoking”, 2006. Written and directed by Jason Reitman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Bright, Maria Bello, Sam Elliot, Adam Brody, Katie Holmes, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, and the underrated J. K. Simmons.

    Now showing at the Uptown Theatre.

    My father is a rabble-rousing, former hippie liberal, my father-in-law an extreme right-winger, a lover of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. I have no doubt that if I could get these two to shut up for two hours and hauled both of them to see Thank You For Smoking, neither man would be offended at what they saw. Bored, perhaps, but not offended.

    God save us if the best we can do for satire in America is this made-for-tv movie. Without its simpleminded swearing, this thing belongs on Fox with a nod and a wink and a bevy of reviewers claiming it’s the greatest satire since they threw the last shovelful of dirt on Paddy Chayefsky. Is it so much to ask that your irony have some bite to it? Thank You For Smoking, for its heavy lineup of top notch actors, succeeds only in being a tedious string of one liners that were edgy, maybe, in 1996. Note to Director Jason Reitman (and maybe novelist Christopher Buckley): jokes about Birkenstocks were stale in the 80s, for God’s sake.

    Thank You For Smoking features a cast of some of the finest character and supporting actors we’ve got, from William H. Macy, the underrated J. K. Simmons, the underused Maria Bello (obscenely wasted), the perfectly slimy Rob Lowe and relative newcomer Adam Brody, not to mention Sam Elliot and Robert Duvall, for the love of Christ. The movie is ostensibly about spin, which makes me think that it might be fascinating just to see how this damn film got made, and how much of this magical spin was used to convince everyone to hop on board. The barely-beating heart of the film is lobbyist Aaron Eckhart’s relationship with his son, Cameron Bright. This plot, thin as it is, would have been much more powerful if the son were narrating the thing, giving us a clearer view of this conflicted man from a more neutral standpoint. This didn’t happen and the story is an unholy mess, with little subplots that come and go and details that seem to be forgotten. I wonder what the movie would have been like in better hands. Reitman might have promise, though he would have to fall from his father’s tree and roll a good city block–pop Ivan Reitman’s got to be the worst comic director in history if it weren’t for Blake Edwards.

    Sadly, almost every actor has one decent scene to strut his or her stuff, independent of the plot, which makes the movie seem like a very professional high school forensics tournament. Duvall was so good at describing a mint julep I wanted to run out and grab one. J. K. Simmons does his usual bluster, which I love; Sam Elliot is great as a dying Marlboro man; and Rob Lowe and Adam Brody are creepy, doing their high-powered agent schtick, with Lowe an unsleeping powerbroker who wears a giant kimono.

    All of which makes me want to run to the seance table and call Chayefsky back to the old Underwood. It’s not enough for a filmmaker to toss these scenes at us, joke after joke. We need to see how characters respond to these existential laughs. It doesn’t help that Thank You For Smoking’s humor seems ten years old and lacks even the muted guffaws of a poor week at The Onion, but it’s got no characters anyone can relate to. Had old Paddy lived long enough to write Thank You, we might have had something with guts and character, and even quite a few heavy and uncomfortable laughs.

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  • Out-Takes: The Ups and Downs of Being Untouchable

    Tom Friedman was in town this week to speak at Macalester College, which turned out to be his stump speech for his best-seller The World Is Flat. It’s a good speech that nicely summarizes his arguments, and it’s clear that he’s given this lecture quite a lot– which sort of supports Chris Lehmann’s view, expressed to me in this story, that Friedman is sort of the punditocracy’s equivalent of a motivational speaker.

    These days, anyone who writes a book with business applications–especially one with a pro-globalization business message neatly broken up into memorable little talking points (the “Ten Great Flatteners” the “Three Convergences,” that kind of thing)–will invariably hit the lecture circuit to spread the new gospel. Friedman’s message, though, more than most is a very cogent short history of the 21st century, as his book is aptly subtitled, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the Web. He believes we’re at a historical “inflection point” not dissimilar from the genesis of the Gutenberg press, and the evidence is compelling, even if it is rather mundane (for example, worldwide standardization of work-flow protocols, thanks to Microsoft’s global monopoly–the latter point mine more than Friedman’s).

    What I wanted to say here, though, is that when I recently interviewed Friedman, I wanted to ask him if he felt that his own job could be outsourced or offshored or whatever. For the sake of argument, he notes in his book that lots of journalism–particulary run-of-the-mill financial market reporting and number-crunching, for example–is already being outsourced by, say, Reuters to financial analysts in Bangalore. But ultimately the answer is that Friedman, as a Great Explainer, is–to use his term–untouchable.

    The best evidence for that is that the Times put their star columnist behind the TimesSelect firewall. But how did he feel about that? “Well, it was not an idea I originated. It’s not something I’m crazy about, but it’s something I believe was necessary that we try. In the newspaper business we’re caught between two platforms. One built on dead trees and one built on bits and bytes. And we’re in transition. And I felt that my newspaper was justified in taking this and conducting this experiment to see what would happen.”

    His boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told me that the jury is still out on TimesSelect, and Friedman is kind of a bellwether. “It is a bet,” Sulzberger said. “But it’s a bet on the value of judgement, the value of insight, the value of experience. I remember calling [Friedman] and talking to him about this. He said, ‘Arthur, I gotta tell you, it’s going to cut my audience way back, but we’ve got to do it.’ In fact all of our columnists came to that place.”

    Friedman confirmed that point with me. “I suffer a lot,” he said, “because I’ve got a lot of readers online around the world. So, it’s not my preferred call, but I understand it, and I respect my paper’s need and desire to do it. I just went to Mumbai, my ticket was $8,000. Someone’s got to pay for that. And if newspapers are free, I won’t be going to Mumbai for too much longer.”

    Indeed, one of the challenges of writing a good, current piece on Friedman that includes the views of his readers–particularly others in media who might follow the columnist’s work, and have something to say about it–is the impact of TimesSelect. Almost everyone I interviewed about Friedman confessed that they hadn’t really kept current with his column in the last six months, because they only read the Times online, and they have not coughed up for TimesSelect.

    But someone’s coughing up. Sulzberger told me that, “If you were to take the number of people who have signed up for TimesSelect, it is the third largest paper we own, after the Times and the Boston Globe. Now many of those are people who are home subscribers to the paper. But many of these people pay for it uniquely, and if you were to take just them, they are our fourth largest paper, behind the International Herald Tribune.”

    Despite recent stories about Sulzberger being a man who is swimming in his suit–well, you know, not quite filling his position as regally as his father Punch did–I found him very smart and very eloquent on the subject of the Times as a media proposition. When I pressed him to admit that the newspaper was the company’s core competence and flagship, he quickly disagreed. “No, journalism is our core competence, across boundaries. We have to be able to translate our journalism from print into television and into the web, and we’re working on that. And the stuff that Tom has done [on the Times-Discovery channel] has been just wonderful.” That would seem to contradict recent reports about the Times-Discovery Channel partnership, and probably bodes well for same. Though everyone seems to agree that the cable station isn’t high-profile enough, or capturing the viewers it deserves, I personally find Friedman’s television documentaries very compelling, and in a league with Frontline, though perhaps with a higher “Aw, shucks” factor, thanks to Friedman’s Minnesota roots.

  • Hunters, We Hunt

    Be my Venus, baby.
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    On the cultural docket for this weekend: happy hour with my running club (a less-organized variation of the Hash House Harriers, we, too, are a drinking club with a running problem), watching Singing In The Rain with my two best friends (yes), and, with any luck, dragging my mother and my, ahem, boyfriend to see Frank Theater‘s production of Venus. Neither mother nor boyfriend is a seasoned theatergoer. My mom’s most exotic performing arts experience is probably Cosi Fan Tutte. And, well, as for the boyfriend, let’s just say that his favorite house in town is The Brave New Workshop. (For the record: I enjoy The Brave New Workshop very much as well. Especially Caleb McEwen, who I regard as a genius!)

    In any case, I’m not sure that Venus’ big, round rump will be an amusement for the mother, but I’m pretty sure it will be for the boyfriend. (I predict how difficult it will be for him to “be in his body” and respond naturally to Venus’ anatomy–especially if he’s seated next to mom!) Oh, but did I mention that this play is quite sad?

    I’m so glad Frank is having this love affair with Parks! All that cursing! All that pissed-off, third-wave feminist angst! I spoon it all up! Their productions of The America Play and Fucking A are both theater experiences that burned into my memory. Especially catchy was, in A, the hunters who haunted around singing their cute, lil’ hunters’ creed. As I remember it: “Hunters / We hunt / But we don’t eat what we catch / Because that would be a little much / Dontcha think?” (It was, of course, camped-up somewhat Minnesota-style.)

  • Who Can Blame Her

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    Reuters recently reported that a mysterious woman has perfected the dine-and-dash in many of Rome’s best restaurants. The alleged “gourmet food junkie” has been known to dine fabulously on fine wines and exquisite fare, simply to find when the bill arrives (ooops) her wallet has been left in another purse. Revealed only as DN of nearby Viterbo, the “mooch artist” has been dealt with accordingly: she has been banned from Rome for five years.

    Not arrested, banned. Not made to pay restitution or scrub pots and pans, just banned. And maybe that is the ultimate punishment for a food-lover, not only taking the good stuff away, but keeping it just out of reach.

    Not surprisingly, Roman police have reported that despite the ban, our daring and naughty DN continues to sneak into Rome. Who could have predicted that one?

    It’s just not in the nature of Italians to deny anyone food. I think the waiters secretly hope she turns up at their table. What will this hungry woman want? Will she have an appetite for pungent cheese with honey and figs or will she just order a simple ravioli with dusky truffles. There’s no doubt that every bite will be savored, every moment a mark on her memory of this amazing meal. They’ll pour her a glass of prosecco while she watches the sunset, their hearts secretly proud that she chose them for her potentially last meal in Rome.