My Favorite Urban Legend

A few weeks ago, after attending a reading, I headed to a nearby bar with some of the cast for a little post-performance celebration. As we shot the breeze, swapped our stories and jokes, a friend of mine spoke up. "Wait, wait," he said, "I know a great one. I know someone whose friends once asked her to dog-sit for their very old dog."

He didn't need to say another word. I knew where it was headed. I could have stopped him right there, said, "ooh, I know this one - this is a good one." But I didn't. Where would the fun have been in that? I love this story.

The story goes - if you're curious - like this: A girl volunteers to dog-sit for a family she knows. The dog is getting on in dog years, and while the family is away, he dies. She calls the family, distraught, but the family says not to worry. The poor guy was very, very old and the death is not at all unexpected. They tell her to bring the dog's body to the family's veterinarian. He'll know what to do with it. So she does.

But, now, the vet is a ways away, and, not knowing better how to get the dead dog there, she packs it into a duffel bag and takes it on the subway. Of course, the still old dog corpse is pretty heavy, so she struggles with it a bit on the stairs. A man, seeing her struggle, helps her onto the subway with the bag.

"That's one heavy bag," says the man when they get on the train. "What have you got in there?" And the girl, obviously not wanting to tell the truth, says, "Oh, you know, just stuff I'm bringing home from college. Books, clothes, my computer, ipod, stuff like that." And you see where this is going. At the next stop, the man grabs the duffel bag and runs off the train just as the doors are closing.

This is, without a doubt, my favorite urban legend. At this point, I have heard this story from at least four separate sources; the number might actually be closer to five or six.

I love this story. It fills me with a deep joy and fondness for my fair city. I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's because I heard the story for the first time shortly after I moved to New York, and it makes me remember loving the city with a fresh heart. Maybe it's because it's so quintessentially. Struggling down the stairs and allowing a stranger to help with us with our load; muggings, or hearing about muggings on the street or on the train; and of course, carrying something unlikely and entirely ludicrous onto the subway - these are all such familiar circumstances. it seems only a matter of time and fortune before they should align so perfectly and comically.

Or maybe it's because it feels like something communal- some kind of great in-joke, a story in which we've all partaken. It's something that we've all laughed at, loved, and shared and, for a moment, that makes this great behemoth of a city seem a little smaller.

Here is something interesting, though: the facts never seem to change. I've heard this story possibly a half a dozen times and, unlike most urban legends, the facts of it never seem to change. There's no confusion over detail or circumstance. No, "Oh, I heard it was a dead cat," or, "The way I heard it, it was her dog." No, it's always a girl, always dog-sitting, always a duffel bag on the way to the vet. It's so consistent, it makes me wonder if this is not an urban legend, but a very famous, entirely true story.

Who out there has heard this story? Do you remember who told it to you? Do you know - or know somebody who claims to know - the original source of this story? How fantastic would it be if we could track her down?

It's Been a While

Good lord, it's been a long time since I posted. It's been a long and trying month of job searching and scheduling insanity, ultimately leading to my current gainful employment: a new job waiting tables. Which, sufficed to say, only means the lunacy and scheduling nightmare has only just begun. Hello shift-switching, restaurant politics and despotic managers*, how I've NOT missed you.

As all this madness was going on, one of my close friends said to me, "Why don't you blog about everything that's going on with your job search? That's a part of working in the theater and living in New York City - why don't you share that?"

"Yes," I said, "But there's nothing INTERESTING about that story. What would I say? I looked for another temp job for a while, but none of the temp agencies I signed up with had any work for me, and then I applied for nearly 50 entry-level administrative jobs, only one of which gave me an interview and I didn't get it so I finally had to face the music and look for another restaurant job and then I got really depressed because the only thing I'm apparently qualified to do is wait tables? That's not a good read."

But if you're curious as to what I've been doing these past few weeks, there it is in a nutshell.

And when I haven't been losing my mind over that small matter of paying rent, here's a few other things I've been up to.

• Signed on to direct Captain Moonbeam and Lynchpin a short play by James Comtois for the Brick Theater's Comic Book Theater Festival. I'm really excited about this. It's a great play and I can't wait to take a crack at it. This is also my first time working with James' theater company, Nosedive Productions, and I've heard nothing but good things about them.
  
  Tickets are already on sale for the show through Ovationtix - get them here.
• Played around with the awesome people from Flux Theatre Ensemble. I've been able to attend a couple Flux Sundays and even had the pleasure of directing a scene for the most recent installment of their Have Another reading series. And oh. my. gosh. What a joy it's been to get to know this group of artists. These are some of the most talented, enthusiastic and nicest theater people I've met in New York City.
• Hosted my old BFF from high school, visiting from Chicago and we had the kind of amazing, exhausting experience that you can only have with someone who's seeing the city for the first time. We wandered around Central Park and the East Village, we ate from food trucks, we got bagels from the best bagel place I know of in the city (that would be Absolute Bagels on 108th and Broadway, thankyouverymuch). We had late-night drinks at the newest neighborhood joint. We took a walking tour of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, stopping for pierogis for lunch, followed by a walking tour of Chinatown, stopping for dim sum for dinner - that day was our cultural dumpling food tour. We went to a concert (PJ Harvey), we went dancing at a gay club. Yes, dancing. At a gay club. Till 3 in the morning. At one point I found myself suddenly and inexplicably hoisted into the air by a half-naked man. It was a great and grueling few days.
• Partook in a Spring holiday marathon. I went to a Passover Seder on Saturday night, only to literally wake up the next day and immediately have an Easter brunch. What time I didn't spend this weekend savoring brisket and matzo ball soup and watching the Prince of Egypt was taken up by desperately cleaning, grocery shopping and preparing pierogis from scratch. The recipe is my grandma's, brought with her parents from Hungary and taught to me when I was 14 years old. And Easter tradition in my family for the simple and accidental reason that my grandma was visiting over Easter when she taught me the recipe. It's a strange tradition, but one that makes me feel specially connected to her, my family, and my heritage - something that, besides this recipe, seems to have all but dissolved like gossamer threads in its eventual journey across the continental U.S.
  
  The spring holiday marathon was an intense 24 hours of celebrations, but it was beautiful and it was spring and oh. I live for weekends like that.
• Saw some pretty sweet things by some Sarah Lawrence alumni. First, a reading of Sharon Is My Name, a new adaptation of The Merchant of Venice by the always-on Daniel Kelly; next, a performance of a lovely play entitled Harlowe by Jennifer Lane (her thesis project for her MFA in playwriting from Columbia, by the way). And most recently, Brick by Brick, a new musical by Ross Wade (book and lyrics) and Nehemiah Luckett (music) based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe - a really strong work; I'm excited to see how it develops from here. It's inspiring to see so many Sarah Lawrence people involved in such great projects.

And that's how I spent my summer vacation.

*It should be noted that all my managers seem perfectly nice so far. But I've been burned before. All I'm sayin'.

Broadway Shows That Everyone Liked But Me

I keep getting comp tickets to Broadway shows, courtesy of my delightful and generous friend Teresa, and I keep disliking them (either vaguely or acutely). I've left, on all three occasions in question, with such an overwhelming feeling of eh that I haven't even felt compelled to write a review of any of them. But here they are, if anybody is keeping track.

BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO
Of all the three, I disliked this one the least. In fact, I liked much about it and even liked the whole show at certain points, from certain angles. It was a very pretty play - pretty is the only word I can find to describe it. A lot of interesting ideas about God and energy and violence and consequences run through the play like a pretty piece of ribbon that ties up quite nicely at the end. It makes you consider, and consider ideas that are worth considering at that. So what was my trouble? Underdone character development, plain and simple. None of the characters felt like real characters to me - rather, they were devices that pushed forward the play's philosophical musings. I never felt connected to any of them, they had no texture or depth. I couldn't tell you a thing about them other than what they said and did in front of me on stage. A friend of mine told me she loved the character of the young, stupid soldier because he was exactly like every boy she ever knew who became a soldier. Perhaps this was the problem: he was so much every soldier that he was no longer an individual, more a symbol than a fleshed-out person. And while symbolic characters are often fine, important even, do you really need another one in a play with a talking spirit tiger? What's more, the same could be said of all of the characters. All of them made bold and provocative statements about spirituality, morality, and free will. None of them really filled the shoes they stood in.

GOOD PEOPLE
I enjoyed Good People as I watched it, but disliked it so much once it was over I actually became a bit resentful of it. Resentful of how it lectured to me, of how it beat me over the head for two hours with a concept I got in the first two minutes of the play. Unlike Terry Teachout, I disliked this play not because of the "crude deck-stacking" in favor of the maligned underclass, but because it was insufferable even-handed. THIS IS A COMPLICATED ISSUE! WITH NO EASY ANSWERS! It seemed to scream at me at every turn. There were multiple scenes where I could find no earthly reason why the two people on stage were still talking to each other, except that Lindsay-Abaire had more to say about class dynamics.

ANYTHING GOES
I'm more befuddled by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this baby than any of the others. Really? Really?? Because all I saw was a markedly lackluster theatrical event. Everything about it seemed both static and staid, as if the musical were even bored with itself.

Feeder: A Love Story

I got slightly distracted this week with that small matter of having a job, but before I completely lost touch, I had the chance to see Feeder: A Love Story by James Carter at the HERE Arts Center. Feeder, the latest from terraNOVA Collective which closed on Sunday the 26th, is a provocative tale about a shocking, strange, and thoroughly human relationship.

Jesse and Noel are married. They're madly in love, care fiercely for one another, and would do almost anything for each other. They're a typical happy couple - except for one small thing: Jesse is 703 pounds and Noel is her "feeder." The two are engaged in feederism - a relationship in which both parties derive pleasure from one person feeding the other in order to cause weight gain. As the play opens, Jesse and Noel have decided to pursue the ultimate and elite feeder goal: 1000 pounds.

Except Noel comes home one day to find nothing but a hole in the wall and a note from his wife. Jesse has left - taken away to a weight loss clinic by a talk show host for whom she used to work. While Jesse is at the clinic contemplating when and how her new life will take shape, Noel is left at home to deal with the aftermath of a life unraveled and a wife whose goals and aspirations have suddenly and inexplicably veered away from his own.

Feeder: A Love Story really succeeds in the sensitivity and sympathy with which its characters are painted. As bizarre and even grotesque as their lifestyle might seem to the audience, to outsiders, the core from which their strange choices come, their basic needs, fears, desires are familiar and universal. They want what we all want: love, sex, to care and be cared for. It's easy to become invested the dynamic of their relationship and its possible breaking apart.

And yet, as human and as genuine as Jesse and Noel are, the play never advocates for them, it never preaches. It presents a complex relationship with no easy answers - just like any relationship - and lets the audience be its own judge. I felt for Noel, for example, I really did. But at the same time, I'm not sure I liked him - or at least, his choices. As much as I understood his desires, I can't seem to reckon with how a person could do what he did to someone he loved. How could you want someone you genuinely care about to fall prey to all the attending health risks of morbid obesity? Getting off on the feeder lifestyle seems to me, in some ways, tantamount to getting off on slowly killing your partner.

And after Jesse "goes immobile," as they pursue their 1000-pound goal, Noel talks a great deal about about how rewarding it is to take care of Jesse, to be there for her every need. Feeling needed by the people you love is an intoxicating sensation, but how can you relish in the giving when you're also a part of the taking away? Later, Jesse expresses second-thoughts about what they're doing and Noel responds with reticence. "This is my life," he tells her, and I couldn't help but think, "No... it's hers."

I felt similarly vexed by Jesse's choices, although less so - perhaps because I'm a woman and identified more strongly with her, perhaps because she ultimately makes the choice to leave the lifestyle, although she doesn't regret her time with Noel. "I'm proud of what we did," she says, and takes great pains to make that point clear. The truth is they were happy together, they were in love.

The play takes place largely in vlog form: Noel records videos for his and Jesse's online following, Jesse keeps a video log for the talk show which her benefactor and former boss hosts, on which she'll eventually be a guest. The vlogging integrated well into the online/social media aspect of the show: both Jesse and Noel have websites and Twitter accounts that you can follow online. This digital component worked well for the story being told. Noel often repeats the refrain, "Everyone needs a corner of the internet, and this is ours." Without the internet, Jesse, Noel, and their unseen internet following would be isolated, silenced, left alone to wrestle with their strange and inexplicable desires. But online, they become part of a community, their identities validated and affirmed. Without the internet, this story would never have taken place, so it makes perfect sense that we should be able to follow it on the internet as well as in the theater.

Still - and perhaps it's just a question of personal taste (I've voiced this feeling before) - the strongest moments of the play came when Jesse and Noel unhook from their computers and occupy the same space together. The scenes where they speak their monologues into their respective digital devices were good, but the moments when the speak to one another were exponentially more powerful. I would have liked to have seen more of that.

Still, Feeder: A Love Story is a sweet play, a sad play, a thought-provoking play. It leaves room for speculation and contemplation. Should they be proud of what they did, as Jesse says? Would their relationship have endured, in different circumstances, beyond their feeder lifestyle? There are no easy answers.

What made me love Feeder even more, though, was the conversation with the playwright I had after the show. He spoke eagerly and passionately about "the community" of feeders, of how they had responded to the show and Jesse and Noel's blog leading up to the show. He offered interesting facts about the research into the community he had done and fascinating stories about people he had met. I loved this conversation for the same reason I loved Feeder: A Love Story. It gave a voice to an unrepresented or misunderstood facet of the human experience. It brought depth and dimension that I would have otherwise never known.

Is It Enough?

I've been somewhat lax about posting this week, a trend that might continue for a while as I struggle to get my two feet back on the ground. I'm discovering the downside of temping - that is, when your assignment ends, then you don't have a job. Today marks day three of sitting on the sofa in my jammies, wondering if I'll have the opportunity to make money again before the rent is due. You'd think that this would be optimal time for blog-writing, but alas, process of switching between applying for jobs and worrying about applying for jobs has occupied nearly all of my time.

It's the kind of gray day with no rain, just that ubiquitous chilly mist, that, on days when I do have responsibilities like work and shows that drag me out into the elements makes me curse the heavens and wish for nothing more than to be curled up on my couch with a blanket, a mug of hot tea, and maybe the 6-hour BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. What am I saying here? "Appreciate the opportunity you've been given"? or "Be careful what you wish for"? I don't know.

Anyway, on to something a bit more topical. I've been following the response to this post in the HowlRound blog, wherein Mat Smart posits that playwrights who fail do so simply because they're lazy and/or untalented.

All right, I'm not a playwright, but I think I can extrapolate to the theater sector at large here. This ruffles my dander a bit, partly because it is somewhat inappropriate to declare the system to be fair when there are clearly issues of race, gender at class that stack the deck. I mean, come on, Mr. Smart - just take a look 50/50 in 2020 for a quick sec and then come back and talk to me when more than 25% of professional opportunities are going to women. Of course gender inequality is only the tip of the iceberg - it's just the advocacy group that I happen to be involved with. But I'm not going to dwell on that, because Isaac Butler and Joshua Conkel have done a more than adequate job responding to that particular grievance.

I also want consider the fact that this post rankles because, well, I pretty much have a running inner dialogue telling me exactly what Mat Smart is telling me here. I'm too lazy, I'm not talented enough.

Isaac Butler quotes the following passage from the original post,

You have to love the actual working on the thing—the actual writing—so much that there is an inevitability about it all. Every day you spend six hours writing, eight hours temping, three hours sending business emails and you know it’s not enough. You’ve had a ton of workshops at fancy places where you’ve stayed up all night writing for weeks on end. You’ve finally integrated that big note. It is not enough. Writing a play, revising it, really working on it, staying open to the good and bad criticism, really reworking it, getting it out there, seeing it through to production, dealing with poor casting, weathering pans or rave reviews, reworking it, getting it done again, reworking it, repeat for the next script, repeat— all this is an act of love. It has to be. In the end, our approach to our own work is the only thing we can control—and I believe that you have to love the doing. You also have to love the chase, love the absence of any resemblance of fairness, justice, or due course. And as long as it doesn’t make you too desperate or crazy—there is a nobility in this endurance, in this brand of foolishness. There must be a sense that “I am going down with the ship.” And frankly, it is a commitment that I don’t see many emerging playwrights make.

And then says,

I actually agree with Smart about much of the above, but to me this is simply a list of symptoms that the system is broken. Any system that requires you to work seventeen hours a day all year long on the basis of "love" is a system that doesn't work.

I have to admit, reading that first paragraph by Smart sort of terrified and saddened me. I have made, and continue to make, a lot of sacrifices to theater. I have dedicated a lot of my time to the pursuit of both the art and the profession in my life. But Smart's essay makes me ask: do I do all that? He says, "Every day you spend six hours writing, eight hours temping, three hours sending business emails and you know it’s not enough." Well, I know Smart is probably hyperbolizing for effect, I know he probably doesn't spend every day working seventeen hours (he is hyperbolizing, right??) And there have certainly been days like that in my life, but they haven't been every day. The more common days have been the days that I've come home from waiting tables or temping, rehearsing or seeing shows or reading plays, knowing I could do more, that there is more to do, but watching TV instead because I am just tired. But the question nags at me: have the former type of days been numerous enough? Do I need to work harder? Am I just too lazy?

The commitment that Smart speaks of, the "I am going down with this ship" mentality," that he doesn't see in enough playwrights is a commitment that I don't know if I can make anymore. I know there was a time in my life when I could, and did, but now? I simply don't know.

Am I a traitor to my art? Am I the kind of fair-weather amateur that is the reason that someone saw fit to write such an article in the first place?

That doesn't seem fair. I love theater. I've loved it longer and more constantly than anything else in the world and I would be a lost soul without it. Butler doesn't think it's fair. He says, "Any system that requires you to work seventeen hours a day all year long on a basis of 'love' is a system that doesn't work."

But at the same time, the system doesn't work. So... where does that leave me?

2amt Post - My Last Play.

I'm extremely proud to have written a post for the 2amt blog this week about My Last Play. I absolutely love this blog. It has some of the most interesting, intelligent and topical theater talk I've found, by artists in the field doing really exciting things. I read it religiously. So I'm so pleased to have been able to contribute a piece of writing to the site. Please check it out!

I wrote a review of "My Last Play," the mysterious performance by Ed Schmidt which he's currently performing in his living room. It was a fascinating evening, completely contrary to what I had expected. After chewing on they play for an entire week, I still can't say if I enjoyed it. But I do have to respect it.

Here's a little excerpt of what I said for 2amt:

At one point Schmidt quotes Albee, saying “Fiction is fact distilled into truth,” to which his father replies, “That’s bullshit.” This exchange, I think, could almost serve as Schmidt’s thesis. As artists I think we must believe in the inherent truthfulness of stories, that they impart to us a deeper kind of understanding, one too complex to be encompassed in simple facts and plain truth. Well, maybe. But couldn’t it also be argued that the storyteller’s duty – by the very DEFINITION of fiction – is to lie to you? To manipulate, falsify, to make you believe things that are patently untrue? Maybe Albee’s quote is bullshit, maybe the truth is the truth and fiction is simply a lie.

And all of us – yes, artists, but any of us who have taken part in the hearing and telling of stories – we all labor under the unspoken and sometimes even subconscious understanding that stories uncover deeper truths. They bring a sense of order and understanding to an otherwise chaotic and confusing existence. That is the very point of storytelling – to give meaning and structure to the act of living. But it’s possible that there is no order, no meaning. There are no deeper truths to be learned. Life is just a big, messy, pointless accident and stories are simply lies we tell ourselves to make us feel like it’s not so.

Read the rest here. Go check out my post and (if you haven't yet) 2amt!

The Most Amazing Subway Graffiti

So, I happen to love subway posters. Chalk it up to my alternate life in advertising; I'm totally fascinated by them. I scrutinize them in painstaking detail, get unreasonably angry at the ones that are lazy, slapdash, or lacking in craftsmanship, and get really really excited about the ones that have been artfully and carefully constructed.

For example these:

These posters were out a couple summers ago and I loved them. So much so that I clearly had to document them for posterity. They were somehow entirely aware of their own ridiculousness, and yet still entirely sincere about it. It was genius.

Anyway. I saw another instance of genius a few days ago (although didn't think fast enough to get a picture). This one was not marketing genius, though, but inspiration from a civilian:

This particular poster was for some reality show or another, and featured a bunch of people standing around looking at the camera. There is a poster currently on the subway lines advertising an exhibit about Houdini at (I believe) the Brooklyn Museum. It features a big picture of Houdini with his name and some information about the exhibit underneath.

This graffiti artist had cut out the figure of Houdini and inserted him along with his name in the reality-series posters. The effect was that Houdini had somehow escaped from his own poster and materialized in this one. His name (the final touch), pasted next to him, seemed to announce, "Ta da! The great Houdini!"

It was kind of brilliant.