The Doors

If it wasn't raining, they were going to paint all the front doors at my apartment complex tomorrow. Guess that ain't happening.

Los Pintors

I'm stuck upstairs as they paint the front door. It opens inward, and the small space between the bottom of the stairs and the door is taken up by the painter and a piece of cardboard onto which lots of black paint is dripping. Drop cloths are for wussies,  I guess. They were not supposed to paint the door if it was going to rain, and it sure looks like rain to me, but so far it's only threatening.

The cats and their food, water and litterbox are locked out on the patio. They have a recliner, a bathroom rug and a sheepskin rug so they should be okay. That part of the patio is covered, so they won't get rained on.

This morning I went to the apartment office and picked up a gift shipment of tea from crowblog (who doesn't seem to have logged in here since she first set up the account). Then it was off to MicroCenter to find some reasonably priced software with which to shred the four hard drives in the old PC, so I can sell them on eBay. I chose the 35-pass version, followed by "fill with all-zeros" and for the four drives in there, a total of 114473 MB,  it's going to take more than 5 days. That's fine, the PC is in a corner out of the way and to me it's worth the time to get this done right.

Will be selling the motherboard/CPU and probably the RAM, though I may need to give 1GB of the 2GB in there to a friend, if it fits her PC. All this stuff works fine, I just got the "need to upgrade" bug. The original plan was to simply put the old motherboard and stuff in a new case, but I figured that since the hardest part of changing cases is installing the motherboard, I may as well buy a new motherboard. The case wasn't tall enough, so I ended up buying another one. So this morning while the disks started wiping I took that case, mounted the fans and 400W power supply in it, and stuck it in the closet. Anyone need a case?

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Painters are done, door needs to stay open to help it dry for 3 hours. And of course now it is raining. Went out on the patio to play with the cats, will change the kitty litter next time I'm down there. And pop something from Netflix into the DVD player.

Disney TV The Music Man review

I rented this 2003 TV special because Kristin Chenoweth plays Marion the Librarian - I love her voice and she's pretty hot, too. Matthew Broderick as Harold Hill would not have been my first choice, but neither was Robert Preston. Broderick can actually sing, which is an improvement, and he's an excellent dancer. Jeff Bleckner did a pretty good directing job.

Disney rewrote this show from top to bottom, and I hate to say this, but for the most part they improved it. My only complaint is minor - I think they played Hill too young and Marion too old. A little makeup could have fixed that. Chenoweth was 35 - and looked it - when the show was produced, and though Broderick is 6 years older than her, he looks like he is 10 years her junior. They actually left the line in the script where he mentions Marion is 26. He needs to look significantly older for a lot of the love story to work.

The production is well-directed, the cast has amazing talent in unexpected places, and amazing lacks of talent in other places. Chenoweth is superb in this. She looks amazing in those period outfits, and her voice is to die for. Shirley Jones eat your heart out. Ditto Barbara Cook. The original Broadway and Hollywood Marions were excellent singers with cabaret-quality voices. Chenoweth has the range and control of an opera soprano on top of that. In their duets she pretty well drowns out Broderick, who sings well but not very strong. They did some good audio mixing to help him along, but his voice just doesn't measure up.

There is  a lot of choreography in this piece, most of it Standard Disney. It's obvious they favored dance skills over singing skills because the chorus numbers are not very strong but the many production dance numbers are well done, and way too long. They have Hill dancing all over the place, even when he's just doing his patter, and it got annoying. On the other hand, he was definitely the lead dancer in his numbers, which is rare to see in a leading man.

Some outstanding performances were handed in by supporting cast. Debra Monk as Marion's mother is charming and very Irish (Chenoweth's accent becomes very Irish in scenes with Monk, and reverts to Standard Iowa in the other scenes) and she really perks up the piano lesson number. Cameron Adams is adorable as the mayor's eldest daughter Zaneeta, and she gets to show off her acrobatic dancing skills and a little bit of her clear, strong singing voice. Little Megan Moniz as the piano student Amaryllis also gets a line or two of solo singing, and she'll be someone to look out for in 10 years or so. There was one redheaded dancer who caught my eye several times, but she wasn't credited and they stuck her in the back row of all the big numbers for no apparent reason. Also uncredited was the barbershop quartet, who were okay but not as good, IMHO, as the one on the original cast album.

Victor Garber gets a life membership in Overactors Anonymous for his role as the mayor. They went for the in-shape demagogue with a stick up his butt, instead of how the script is written - which would be a bumbling fat pork barrel politician a la Dukes of Hazard. Other disappointments were Molly Shannon as the mayor's wife, who did not over-act enough and played it as a normal person which is not who this character is; Cameron Monaghan has the red hair, freckles and missing front teeth required for Winthrop, Marion's lisping baby brother, but he's kind of wooden, and has all the early warning signs of being the pawn of a stage mom; and Clyde Alves as the juvenile delinquent who becomes the drum major is just boring. The part needs someone like Henry Winkler and Alves is more like the guy they just cut from the basketball team for being a wuss.

I would have liked to have more singing and less dancing, or at least shorter dance numbers. The director did some interesting experiments with Iowa Stubborn, Lida Rose/Dream of Love, Wells Fargo Wagon and 76 Trombones using vast sets and street scenes which couldn't be done on Broadway. I think the Hollywood version handled those better, however.

This version also added a few lines here and there which did a better job than the previous versions of explaining a few things about who some of the characters are. All in all a DVD worth renting.