Category: blog

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

It’s been snowing in Seattle this week. Combined with the December end-of-month slowdown and the financial crisis hunker-down, I feel as though I’m living in a cocoon, a temporary safe place before the new year and the new life.

None of that has anything to do with this week’s pints. Just musing. I hope that all is well with you, wherever you are.

  • Pain (March 2004) — One of my stories, “Alien Jane,” is about a woman with congenital insensitivity to pain

  • The variety of art (April 2004) — So many ways to get into story, and for it to get into us.

  • Riffing (April 2004) — I am She Who Riffs. It’s still my biggest joy, and biggest trap, as a writer.

Enjoy your Friday.

Like a Song: Surrender

I’m a staff writer for the website @U2 (and yes, I say this every time, but it’s still the best damn U2 fan site on the planet). One of my favorite parts of @U2 is our Like A Song series, personal essays by staff members about U2 songs that are important to us.

This month’s podcast includes my reading of my essay on the song “Surrender” from the War album. Powerful album, powerful song. My audio is a bit hissy, alas — I’m still learning how to manage the technology we have — but I hope you’ll give it a listen. The reading is a titch over 8 minutes long.

Download the entire podcast, or listen directly to my segment.

And here’s the essay.

And here’s the song:

[Use this link if you can’t see the media player.]

Enjoy.

Trouping

Since I wrote yesterday about Bret stabbing himself, I’ve had a whole surge of college / theatre department / acting memories. So here’s another story.

From the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:
 
trouper noun
 
1 a successful entertainer who has had a lot of experience
 
2 APPROVING anyone with a lot of experience who can be depended on and does not complain: Good old Edna – she’s a real trouper to do the washing-up without even being asked.; He took his disappointment like a trouper.

I really did want to be Juliet. Sigh. But it was not to be — a) there were better actors than I to fill the role (digression here: people in Hollywood talk all the time about “actresses” and I try to behave in their company, I really do, because it’s polite to speak the native language if one can. But we’re all actors, people! Yeesh.) and b) I was taller than Romeo, and gods know in the 80’s we just couldn’t have that kind of thing on stage.

Our Juliet was a student in her late 20’s who was small and fresh-faced and could still play a teenager. Our Lady Capulet (Juliet’s mum) was a student in her late 20’s/early 30’s who looked, as we liked to say in the South, like she’d been drug down a mile of hard road. She was, I now understand, deeply depressed and doing her best to just hang on. At the time, because I was young and stupid, I just thought she was gloomy and grumpy and a little weird.

One afternoon during the run of the show, my stage manager Suzanne came and pulled me out of class and took me for a little walk. She put an arm around me. “Kelley,” she said, “you know the tradition that if something happens to an actor, the ASM steps into the role?”

“Um, no,” I said, “I don’t know that one.”

She said, “Well, I need you to be a trouper. Because we may need you to be Lady Capulet tonight.” Then she smiled and squeezed my shoulder, and before I knew it I was in the costume shop being fitted, and then in an empty room with the choreographer learning the dances. Yep, dances. I pretty much knew all the lines, I’d been prompting for six weeks, but the dances… And I knew enough to be terrified: knowing lines from the third row every rehearsal is a hell of a lot different than knowing them in the moment, under the lights and the hot heavy gaze of the audience, especially when one is trying to sort out her left foot from her right.

6:30 pm. Actors’ call. No Lady Cap. Suzanne smiles reassuringly.

7:00 pm. Cast warm-ups. I take my place and start stretching and la-la-la-ing. Suzanne is practically incandescent with calm. The director gives me an enormous hug, looking exactly like Peter O’Toole in The Stuntman, that particular combination of what a cock-up and isn’t it all exciting? The actors look at me with varying blends of sympathy, concern and well, that’s you fucked. And I trouped. I trouped until 7:25 pm when Lady Capulet came into the room.

Everyone looked at her. Everyone looked at me. The director said, “Thank you, Kelley.” And I nodded and left the room before I gave in to my impulse to smack Lady Cap into next week and thereby ensure that I would have to play the role after all.

I still don’t know what happened. But whatever it was, I understand now how brave she must have been to have come back when she did. I imagine at that point it would have been far easier to just bail. I think she was much more a trouper than I.

Showstoppers

From the Daily Telegraph comes a story of an actor who stabbed himself onstage by accident.. I hope he’s okay. I can easily imagine how it happens: it’s hot, you’re sweaty and focused and maybe very much in the moment as you draw the prop knife across your throat — and you know immediately that something is very, very wrong, and the blood comes out, and the pain, and the world tips 10 degrees to the right…

I’ve never done something like that (all my injuries came in rehearsals), but I was there one time when it happened.

When I was working on my theatre degree, I had the good fortune to learn, work and play with Bret Ancell, who was talented and funny and especially gifted at improvisation and finding the absurdities in small moments.

One year, the theatre department did Romeo and Juliet, directed by Paul Massie, a great teacher and charismatic actor who we were all half in love with because he was that charming. So everyone worked hard for Paul. I wanted to be Juliet, but I didn’t get the part, and so I took the job of assistant stage manager. It was Shakespeare, it was R&J, and I just wanted to be a part of it.

During performances, Suzanne, the stage manager, sat up in the booth and called the show. For the non-theatrical, that means that she was on headset telling everyone when to do what — lighting cues, sound cues, scene changes, etc. There were hundreds of lighting cues alone, all written down in Suzanne’s Big Notebook along with every single piece of blocking, line edit, costume change, etc.

As ASM, I was in charge of backstage. I gave the actors their time warnings, double-checked that all the props were in place, and spent the show on headset in the stage left wing making sure everyone was in place for their entrances, that scenery shifts went smoothly, and ready to prompt if anyone needed it.

We were several shows into the run, and one night little things were going wrong. Not enough to change the show for the audience, but enough for cast and crew to notice and maybe be a little thrown. And Bret was doing a scene with his extremely blunted dagger — seriously, it was so blunt that the end wasn’t a point at all, it was more like… hmm, like the end of an Allen wrench, maybe. Squared off, at least 1/8 – 1/4 inch thick. It was safe.

Well, hah. Bret slipped, or stumbled, or something happened, and he basically fell onto his own dagger so hard that the damn thing punched a nice square hole in his abdomen. About six feet away from where I was sitting on my stool with my headphones.

He went white. His scene partner blinked. And then they went on with the scene, Shakespeare flowing trippingly from their tongues and just the tiniest bit of blood on Bret’s shirt.

There was no way I could get on the headset with everyone listening and tell Suzanne that the lead actor had just put himself in the hospital. So I did What No ASM Must Ever Do. I abandoned my post and scuttled behind the curtains of the aisle up to the lighting booth. Suzanne was calling cues bam bam bam, so fast she couldn’t take here eyes off the notebook to look at me. But she knew I was there, and she was pissed.

Until I said Bret stabbed himself, and then she was just… well, she was amazing. I don’t remember a lot of the details at that point, just that Suzanne was the calm center of what could have been a real shitstorm if anyone had been allowed to freak out.

After some frenzied negotiation, I went back to my post with strict orders from Suzanne to keep myself and everyone else together. I checked on Bret. Someone put a bandage on his tummy. I told everyone in my most stern ASM voice that Suzanne said to stay calm. Then I stood terrified (in a calm way, grin) in the wings with two large young men ready to run out and scoop Bret off the stage if he started talking nonsense or falling down. Bret finished the show, although I’m pretty sure that there were a few moments when he honestly had no idea where he was or what he was doing. There is a reason that we rehearse these things all those weeks, you know? And then we all went to the hospital.

Bret was okay, thank goodness — we all liked him and admired the fact that he went the distance without passing out or wandering off into some other script. And of course it was probably dumb to go on with the show. *Shrugs* That’s what actors do unless we are actually unconscious or bleeding out on stage.

I have a lot of other theatre stories to tell one of these days — how I almost was in R&J after all, the day I did a monologue with a shotgun in a bikers’ bar, the night I was sure someone was coming to kill me up in the lighting loft. Good times.

Naked invisible spider pix!

Here are some of the keyword searches that brought people to my site in October and November.

  • The skin-seekers are still with us, and they’re getting more creative: beautiful naked people, beautiful people naked (not necessarily the same thing), my naked parents, naked blue people, naked fairy girl, private naked emo pics (now there’s an image).

    Special mention goes to werewolf transformation naked nude female girl.

  • wil wheaton nude

    I had to call this one out because I enjoy Wil Wheaton’s work (and his blog) and was amused to find someone coming here to look for naked pictures of him.

    Wil, I assure you I would never advertise those pictures, I treasure them too much (big grin).

    It still amazes me that I get the entire naked internet crowd because of one post.

  • if i were invisible, a day invisible, haunting hill house, shirley jackson, whatever walked there walked alone, i’m alive he thought, oh i sure hope they know

    This month every high school in the US is assigning the same essay topics. Invisibility is still the clear winner — there are scads of kids crawling the web looking for essays to steal. Maybe they haven’t figured out yet that on the internet, everyone’s invisible already. Second place is a tie between The Haunting of Hill House and Dandelion Wine.

  • exploding like spiders across the stars
    Another essay topic, I’m guessing. You won’t find a deep analysis here, kids, just the quote because I love it so.

  • rhythmic quotes about spiders
    This is just fantastic. The internet is so full of people.

  • boots sci fi sex
    This actually makes me think about how much of the sex in science fiction isn’t really sexy. This person may be in for a long search…

  • second hand latex clothing
    Okay, ew.

  • girls watch boys kiss
    I just did that last night, we’re watching Queer As Folk (US) again on DVD. Brian broke Justin’s heart, but there was some great kissing.

  • does it hurt to drown
    Yes. It does. In whatever way you do it.

  • another fucking learning experience
    Exactly.

  • I want to be a writer but I have no talent whatsoever.
    Ah, that’s a hard place. You need different talents to be a writer. Observation, imagination, storytelling, the ability to find a center that is different from your own and put words to it. And the talent of the room.

  • too late to become an artist
    Neve, never, never too late.

  • at what age do people bloom
    At every age.

  • reasons for guys to dance
    Because it’s fun, and some of y’all are so pretty when you do it.

  • This month’s WTF award goes to:boy’s and girl’s kissing each other with the butt butt stick together video
    I feel badly that I had so little to offer this charming search. I hope they found their way to a butter place.

  • And let me leave you with this: tips shmips if you got no love
    Because, really, what more is there to say?

If you liked this post, read more keyword search posts.

Enjoy your day.

Song of my Sunday

All the world that I can see from my office is covered in snow, framed by icicles on the overhang outside the window. It’s cold, it’s quiet and still, the sky is half-blue and half-more-snow.

Today I am many things, but mostly I am lucky. I have food in the house and a house to keep the food in. I’m warm in here. I have health insurance that just paid for half the medication I’m taking because I’m still coughing 6 weeks after being sick. I have a new business that I suspect will struggle for a long time before it takes off, but I have (perhaps absurd) faith in the integrity and goodness of it, and I believe that it will reach people and help them. I am worried about finding paid work in the meantime.

There’s a lot going on.

So what am I doing? I am working on my screenplay all day today in a grand gesture of thank you to the beautiful day and fuck you to the people who say that female-driven movies can’t get greenlit, to the search for paid work, and the many frightening things in the wider world. Because writing this movie makes me most happy, and today being most happy is more important than being stressed or realistic or responsible. I am having enormous fun. And I am listening to this.

My advice is to turn it up loud.

Click here if you can’t access the player.

Storm

I have a pile of work to do, and there’s a big storm on the way — the temperature is dropping and the sky is drawing in on us, as if the world were shrinking. And so rather than telling the story of the actor who stabbed himself, or doing my monthly search keyword roundup (both coming soon, I promise), I thought I would just leave you with some music.

When I was younger and even more consciously dramatic than I am now, I once stood on a Florida beach at midnight watching heat lightning twenty miles out to sea, the last shreds of a thunderstorm gang that had come hulking across the area that day. It was a big system: the lightning poured down across half the horizon, and a cool wind blew in and out of the warm night, and the surf was pounding… so you know I had to sing “Riders of the Storm.”

I hope you have had the fun of getting big with the universe sometime.

Writing sex

Thanks to Gwenda for pointing out this post by Marianna Baer about sex scenes in young adult novels. It’s the most thoughtful consideration I’ve seen of writing sex scenes at all, not just in YA fiction (and if anyone knows of other good posts on the topic, please share).

These issues come into play for me particularly when writing the Mars stories, and I’m also thinking about writing sex in screenplays, and when I write my own YA novel there will definitely be sex (because it’s such a force in adolescence whether you’re actually having it or not). I don’t the brain bandwidth to be thoughtful about it myself today, but it’s mulching in my brain along with everything else.

[And with the word “sex” in the title and about ten other times in this post, I’m bound to get a whole new category of search engine hits (grin). The monthly keyword search post for November is coming soon.]