Beowabbit

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!

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!

Too busy and tired for a real post, but here are a few scattered impressions:

• I’m going to be directing! I’ll be directing audioboy’s staged radio-play adaptation of the 1954 movie Them!. I am hugely looking forward to my first directing experience, and am very grateful to audioboy and the rest of PMRP for the opportunity. [Note to self: Post this to Facebook, too. Also Twitter, ВКонтакте, Friendster, Orkut, G+, QQ, G--, E♭-major, and Compuserve.]
• Work has been exceptionally busy and high-stress lately.
• That said, I took Friday off to make a four-day weekend which was utterly excellent. Much of it was spent with plumtreeblossom’s company, and I got to see lots of other wonderful friends, and it was generally a wonderful weekend.
• ...marred somewhat by plumtreeblossom’s phone dying. For the second time. She gets it through work and so getting it repaired or replaced has some extra layers of bureaucracy and delay. Given how panicky she and I each get when we’re having phone problems, and how flaky her phone and her service have been, I decided it was time to get us an emergency backup to share, so I did, and I’ll be taking it over to her later today.

Saw PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, which was great. This included an encore performance of “Red Shift: Havoc over Holowood”, which plumtreeblossom was in, and which was originally performed at an Arisia a couple years ago. That was a lot of fun. And the other show was a radio adaptation of The Day the Earth Stood Still, originally broadcast in 1954 by Lux Radio Theater. That was a truly spectacular performance. Kudos to Michael McAffee, who starred as Red Shift (the lead Interplanetary Do-Gooder in the Red Shift episodes) and directed “The Day the Earth Stood Still”¹.

I finished Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (spoilers at link, of course) a couple weeks ago. I had a weird, mixed reaction to it. I love alternate history in general, and this is an important book in the history of that sub-genre. And I love actual history, and the actual history in the book was meticulously researched. But I had a hard time with the pervasive racism that has to be depicted in a book about 20th- or 21st-century Afrikaner white supremacists travelling back in time to ensure that the South wins the Civil War. I don’t have a similarly hard time with nonfiction history, and I think I might have less of a hard time with a historical novel that didn’t alter actual history so much. And of course, accurate fiction set in the early 21st century also has to depict racism, albeit without quite the same focus on it. So I’m not quite sure what it was about this book that made it so hard to read. (I liked it better after the end of the war, when it became about politics; not sure if that’s because the tone of the book changed or if it’s just that I’d gotten used to the book and its universe by then.)

The other thing I didn’t like about it, was that it mixed very plausible, believable characters with some really implausible behaviours and reactions. I mean, the whole premise is time travel and altering history, and I’m willing to suspend disbelief that far, but a lot of the things about how the time travellers behaved and how the 19th-century Southerners reacted to them and their technology seemed completely implausible.

I have started reading Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, about the epidemic of sleeping sickness (epidemic encephalitis or encephalitis lethargica) following World War I. I’m only about halfway through it, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s largely taken from case histories, but it also creates an excellent sense of the era. Here’s an example:

For New Yorkers, for Americans, and for the world, the 1920s would prove to be the decade with the most rapid technological change in history. In one generation, travel by horse and carriage would make way for autos; people would travel underground, and soon, in the sky; wireless radio would change ship travel; kitchen appliances and indoor plumbing would become mainstream; light would come from a switch and heat through pipes; telephones would appear in the majority of homes; and the canned music and crackling voice of radio would provide home entertainment and news.

One minor quibble I have with it is that it’s a bit fictionalized and novelistic, including details that I can’t imagine are all actually attested in contemporary sources. But that certainly adds to the vividness, and it’s a very vivid book. Definitely recommended.

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¹ So in this post I have two cases of the same or similar titles appearing in italics as the name of a standalone work or series, and also in quotation marks as the title of an episode of a series. There’s something wrong with that.

So, since SALMON and PSYCHIATRIST are the phonetic-alphabet¹ spellings for L and P respectively², I'm curious what the rest of the alphabet is like. Some letters are obvious, of course, like DAMN for N, HONOR for H, and WRY for W (or should that be ANSWER?), but would anybody care to make suggestions for the rest of the alphabet? The vowels seem particularly hard; I mean TAOISEACH is great, but is it the spelling for A, O, or E? Or should we just go for maximum efficiency and use it for all three?

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¹ In the radio spelling alphabet sense, of course.
² According, of course, to that authoritative and reliable source for all such topics (including mathematics), Red Shift, Interplanetary Do-Gooder.

Had a great weekend with my wuzzle! On Saturday we went to the Franklin Park Zoo and had a great time. I will eventually post some photos to Flickr, but for now there are a couple on my Tumblr account. (Sorry they’re fuzzy; my good camera was out of batteries and I was taking them with my phone — at an unreasonable zoom level without a flash — until we found the gift shop to buy spare batteries.)

Then on Sunday we saw closing night of The Big Broadcast of 1954, and had a blast. We’d seen opening night, too, and it was neat to notice the minor differences — such as PMRP’s favorite deployed Marine delivering the recorded opening speech. Yay srakkt!

This was a great show, and while we regret that geography kept us from participating this year, we enjoyed the opportunity to experience a show purely as audience members. If I listed all the great performances and nifty touches I’d be typing all night, but I have to mention just how much the band, Jaggery, added to the performance. (The background music for the final climactic ride in Sleepy Hollow was especially effective.) Everybody involved should be very very proud, and I can’t wait to hear the Ride Across America CD when it comes out and see what the other radio-drama groups that participated came up with.

Then Monday night I helped plumtreeblossom and one of her downstairs neighbours hand out candy to Trick-or-Treaters, which was lots of fun and something I almost never get to do since I’ve usually got Hallowe’en night commitments. And we finished up Hallowe’en night with a nice chat with vanguardcdk and a Twilight Zone episode.

Lovely weekend!

Hi. First of all, on Thursday plumtreeblossom and I saw The Yeomen of the Guard put on by the MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players, and it was a rolicking good time.

Then yesterday (Saturday) we went to see the Boston Ballet. Aside from The Nutcracker, this was the first time I’d seen ballet live, and I loved it, as did plumtreeblossom. They performed three pieces. ( More about the performances. )

We got relatively affordable tickets through MIT, but I think they may have us hooked. (“Psst! Hey, kids, wanna see a ballet? All the cool kids are doing it! First one’s free!”)

Then today we helped surrealestate and DD move to their new condo. (Well, and Julian moved too, but he wasn’t really carrying his weight. Kid’s a slacker — he didn’t even help with the chest freezer!) Their new place is much closer to plumtreeblossom’s, and is really nice. I’m looking forward to having them a bit more conveniently located. They had a lot of people helping and everything they were planning to move got moved in good time.

Then tonight were tryouts for PMRP’s summer live radio drama trilogy. I’m trying out for voice rôles this time (after doing a lot of Foley); plumtreeblossom is trying out for both voice and Foley. That was fun, and we’ll see what happens.

Life is good.

And now it’s 11:30pm and I’m home and really tired (physical labour will do that to you), and it’s just barely conceivable that I will be asleep before midnight for a change.