howeird | Entries tagged with theater

The bird feeder I put up on the front porch was completely ignored until it rained. And then in three days it was completely emptied. Re-filled it when I got home tonight. Meanwhile the hummingbird feeder has hardly been touched. They seem to prefer the flowering bushes across the street.

Work was a cavalcade of data entry and reading specs and boss sent us our assignments for the upcoming product, through November at least.

Did some more research on the Nissan LEAF, which showed that the tax rebate might make it affordable, also saw some debates about its range. Some claimed 100 miles EPA says 75, or 85 for 2014 model. Punched Sunnyvale Nissan into the GPS, and was getting close when the Target sign drew me in (I was down to my last Breath-Right strip and had the discount coupon in my wallet). Bought a bunch of stuff on my "back of my mind" list and cogitated about the LEAF. Bottom line is even 100 miles is craptastic - can't get to Yosemite or Moro Bay on a single charge, and even Capitola becomes iffy. I don't drive those distances a lot, but it would suck to not be able to. The problem is more how long it takes to charge.

So I nixed the visit, and decided "wake me when you can do 200 miles or recharge in an hour"

Home, the right Little Shop CD was in the mailbox. I'm playing it now. I have no idea how I am going to nail down Mushnik's songs. Oh well, live theater is always a challenge.

Vacuumed up the cat barf. I knew I shouldn't have given Domino all the American Singles cheese she wanted. :-(

Finally was able to upload my POIs to the in-dash unit - it wanted them on a USB drive, not an SD card. Now I need to figure out how to build another POI list from Google Maps or Earth. Used to be easy to get the GPS coordinates, but they messed up the UI big-time.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1 if it isn't postponed/canceled
Much more data entry & spec reading for the additional features on my list. Yesterday there was only one.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Furball Hall
Current Music: Suddenly Seymour

Or not.
My whole day was all about seeing an all-female production of 1776, which was originally written for all men except for two women (Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson). Took light rail, met Janice at the theater, The Theatre on San Pedro Square is cleverly hidden behind Peggy Sue's, it's a very comfortable 300-seat venue with great sight lines.

I got what I expected - a very talented group of women acting and singing their hearts out but utterly failing to convince me that they were the Founding Fathers. A large part of it was they were not in costume. Another chunk was there was no set. The furniture was decidedly not period.

The cast was miked, but the sound system was not surround or even true stereo so there was no audio clue where the person was on stage. Music was electronic, and the sound booth did a horrible job of balancing it, so I often couldn't hear the words. They had this obnoxious church bell effect which was rung at what appeared to be random times, and also tolled as each delegate came up to sign the Declaration. It drowned out the roll call.

Well worth going to for the level of talent and the novelty.

Janice gave me a ride home. It's been raining and blustery on and off all weekend.

I took down the flag pole with the US and Thai flags, because it is rude to fly national flags in this weather. Makes it harder to find my house, though. Maybe I'll get another pole and put up my old obsolete Coast and Geodetic Survey flag. That was designed to fly on ships in all weather. CG&S was absorbed by NOAA in the late 60s. I got the flag because I worked in a NOAA warehouse as a summer job when they decided to toss the old flags. I can't find an image of this one online, it has a yellow sinusoidal projection of the globe in the center, the ones I'm seeing online have simply a triangle, or the NOAA bird inside a blue circle inside the triangle.

But imagine this, in yellow in the center:

Domino has been a nudge all evening. Well, during dinner, which was two courses. Corn chowder then I finally dug the last two sourdough English muffins out of the freezer and nuked them with margarine and swiss cheese. Dessert was sliced banana under chocolate ice cream with sprinkles. And a heart-shaped shortbread cookie half dipped in chocolate.

Tivo supplied the entertainment, I watched two episodes of TMZ and the latest Shark Tank. The latter lived up to its name, the final presenter had The Next Great Smartphone Thing™, and all the sharks were jumping each other to make a better offer. Better for them, not for the presenter. He finally took the highest $$ bid which also meant giving up the most equity.

Also spent some Quality Time programming the Tivo to record the gold medal rounds of the sports I really want to watch. Luge, skeleton, speed skating short distances. Unfortunately that will mean a lot of FF-ing through biathlon (yawn) and figure skating (WTF, judges?).

Put out the garbage/recycling. One of the many things one gives up owning a home is the luxury of taking stuff out to the dumpster whenever one wishes, and not paying attention to what day it is. Except now that I think about it, the dumpsters were full most of the time.

Did look at prices for Nissan Leaf. $30k. I probably can't afford that, unless I can get $15k for the Corolla.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Maybe BASFA

Current Mood: critical
Current Location: Furball Hall

Taken through my windshield in the Costco parking lot.

After the driest January in history, tonight's rain was a bit of a surprise (the weather reports were for a 40% chance) but it was light enough to not be a problem driving home.

Today work was spent following up on yesterday's test. Boss had wanted step by step instructions for the customers by noon yesterday, but the steps I was given were so far from accurate that it wasn't until end of day I was able to show the program probably had something wrong with it.

The routine went like this:
1. Upload all the files for an update to the test machine
2. Run a program on the test machine to use those files to update the machine
Sounds easy, no? Well, the way our network is set up, it took 2 hours to do step 1, and it turns out that the files needed to be uploaded to a particular directory, and the program had to be run from not-that-directory-or-anything-close. And the update takes about half an hour.

I needed to run 4 tests to validate the customers' process.

The good news is all the Seattle TV stations were live streaming the Superbowl celebration parade on their web sites, and Channel 13 (Fox) was the only one with rights to broadcast the ceremony inside the football stadium, which also bled over into the next door baseball stadium. I found that out just in time to watch.

Initial estimates, which the idiot media kept reporting was 700,000 people. But that was at about noon, and by the time the parade made it to the stadium there were probably a million. It was incredible. Seattle only has 600,000 in the city limits, maybe two million in Greater. Channel 13 is actually in the next city south, Tacoma. Wait a minute, I just checked and they have moved to downtown Seattle. Probably eons ago. Nobody pays much attention to them except when Fox lands some coup like the superbowl. And I think they used to do Creature Features on Friday nights.

Anyhow, I'm guessing

susandennis got quite a show from her condo overlooking the stadium parking lot.

Speaking of football, I finally got around to checking for actual video showing Navarro Bowman being pelted with food by Seattle fans as he was carted off the field after being injured during the final playoff game. What I saw was after his cart was well into the tunnel, a few pieces of popcorn fell from above onto the end of the cart. none of it hit him, and it didn't look intentional. In short, no food was thrown. What reminded me was this:

Marshawn Lynch started a thing where it's a compliment to throw Skittles at players. Here he returns the favor. He is now an official spokesman for Skittles. When I was lookng for a Seahawks venue to watch the Superbowl, the place I found posted a plea to leave the Skittles home - they are impossible to clean up, especially in the nooks and crannies. Notice it is not raining. Seattle got a break from that, but it was freezing. Snow flurries likely tomorrow.

Lunch was at "New Tandoori Cafe", a hole in the wall created from two holes in the wall. It is next to Thaibodia, which was my original destination until I remembered how bad they suck after 1 pm. Tandoori was just plain bozarre. Layed out like two separate spaces, one a diner and the other more like a coffee shop, you order at what would normally be a hostess desk, seat yourself, and wait. I had the lamb tikka marsala, which had an odd taste but not awful, and it cleared out my sinuses over the course of the meal. The naan was huge and excellent. There was sliced lettuce with onion slice which they called a salad (no dressing). Biryani rice was the usual Indian crap. Some day India will learn how to grow rice. Maybe. Maybe not because the population is used to eating pig food. There was no water served or available. They had coffee and a refrigerated case full of mango lhasi and soft drinks.

After work I was starting to set Mathilda Ave Starbucks in my autopilot, when I remembered I had a long Costco shopping list. So Costco it was. I managed to spend > $200 and not get ice cream (they don't have any I like) or snack sized ziplock bags (they have none at all). So on my way home I gritted my teeth and picked those up at Fresh & Easy. F&E is not easy at all, every checkout line is self checkout. :-(

Home, lugged all that stuff to the car in 4 trips. Nothing in the mailbox. On the stoop was the pair of walking shoes I'd ordered. I went a half size larger because the identical pair I have been using is doing rude things to my toenails.

Pulled up the Little Shop performance schedule and poked those days and tech week into my Google calendar. I hope I survive. 4 shows a week, 4 weeks. I bet they would get just as many audience members if they only did 3 weeks. And/or cut out the Thursday shows.

The director added me to their "secret" Facebook page, and several cast members sent friend requests. The guy playing the voice of Audry II has as warped a sense of humor as I do. It looks like a fun cast. I've already (last night) fallen in love with the ASM. She's hot, and laughs at my jokes.

After dinner I watched Channel 13's stream of the parade, but it stopped as they got to the stadium. They were going to live stream the inside ceremonies at 11, but I forgot. It'll be online tomorrow I'm sure. I saw most of it live, but there are spot I wanted to rewind and turn on closed captions.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work. No idea what I'll be doing. I ought to re-format those instructions which are in 3 different fonts.
Starbucks after

Current Mood: up way too late again
Current Location: WeirdHome

Starting at the middle and working my way outward.

Tonight's adventure was going to the home of a Sunnyvale Community Players board member to audition for Little Shop of Horrors. Apparently the person they cast as Mushnik either said no, dropped out, or they didn't find a match through the audition process. The director found me on Facebook, messaged me an invitation to audition, and tonight was it.

I had brought music, but the music director was already in callbacks mode, meaning teaching me one of Mushnik's songs from the score. He did a good job of breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, and I did a good job of breaking it and leaving pieces scattered on the floor by the piano. It's a patter song, which is bad enough, but on top of that the words and they lyrics don't quite jive, and even when they do the syntax is not natural to me. Funny thing is when he switched from playing the melody to just the accompaniment, I got it a lot better. It's a really cute tango. The fellow playing Seymour showed up in time for me to yell at him. Nice guy, cute as a button with a Velcro top.

After many many run-throughs of the 32 bars or so we rehearsed, the director and production staff were called in to hear me totally not nail it, and then Seymour and I read a couple of pages from the script. That I nailed. But it's going to be a challenge learning lines because the script puts both stage directions and yelled lines in the same font & size italics.

Director kept a poker face, thanked me for coming all the way out for just a few minutes of audition (it was actually almost half an hour), and said he would message me on Facebook tonight.

Thai Pepper is a cleverly hidden restaurant on the way home, also happens to be across the street from Michelle's Nails. I'd been meaning to try it, and as it was only 8 and they are open till 9, I did. The place is huge and the decor is nice, with some gorgeous pieces of Thai temples which are probably illegal to export from there. The location sucks and the prices are high, even for a Thai place, and even though there were about a dozen customers, the place looked empty. The waitress spoke un-accented English, I asked in English if she spoke Thai, and she said "what?" So I asked in Thai, and from then on it was all in Bangkok Thai. I ordered chicken satay, basil seafood and white rice and Thai Iced tea. The satay was very American, thick pieces of chicken, cut enough halfway down the stickto fork off easily. The peanut sauce was bland, soupy and without actual peanut bits. Cuke and onion bits in vinegar were just right, though. The irony here is those are to cut the spiciness of the peanut sauce, of which there was none. The main dish came out while I was still working on the second satay stick (out of 5? 6?). I had asked for not spicy and that's what I got, but I had not asked for not tasty. The calamari rings were way too chewy, but the scallops and fish bits were good, and so was the shrimp once I pulled off the tails. WTF is it with tail-on shrimp in Thai sauté? The iced tea was very good, authentic. $28 was a bit too much, but I took home half of each dish, so maybe not.

It took a while to flag down my waitress because I was way at one end of the place and the kitchen was way at the other end. I should have sat closer so I could hear the kitchen conversation, which is usually amusing and at my vocabulary level.

Work was a summer festival. Boss figured out what was wrong with the database, but he needed to reset it, which didn't happen today. Instead he assigned me a test of an undocumented feature which I could not get to work because it didn't. The directions were screwy. And somewhere in there our network went down, which set me back to square 1 transferring a boatload of files.

Attended a meeting on another feature I own and the good news is they are adopting an industry standard way to implement it, the bad news is this means we have to re-write all the test cases and automation scripts, which were written for our home-made implementation.

The file transfer thing kept me in the office till after 6, but there wasn't enough time to go home and get to the auditions by 7:30, so Plan A was to stop in the Starbucks on the way, but I got trapped by rush hour traffic in the wrong lane and ended up parking in the Thai Pepper lot, walking around that little strip mall and then listening to the car radio for 15 minutes.

Home after dinner, Domino got her usual half can of Fancy Feast, and yelled at me to feed her. Looked in her bowl and for the first time in ages she had completely finished it. So I gave her the other half. While she was munching I changed the litterbox and plopped the old one into the bif new! improved! garbage container. Much better than the old small one.

Box on the porch was a new Pocket Wizard, which I installed batteries in, put it on Channel 1 which is what everyone in the studio uses, and plugged in the USB to download updated firmware, but there was none. Put a new battery in the mini PW which had crapped out on me last weekend, but it wouldn't fire up. I'll have to check if it's under warranty.

Nothing on Facebook when I got home. But the director sent email inviting me to the show. And he had found my photo album of programs/cast lists from shows I've been in and emailed that we had been in one together - Annie in Palo Alto, 1984. That's the 80s show I have the most FB friends from. He's using a different last name, which is part of the reason I didn't click on the connection earlier, but also his name is the same as the student body president when I was a Junior in college, and the author of the novel on my Kindle right now. James Gunn is a pretty common name in my life. So is Tom and Thom Gunn. Anyhow, I accepted the part, and am now in "What have I done?" mode. It's a bigger part and the music is more difficult than I usually attempt. But I guess if I can sing similar roles in Gilbert & Sullivan, I can handle this too. First read-through is on the 15th, then the grind begins Sunday through Thursday on the 23rd. The show opens April 4, runs Thurs-Sun till the 27th. Very long run, IMHO too many performances for the small audiences they get.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Costco
Maybe do some laundry

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: Furball Hall

Woke up at about 6 am feeling very chilly, thermostat said 70° but it felt like 60. Went to take a leak, and started shivering so much I couldn't stand. Decided being warm was a higher priority and went back under the covers. It didn't take long to get back to normal, and I should have thrown on my heavy robe and gone into the kitchen where my blood glucose meter sits and seen how low it was, but one of the things about low Hgl is it messes with your sense of priorities. Used to be I could feel low blood sugar coming on from mile away, with extreme hunger and that trademark squirrelly feeling. No longer have that gift, I need the meter.

Got up at about 8, feeling very much like I'd had a low (very drained), and after I did my bathroom routine and got dressed I took a reading and it was 250. Way too high, but part of my diabetes issue is my body over-compensates for lows by shooting adrenalin and sugar into my system. I usually wake up with high readings, no matter how low they wer in the middle of the night.

But the good news is this put me ahead of schedule and I got to work on time.

It was hard to find parking where I usually park, in the back of the building (the entrance closest to the lab and my cube) because the landlord is destroying the front facade of the building and the front entrance is closed. The reception desk has been moved to the side (delivery) entrance. They had finished completely renovating the building next door, which the company will be moving into soon (not us, people from other offices nearby), and it looks like they are simply making the front of ours look like the front of that one. Last week they re-roofed the place. Didn't affect me, but the people upstairs had a lot of noise to deal with.

Team meeting should have been over in half an hour, but That One Guy who doesn't know when he's made his point made the next meeting group late.

Boss gave me a project to do - enter test cases in the new database for the upcoming product. I got about 10 done before the database crashed. Boss had to leave early, so I didn;t get any more entries done, but I did get a chance to research what some of the tests required. The specification documents are sometimes vague about specifics (LOL) and refer instead to standards (by number) which I have to go online to look up.

For lunch I told the GPS to find me the nearest Togo's, and it found the furthest of the nearest three. That's because I was out in the back of the parking lot by the railroad tracks and the GPS thought I was on the street on the other side of the tracks. Turned out for the best, though, because I needed to get some cash, and my CU was on the way to that Togo's. The second nearest also has a CU ATM, but there's nothing near the nearest.

Home, two boxes on the porch, one big one small. Small one was a 10-pack of paper 3D glasses. I lost the two pair I had by the computer and at work, for viewing the Mars mission images. And lately one of my artist friends has been experimenting with creating 3D pictures.

The big box had the ASUS 802.11AC router and the corresponding PCIE card for the PC. I had about an hour to kill, so I did the basic setup on the router, made sure the port forwarding worked for one webcam, and then headed to BASFA.

Lightly attended meeting, relatively, but enough critical mass to make it worthwhile. I gave away 5 of the 3D glasses, it turns out more people than I thought were wanting a pair.

I mentioned that Sunnyvale is doing Little Shop, and I may have something to do with it, and a friend who works part time at the Foothill College radio station said the school was doing it Real Soon Now. That's pretty normal in the Bay Area, as soon as the rights are released all the community theaters put it on their list.

Not much pun fodder for me, I think I told two less than brilliant ones. But I did get the Rumor of the Week - Denver must have smoked a super bowl last weekend. Wonderful 3-second pause before everyone got it. I was wearing my Seahawks jersey and stadium jacket, which helped.

Home, spent another hour fine tuning the router settings. Now all the equipment in the house is at the IP address I want, all the webcams are viewable (Comcast gives a different IP address each time you change routers), and I was able to see Amazon Prime content on the blu-rays in the bedroom and livingroom.

The new router is noticeably faster loading web pages, and I'm getting more upload/download speed than Comcast says I deserve.

One of the real tests will be overnight, there's a certain Thai channel on the bedroom internet radio (the one furthest from the router) which has been dropping out a lot. FungFungFung "music every day, every hour". In Thai "Fung" means "listen". It can also mean "to hear" but there's another word, da-yin, which is closer to that. "Fung mai da-yin" means "I was listening but didn't hear you". Common phrase.

The radio in the office, mere feet from the router, is playing it, but there is some re-buffering, even at the low bit rate stream. But it isn't giving a 404 error anymore.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Little Shop audition. I'm not sure I really want the part, Mushnik's songs are patter which I don't do well without eons of practice.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: WeirdHome

Doing my part to alleviate the California drought, I skipped taking a shower this morning. I did not skip the deodorant.

Just as I was totally out of anything to do at work, boss assigned me a bug to look into. It's one QA really should not be working on because it's a tech support/field engineering issue. Neither of them was able to replicate a customer's issue in our lab, and after many months they asked the customer to send a pair of machines, or more, so we can test in our lab using the equipment which is experiencing he problem. We have a feature in our device which lets you set up a backup unit identical to up to 10 production units. If a production unit has a serious problem, the backup will take over. Apparently the customer's backup has been taking over at the wrong times.

Boss say see one of the support guys for the customer's units, so I do. But (a) he only has one unit, (b) it is from a different customer site and (c) it's for a different issue and (d) there's only one and both issues need at least two to run the test.

So I continued to have almost nothing to do until it was time to write my weekly report.

Lunch was at Amarin Thai's hole in the wall place near Mission College, where the challenge is to arrive late enough to find parking but not late enough to be turned away because they close at 2 pm. I had the garlic rice with garlic spinach and duck. There did not appear to be any garlic in what they served, but it was still pretty good.

Back at the work parking lot I phoned Sassy Nails and made an appointment for 5:30. I didn't make it out the door till 5:25, which should have only made me 3 minutes late, but traffic was slow and more than the usual inconsiderate slobs were wedging their cars across two lanes, blocking intersections, not letting people through the commuter lane to make right turns. Whoever decided that commuter lanes in the bay area expressways should be the right-hand lane needs to meet a violent end at the hands of a sober driver.

Ms. Sassy (not her real name) waited for me, because she had made me an hour late last time, and I was her last client of the day since they were closing an hour early for Chinese/Vietnamese New Year, which technically was last night. It still took too long because she was interrupted every 3 minutes to answer the phone or greet a customer (to say they were closed). She needs to hire a receptionist.

Went from there next door to the massage place, only went in for a 1/2-hour session. Good masseuse, in her 40s, ended with a face massage which felt better than I thought it would.

Home, there was a package by the side door - a pack of 3 Jockey briefs. And two in the mailbox - a peephole wide angle lens for the front door and 2014 America The Beautiful quarters proof sets, one for me and one for my little sister.

I was going to install the peephole, I knew it needed a 5/8-inch drill bit which I thought I had, but all I found was a super-long and a normal 1/2" and a 1". And a 2: hole saw.

During the day I did some research online on the latest wireless standards, which claim to be able to equal (or come close enough to not matter) 1Gb streaming. And ended up buying an ASUS router and a PCIE card for the big PC. Did not get a USB adapter for the laptop because USB can't keep up past 800Mbps at best, more like half that IRL.

Allstate sent me a note asking me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey. I was not satisfied at all with how they handled the insurance on the new home, but they did okay on auto. After about 5 pages, it was clear the survey was not set up to cope with anything so complicated. I gave up after 10, having become completely dissatisfied with the survey itself.

Dinner was a Safeway Select mac-n-cheese-n-bacon, followed by most of a wedge of soft French cheese spread on slices of steamed sourdough baguette. Took two Lactaid pills just in case.

Looked at the SJ Astronomical Society's web site for events where I might get some pointers on how to take photos through my telescope, and they seem to meet twice a week for informal stargazing and helping the unwashed. Membership was a mere $20 so I joined, and put the next two sessions on my calendar.

Finally got the invite to audition, but in a roundabout way. I did not renew my howierd.com domain, it is due to expire in April. It;s sole purpose is to send an auto-reply to tell people to spell "weird" correctly and try again. The email was sent to howeird@howierd.com. So he should get the auto-reply, and if he's paying attention will re-send the message to right address. Since it took him three days to get back to me I'll give him a day before replying.

Plans for tomorrow:
Buy a 5/8" drill bit
Install the peep hole lens
Photo shoot at 2 pm
Janice coffee klatch at 5:30

Current Mood: mischievous
Current Location: WeirdHome

The piano tech arrived a couple of minutes early, I was on the PC, VPNed into work and actually working.

Tall Hungarian fellow, the first thing he did was claim that tuning it the right way would cost more than buying a new piano. He makes the mistake that I actually play the piano, though he does understand the concept of emotional attachment. No, that's not the phrase. I'll think of the right one and poke it in later. Sentimental value. That's the phrase.

He had sent me his prices, and I knew we were looking at about $300. He way underestimated how well built this relic is, and was sure we would be busting strings right and left at $80 a string. The piano was flat by about 2%. He was afraid that tightening the strings, which are almost all the originals, would break them if he did it all in one fell swoop like all the other piano techs have done for the past 46 years. So I let him do two passes at $45 and an hour each. He also wanted to adjust the action, which is something it needed, but he gave up before he had finished the 5 & 6 octaves. I use 5 a lot, 6 not so much.

I've probably told the sentimental value story before, ( here it is again )

So that was my day, plinking sounds in the background as I read documents & email for work.

During a break I updated my theater resume, it needed the new address, and was set to print it, but could not find any card stock. Tried photo paper, but it's a 2-sided resume, and the back of Kodak paper doesn't take ink.

I quit working at 5, and headed for Fry's to get some card stock. But they have castrated their stationary department, and had none. So I slogged in rush hour traffic up to Office Depot, and paid way too much for a ream. Used to be able to buy card stock in smaller doses.

Since I was now right across the street from Safeway I went there to stock up on produce and frozen food. Oh my, the eye candy was out in force. The woman in charge of the self check-out is DDG, looked like she ought to be on a ski slope posing for a breath mint commercial. Or chapstick. So beautiful! And many customers were in the "mommy, I want one!" category. Enjoyable trip.

Home, big envelope in the mailbox, turned out to be the docs for the replacement insurance. Fully approved, they included flood insurance for no extra $$, and it's for full replacement cost of the home, not the cheap-o $150k which Allstate had lined up. I dashed off email to Escrow Lady with the details, because insurance for the first 2 years is suppose to be paid out of escrow, and asked who else I need to contact. In theory the old insurance gets canceled as of today because I didn;t fork over the bogus $200 they claimed I owed because the community doesn't have a staff member living here full time.

Printed the theater resume on card stock, printed the audition forms and filled them out.

Dinner was the rest of the Marie C lasagna and some garlic sourdough bread.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1 with the boss, maybe. He moved it to Thursday the last 2 times.
I expect to hear from the director about coming in to audition.
Maybe set up the telescope on the tripod. It's a VERY solid tripod. Too bad it's a new moon. I should check to see in SJ Astronomy club is getting together for a dark sky night.

Current Mood: creative

The M stands for Magic.

Somehow the Seamagic connection to LJ mysteriously fixed itself. I'm back to offline editing with full wysiwig features.

Monday Monday, can't rust that day. Everyone knows that no oxidation occurs on Mondays, especially of one's brain cells.

Up with the alarm, for the 5th time in so many weekdays started to change the alarm radio channel from KOMO in Seattle to something else, and for the 5th time reminded myself that it's more interesting than waking up to a Bay Area station until the Superbowl is over.

After that, probably not so much. ( Read more... )

I'd had a difficult night, thanks to scarfing up way too many cheezy poofs without first lactose-proofing my tummy. Finally fell asleep about 2:30, and had to be up and out the door before 9 to be at work with enough time to dry run the demo I was giving at the 10 o'clock meeting.

Accomplished that somehow. Demo was visited briefly by Murphy, but one of my teammates pointed out that the firewall I had disabled last week was back. Nuked that and had a flawless demo.

By lunchtime the gastro-intestinal was still unsure of itself, so as I aimed the car in the general direction of food, I let my combination steering wheel/dowsing rod steer me to where there was fiber. Denny's wheat pancakes FTW. IHOP might do them better, but they are in the opposite direction and lunchtime service is glacial.

Left work at 5:30 to get to downtown SJ in time to get a good seat for the 6:30 show at Camera 12. There is no good way to get there from work before 7 pm when the commuter lanes open to all, and I didn't get there till 6:20. Turns out the FB event had the time wrong, it actually was a 7 pm start. :-( But that meant I got a good seat, right in front of the cast. One of my best buddies from Menlo Players days was the lead character in this indie, called The Devil in White. It's a sci-fi slasher flick. A scientist develops a white powder which enhances the senses. Rub it on your eyes, you can see better. But over time it will draw away from your other senses. And it gas cocaine/LSD-like side effects. Well acted, a tightly written script, very good makeup and effects for an indie, some audio drops and a few abrupt transitions, but generally well directed and edited. And all the women in it are sexy. Even the mom. Which was nice because they were sitting right behind me. I don't usually like slasher thrillers, but I had a good time. Better than BASFA, but fewer puns.

Home, Domino kept yelling at me, she hates it when I am not home to give her treats at a reasonable hour. Banquet piece-o-crap alleged chicken fried steak dinner, yummy fudge brownie ice cream for dessert.

During the day, the director of Sunnyvale Players' upcoming Little Shop of Horrors messaged me on FB asking if I was interested in auditioning for Mushnik. I don't know him, don't know who suggested me (my last gig there was in 2000), so it's quite a compliment. They are doing the version where Mushnik sings, which I am not familiar with, so I told him I'd have to check on the piano if I had the G2-F4 range they listed on the audition sheet. I did that tonight, I have more than that range (F4 turns out to only be F above middle C), so I messaged him about that. But I also saw on the sheet what it was which kept me from auditioning, they were going to make everyone dance. So I added to the message that I don't dance anything more intensive than character dances (I am not someone who benefits from extensive warmups or can stay upright through a production number). I suspect that will be fine. Next step is to arrange a time/place to read & sing for him. I looked him up online, he appears to be directing his first show, and his background is the SF comedy competition in 2006 with a routine which made fun of The Annoying. Parts of it were clever, parts were annoying & stupid. But he showed good comic timing.

Plans for tomorrow:
Wait for the piano tuner, due at 10.
Work from home while he's raising the pitch (right now A is 433 instead of the desired 440) and tuning, and making any necessary repairs. I need to ask if it's possible to put wheels back on the thing.
To the office, if there is time
???

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Furball Hall

Especially for zyzyly

After You're A Good Man Charlie Brown, they held auditions for Camelot. Different director, and I was still not convinced I could sing. I had always wanted to play King Pellinore, an elderly knight who shows up at the start of Act II wearing full armor with the visor closed. He has a dog, the shaggier the better. His only singing is from the wings with the chorus in Act I and with the other knights as ensemble in Act II. He doesn't have a lot of lines, either.

I was 23, but had played old men in high school and college, and enjoyed it. And it was a low-impact part which wouldn't require a lot of rehearsal.

This time auditions were short, I sang a song, I think, and did cold reading from the script. I don't remember any callbacks, or reading against anyone.

A day or two later the director phones me, and he says he has some bad news. He reminds me that this is community theater, and unlike high school and college, there are a wealth of men who actually are old, and he has chosen one of them to play King Pellinore. "He even owns his own set of armor", I think he said. Or maybe just that the other guy fits into the suit of armor they will be using. Whatever. I am heartbroken, until he says he has some good news. Maybe. "

"Would you consider playing a different king?" he asks, timidly.

"I don't remember any other kings in the show."

"King Arthur."

"Oh. That other king."

Before I could answer he said how much he enjoyed my Charlie Brown, and he was looking for Arthur to start out as that kind of naive, innocent, victim type, but then grow up. And he said he liked my singing.

I said yes, and the rest is history. (the userpic is me and Guenevere dancing a fiery dance).

Except for two things:

Thing the First: At the start of Act II, King Pellinore leads his St. Bernard onstage, plants himself downstage center. Every night the dog peed on his leg. He waits for the laughter to subside, and does what it says in the script:

PELLINORE lifts his visor, and looks around.

PELLINORE: Oh! It's stopped raining!

Brought down the house every time.

Thing the Second:

The Monday after closing night I was fired, given 2 weeks' notice. We had changed bosses sometime during rehearsals, and new boss told me he wanted to fire me sooner and put in his own layout editor, but he and his wife were big boosters of the theater, and he didn't want to leave them in the lurch.

What do the simple folk do?

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: WeirdHome

Almost everyone I know had shifted from here and Dreamwidth to Facebook, but this is my journal, The Book of Face is merely my place to be clever and annoying.

When I got to work, the sky was incredibly blue, not a cloud in it, and my brain fed me this quote:
"The sky so blue, the sun so bright, how could anything go wrong on a day like this?"
Followed by:
"Woof! Boom!"

The first line is the cue for the cast to start the title song for You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, for which I played the title role in Astoria, OR in 1973. At the end of the intro, Snoopy yells "Woof!" and the cast echoes with "Boom!". I love that bit. Probably my favorite moment in all the shows I have been in. Partly because this is the first musical I was ever in. It was a total fluke. I didn't think I was a singer, all my theater had been comedy or drama plays, except for a musical which the Temple choir did when I was in grade school, while I was still a first soprano, so that doesn't really count.

( Read more... )

More adventures at work today, while I was trying to tune up the scripts on the machine which Automation Guy had allegedly reserved for me, someone else started running scripts with the same program, by automation. So Automation Guy says he can only lock a machine for 8 hours. So he found a machine not in the automation pool, but VNC does a strange thing with it - any time I hit a letter for which CTRL+ALT+letter is a command, it does the command. So I hit an F and it opens the search dialog box. U throws up the accessibility menu. And so on. Makes it useless to edit my scripts. So I edit them on my own PC, saved the a shared drive in the lab, and run them on the machine he assigned. But we can't do Monday's demo like that. And it's a royal PITA to write that way.

Lunchtime was Togo's, I asked if they still did the half-and-half: half a sandwich and half a bowl of soup. He said yes. But they don't. Instead I got half a small bowl of soup and a min-sandwich on a bun. Gag me. Next time I'll order a full one of each and take half the sandwich home.

Went there because it's the closest place I can get no-fee cash from an ATM which is near good places to eat.

Rivermark Safeway after work, which had the stupidest, most dangerous exit from the expressway and is a total clusterf*ck for parking. The lot is HUGE and turnover is constant, except the traffic patterns prevent people from getting in or out in anything resembling a timely manner. Medium-sized shopping this time to stock up on frozen dinners, ice cream, crackers and I forgot the cheese. Was able to log into their wi-fi and see what was extra cheap on my card, otherwise would have forgotten margarine.

Home, one huge box on the side steps, one large box by the livingroom door, one small box on the porch landing. All from Amazon. Go figure.

The huge box was a ceramic heater with electronic thermostat for the bedroom/master bathroom which are at the far end of the house, so by the time air from the furnace gets there it is not very warm.

Large box was candy. A 64-pack of Anton Berg booze-filled dark chocolate mini-bottles (a bedtime snack) and a 12-pack of Werther's sugar-free caramels. Good to wake up to.

And in the small box was a wireless doorbell, with two push buttons. The side door already has one which plays Winchester chimes, I was hoping that the buttons were on the same channel, but they are not. No problemo, JoseBee, there is an archway between the kitchen and piano room which the bell fits on perfectly and resonates through the house. The buttons program the sound, so I installed one by the kitchen door which cuckoos, and one by the livingroom door which plays a standard door bell sound. I was going to make it do a knocking sound, because there used to be a 1-ton knocker on that door which I recently removed because it is heavy and ugly and I'd rather have a peep hole there.

I have been buying entirely too much Stuff. En route still are 2 pairs of Levi's 550's, an 18-gallon storage tub on which to raise the night table, and a set of coat hooks to be mounted near or on the side door.

Did a load of laundry - put things in in the morning and into the dryer when I got home. This morning it occurred to me that my shower towel has been in use for a month. And I've been looking for a time to wash my Supersonics jacket. Some jeans and T-shirts also benefited.

The Big Games are on Sunday, so I'll go to Ardenwood on Saturday with my camera and telescope or just a long lens if I can't figure out how to mount the camera to the telescope. Monarch butterflies are in season.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
????

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Furball Hall

Slept till 9, when my calendar alarm went off telling me to call my aunt in NYC. Noon her time. I decided to wait an hour, shower, shave, brush my teeth, take my meds, get dressed and find my Seahawks jersey first.

Called at 10, cousin's wife answered the phone (I knew she would because cousin posted she would be there). Had a nice chat with aunt, though the connection did not seem to be very good. I could hear her just fine, but she said I was fading in and out. She sounded good, and followed up with email which told me she didn't understand what I said about the cats, and suggesting phone was the best way to communicate with her.

Went to MV Goodwill looking for a tall (30") night table, did not find one but found exactly the microwave stand I have been hunting for. Could not find a price, so asked the nice lady, who looked around and grabbed this gorgeous marble cutting board, put it on top of the stand where it fit perfectly. $30. I bought the set and slid it into the back seat. Still wanting to find a nightstand, I pointed the car toward the Santa Clara branch. Stopped on the way to get a cat bed or two to put where Domino has been sleeping on the floor. Found exactly what I wanted for $12 each, bought two. Also bought three cans of different flavors of Fancy Feast to see if Domino likes any of them more than the classic Savory Salmon, which she seems to be eating less of lately.

On to the SC Goodwill, nothing fit what I wanted. I may have to punt and simply find a tub or something that's a foot tall to put the current night table on. The new bed is so high I can't see the clock or reach the light switch on the night table.

Thought about the one in Sunnyvale, but it was out of my way (it's off the main drags), they have almost no parking, and not much furniture.

There's a post office with a drive-through lane near there, I was able to mail sister's birthday card, but they changed the boxes so a calendar won't fit, and once you're in that lane there is no easy return to the main parking lot, which was full anyway. I went to the Sunnyvale PO and mailed it there. I don't think I wrote about this - one calendar came back "address unknown" which was sent to the same address last year. It's a woman I worked with in 1978 and dated and boinked after we no longer worked together. We have kept in touch, when I moved back to WA in 1997 she lived next door. Very strange coincidence - ( Read more... ) Anywho I went to Switchboard.com, found her correct address, printed a label, put the calendar in a new envelope, stamped it and return addressed it.

Home, watched the Seahawks try and fail to give away the game in the last 4 minutes, after beating up the Saints big-time. Wore my "HOWARD" Seahawks jersey, and kept it on. Broke out the chips and clam dip. It turned out great, and Domino was all over me for both - she loves dips and cheeses and she likes to lick the salt off of chips.

Tivo time, a rare episode of Shark Tank in which more than one supplicant was made multiple offers. Meanwhile, Domino sleep-tested the new bed in the office. It's a keeper.

At 6:30 headed out, paid $21 to see the Miss Santa Clara pageant because I thought several friends from the Anything Goes cast were competing. Turns out only one of them made it, and there were only 5 contestants. Sad but true, the person I went to see was not up to the level of the top 3. She won Miss Congeniality, which suits her. The girl they chose was also my choice, as was runner up. The new Miss Santa Clara is gorgeous, is a knockout in everything she wore, and while all of them chose dance as their talent, only the winner and runner-up impressed me. Ironic, because I know Miss Congeniality as a dancer, but as tap and not interpretive, and 10 or 15 lbs lighter.

Unfortunately, the row in front of me was occupied by the high school friends of the Miss contestants, and the girl in front of me screamed like she'd seen a murder every time one of their friends showed up. the boy next to her tried to scream, but it sounded like a bad transmission. It was a lot of horrible noise I could have done without.

Plans for tomorrow:
Since I won't have guests over, I'll probably watch the game with a half-hour head start, on Tivo and FF past the commercials.
Graduation party for a friend

Current Mood: mellow
Current Location: Furball Hall

This morning I was still very sore, so I filled up the tub and had a soak instead of my usual shower. The tub in this place is deep and wide and only a wee bit too short. But the depth makes up for that. I threw in some bubble bath and achieved significant bubblefication. There is enough room around the tub for Domino to circumnavigate, so she did, many times. Between the tub filled with me and the bubbles, she was mystified. I had never taken a bath before in her presence, I don't think.

My plan to get to the Los Gatos JCC by 2 was almost thwarted by the cliff-hanger ending of the Ravens game. But the network cut to commercials and the 49ers game with 4 seconds left on the clock and the final touchdown under review.

I got inside the JCC just as the director was giving his pre-show blurb. Not exactly on time, but not so late as to be forbidden entry. I would have made it before he started if there had not been security theater at the front door. Non-members had to show ID, and have their names written in the log. So if you want to do something bad, become a member. It's always the quiet ones.

The show was a reading of Tevye and His Daughters, three chapters from it. It was billed, I think, as a staged reading but there wasn't any staging to speak of. I went because I knew two of the cast, and had met the director at a pizza party while he was playing Tevye in local production of Fiddler.

They did a good job. The cast was well chosen, one man was double-cast as the tailor and the student, and he did such a good job putting on an accent and changing his personality for the latter that I didn't recognize him.

There was a talkback session afterwards, and I was very impressed by the eldest cast member, who had taken a very small part, but is obviously an experienced actress. Her bio in the program hints at that.

Janice was stuck at Mame which ran long as I knew it would. Over-choreographed shows do that. So no coffee chat.

Home, watched the wrap-ups of the football games, and most of the Saints game with bouts of unpacking. Was able to break down two livingroom boxes, and two or three kitchen boxes. My main motivation in the kitchen was to find the large glass roasting pan so I could make the duck I'd bought and defrosted yesterday. This included also finding the wood block with the kitchen knives.

According to the instructions on the duck wrapper it needed about 3 hours at 350°. I had cored & sectioned an apple, and sliced up two oranges and cut a third into 9ths. Stuffed the duck with most of the apple and some of the orange sections and covered it with orange slices toothpicked in place.

While it was cooking I watched football and set up the webcams. The layout here is very different, so except for the cam on the home theater speaker, they all went to different places. I'm not getting a signal from the last one, but I suspect that one is a knock-off, it has never worked well. I may go online and order a replacement. Also found a copy of the right Sony manual and re-adjusted the receiver to the best of the 15 surround sound choices. Finally am hearing the subwoofer. And crowd noise from the football comes from all directions.

Also installed one of my three under-cabinet kitchen lights.

Also need to replace the thermostat with an electronic one. The manual one is broken - it has long ago lost its "current temp" indicator, and the markings on the thing are so small that a tiny change can result in 5° difference. I've installed those before, it's not hard.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Shop for a thermostat and a replacement for the kitchen track lighting fixture. USPS sent me a Lowe's coupon.
Home, football

Current Mood: full
Current Location: WeirdHome

And there was hardly any timing today.

Worked from home till 2, because we'd gotten a note tacked to our doors two evenings ago saying they would be coming in for safety inspections between 10 and 2. I wanted to take advantage of free birthday goodies at a couple of places at lunchtime, but ended up having lunch at home. Nobody showed up to inspect. Assholes. Ha Gow for lunch.

At about 1 the asst mfg rep called, she wante to set up an escrow signing for me Tuesday, a week earlier than expected. Which meant I needed to sign the lease at the mobile home park prior to that. Mfg rep had said I needed a cashier's check for 1st and last month's rent when I went. I called the park, they said don't bring a check, the money will be taken from escrow. Made an appointment for 10 am tomorrow. Bring a picture of Domino, she said. So I cropped one and printed it out.

I also needed to bring to escrow my last pay statement which was today, so put that off till after work.

As I walked in at work a little after 2, boss said I was invited to a meeting at 1:30. The room it was supposed to be in was empty, so I tried our usual meeting room, and though I was late it wasn't too late to be useful. Interesting meeting, looked to me like a boondoggle, though. A small company which wants to make a custom analyzer for our custom product. Maybe not. We'll see.

What time was left was mostly spent chatting with a team member about what a feature is supposed to do, and writing my weekly report. I actually had done a lot of work this week, on paper.

Home, watched some of Batkid's antics. It's a dilemma. On the one hand it exceeded this kid's wildest dreams and made a boy who has been sick for a very long time feel like a hero. On the other hand it pretty much shut down San Francisco for a day. And he's really not old enough to appreciate what a huge thing this was. His wish was for a batman costume. I think they got carried away.
At least they didn't try to tie it in with Christmas.

Mfg rep sent me a form to sign which we missed a month ago, so I printed it out, signed it and faxed it back.

Got to the rec center at 7:10 for the 7:30 uke class. Wrong building. The front desk guy was closing up, so he took me to the right building, which was locked. But he knew the keypad code. Guitar class was still wrapping up, so I waited out in the lobby, and opened the door for 2 classmates. 4th one arrived at 7:30, we all okayed starting at 7 for the duration.

Teacher had forgotten his uke. I loaned him mine for the show and tell about body parts. He gave a lesson on how to read music which I had in grade school, but apparently two of the others had not. And he showed us tablature, but by then I was already learning it just by looking at the book.

We played easy exercises from the book, I was able to do some of them without looking at my fingers after a while, but the uke's tuning is non-intuitive and so were some of the lessons. Why is the lowest string as high as the 3rd fret on the 2nd highest string? Class was only 45 minutes (supposed to be at least an hour) so we didn't get to chords. Or strumming. Next time.

The youngest class member was trying to play Red Hot Chili Peppers tunes. I didn't know they had tunes.

Home, put away the uke, had some nibbles, played on the computer. Sent a copy of my pay statement to the asst. mfg rep

Killed time till 10:15, drove to Jake's in Saratoga, and joined actor/director/composer Ted for his every other Friday night after-theater chat. Eventually we were joined by one of my theater heart throbs, recently divorced; Tevye from West Valley's production and Ande, who usually plays reeds or conducts but is in the ensemble for Fiddler. Tevye is one of three well-known Dougs in local theater. I can't remember if we have been onstage together but I know he has seen me perform at least twice.

Home at 12:45, realized I forgot to shoot up before heading for Jake's. Rectified that.

Plans for tomorrow:

10 am Mobile Home park
Library to retyrn two awful DVDs and a misrepresented audio book
Find a place to have a nice birthday dinner, preferably with lobster. Maybe also with steak.
And find some black forest cake.

Current Mood: disconnected
Current Location: Home of the Lost

After the horrible mess Sunnyvale Players made of Zombie Prom Friday night, needed the antidote. Luckily today was the last of 3 performances in Mountain View (there's another one in Walnut Creek next Saturday) of Free Range Opera's production of the 1919 hit musical Irene. It was delightful.

And this is interesting because it was done on a bare stage with a few chairs, no props, minimal costuming (all the men wore tux, the women evening gowns) in a 150-seat 3/4 round little theater. The musical accompaniment was a single baby grand. I have been on stage with 5 of the cast and the accompanist, plus the producers.

It was easy to see how this now-forgotten gem ran for almost 2 years on Broadway. It's also easy to see why it has been forgotten. There are some tuneful songs, but they lean towards ragtime style. The plot is outdated, but it's not too different from My Fair Lady's plot. And the woman playing the title role needs to have an astonishing memory, she has lines which must traverse two or three pages at a time.

There was such a crush of people after the show that I only got a chance to say hello to one of my friends. I feel a bit guilty about that, but it has not been a good week for that.

Standard Time has me doing everything an hour earlier than usual, including this entry. I did manage to turn back the clocks which needed it. I used some of that time to do more packing, but not the packing I had in mind yesterday. Instead of the office book shelves, I cleared out the three drawers of a plastic dresser in the living room, which was stuffed with my parents' drug store-developed photos. That's what I remembered being in there, but when I dove into it there were stacks of souvenir postcards, a lot of loose older photos of the family, cassette tapes of my Israeli nieces and nephews singing tunes they composed, and an 8mm spool which I don't have the equipment to look at. It's a single roll of film's worth. It all filled one small book box.

Lunch was a pair of corn dogs.

After the show I watched football, dinner was beef brisket in Jack Daniels sauce and baked beans mixed with sliced green beans. No unidentifiable body parts in those so far.

And I packed up most of the shelf in the livingroom of the parents & grandparents old photos. Most of them are framed or matted, and there were also some other gems like mom's & dad's high school diplomas. And a school pennant or two.

No more ice cream, so I had pistachios for dessert. Maybe I'll make an egg cream later. I am really enjoying the Sodastream unit. Much less hassle than siphons. But still some hassle because you have to use their bottles to charge a liter at a time of water.

Kaan did something while I was watching the ball game which amazed me. Hanging from the bottom of the top shelf of the tall cat tree is a pair of soft fuzzy balls on an elastic string. He has been batting them around for weeks. Today he wrapped his mouth around one, jumped down one level, then to the top of my tall speaker and then to the floor, which snapped the elastic and left him playing with one fuzzy ball. When he got tired of playing I tied it back onto its loop, and tied the other one on as well. He is too clever by half.

In other cat news, this morning the Humane Society called, they won't take Domino. They will take Kaan, but I'm not really interested in that. Good to know it is an option if the park manager insists on the 1-cat rule.

While I was at the show, the guy from the first choice moving company left voicemail saying they could do the move, $145/hr. Minus a 5% return customer discount applied at the end of the move. It took him more than a week to get back to me, and the mover I scheduled is charging $119/hr. Maybe in a week I'll let him know he was too late. He did this the last time too, but it was more like 3 days.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Kaiser pharmacy, insulin & enteric baby aspirin. If I take enough, will I have an enteric baby?
MNF and more packing. What I pack depends on whether the parental collection of 78's & LPs will fit into the boxes I already have.

Current Mood: cured
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall

Last night I joined a standing room only audience at Newark, CA's Memorial High School theater to see Stage 1's Les Miserables. Before I start to nitpick, so that you don't get the wrong idea, I was one of the first ones up and one of the last to stop applauding during the 7-minute standing ovation.

Non-spoilers first:
There are about 50 people in the cast. I counted more than 60 names in the program, but some of those played more than one part. It is very hard to costume that many people, each of whom had at least 3 costume changes. Unfortunately, it showed. Costumes were mostly adequate, few were more, most were less. Javert was cheated out of what should have been progressively ornate uniforms, wearing a greatcoat for his last two iterations. That was a FAIL. Valjean wore pretty much the same thing throughout. Cosette's dresses were atrocious. The only example of planned costuming was the matching dresses for all the woman in the factory scene, a symptom of making the costumes in the order that the show takes place. Police & army uniforms were far from authentic period or
complete.

The director blew it on several levels. Blocking was like a children's pageant, one long line across the stage, no groupings, no levels, boring.

The program lists a choreographer, but I saw no choreography. Not that there needed to be, it isn't that kind of musical. Javert and Valjean fight hand to hand, very poorly staged, could have used a fight choreographer.

Audio. Every member of the cast was wearing a horribly apparent mike, glued to the forehead, with the wire coming up the back and loosely over the head. Disgustingly distracting. And while the sound was clear and totally feedback-free, it was also non-directional, and the way the show was directed, it was hard to tell in the group scenes who was singing. FAIL.

Orchestra. It's a difficult score. On the whole they did well, but as the show wore on, the oboe and first violin went out of tune, and because the conductor only conducted the orchestra and ignored the actors, there were several missed cues on stage, and times when leads had to rush to get together with the orchestra. I was also a bit put off by the conductor having the orchestra take a bow before the start of the second act. That's not the etiquette I was brought up with.

Set. There was not much of one. Just a backdrop which never changed, even though the scene changed. The barricade was a clever construction in two parts, half rolled in from stage left and the other from stage right, with stage hands inside it hidden by a burlap flap. Once onstage it bolted together. It was able to rotate. That was well done.

Lighting. The theater has minimal lighting facilities, they did what they could. The follow spot operator was spot on.

The cast. Lots of people on stage all at once a couple of times. Almost everyone had at least one solo singing line. Every voice I heard was professional-grade. Quite amazing.

Dean Christman as Jean Valjean was very good, it is a grueling part and he survived it well. His voice cracked several times, and his rendition of his final scene was a bit uninspiring.

Jess Martinez nailed it as Javert. Extraordinary combination of voice, acting skills and attitude. He played a heroic upholder of the law, not a Bad Guy™.

Ben Decker as the Bishop did well in this small but critical role.

As Fantine, Kristen Del Rio was adequate. The craptastic costumes and wigs did not help.

Piper Sperske as Little Cosette was very cute until she started to sing, and then she was transformed into a little girl who could use some age-appropriate voice lessons.

Diminutive Elmer Strasser played the part of Thenardier as a sleezy little twerp, reminded me of Fagin, but without the sense of majesty. He was very, very good, I wanted to throttle him every time he appeared. The Mrs., played by the very large Belinda Maloney, was a superb foil. Both of them would have benefited from competent costuming.

Young Eponine was a total WTF, partly because of a lack of talent, and partly because of something in the spoilers section.

Nico Duchez nailed it as Gavroche, he did so well that I didn't recognize him - even though we had just done Brigadoon together and he was paired with me in a lot of the stage schtick. He has grown. But also he was allowed to act. I forgot how clear his voice is. Part of not recognizing him is he is billed as Nickolas in the program.

Eponine is played by a high school junior named Angela Busgano. She was ever so close to perfect, just a couple of vocal snags away. And maybe a couple more major acting roles under her belt, too.

Robert Lopez was okay as Marius, a little wooden acting but great vocals.

And Brian Palac got to show off his voice but not his acting skills as Enjolras. I have seen him a few times, he is better than this, but woefully mis-cast.

Final ding is for Cara Wodka playing Cosette. Kinda like watching a puppet. Great voice, but when she goes to dialog there is no way I am believing she is in love.

So, some spoilers. During the chain gang scene, they cut the part where Valjean shows his super-human strength, which ruins the follow-up where Javert recognizes the guy who pulls the cart off of the man it fell on. To add to the mistake, they have Valjean struggle mightily to raise the wagon just enough for the victim to be pulled out from under - and immediately two cast members grab a handle and right the thing easily to roll it offstage. Completely destroys this critical plot device.

They cut most of the violence against Fantine, which makes it unbelievable that she is suddenly in the hospital on death's door. Again, fight choreography could have saved this scene.

Little Eponine is white as an aspirin, she is in a curly wig, and is as Caucasian as can be. Grown-up Eponine is Asian, with dark skin and straight silky hair. Little Eponine is apparently a relative (daughter or granddaughter) of the Bishop. Non-traditional casting is one thing, (Lea Salonga is my favorite Broadway Eponine) but this was a FAIL.

What makes Brian Palac mis-cast is he is about 5 feet tall, and very slightly built. Not the image of a Great Leader. But also his acting was many stops short of firebrand.

In the Eponine death scene, she has been shot, the script says she is covered in blood. It's in Marius' lines as he holds her. We can see her white blouse when her coat opens. It would have been so easy for the blouse under the coat to have been blotched with red. The white blouse transported the scene from 7 Kleenex to maybe 1.5.

I'll leave it there. Despite the little failings, it is still worth making a trip across the Bay to see. It runs one more weekend.

Les Miserables
Stage 1 Theatre
Newark Memorial High School
Newark, CA
Link here.

Current Mood: critical
Current Location: Home

Busy day, went mostly as planned. Somehow doing stuff online to prepare for tomorrow's mobile home tour/financing, a stop at the PO to drop off a couple of packages (the gov't shutdown didn't affect the PO), delayed my noon visit to the uke shop until about 1 pm. The nice lady showed me some of the differences in the ukes, and the prices are clearly marked above each one. There were not many for less than $100, which I decided was my limit since this is for starters. And I wanted a soprano (the smallest adult size) because of the irony of big man, small instrument. After tryng out a few, I bought the Kala KA-S, a very pretty mahogany box with rosewood fretboard. Sounds excellent for $72. Another candidate was Daniel Ho's starter kit for $99, which included a carrying bag, but also a DVD and instruction book which I don't need, since I'll be taking a class which has its own book.

Back near home, got gas, since the price is down and I still had a trip across the Bay later. On to Target, hoping to score Dean Edell readers for work, but they have dropped his product line and now only have crap Foster Grants. I did manage to stock up on insulting birthday cards and got a replacement for the hair trimmer which broke this morning.

Home, watched some football but all the games I was really interested had to be relegated to Tivo.

Early dinner was sausages and baked beans.

7 pm, on the road to Newark memorial HS, whose theater was the venue for Stage 1's Les Miserables. I'll do a fuller review tomorrow, but for now let me say that the standing ovation lasted more than 5 minutes. Every member of the cast had at least one solo line and every voice was excellent. There were some casting disconnects because it was cast for the voice first, and in several cases they completely ignored looks as a factor. More later, probably with spoilers.

Plans for tomorrow:
Catch some early football
12:30 meet mobile home rep for two open houses and start the financing thing.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Home

Had a painful night last night, my elbow would not stop hurting. Finally took 2 nighttime Tylenol, which didn't do much for the pain but made me stay drowsy when I finally hauled myself out of bed at 10. Part of the delay is just as I was trying to get up, Kaan, jumped on the bed and parked himself against me.

My plan was to sleep till 10, anyway, due to not enough sleep Thursday night.

After my usual Saturday routine, I hunted for and finally found the crock pot (it was at the back of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, behind the paper bag collection) decided it was too small and instead found the giant wok-like pan I'd bought for this kind of project. Its flat bottom is anodized aluminum, the right size for a large burner, and it curves out to a much wider circular bowl. Non-stick surface, very solid, great for not burning things.

Into that went three cans of coconut milk (the white kind), three cans of water. Heated on 5 (out of 10) for 15 minutes, then stirred in 1 Tbsp Thai yellow curry paste. A taste test said "what curry paste?" so I added another dose. Better, but still a bit mild. Better mild than too strong, I figured.

Added the chicken drumsticks, covered the pan, and gave it half an hour to come up to a simmering boil. Added baby corn, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, because those don't overcook. Turned the heat to 3, another half hour it was at a boil (much to my surprise), added the straw mushrooms and green peas and turned the heat down to 1.5.

Let that simmer for an hour, which was just a wee bit too long, but the drumsticks were holding together, so I caught it in time. Sort of. Could not spear them with a fork, they were too tender, so I used a slotted spoon to put them into my official potluck food containers (they fit perfectly). Next I used a wok strainer to scoop out the small stuff, and distributed it fairly evenly between the two containers.

What with the added water and chicken fat, the curry sauce was way too thin, and there was way too much of it, so I boiled it down. Added a dash of fish sauce and a little dark brown sugar suggested by Nancie McDermott's recipe book, Quick and Easy Thai. And I also added another Tbsp of curry paste, since this was going on top of and not inside the chicken.

That took about 2 hours, but after 1.5 it was time to pick up a package at UPS, so I turned off the stove and did that. Then I decided to try out a new massage place I saw in The Metro, punched it into the GPS and discovered the address was the parking lot of the Santa Clara American Legion post. :-(

Not to be discouraged, I went to the one I've been using, not too far from home, and Jessica made my right shoulder feel much better.

Heading home, passed Fry's, remembered I needed to buy some canned air, so I cut off an obnoxious SUV which had been pacing me as I tried to slow down to change lanes behind him.

Canned air was on special, 3-fer, so I got a a pack of that, and also a pack of microfiber cloths. Looked for but did not find backup software. Decided not to spend $700 on an 8TB backup drive. Or settle for the small package of inkjet internet shipping labels (they only had the large economy size in laserjet ).

Home, emptied the console storage bin of 8 CDs, which are waiting to be shelved where they belong. I had been listening to the London cast recording of Matilda which is what was in the Amazon locker yesterday. I am disappointed in the music. One tune is memorable on first play, two more might be after listening a few more times, and there is a monologue near the end which is a non-ingenue actress' wet dream. It is not listed on the track list, they have buried it after several seconds of silence after the final song, not in its own track. ( Read more... )

From the album, which includes a lot of dialog, it is clear this is one of those shows which will be spectacular as a production, as long as they find a super-strong set of children, because it's all about kids in an exclusive private school.

The reason for my interest is I was in a production of The Wizard of Oz in 1986, Dorothy was played by a very talented girl named Lesli Margherita, who is now starring in the Broadway production.
This is her then:
( Read more... )
This is her now:( Read more... )

Finished the coconut milk curry reduction in between flipping between the very wet Oregon Ducks and Stanford games (Stanford playing WSU in Seattle for some strange reason), and miffed because none of the channels I get was showing my 17th-ranked Huskies. I had to rely on my Baltimore sister's FB updates for that. Also peeked at the Mariners-A's game, which showed the April Fools broadcast, Mariners leading in the 6th by a hefty margin.

Poured the curry sauce into each of the containers on top of all the other ingredients and let it seep in. Back into the fridge, and after it was clear that Oregon and Stanford were blowing out the competition, I fired up the PC and made card stock tents naming the dish and its ingredients.

Caught up on FB, Twitter & LJ, and also took a look at mobile home park listings, and found 5 nearby which are for old farts.

Plans for tomorrow:

Put on my band uniform, glue in my teeth, grab my horn and participate in Ye Olde Town Band's last concert of the year.
Potluck dinner afterward.

Current Mood: eclectic
Current Location: Home

Time for a haircut. Maybe tomorrow.

Almost didn't go to work this morning, I was up way too late, 'cause when I buy a DVD I am compelled to watch it, even though I've gotten a late start because of band practice.

Checked in via VPN, there was actually some email with something for me to do, so I got motivated and did the morning routine and got there at about 10:30. Email was from Automation Guy, when I talked to him about it, he said he had already fixed it, because it was his minions' fault. So nothing to do.

I found a few things, but also had time to watch the news, and found a link to a company which manages a dozen mobile home parks in the area, many of them 55+. That link had a link to another page which shows what's for sale, including prices, sizes, floorplans and snippets about the park, but there is no mention of how much the lot rent is.

Reply from CU Loan arranger saying how to finish filling out the application, so when I got home I did that, printed it, signed it, scanned it and emailed it to him. Yesterday I sent more finance-related pdfs than I knew existed. Looking at my 2011 tax return reminded me that I was fired in February and didn't find another job till July. And I quit in September to take my current job.

Lunch was at Carl's Jr because it was close and I wasn't very hungry. Paid for it with a touch of Montezuma's.

Home for a while to let traffic subside, and to do the mortgage stuff. Next stop, 7-11 to pick up a CD from the amazon locker. The London original cast of Matilda, which I figured it was about time I listened to, because someone I was onstage with in 1986 is starring in the Broadway cast, and has been Facebooking about their recording the OBC album. Word is she came very close to being nominated for a Tony this year. Maybe next year.

Thence to New Wing Yuan Market for makings for Thai Yellow Curried Chicken drumsticks, which is what I'm making for the Sunday band potluck. But it was 8:05 and they closed at 8. Strange - what kind of supermarket doesn't stay open till 9? Time to punt. Of course I could wait till tomorrow, but Lucky's usually has a goodly selection of Asian food, so I went there. They had what I needed, but I pretty much bought two of everything in that section, it's now a very small section.

Back home I had dinner while watching Restaurant Stake-out which you would think would be getting old, since it's very formula, but they manage to find a wide range of personality disorders, so that's something I can identify with.

Listening to the news, there's a pair of women who went to CA to get married, then moved back to Mississippi. One of them wants a divorce, and when the judge said in MS their marriage was not recognized, so they couldn't get a divorce, she sued. Idiotic. When I was a kid, the routine was people routinely went to Reno to get married or divorced, because the laws there were (and still are) liberal. Lenient. Loose. Pick a word. She claims that she needs the divorce to protect her financial standing (Social Security, etc.) but as long as she lives in MS she doesn't have that. She doesn't really need a divorce because where she lives she isn't married. But if she really wants one, there's always Boston or go back to SF. She's already spent more on lawyers, I bet, than it would cost to make the trip. The Supreme Court has already ruled that people living in states where their marriage is not recognized don't get Federal recognition.

While we're on politics, I listened to the UN speech by Iran's prez live the other day, and was completely blown away. One by one he blew off the things his fanatical predecessor ranted about, and talked like a reasonable person who wants peace and a return to normality. It's worth listening to:

In other news:
Probably the most important entertainment news of the month

Where was I? Oh yeah, relaxing at home, watching TV, Kaan jumped up on my lap and after about 30 different poses, settled in for the rest of the night in the crook of my left arm, with his face buried. By the time he got settled it was time for me to turn off the TV and write this. :-(

FB has finally added the ability to edit original posts, if you're using a browser. AFT, as they say in French.

Plans for tomorrow:
Try to find the crock pot. Looked almost everywhere, can't remember where I put it. If I can't find it I'll make the chicken in the big flat-bottom wok. That probably will be better anyway.

Hopefully the maintenance guy will visit in the morning. The air conditioning vent is leaking, and apparently has been all summer, I just never looked up at the corners to see the blossoms of mold before. What clued me is when I moved the cats' dry food tower aside to clean up what looked like catpuke, it wasn't catpuke at all but a tiny Grand Canyon eroded into the carpet by slowly dripping water from above. Maybe a drop an hour, or less.

Maybe visit a mobile home park or two.

Current Mood: asleep
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall

Soon.

Forgot some routine stuff this morning. Forgot to put the blue ice into my cooler, so the cans of Diet Coke I brought to work did not stay cold very long. Forgot to close the bedroom door, and when I peeked in on bedcam, Kaan was a large meatball on the quilt. At least he didn't poop in there.

Work was a saga of continuing sagas. Needed to re-run a long boring test because the sales engineer forgot to mention that the issue was seen on one of a paired device. Our boxes have a feature where one can be set as a backup to as many as 10 units, and will automagically pretend to be any one unit which has failed, or has been taken off-line. In this case it was a 1:1 setup, which made it do-able.

I was going to nuke Candy Crush on my phone, but discovered that it takes about the same amount of time for me to finish a level (either pass or fail) as it does for our machines to reboot.

Late lunchtime was a serial surgical strike. UPS to pick up a package (it was a 6-pack of body wash obtained at a bargain price), maincure, and a stop at Petco to buy a second Littermaid automatic litterbox and a box of their poop containers. More on that later.

Home, checked the mail (this means a 2-block walk so I only do it every other day) and there was nothing except a pennysomething crapola newsprint thing. I had expected to hear from the DMV by now about my replacement license plates, if only to have them tell me I need to pick a new moniker.

Unpacked the car onto my little dolly, filled the body wash bottle in my on-the-wall shower dispenser and parked the other 5 containers of Old Spice in a convenient spot. Ran the SmartScoop litterbox a few times to confirm that it misses 80% of what it's supposed to be raking up and dropping in the container.

Grabbed my Baritone Horn and headed for YOTB practice, but there was a Kenney Chesney concert at Shoreline, which pushed a ton of traffic onto my route - Central Expressway, and that was tied up by a major crash and the train crossings. Took an alternate, faster than 5 mph way, but when I got to the park there was no parking, so I had to circle the block and park up on the main road where I usually park for our concerts. I was about 10 minutes late, left early enough to be 10 minutes early. :-(

Which meant I missed most of one of my favorite pieces, The National Emblem March, which sounds like a Sousa piece but was written at the turn of the last century by Edwin Eugene Bagley. Sousa called it the best march he had not written himself. :-)

We blew thorugh (pun intended) most of the program for this Sunday's concert, doing some pieces more than once but mostly working on specific problem bits. The more I play this 4-valve horn, the more I miss a lighter 3-valve. I think I'll drop in on Starving Musician and see if they are interested in a trade.

Home by way of Walgreen's and CVS, looking for a tall kiychen garbage can with an attached lid. The clumping litter fills those recepticles way faster than the crystal litter did, and I need something to dump the poop into so I'm not running it out to the dumpster every 2 days. Neither one had anything. And by the time I got to the new huge drugstore in downtown MV they were closed.

Had dinner, treated the cats, then assembled the new litterbox, pulled out the Bad One and transferred its litter into the new one. I need to WD40 the new one's gear track. Tomorrow.

Parked the Bad One on the patio, where the sun will bake it tomorrow.

Now to take drugs and get some sleep. Last night I found a radio station in Brussels which plays a combination of French and American easy listening. They speak in a highly accented French, which I can ignore until, as happened at about 5 am my time, some motor mouth held forth.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Shop for a garbage pail
Send my name in to Dragon Theater as a possible director.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall

Got up earlier than usual, had breakfast in the hotel, went to the Zin room for the 10 am Where's My Tricorder? but it was full, so I had to bail.

I was on a panel at 11:15, Storytelling the Old-Fashioned Way for which I was mostly comic relief, and I am kicking myself because I was going to tell Mooseturd Pie, but totally got derailed and told a boring story about running into a long-lost friend, told poorly.

From there to Page 119 - Is The Book Any Good? which was a lot of fun. Four of us read page 119 from three books each, rotating around the table. We didn't show the books until the audience had voted on whether or not they would buy the book, and tell us why. My last book was Nancie McDermott's cookbook, Southern Pies which I had not looked at in advance so I expected to be reading a recipe, but 119 is the intro to chocolate pies, and is so well written almost everyone in the audience said they would buy it, and wanted to hear more about the characters. :-)

Lots of time for lunch before my final panel, so I told the GPS to find me a grill, and it found me the Sacramento Brewing Co. when I got to the point where it said my destination was on my right, what was on my right was a green mesh fence with a huge pile of dirt. Circumnavigating the Town & Country Center, it was clear that the remodeling had started with bulldozing the Sacramento Brewing Co.

So I let it try again, and it found a place called something like Flaming grill, but on the way I saw the Thai Chef's House, a medium sized place, basically a diner, with a decent crowd for after 2 pm. The waitress had no problem with my Thai, but was too busy to ask me about it. I ordered the BBQ chicken, which was a FAIL on two levels. First, it was served with a knife on the plate. That's an insult in Thailand, and the chicken should be chopped small enough to not need to be cut by the customer. Second, I don't know what BBQ sauce was on it/in the cup, but it wasn't the Thai honey/pepper sauce I was expecting. The chicken was very tender and moist, which is also not ethnic but I'll take it. For dessert I had the sticky rice with mango, and that was perfect. So was the Thai iced tea.

Back to the con, my final panel I was the moderator, I know not why. Finding Your Muse had three authors, and they managed to keep things moving while I provided puns and some Standard Questions. I think it was a little dull, but the writers in the audience didn't.

The plan was to wait till 7 and have dinner in the hotel grill, but it was jam packed, so I just had a couple of candy bars. Then it was time for the masquerade, but there were many more people than there were chairs, even after the hotel brought in many more chairs. I had a great place to take photos, but tall people decided to stand in front of me, so I ended up shooting from the side. Boosted my ISO to 3200 when they said there was to be no flash photography. Good thing I has the 1.1 lens. They said there would be a fan photo session after the presentations, but the person they said was in charge of that shoot is someone who was a major FAIL the last time I saw him do this. And sure enough, it was a mob scene three deep, I didn't even try to get into that mess.

And then my Big Mistake. I kept hanging around the Atrium for the Match Game R-Rated version, but they took down the masq stuff and nobody was staying in the room except hotel staff, so I thought I'd missed the announcement that it was canceled. After an hour I went up to my room, packed for my early check-out tomorrow, got undressed and looked on the computer for The Memo. I'd forgotten they were doing the Game in another room. Argh.

Plans for tomorrow:
Breakfast downstairs
Check out by 10:30 (nice to have my car here to put things in)
11:15 moderate Is Theater Dead? panel
Maybe catch the noon art auction (there is one piece I am high bidder on)
Pick up any art I'm high bidder on.

1:45 Hugh Daniel memorial - if they do a Destructo bit I have things to donate
3:00 closing ceremonies
Drive home. BART strike being over may make it slightly less of a mess, but maybe not.

Current Mood: self-loathing
Current Location: Sacramento Arden West Hilton

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howard stateman

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Writing Wrongs

Annoying The Neighbors Since 1950

Entries tagged with theater

From Seed to Shining Seed

This'll be short

Beyond a shadow of a drought

A Trip To Skid Row

Shake It Up Baby

E Before I

Two Ning

Back by FM

Follow-on to the Charlie Brown story

Mostly Deserted

Diverse Day

Rub a dub dub

It's All In The Timing

Antidote

Les Miserables @ Stage 1 Review

Much Done

Drowsy, no Chaperone

Subject to Change

Hello, the bed

Three panels, GPS foo and one Big Mistake