a poor player

Dunkirk NY – I’ve meant to get in an update post so many times, and I have so many things on my mind, but time and circumstances being what they are, I had to let this lag for a time. I’ll be working to get back to it soon?

What’s been keeping me busy? Mostly family stuff. I spent a week on Long Island with the folks getting them ready for the BIG MOVE out of their house (which some in the family call “The Castle”) and off to a condo in Amherst MA. My brother Kevin is buying The Castle and getting ready to sell his own house, so I became a moving man for a weekend. Tying up loose ends, and preparing Powerpoint slides for the Intro class I am teaching for the first time in 12 years also took up a great deal of time. Lastly, setting up the new and improved department blog – complete with Facebook and Twitter links – has consumed more time. Under all that, bloggin takes the back seat. Continue Reading »

Tommy Flynn

Dunkirk NY – No, you don’t know him, unless you worked in Buffalo theatre somewhere between the mid-80s and the late 90s. He was the proprietor of Ray Flynn’s, a little hole-in-the-wall dive of a bar on the 800 block of Main St. in Buffalo, next to the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo building. It was at one time the city’s theatre bar, where theatre people of all stripes used to come and hang out after rehearsals and shows. There was a time in Buffalo when your day’s or night’s work in the theatre wasn’t complete until you went over to Flynn’s for a drink and some conversation. There was always someone over at Flynn’s to talk to, and even if there wasn’t, there was always Tommy himself. Everyone was Tommy’s friend.

(UPDATE: click here to see Jeff Wilber’s reminiscences about The Golden Dollar at Buffalo Rising, and then check out this page on Forgotten Buffalo on the history behind Tommy’s bar, which includes an image of the Buffalo News story about Flynn’s final night.)

When I first came to Buffalo in 1989 it wasn’t long before I was taken over to Flynn’s. The place was named for Tommy’s father, Ray, who started the bar. Before it started hosting the theatre crowd, it was a popular hangout for newspaper people, in particular those who worked at the defunct Buffalo Courier-Express. The C-E had ceased operations in 1982, and slowly the patrons of Flynn’s morphed from the newpaper crowd to the theatre crowd. The bar was a two-block walk from Buffalo’s Theatre District, an area around the 600 block of Main St. It was close enough to walk to after a show or rehearsal, but in just a bad enough section of downtown that nobody but theatre people wanted to go there. There were maybe four or five booths, three or four tables, a curved wooden bar, and one hell of an odorous bathroom. You had to get buzzed in by Tommy due to the potential for robbery. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – Lest you thought the arts in academia were somehow going to escape the ravages of this economy, read this. I predicted a while back that this would begin to happen as budgets tightened. No one is immune.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I rejoice in the elevation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. My 80-year-old mother, who is Puerto Rican herself, is also taking a quiet pride. Of course, the 31 senators who voted against her is another indication of how low this country is falling in terms of its ability to hold civil debates and to consider issues on their merits rather than on selected, skewed, and in some cases, made-up evidence. Calling her a “racist” and using one particular quote taken completely out of context is just a further indication of this trend. With a 17-year record on a federal bench, you would think a lifetime record would have much more to say about her than one or two quotes. Not in this time and era. We’re seeing this in the “birther” movement and also in the town meetings on health care debate, where it appears even death threats are now a legitimate means of rhetoric. Assaults on the homeless are now getting bad enough to think about passing hate crime legislation to fight it. I find the trend truly disturbing.

Perhaps the only attitude or refuge we can take in this era of over-hyped ad hominem rhetoric are the words written by the late John Hughes. From the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles:

You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I’m an easy target. Yeah, you’re right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you… but I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Well, you think what you want about me; I’m not changing. I like… I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. ‘Cause I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.

-twl

Dunkirk NY – Vacation’s over. These next few weeks will be spent preparing for the coming semester. For the first time in about 10 years I have a large lecture class to prepare. I also have the approaching Middle States accreditation to prepare for. T.S. Eliott was incorrect – August is the cruelest month. As soon as the word “August” comes out of my mouth, I know the time is short to when I have to pick up the daily grind again. But I must say that so far this summer has been one of the best in a few years. I did one show, worked summer orientation, took an actual vacation (by which I mean traveling to places where I don’t live for the express purpose of seeing new things and enjoying new places), and now have about three weeks still to prepare for the fall semester. That is not shabby. Regrettably, I neglected my Middle States duties a bit, and will have to play catch-up this month and through October, but I think it has been worth the price. Continue Reading »