Car!

Get your spaldeen and meet me on the stoop: Timothy Williams and Cassi Feldman find a few kids still playing street games.

Last year in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, 58-year-old Delores Hadden Smith organized a street festival at the Gowanus Houses and had adults teach children games with candy-coated names that sounded like the made-up concoctions they were.

There was red devil; box ball; bluebird, bluebird through my window; hot peas and butter; a variation of ring-a-levio called cocolevio; steal the bacon; look who’s here punch-a-nella; knockout; and duck duck goose.

Market signals

Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market. The upshot: offsets are helpful (though there are skeptics when it comes to forestry offsets), but you may not be getting what you pay for.

I returned to Stanford’s Schneider to ask what kinds of offsets he might buy. “It’s legitimate to put windmills in if you displace fossil-fuel power,” he said. “It’s legitimate to put coal emissions underground if you could figure out how to make that permanent. Financing a gas plant in India if they were going to put in coal would also be good.” The key with all of these is they reduce carbon emissions at their source.

Kaplan, again

Via Robot Wisdom auxiliary, Jerry V. Haines is developing the World’s Least Helpful Phonetic Alphabet. I am reminded of a venerable Mike Nichols and Elaine May routine from the early sixties that my mother and I listened to incessantly on LP. Mike is running very late for a very important appointment, and is trying to get the phone number of George Kaplan, his meeting contact, from Information (what became known as Directory Assistance, because people kept using 411 as the public library). Elaine, the operator on the other end of the line, clearly needs to get out more. She repeats back the name he’s looking for:

That is Kaplan, George Kaplan. That is K as in Knight, A as in Aardvark, P as in Pneumonia, L as in Luscious, A as in Aardvark again, N as in Newelpost?

Now I feel safe

Commonwealth officials are cracking down on restaurants serving sangria prepared according to old-fashioned recipes, reports Jessica Gould.

La Tasca [a Spanish-themed restaurant in Clarendon] manager Daniela Schenone says the restaurant’s two Virginia outposts stopped serving brandy with their sangría about six months ago. Why? Because swilling traditional sangría is against the law in Virginia—and has been for decades.

Beth Straeten, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, writes in an e-mail that sangría has been illegal since the state’s alcohol agency was created in 1934. According to Virginia code, any restaurant with a mixed-beverage license is prohibited from “selling wine to which spirits or alcohol, or both, have been added.” Restaurants are also barred from selling beer to which wine or spirits have been added. So no go on the boilermakers, either.

Step by step

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted to pay the county’s share of Metro construction through Tysons Corner, Reston, and on to Dulles airport, rejecting the arguments of developers and some county residents that the tunnel option through Tysons warrants further study.

I can’t say that I’m with the tunnel supporters (who only got organized once certain businesses got on board) on this one. Tysons is an uncoordinated, traffic-choked mess, and I don’t have any hopes that burying the subway line will make it that much easier to rebuild the core to improve pedestrian access. The only county resident that I know personally who has spoken in support of the tunnel drives everywhere in a tank of an SUV. I suspect she’s more concerned about construction interfering with her commute than she is about trying to make Tysons Corner people-friendly.

Sinner update

after the renovationsWe move rehearsals on to the stage later this week, out of the newly tiled and cleaned-up karate studio, and I am really looking forward to seeing the set that Bruce has designed and John built—the renderings look fabulous.

John Logan, the playwright, has selected lots of repetitions from the source material (court transcripts, newspaper and radio accounts) of this play. For instance, his Robert Crowe says, in his five-minute closing summation, “…there is but one penalty that is proportional to the turpitude of this crime, only one penalty that applies to a crime of this sort, and that is death.” Director Michael has been relentless in making me emphasize, depend on, trust in those repetitions. Though this play depicts a bloody crime, it’s ultimately a very talky courtroom drama, and Michael’s vision, as I understand it, is to throw key ideas into precise, high relief: judgment by a jury of peers, mercy, justice, the rule of law. Logan also retains the declamatory conventions of the pre-television age: alliteration, direct quotations from the Pentateuch.

Michael asked me to do something else that no director has ever needed to ask me before: to stop gesturing. In scene 18, Crowe and Clarence Darrow have their one duet scene, a meeting just outside the courtroom. The normally intellectual Crowe, who begins by saying, “I really don’t have to justify anything to you,” in fact spends most of the scene trying to do just that to Darrow, explaining his hardball tactics in pursuit of the death sentence. In the midst of a flailing emotional outburst, Crowe takes the personal tack with Darrow:

You know what’s happening in Chicago. You know about the gangs and corruption. It’s just creeping in. Everywhere. All because the laws are not being enforced! You like that? I want my children to grow up in a city where they can depend on the law to protect them.

And it is Michael’s wisdom to direct me to keep this passage intimate, personal, not stagey. Early on, he walked over to me during a rehearsal of this bit and took my hands in his and placed them at my sides. So I’m forced to use my eyes, my face, my voice to convince Darrow that I’m right.

Claire, who is responsible for hair, took the clippers to us last week. Most of the younger cast members are growing theirs out. I, on the other hand, am still stuck in the 1970s when it comes to the back of my head, so Claire had lots of hair to hack off back there. Crowe had a lush head of hair on his crown, however, and we’re looking for ways to train my baby-fine locks into a bushy fighting Irish do.

Sam and Ryan, playing the teenaged killers Dick Loeb and Nathan “Babe” Leopold, are scary-creepy good at what they do.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

I know someone who once found himself in the awkward situation of having to tell our mutual friends that one of our number had died unexpectedly. That’s sort of the situation that Jean (sad sack Polly Noonan) finds herself in at the top of Sarah Ruhl’s new black comedy. Jean, annoyed by the ringing phone of a neighbor in a cafe, accosts him, only to find that he has expired in the midst of eating his lentil soup. Impulsively, she takes his phone and takes on the responsibility of explaining to Gordon’s callers—for she eventually learns his name—what has happened to him.

There’s some comedy to be found here: we learn that there wasn’t much love in the businessman Gordon (a dyspeptic Rick Foucheux), but yet Jean lies to each of his loved ones that Gordon thought well of each one in his final moments. But that’s not what Ruhl is after. Rather, she’s interested in exploring the alienating effects of technology, as she explains in a program note:

I don’t think we’ve caught up, emotionally, culturally, or physically, to the digital age. We live in an instant culture. But we don’t have instantaneous bodies.

And one of her characters in the play says, more poetically, “We’re all disappearing, the more we’re there.” The sort of business Gordon deals in is a commoditization of the body.

While the first act closes with a beautiful stage picture of paper houses descending from the flies while Polly finds a moment of connectedness, the second act plotting, with its necessity to introduce Jean to Gordon face-to-face, feels forced.

The multiple scene shifts required by this production are managed neatly by Production Stage Manager Taryn Colberg’s crew, who are dressed in suits to match Gordon’s smart three-piece number.

  • Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Friday night fun

—Number 5, please.

—My name is David Gorsline, and this is from State Fair.

After years of protesting, “I don’t do musicals, if you heard me sing, you would understand,” I walked into RCP’s auditons for Guys and Dolls armed with nothing but my water bottle and the sheet music for “Isn’t It Kinda Fun.” It’s an uptempo showtune, which is what was called for in the casting announcement, and the music is by Richard Rodgers, who makes everyone sound good (this on my authority for all things musical, Leta).

At least Sue, the director, looked pleased to see me, as we have worked on one or two straight-play projects before. And Brian, the music director, had accompanied us for Seussical rehearsals, so he knew what he was getting. Elisa, one of RCP’s sweethearts, was at the piano.

This was a typical evening of wham-bam screening: with 40-plus actors to see, there’s only time to sing your song, crash through the dance combination, and be released. I made sure that I was there early (something I do anyway), so I was in the first group of twelve to sing and dance, and I was back in the car by 8.

I’m not really sure how the song went, but I got a clue from the more experienced singers on the bench next to me. One said, sympathetically, “It’s hard to go first.” This was the first time that I’ve sung this song with piano accompaniment EVER, so I’m not sure that I started on the C that I intended, but rather I may have wandered down to the G, which is the root of the chords in the intro. I got the ship righted in the second 8 bars, and Sue was bopping along with me, but Brian mercifully cut me off after the bridge.

Not everyone followed Sue’s request for “upbeat.” In my group of twelve, I heard some nice Lerner and Loewe, a couple of showcase pieces for good soprano voices, a G&S patter song, and (THANK GOD) since this was a show for adults, only one version of “Popular.” Mike (Horton from Seussical) was in the house, but not in my group, which is too bad, ’cause I wanted to hear him sing.

Choreographer Ivan then ran us through the dance combination, sort of a mashup of the steps he planned to use in the show from various songs. I unabashedly smudged my way through the bourrée that Ivan gave us, but he said he was looking for manly attitude, and I tried to focus on that.

All in all, no one fell down, no one threw up, so I’m calling it a win. Callbacks and casting decisions are this weekend. I’m only trying to get into the chorus, and maybe to do one of the character bits. This is all about pushing against the envelope.

Very like a whale

Rebecca Stott praises the great 19th-century pre-post-modernist novel Moby-Dick:

It is a creature quite unto itself: a great library of learning contained within the belly of a whale, a key to all mythologies, a joke, a quest, a witch-hunt, a parable, a water eclogue and a warning against the dangers of monomania and what we might call fundamentalism.

Stott compares Melville’s book to an earlier gallimaufry of a novel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

So long, Don

Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard of my childhood, has passed away. When I was about nine years old, my hometown television station replaced Herbert’s show with some humdrum public affairs program: I fired off a snarky note to the editor of the TV section of the Dayton Daily News, and got it published. (My first and last effort at grassroots activism, and of course it didn’t have any effect.) Here’s hoping that there’s a Van de Graaff generator wherever you are, Mr. Wizard.

(Link via Boing Boing.)