Variations long after a theme

Photo by the fab Gary Norman.










I would have preferred to inherit Grandpappy's talent, instead of his penchant for fatty snacks, but oh well.

16 or so semi-interesting things about ME

Perhaps you too have been a victim of the current Facebook vogue for this exercise: you list some random stuff about yourself (25, supposedly, but I lost interest partway through), then you tag 25 others (!!) who perpetuate the process.

It was fun, actually. And since I wasted an hour of time yesterevening typing all this up, it seems only right to foist it upon unsuspecting readers at this site, too. Enjoy!

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1. Not until I was nearly out of my teens did I realize that not all people hear voices.

2. You can divide people into two large groups by asking whether they loved Alice in Wonderland in childhood or thought it was freakishly grotesque. Guess which half I fell into.

3. Likewise with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Some readers think Joyce’s writing perfectly reflects the flow of internal human thought; others reject this and think Woolf is the better reflection. Clearly not everybody sounds the same way to themselves. Me, I’m with Virginia.

4. In the late 20th century, my father turned up in New Orleans after a complete absence of 35 years. I haven’t "had time" to reestablish connections (nor has he).

5. At a very early age, I decided it was better to be spanked than to be ignored. Is that true of all kids?

6. Whenever I watch Mad Men, I find myself envying Betty Draper. Not her daily psychopathology, just her agoraphobia. Why can’t I stay at home all day and clean and cook?

7. This has been discussed on my blog already, but: biofeedback machines don’t respond to me. They sit there as though I’m brain dead. It has been suggested more than once that I may only be a visitor to this time-space continuum.

8. Since I was too young to be able to articulate it, I have had a terrible fear of death and of annihilation; this is my primary motivation for getting anything done on this miserable planet.

9. Years ago my Cousin Tabitha and I got so sick on rum and coke that to this day it nauseates me to smell either.

10. Believe it or not, I was alarmingly skinny until I turned 28.

11. A mania: I believe that if I don’t think about my loved ones before leaving home every day, something terrible may happen to them.

12. Recent development: after 14 years in L.A. with no problem, here in pacific Oregon I’ve acquired a fear of driving on the freeway.

13. Watch out, I can see your aura. Really. But unlike psychics, I have no idea what the colors signify.

14. Fun you can have with your aura: if you mentally imagine pulling it into your body, you’ll become all but unnoticeable to other people, for some reason.

15. Technically I’m hermaphroditic, in that I carry vestigial oviducts in my body. Before you cart me off to the circus, however, one man out of every six has this condition, according to my doctor.

16. My first clue that I was a tad light in the loafers came at the age of four or five, while watching Bonanza. Pernell Roberts showed up all dressed in black – in leather pants, yet, who dressed those boys, anyway? -- and I started feeling all shimmery.

A moment's hesitation

Follow-up

Taking a suggestion from Studio Z, I decided to start my OWN Celebrity Look-a-like service.




Ah....MUCH better. Sometimes to get something done right, you just have to up and do it yourself, you know? Thank you.

Horror Show

All right, back to me. Guess what, there’s a new site out there called MyHeritage – a genealogy site, essentially, but one with a hook. You log on and enroll, and after the usual assurances that your name won’t be sold to anybody at any time, you’re treated to a couple of tedious “opportunities” to hear from Tempurpedic and other fine merchandisers. Then at last you get to the goodies. You upload a photo of yourself, and the site tells you which celebs you resemble!

And okay. I wasn’t expecting Shia LeBeouf, right? Or even Sean Connery. But I was ill-prepared for the extent of the program’s cruelty. The first search likened me to Michael Douglas, James Doohan, Itzhak Rabin and Larry Flynt, for mercy’s sake. Yikes!






Naturally I wasn’t settling for that; I uploaded a fresh photo, this time by professional photographer extraordinaire Owen Carey. And did somewhat better: Kirk Douglas. John Goodman (hmm) and George Bush. That’s Dubya to you, Mr. Snark, not Aitch Dubya.


Not to be outdone, I tried uploading a photo of Sean Connery. And was rewarded with a phto of…Sean Connery.

This is why I am now on a starvation diet.

You asked for it.

And now you’re gonna get it.

I mean all right already. In recent weeks I’ve lodged several complaints – well, good-natur’d enough complaints, but still – about the devolving content of this blog. In the main, the demurrers mention one or all of the following:

1. Too much stuff about theater in general.

2. Too much stuff about PCS specifically.

3. Not enough about you (you meaning ME).

As my friend Kim put it so crowcrastinaciously, “I signed up for pu pu, and I’m only get the won tons.”

Okay. Seems to me I may be forgiven for going on about JAW; it occupied nearly every minute of my waking consciousness for at least a month before it opened, and then, well. And also….why not admit it, the Festival was convenient for me, content-wise. It’s embarrassing to go on about oneself! It feels self-aggrandizing. No matter what I say or how I couch it, what I hear myself saying is best expressed by a song from Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharma’s underrated film Shock Treatment:

Deep in the heart of me
I love every part of me
All I can see in me
Is danger and destiny
I pray every day to me
And here’s what I say to me
This is the me of me
Me me me.

Now: I wouldn’t mind so much if I could manage to be as bracingly forthright as Josh Friedman’s blog, i find your lack of faith disturbing. Or if I could achieve the camera’s eye of Art Scatter, or the camera obscura effect of Splattworks. How can I live up to the perspicacity of Parabasis, the carnivalesque abandon of Bamboo Nation, the clinical eroticism of Roissy in DC or Jeffrey Jones’ erudition. I aspire to all the above, in different ways, but NooooOOOOOoooooo. I got nothing here, people. Just me. Me-meaning-me.

So here goes nothing.

Premature E-cachinnation

Days to go before it’s 2008, I realize, but already I’ve resolved to devolve in the coming year. There’s something I’d like to do a lot less, and it’s a something that’s frequently regarded by others as a signature of sorts for me – my smile.



The impetus for this, you ax? It comes out of a conversation I had a while back with Adam Bock. Now Adam is not a smiley kind of guy, in my opinion, but it came out that we came to feel we both offer up our smiles too much and too easily, as a reflex. Adam observed that it’s a trait endemic to gay men in particular – smiling as an act of submission, a way of saying “see, I’m harmless.” Just as so many gay people wind up in helping professions as an unconscious way of self-justification (“I make an important contribution to society”), so too does the self-deprecating smile telegraph that the smiler is soft and toothless and not worth attacking.

Also, because society tends to look on smiling, friendly people as weaker than their more impassive counterparts, smiling for gay men can broadcast an acceptance of their own second-class status.

There is a study related to this, which John Tierney quoted in The New York Times earlier this year, that speaks to this bias:

While we typically think of a smile as displaying our emotional state (happiness), it also appears that smiles convey information about the signaler’s status. Specifically, lower status individuals appear to smile more than higher status individuals. I suspect that this is due, in part, to the fact that there are several different types of smiles, including a true happiness smile and a true embarrassment smile. The latter smile, the embarrassment display, is often seen as an appeasement display in primates. Jimmy Carter smiled a lot, George Bush smiles much less. Jimmy Carter is generally perceived to be warm and friendly, but not very dominant and strong. George Bush is perceived be somewhat less warm and friendly, but is seen as quite dominant and strong.

Not that we shouldn’t smile at all, thank heavens people do. But for me, well . . . it’s a habit I’d like to break. And let me add that (notwithstanding the illustration I chose to accompany this post) I’m not saying my smile is fake or forced, I’ve just come to the point where I distrust my very readiness to smile. To always seek to blend with others, to pacify, to help and to cheerlead.

So don’t take it personally if the next time we meet my face is a perfect Botox blank. Blame Adam!

!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MOI-MEME !!

Well, somebody has to say it. Yes, I turn timeless today. And so though it's a 12-hour day at PCS and though I'm still drowning in a constant stream of internally produced PUS (that's right, thank you), I will still strive to celebrate the me of me all day today.

The illustration on the left is from an ancient Incredible String Band anthology entitled Relics. That seemed apropos for my 75th solar return.

No need to send presents, but psychic flashes of all kinds would be most welcome.

molto spiritoso!

Demon video provocateuse Rose Riordan strikes in her relentless drive to freak me out on acid. This time she's enlisted the help of the evil genius of IceTruck. Click on the above link to check it out, and then -- if you like -- accept the invitation at the end to foist this onto another vicitm...

Hey, it's all about me!

I mean: what’s a blog for if not megalomania? I’ve had a run of favorable press recently. First there was an interview in followspot, Portland’s leading theater blog, about PCS’s upcoming JAW Festival. Then there was a “hot seat” discussion in the July issue of PDXmagazine between myself and the glam Trisha Pancio Marketing Director at Artists Repertory Theatre and also President of the Portland Area Theatre Alliance) in which we opined about the future of Portland theater. And then too there are some new contributions to Lit Up!, an ongoing column on The Playwrights’ Center’s extremely informative website – a resource no playwright should be going without, by the way…..

…..so you see, it’s been a Festival of Dr Fun. And a nice boost of much-needed energy for me, as I veer recklessly into JAW mode……