As I sit to begin this final post before I return to work tomorrow, the morning has a vague emptiness to it. It is a rainy day, with a light rain now falling. I’ve just returned from a three-day trip taking Eric to Northern Illinois University, there are suddenly no children in the house anymore, and word has reached me that a former professor of mine from undergraduate school, John F. “Jack” Kingston, passed away last Wednesday. [Read more →]
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Misfiring Cylinders
Yow - last night’s rehearsal sure was one of those incidents where you can tell things are slipping. Stephen Sondheim is difficult enough, but once again those memory cells seem to be misfiring. When you have lyrics like “Fluttering up the stairway/Shuttering up the windows/Cluttering up the bedroom/Buttering up the master” that’s one thing. When you have notes which go sharp when you want them flat and flat when you think they should resolve natural, that’s another layer. Add dance steps to them, and that’s a recipe for disaster as far as I am concerned. [Read more →]
The Great Divide
I came late to l’affaire Walters, and for the past week or so I have been doing what I can both to catch up on the relevant posts and subsequent comments and replies (anyone who reads this blog and does not follow other theatre blogs can start here if they wish. I will leave it up to you as to how far to go from there. Read the post and the comments). I’ve also been trying as best as I can to glean some sort of understanding of the human dynamics behind all the writing. Finally, I have been trying awfully hard to figure out my own relationship to all this information. Not having come to any firm conclusions about anything, about the best I can offer those who read these poor words are the following internal sensory observations I’ve experienced within me, my own relation and reaction to what I’ve read (N.B. - In the interests of full disclosure, readers must be advised that I write these observations under the following handicaps: A BA degree in English and Theatre; an MFA in Acting; 30 years working in non-professional and professional theatres of various sorts; membership in AEA; steady employment since 1974 as a teacher of high school religion, high school English, community college-level speech communication, broadcasting and theatre, and finally BA/BFA-level undergraduate theatre; a tenured full professorship; located in a rural, out-of-the-way economically depressed upstate NY city with little opportunity to see real theatre; married 31 years with three grown children and their concomitant responsibilities; over 50. An understanding of these handicaps I possess may allow the reader to perhaps better understand the following observations). [Read more →]
Filling in the Blanks
It seems like a good morning to fill in the blanks and clear out some cobwebs in my head from posts and thoughts past.
- It occurs to me in reading my conversation with Carolyn that I was arguing for the status quo in terms of how theatre departments should go about their business. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I really resist is the further incursion of the “show business” mentality into theatre training. There is much to be reformed within theatre departments, and at some point I must address those issues here. But I feel that what is definitely not needed is more classes on head shots and auditions. [Read more →]
A Good Cup of Coffee
“There’s nothing like a good cup of coffee.” That was something my grandmother always said to me every time she had her morning coffee. The Puerto Rican side of my family were all major coffee drinkers. I started myself at age 13 at the encouragement of my mother, who must have been drinking close to 14 cups a day when she was younger (she has cut down considerably). If there was one memory I took back from the trips I took to Puerto Rico as a child, it was that everyone, no matter how poor, had a coffee bush somewhere in their yard. [Read more →]
A Student-Teacher Dialogue
I recently had this email dialogue with a former student who is now in New York City making her way in the world of stand-up comedy. She reads this blog, and it was her idea to take the exchange and blog it. So here you are:
Student
Hey Old Man, Any idea who the Chair is gonna be yet? I wanna come up and do a Visiting Artist. I know it’s sort of been eradicated but you better work to put that shit back together because without it these kids are gonna have no idea what to do when they graduate! 
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A Day in Buffalo
It’s a Buffalo day. I had to come into the city this morning to sign all my paperwork for the Kavinoky Theatre in preparation for Forum, and I decided to make a day of it. I haven’t spent a day in Buffalo since I’ve been back from Staunton, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to do so. So I’m sitting right now in Spot Coffee, and it feels like sitting in Coffee on the Corner, with the exception that for some reason the Spot Coffee location on Elmwood Ave. in Buffalo does not have wireless. The downtown location on Chippewa does, so I assumed moving uptown to Elmwood might. No luck.
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Heading Home
I’ve been doing a great deal of chilling this past week, and at this very moment am sitting in my backyard having coffee and grabbing the news off the net. Later on I’ll head up to my cabin retreat, which is off the grid and so has no internet. It’s just that this past week I’ve really had nothing to say about anything, and perhaps when you’ve got nothing really to say the best course is silence.
Or perhaps it’s because Lew passed away last week. He succumbed to the lung cancer he told me had contracted last January or so, just before the winter meeting of our fantasy baseball league. Lew was the heart and soul of that league, and together we maintained the statistical website for the league. He was doing more of the work than I was while I was touring with the ASC. I recall when he first told me, and it came as something of a shock to me. He was hoping to make it through the baseball season, and as of last week his fantasy team was in first place. He had been actively making trades and working the web site through Thursday the 27th, but passed before he could place any bids for the players coming over from the National League. All during his time with cancer he lived every day as if he was in perfect health, refusing to stop any normal routines other than working until the last moment. He was a good man, the kind of honest, everyday good man it is becoming rarer and rarer to find. All of us who were fantasy owners in the league with Lew, mostly men in their 50s like myself, were given a lesson in how to face death. Lew didn’t have to slide when he got to home plate; he just trotted up the line to everyone at home welcoming him. I tip my cap to you, Lewis - cancer is a nasty curveball, and you belted it out of the park. -twl