Attend

She attended to the quiet in the world
And those who move quietly in it
She was a whisper
in a world of thunder
A carefully watching eye
at the center of the storm.

How Did I Miss That?

Scanning in a bunch of programs from the last year's worth of performances and had a bit of a shock when getting to the bottom of the pile and looking at the program for 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' from last July at SLT.

Camille Schmoutz made such an impression as Mrs. Meers I've been very aware when she's appeared in other things, and I was pretty sure I recognized Liesl Cruz when seeing her recently in Fun Home (though I didn't realize from where until reading her bio in that program), but it also turns out to be the first place I saw Mikah Thomas (my favorite player from this years drama class at Bossier Parish Community College). The same for Sarah Lord whom I saw later in 'Godspell', and Yoon Lee, later in 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.

Truly surprising was discovering this is also when I first saw Cassidy Giddens, who did such a wonderful job as Esmeralda in 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' that I don't know how I missed her connection to this earlier show.

It's not surprising, and often a joy, to see the same actors performing in multiple productions with different groups, it just confounds me to not have remembered seeing so many of these wonderful performers not even a year earlier.

It Does What?

My favorite thing so far about learning to code is being able to hack together rough, highly specific utilities only I will ever use. It's usually to keep me from chuncking through huge blocks of data manually or having to hire another person to do it.

Even when it takes as long to write the code as it would to do the work manually (which is almost never at this point), it's so much more fun to write code, and the next time the same task comes up I'm ready to go.

Second to the fun of writing the code is not needing to worry at all about interface design.

“A boy loves his dog.”

Many of the writers who’ve most profoundly effected my approach to words are volatile people I would never want to actually meet. Harlan Ellison tops that list, and while I never would’ve wanted to run into him, it’s a tremendous sorrow to know that now I can’t.

The Faith of Fate

Annie Drury - Am I Sleeping Alone Tonight

Love the loss, hope, love, and mostly the patience.

Hug?

"There's so very many things you'll have to do", he told her, "and almost none of them will you have to do alone."

All That and Mrs. Meers!

It’s hard to say how profoundly I was effected by last night's performance of Fun Home by Stage Center. I was honestly speechless by its end, trying to process the things I had been led to feel. It was a perfect storm of powerful story, intimate setting, and some of the most magical performances I’ve seen:

Mary Kate McLaurine's grown, narratorial version of the author, Alison Bechdel, haunting the stage with a mature desire for truth and a palpable, confused anguish. The hope and heartbreak she communicated as she sang "Telephone Wire" trying to engage her father in a shared truth, knowing it wasn't to be, was stunning.

Aubrey Buckner as Middle Alison, so wonderfully embodied the struggle of a fearful young woman, feeling utterly out of place in the world, emerging into a freeing truth she wasn't sure was possible. Her rendition of “Changing My Major” was so joyful for the hope, life and passion Ms. Buckner brought to it.

Lauren Matthews as Young Alison, struggling with wanting to be the self she felt she was, but not knowing what that meant, especially as her father bullied her into a mold similar to the one destroying him. When she stood in front of us, just feet away, singing "Ring of Keys" about the wonder of seeing someone real in the world embodying the things she felt about herself, the bright smiles, the shy foot shuffling, the coy glances away, it was impossible to imagine a performance any more perfect than she delivered, and I will treasure my experience of it.

There was much more to the musical, all of it amazing, but the way these three ladies told the story of a woman trying to come to grips with her relationship to the world and her father was stunning, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful.

Some Singing, Some Dancing, Some Micah Goodding

The Shakespeare Festival is almost upon us! With a little help from some of our other favorite venues, it makes for a full summer schedule.

June
Fri 15 - SC (Fun Home) Mrs. Meers!
Fri 22 - RWN (Midsummer Museum Crawl)?
Fri 29 - TSF (Tartuffe)

July
Fri 6 - TSF (King John)
Fri 13 - SLT (Memphis)
Sat 14 - TSF(The Belle of Amherst)
Fri 20 - TSF (Love's Labor's Lost)
Fri 27 - TSF (110 in the Shade)

August
Fri 3 - SC (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) Gonna take some work to get Ma on board with this one
Fri 10 - BPCC(A Texas Romance) Hoping to see Mikah Thomas again

SC -> Stage Center
RWN -> R. W. Norton Art Gallery
TSF -> Texas Shakespeare Festival
BPCC -> Bossier Parish Community College

Stand Guard

She had the face of an angel.

Carefully folded in the right rear pocket of her jeans, she'd cut it from the Seraph Anadial the night he came for her youngest son.

She was not surprised when it was an angel who came for the boy. She knew something would eventually. It was why she kept such careful watch over him, why she had the long were-bone knife in the first place, despite the small fortune it had cost.

Her family had a long history with the malakhim, tracing back even before her ancestors had joined their fragmented community of Ethiopian Jews. For as long as she could remember one of the highest holy days of the year for her family was the celebration of child slaughter at angelic hands: it wasn't the passing over of their own which bought the Israelites their freedom, but the spilled blood of Egypt's first born. It made a certain sense they would be the first to come after hers.

Lambs blood was one of many tools she used to try and keep her son safe against a poisoned fate, luckily it wasn't the only one.

She had the angel's wings as well, but they didn't travel as well.