Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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Rebecca Hilliker, chair of the theater department of the University of Wyoming and a character in The Laramie Project, paid us a visit on Tuesday, as other business had brought her to D.C. She turns out to be a very grounded woman of perhaps German extraction, in her forties, raised in Madison, Wisc. Since we are two and a half weeks from opening, her visit provided perhaps more inspiration than information. Some of us were happy just to talk and vent with someone who was personally involved in the events. Rebecca passed along some Laramie lore, like the story of Prexy's Pasture on the university campus, where you can still tie up your horse. Everyone knows Doc O'Connor as "Bosler Doc;" he seems to comprise the whole economy of nearby Bosler, Wyo., where keeps a used appliance store. The media circus in the days following the beating was exactly that. She said, "There were more media people than people in town." Dr. Hilliker talked about the play, pointing out similarities to the work of Brecht and Pirandello. She is especially interested in the play's dialectic, its interplay of light and dark sides, yin and yang. Like Stephen Johnson, she mentioned the Christ imagery associated with Matthew.
Most importantly, she reminded us that the play is a work of theater, that it is an act of compression and restructuring of the words of its people/characters. She said that several people, including herself, are frustrated in part that the play doesn't say exactly what they wanted to say. She says (and I'm paraphrasing), "This is Our Town in Laramie. Find yourself in the characters. Concern yourself less with accurate portrayals of these people." posted: 11:23:00 PM |
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Okay, I'm a big grouch. My boss has brought his dog in to work today, without so much as a word of explanation to us. It's a small terrier. Right now it's whimpering out in the reception area. My door is closed. Am I the only one in the world who thinks he's being less than considerate? posted: 1:30:32 PM |
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America Online joins the rest of us:
Over the past year, the Dulles new-media pioneer built a fancy new system to
publish its fare not in the company's proprietary programming language
called Rainman but in hypertext markup language (HTML), the open standard
used to create regular Web sites.... By the end of the year, all of AOL
should be ported to the Web-based system, with a subscription screen still
preventing nonmembers from viewing most of its content.
posted: 1:30:30 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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