beowabbit: (Me: on Ferris wheel 2012-09-09)
Apologies for the fact that I haven’t been reading LJ any more, but this thing I just posted on Facebook was important enough, and enough like the longer-form writing that my social media life used to be about, that I wanted to post it here too.

I am doing so well just a day after getting my wisdom teeth out. I can tell there’s a little aching if I pay attention to it, but (as long as I don’t have Grape Nuts for breakfast and nachos for lunch) if I didn’t know I’d had my wisdom teeth out yesterday, I wouldn’t realize anything was wrong.

Thanks so very much to [livejournal.com profile] cathijosephine and [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom for taking such epically good care of me. And special thanks to [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom for representing at the Davis Square equal marriage celebration; I wish I could have been there. [livejournal.com profile] cathijosephine came with me to the procedure, brought me home afterwards, took my slight mania in stride, and showed me entertaining stuff on Netflix. Then [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom came over with epic quantities of ice cream and we all watched most of The Wizard of Oz until we got sleepy.

This morning, we tried out [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom’s wonderful idea of taking prepackaged biscuit dough, putting dimples in the top, and spooning in preserves before baking them. Best breakfast ever! Then [livejournal.com profile] cathijosephine and I finished The Wizard of Oz while [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom (who has it completely memorized) planted beans on the mounds with our corn (already knee high before the Fourth of July) and pumpkins.

[livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I are shortly headed out to the hardware store to get some screws of an appropriate length to put our “The Wuzzles” sign up on the house, and ceramic pots to put the basil and the blueberry bush I got last weekend in. (Our experiment with pesto from homegrown basil last year was a huge success, and we intend to repeat it.)

If you have a phobia about aspects of surgery or injury, don’t read further. Short version: Everything’s fine! )
beowabbit: (Local: Quincy house pre-purchase)
On Friday, [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom, [livejournal.com profile] cathijosephine, and I went to see Eddie Izzard’s Force Majeur show, which was wonderfully hilarious. Can’t possibly do it justice. (And wow, the Wang Theatre is a stunning and stunningly restored venue!)

Beforehand, [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I had had dinner nearby at Empire Garden, which was the site of our first date almost eight years ago, and I had a scorpion bowl for the first time.

On Saturday, we went to Johnny D’s for brunch with [livejournal.com profile] vanguardcdk for a late celebration of his birthday, and then headed to the Quincy house. I was exhausted — I’d been a bit underslept all week, and I had had to sleep without my CPAP machine the previous night because some bits were being cleaned — so I had a nice long nap, which is almost unheard of for me. Then I was thoroughly refreshed, and we did a bunch of yardwork (planting and watering our cosmos, and finally managing to take soil samples — previous efforts had been stymied by the weather). We finished just in time to enjoy a brief but torrential downpour from the dry comfort of the porch, had a yummy spaghetti and meatballs dinner, and then watched Ken Burns’ documentary The Shakers, from which we both learned an awful lot.

On Sunday we did a bunch more puttering around indoors and out (I was alternately working on house stuff and PMRP website stuff). I had a nice phone call with my mother [livejournal.com profile] silverlibre (and left voicemail for my sister). Then around 2pm when we started to feel a little eleven-o’clockish, [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom had a culinary inspiration and made me a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch with Cheddar, blue cheese, cream cheese, minced garlic, and roast beef. It was spectacular! And she doesn’t even like blue cheese herself. Now it’s her turn to take a nap, and she’s dozing in her room (which has become our nap room) while I catch up with the world.

How’s your weekend been?
beowabbit: (Me: on Ferris wheel 2012-09-09)
Having a wonderful weekend with [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom. I got to see closing night of the fabulous and very funny Theatre@First production of Twelfth Night. Congratulations to director Ari and to a wonderful cast and crew (including a bunch of excellent actors new to Theatre@First). Then after strike we went to the cast party which was delightful (and yummy, which was good, because I realized on my way out of the house to go see the show that I hadn't had dinner!).

We had to leave a bit early so we could get up this morning early enough to have dim sum with [livejournal.com profile] bitty and [livejournal.com profile] bubblebabble and a bunch of their friends while they’re in town. (We were still half an hour late to that, but we got to see people, which we wouldn’t have managed if we’d stayed up like the party people we wish we were.) Was wonderful to see them!

And then we went and saw a movie. We went to the theater knowing nothing about any of the films that were playing; one was a sequel to something whose original I had at least heard of, even if I hadn’t seen it and hadn’t realized that there was a sequel, and a couple others that I’d vaguely heard of, or whose franchises I’d vaguely heard of, but then [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom noticed that one that was about to start had James Gandolfini in it (in his last lead before he died), so we saw Enough Said, and we loved it! The acting and directing were really good — the dialogue (especially in awkward situations) was very naturalistic, and we left the theater sort of feeling like the characters were a bunch of people we knew. Highly recommended. (And I’m not just saying that because as a middle-aged fat guy I like seeing James Gandolfini as a romantic lead. :-)
beowabbit: (Me: on Ferris wheel 2012-09-09)
Boston skyline against sunset (wide 2)Propeller aircraft coming in for a landing at LoganBoston skyline against sunset (detail 1)Spectacle IslandMy beloved looking over the waterBoston skyline against sunset (wide 1)
Boston skyline against sunset (detail 4)A buoy in front of Spectacle Island (1)Wind vs. oil 1Wind vs. oil 2

Via Flickr:In August 2013, my darling [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom took me on a harbor cruise and sea-chantey singalong put on by the Revels (http://www.revels.org/). We had a blast! These are some of the pictures I took from the harbor.

beowabbit: (People: me with plumtreeblossom May 2007)
Last night my beloved wuzzle took me on the Revels’ Harbor Cruise and Sing, and we had a truly fabulous time! Neither of us quite knew what we were in for; we both envisioned something like an smaller, but still concert-like, Christmas Revels performance aboard ship, but it was basically a sea-chantey singalong. It was wonderful! It really touched a chord in me (heh, heh) because I had a group of friends in college who used to get together on a fairly regular basis and sing folk songs (including some of the same sea chanteys we sang last night). It was just wonderful, and very romantic. I love being on the water. And I love my sweet honeywuzzle who knows how to make me so very happy.

(Photos to follow, BTW.)
beowabbit: (Me: on Ferris wheel 2012-09-09)
Stolen shamelessly Borrowed from [livejournal.com profile] vanguardcdk:

PMRP is proud to announce the cast for our Hallowe’en show!


Ghost Hunt
Directed by Mindy Klenoff

Smiley Smith.....................Joev Dubach
Claudia MacDonald.............Joye Thaller
Abigail Thorpe....................Caitlin Mason
Dr. Clarence Reed...............David Cole
Foley Artist........................Kal Gieber


Night of the Living Dead
Directed by Jay Sekora

Ben...................................Emery Westlake
Barbra...............................Samantha Amodeo
Helen/Ensemble................Heidi Clark
Tom/Ensemble..................Kal Gieber
Harry/Ensemble................Michael McAfee
Judy/Ensemble..................Sarah Brinks
Johnny/Ensemble..............Stever Robbins
Ensemble..........................David Cole
Ensemble..........................Jacob Sommer
Foley Artists......................Mare Freed, Chuck Corley


Thanks to everyone who tried out for the show!

You can catch “Ghost Hunt” and “Night of the Living Dead” this October 25th – November 2nd.
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
As I posted yesterday, auditions for PMRP’s Hallowe’en special featuring “Ghost Hunt” and my adaptation of “Night of the Living Dead” are this coming Monday and Tuesday. The sides and other files (availability forms, etc.) are now up! Everything relevant is linked from the main auditions page, but in case you have trouble finding the links, here are the role descriptions (and an explanation of what being a Foley artist and performing live sound effects entails), and PDFs of the sides and other forms are available by clicking on the slightly misleading “Download PDF File” link on the “Documents & Files” page (which takes you to a page with a list of files which you can download or add to your Google Drive if you use that).

It would be great if you could print out your own copies of the forms (and either print out or have on a phone or tablet the sides) in advance if you can, but we’ll have copies if you don’t.

Hope to see a bunch of you at auditions!
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
(Cross-posted from the Evil Empire:)

Come audition for my show! I am doing a live-radio-drama adaptation of Night of the Living Dead, and auditions are next Monday and Tuesday (with possible callbacks on Wednesday). Lots more information is on the auditions page. Descriptions of the available roles (for both shows; see below) are here, and sides — sample scenes we’ll be using for auditions — will be up soon. Besides “Night of the Living Dead”, Mindy Klenoff is directing “Ghost Hunt”, originally broadcast on Suspense! in 1949, about a DJ who agrees to spend the night in an allegedly haunted house to prove there are no such things as ghosts. In addition to voice actors, we need Foley (live sound effects) performers, administrative staff (doing things like selling program ads, putting up posters, and collecting sound-effects equipment) and crew.

Live radio drama is not memorized; we perform with scripts in hand, standing on stage with microphones. It’s a great opportunity for beginners and old hands alike; we’ve had some people turn in very impressive performances who had never done any kind of theater before.

(And of course, in a few weeks, I’ll be telling you all to come see the show! Performances are on several dates from October 24-November 2.)
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
Congratulations to everyone involved in The Baltimore Waltz. It was a great show, funny and poignant. [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I are going back to see it next week, and I’m sure we’ll notice lots of things we missed this time around.
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
Congratulations to the cast and crew of PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular on a great opening night! Y’all were awesome, on stage, at the Foley table, and at the boards. Special thanks to the Them! cast for making my first time directing so amazing!

Two performances today, then performances next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and a special matinée on Sunday, April 21, at the MIT Museum. Details on the event page. Come see it!
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
I can’t believe I haven’t hawked this before now, but [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I are both involved in PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular² live-radio-drama event. [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom is reprising her rôle as Billy in “Red Shift: Crisis of the Cuddlykins”, a spoof of Flash Gordon- or Buck Rogers-style serials, and I’ve been directing (in my directorial début!) [livejournal.com profile] audioboy’s radio adaptation of the classic 1954 movie Them!. Shows are April 5, 6 (matinée and evening show), 11, 12, and 13th in Davis Square, and a special matinée April 21st at the MIT museum. More details are on the PMRP site. My cast is awesome (and so is [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom’s, of course; it has her in it!) and it should be a tremendously fun time.

(For the two or three of you who haven’t read me and others talk about PMRP, the concept is that we present a radio drama as if broadcast over the air in the Golden Age of Radio, but on stage in front of a live audience. Most of our shows — this one definitely included — have live Foley sound effects, and we’ve got some awesome ones. Come see us!)
beowabbit: (People: Hamlet)
[livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I saw Theatre@First’s performance of Lysistrata last night and it was hilarious. John Deschene is a genius. The dance and shadowplay worked incredibly well. The actors are also genii, especially [livejournal.com profile] ladrescher. And the music had me bouncing in my seat and worked perfectly with the show. I didn’t realize this until just now, but there was a lot of stuff that just had to be perfectly timed in order to work, and it all was. Go see it if you haven’t yet. (No complaining that you live in Australia! You have almost a week in order to scrounge up plane tickets and get here.)
beowabbit: (Lang: Old English (Widsith))
Mediaeval word puzzles, courtesy of Retronaut. I can’t quite tell whether they’re actually puzzles of some sort or just passages written in a grid like Seek-and-Find. They’re not that; they’re legible Latin left-to-right, but I suspect there’s something deeper hidden in the layout. (The phrasing seems a little odd, and the lack of spaces — the letterforms are clearly from a time when spaces would have been used — and features like the consistent use of Q alone for QU suggest some kind of puzzle.) The site where I found them doesn’t have much information; anybody whose Latin (or patience) is better than mine want to take a guess at what the puzzle is?

(This is a little more retro than Retronaut’s usual fare, but they have some interesting stuff.)
beowabbit: (Me: on Ferris wheel 2012-09-09)
(Brief because I really should be in bed.)

So [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I had lovely plans scheduled for this weekend. Unfortunately, they were incompatible with the amount of coughing I’m still doing. (Was out 2½ days last week; ran out of the good cough syrup Thursday night, got a refill sent to the pharmacy at work on Friday, but didn’t know that it closes early on Fridays and didn’t get there in time. Otherwise I’d probably already be over my Terrible Lingering Cough.)

What we did instead was laze around the house in Quincy yesterday and today watching episodes of Slings and Arrows, which we’d wanted to see since hearing about it, sleeping a lot, and occasionally getting out of bed to eat. ([livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom observed that it was a bit strange that we were eating cheese dogs with our croissants for breakfast; I pointed out that since it was 1pm it was really a bit strange that we were eating croissants with our cheese dogs for lunch.) I slept a hair over twelve hours last night, and I’m still coughing a bit but feeling a lot better.

And now to bed. Well, after moving my laundry to the dryer so I have socks and underwear tomorrow morning.
beowabbit: (Default)
I had a mild cold for some of the show two-and-three weekends ago, but I thought I was solidly over it by the end of the run. Unfortunately, it came back, with new symptoms, early last week. (Or perhaps I picked up something new to replace it in the green room — a bunch of the cast were sick, some of them pretty badly.)

Anyway, that got worse over the course of the week, and I ended up going home early on Thursday, and staying home on Friday.

Friday night [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom came over to take care of me. (We’d already had a date planned, but we decided that with my hacking cough a nice dinner at a restaurant with lots of other diners was maybe not the best idea, so we picked up some take-out.)

After eating, we looked for something to watch on Netflix. [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom said she was interested in something historical, and I asked if Shakespeare counted as historical. She said it did, and we ended up watching Great Performances2010 production of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth. The text was all Shakespeare, but the setting evoked a mid-20th-century fascist state with Macbeth as mad dictator. It was just spectacular. Although clearly done on a pretty low budget, it was visually stunning. The cinematography was wonderful. The acting was amazing — Stewart’s, of course, but also that of the other actors, none of whom we recognized. I felt like you could subtract the Shakespeare play and still be left with a great work of art. [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom posted her own review of it here. See it if you can. It’s available on Netflix streaming and Amazon Instant Video.

This morning, we had a social event planned that we were supposed to be hosting, but I was clearly too sick, and unfortunately it was clear that [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom was coming down with this too. :-/ So we scrambled in the morning to get in touch with some of the other attendees, and we hope it went off all right without us. [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom went home, and I’ve had a quiet day at home watching more Netflix with my kitty and puttering around on the internet. I’m generally feeling better, but the coughing fits have gotten more violent (although less frequent). I really want to just wash my lungs out with warm water. (The vaporizer seems to be helping quite a bit.)
beowabbit: (People: Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet)
Probably most of you who are local already know about this, but [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I are in a live staged Hallowe’en radio show that is playing in Davis Square the next two weekends. (This is voice and Foley actors performing in front of microphones, essentially as if performing a live radio drama, but for a live audience instead of for radio broadcast.

This is part of ’s regular Hallowe’en Tomes of Terror series, but this particular one is all original plays by contemporary authors. (In the past, we’ve sometimes had new works, but mostly used scripts from classic radio series like Suspense and Fibber McGee and Molly.)

There are three one-act plays (each about half an hour long), and [livejournal.com profile] plumtreeblossom and I are in ”The Crasher” about a troubled writer who moves into a sleepy Maryland town to get away from her troubles. But she finds it’s not as quiet as she’d hoped.

The other two one-acts, both by local authors in the group, are ”Shivers on Highway 61”, about a motorcycle gang’s brushes with death (or at least with the dead), and ”The Red Line”, about an MBTA driver, about to retire, who wants to see the T saved from privatization, and the consequences of his choices. Plenty of our friends are involved in this, and all three shows are lots of fun.

There are six performances, all at Unity Church at 6 William St. (on College Ave.) in Davis Square, Somerville, just a couple blocks from the Davis Square T station:
  • Friday, October 19th, at 8pm
  • Saturday, October 20th, at 8pm
  • Thursday, October 25th, at 8pm
  • Friday, October 26th, at 8pm
  • Saturday, October 27th, at at 2pm (matinée)
  • Saturday, October 27th, at 8pm
You can order or reserve tickets online or get them at the door. (Reservations or ordering in advance are a good idea since occasionally shows sell out.)

EDIT: Here’s a link with more info, including a map and the cast and crew.
Hope lots of you can come see it!
beowabbit: (People: me with plumtreeblossom May 2007)
It’s been so long since I posted what was going on in my life that I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Apologies for filling up your F’list. If you’re lucky, I’ll run out of steam and you won’t have to plow through all of it.

But before I start trying to catch up, I have to at least put my fabulous weekend of food, arts, and love with my honeywuzzle into (metaphorical) bullet points.

Food: Saturday dinner was beef, carrots, and potatoes in the crockpot. (Also a sliced onion, but that didn’t come out very well the way I cooked it; next time I might go back to French onion soup.) The base was (originally alcoholic) apple cider.

Sunday morning my wuzzle made me something amazing that had just popped into her head the other day: pineapple upside-down pancakes! They were awesome. There’s a photo and some description in her journal.

Arts: On Saturday we saw Cirque du Soleil: Totem, which is currently touring in Boston. It was spectacular and lavish and stunning and impressive, but it also had some race and gender/power stuff in it that made me very uncomfortable. And unfortunately the acts that were technically most spectacular happened to be the ones that bugged me the most in that way. I had read a little bit about that before I went, and through the first part (before the intermission) I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, there’s some weird ethnic fetishization here and there, but all in all it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But oh, my, the second half made up for it! I hope to get time and mental energy to write more about this at some point, but given how unlikely that is, for now I’ll just point you to— oh, wait, I can’t; that’s a locked entry. Well, this YouTube video will give you a notion of what I’m talking about, although I don’t think you can see enough of the costumes in that to get a full sense of the spectacular wrongness. And one of the trapeze acts involved a woman being led blindfolded to a man on a trapeze, and then finding herself lifted into the air with him. She resists his advances for a while, but it’s all OK in the end because no means maybe and maybe means yes and she ends up happily acquiescing. OK, circus (like opera) is not where I would go for originality or emotional truth or serious discourse about power and consent, but really? In 2012? (That was another one of the ones that was just stunning and beautiful and impressive as a piece of circus art — lots of instances of her dropping and him catching her by an ankle or a wrist, for instance — that was marred for me by the politics of the thin veneer of narrative.) And I found it more frustrating because so many of the acts didn’t have stuff like that that bothered me, and I wish I’d been able to just revel in the spectacle and enjoy all of them. All that said, I am still very glad we went and had a fabulous time. EDIT: This YouTube video gives a bit of a flavour of the show. (The Sioux hoop dance you see a bit of in that video was apparently actually done by Sioux hoop dancers and done in consultation with some office of the Sioux Nation; that’s not the horribly wrong roller-skating bit I’m talking about above.)

On Sunday we saw the Randolph Theater Company’s performance of Avenue Q, which was spectacular and hilarious and a great demonstration of the fact that racism in art doesn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, when it’s consciously (even if frivolously) being addressed as a topic of the work.

Love: See above about the pineapple upside-down pancakes. While she was cooking me sweet love in a frying pan, I was doing her laundry. (The dryer at her house is busted, and three flights down from her apartment anyway.) And the first cosmos of the season blossomed this weekend while she was here; my flowers date from her giving me some wildflower seeds (notably cosmos) as a gift early in our relationship so they have a bit of a special meaning for us.

There was also a conversation in the car about cannibalism (with a detour into black pudding) which reminded me how well suited we are to one another. I love this wuzzle!

Um, I guess that was a bit longer than bullet points. Sorry!
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