What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

I’d never heard of Marcel Marceau before 1982. Granted, when I was finally introduced to his work, I was all of eleven-on-the-cusp-of-twelve, rebellious, snarky, moody. A typical tween-ager.

My introduction to mime had come years earlier, performance artists on television. As cheesy as The Donny and Marie Show was, they had some interesting guests from time to time. Mumenschantz, for example. What other mainstream talk show would spotlight art like that? Okay, Letterman did it, but he was late-night, so it doesn’t count.

The venue was Cal - U.C. Berkeley to the rest of the world - the night was cold and dark. February in the bay area is not balmy or warm. Northern California doesn’t get more than a quarter inch of snow about once every six years, but winter is still pretty chilly. The event: my mother’s first date with the man who would eventually be my step-father.

I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to spend an evening with this weird old guy and his son (roughly my age, also present.) I wanted to stay home and watch my favorite tv-show and have popcorn, and read a book. I lost the battle, so I went determined to have a horrible time.

My future step-brother, who professed to love mime, fell asleep half way through.
I was riveted. Oh, some of the satire was over my head, but for the most part Marcel puts on an entrancing show. Not just glass-box mime, the way annoying buskers do, but vivid portrayals of specific characters.

I loved it.
But I couldn’t admit it.
Not til now.

(Shh. Don’t tell anyone.)

Twenty-five years later, I still have an appreciation for mime, but, as I just posted in a thread about Marceau on the CSz boards, appreciation does not equal skill. I suck at mime. I dread having to do mime. I can tell at a glance if a couch, table, and chair will fit within a room in the configuration I think would work, but when I try to apply spatial relations to myself, it is decidedly awful.

(I’m working on it.)

Mime and writing share the connection of telling stories without sound. Yes, writing used words, but those words must describe place, and placement. Mime tells stories, and has place and placement but must convey thoughts without language. But all art is connected, all forms are about getting to the heart of something, to the kernel of truth that makes comedy universal, mime amazing, and a story about drinking espresso on Mars just as plausible as drinking espresso in Berkeley.

Marcel Marceau died yesterday.
He was 84.
He was amazing.

I left that auditorium with an appreciation for mime, and for Marceau.

Appreciation for my step-father came much later.

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

.

The leaves danced in the trees today and the sun was shining with joyous delight, for the air was cool and the crispness of fall was evident in every breath of fresh air. As I write this, the outside temperature, according to weather.com, is a cool, soothing, seventy degrees.

Three things happened today.

First, I had a long talk with myself, after receiving a link from my mother to a literary agency comprised almost entirely of women, one of whom I really feel clickage with. She specializes in fiction that is dark and/or quirky, and I’m tired of having all the work associated with my name be work stuff, essays, and stand-alone stories. So I’m feeling inspired and as I work best with strict deadlines, plan to have drafts of my proposal and sample chapters out to friends by the end of the month so that I can have it ready to send as a query by Halloween.

Second, I found the inspiration and the hook to weave, or braid, to borrow a phrase from a friend (and thanks, Julia-dahling, for loaning me your husband over the phone tonight. I needed to have a long chat with someone who would let me babble and geek out with me, and stuff.) my vignettes and stories together. Actually BPAL’s lunacies are one of the inspirations as well.

Third, I asked for, and was granted very graciously, hiatus from ComedySportz. No, nothing tragic happened. I’ve just got a lot of personal stuff going on, and all my creative energy is going Write, Write, Write, and I need to focus on that for a while.

But the pink hair is staying :)

September:

The morrow was a bright September morn;
The earth was beautiful as if newborn;
There was nameless splendor everywhere,
That wild exhilaration in the air,
Which makes the passers in the city street
Congratulate each other as they meet.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sleep: I went to bed before midnight last night and, except for a brief time awake when Fuzzy came to bed around 3:30, slept through til eight, then stayed in bed til nine. My head feels less spinny, my brain more focused. I don’t feel like I was skimping on sleep this past week, but perhaps I just wasn’t sleeping well.

Salon: Today I go to get my har re-pinked, and the bangs cut, but I don’t think I’m going to have her trim any length from the rest, except perhaps to keep it healthy. I’m ready for long hair again, with fall coming.

Sugar: I meant to make chocolate chip cookies last night, then decided I was far too dizzy and disoriented to be dealing with measuring and hot ovens. Perhaps I’ll make some this morning. I wonder if we have any parchment. A piece of parchment on top of the cookie sheet keeps the bottoms from burning, while the tops are browning.

Shakespeare: I caught a bit of last year’s version of As You Like It on cable last night, and have the showing tomorrow morning set to record. I like the concept of using 19th century dress for it, but while I understand that Branagh probably had all the actors affect English accents so that the accents all “matched,” I really dislike it when Americans use fake British accents for Shakespeare. It’s silly. It’s also wrong, since Shakespearian English actually sounds more like certain pocket accents in the Appalachians than it does modern British pronunciation. Repeat after me, Bryce Dallas Howard: I do not have to be English to do Shakespeare. (I enjoyed, btw, the performance of David Oyelowo, who played Orlando. Also, he’s seriously nice eye-candy, as is Adrian Lester, who played Oliver.

Stage: I’m on stage at ComedySportz tonight. Likely to be my last show for a while, as September is a weird month for us. I wish I could say I’m looking forward to it, but right this moment, I’m really not. I’m sure that will change as the day progresses, however.

In the last year of working from home, I’ve noticed that I am less and less in touch with popular culture. I don’t have a commute, so there’s no drive-time show to tell me which celebrities are going in or out of drug rehabilitation on any given day, and when I do have the radio or television on, it’s either NPR or the Discovery Channel or a movie that I’m half-listening to in the background.

In a way, this is bad, because I need to know some of this stuff for improv purposes, and because I feel stupid when I do socialize with people who aren’t my dogs or my ex-pat parents who live on the beach in Mexico. It’s truly frightening that Fuzzy knows more about which stars are dating or divorcing than I do.

This is part of the reason I’m looking forward to a three-hour salon session on September 1st (try saying that five times fast). I mean, yes, obviously, I’m looking forward to it because there’s almost no pink left in my hair and it looks ridiculous and my bangs are at the stage where I want to duct tape them just to get them out of my way. But there’s the other attraction of the salon: People Magazine.

This is not a magazine I’d ever purchase for myself. I consider it, like Entertainment Weekly, to be the kind of periodicals that are only appropriate while waiting in doctors’ offices or standing in line at the grocery store, or while there’s a bottle of pink dye soaking into your hair.

But for the couple of hours every few weeks that I read it, I secretly enjoy it.
Except for the book reviews. Because I don’t believe their reviewers actually read.

Earlier tonight, I’d written that I wasn’t feeling into going to ComedySportz tonight, but as soon as we were in the car, I found myself excited. I knew, going in, that I wasn’t scheduled to play, but I also knew that our sound guy and his wife, another player, had a medical issue, and had to miss the show. When I got there, I found out that another player had also called in sick. One of the guys scheduled to play already was pulled to do sound, and I was put into the liners.

Instead of having teams of three with a DJ (designated jokester - a player who floats between teams), we had teams of two with a DJ. This meant everyone had to work a little harder.

Read the rest of this entry »

…is what Fuzzy and I just had.

Friday night, when he finally got home, and I’d finally decided that even another minute at the computer would be a Very Bad Thing, we ate dinner (spinach tortellini with this really amazing pasta sauce that, I confess, not only came from a jar, but was purchased because I liked the shape of the jar) at the kitchen table for a change, and then played the 2-person version of The Starfarers of Catan until bedtime.

Saturday, we each puttered on various projects, after sleeping pretty late. I played with the dogs, and surfed Blogathon sites, and made a few pledges. Later, we went to Dallas because I was on the liners for ComedySportz. I made stupid choices/mistakes in Blind Line, but overall it was a great show. The crowd was totally into it, our ref rocked - he even let us play one of the new games he brought back from tournament - and I had fun. Afterwards, we all went to Fridays, where several of us made a pact to never go to Spaghetti Warehouse again, and I had a delicious margarita that was only slightly smaller than a swimming pool as we sat under the stars. (I also had a burger and a salad, but it’s the margarita that matters.)

Today, I’ve already posted about - shopping in the rain, puttering at home, froufrou coffee, grapes, flowers, and during dinner we watched the first night of SHARK WEEK (Ocean of Fear). Any moment now, we’ll be turning out the light.

…any of the games we regularly play, but I seriously think we should retire Dinner at Joe’s for a while. Oh, sometimes it’s amazing, but mostly it’s sort of annoying. I think there are ways we could be better at it. I think the refs could ask for descriptions differently and lead the audience toward better endowments, for example, but mostly, I think we over-play it, and it needs a rest.

I was in both the Friday and Saturday night shows this weekend, and I was a bit nervous on Friday because we’d been yelled at for not bringing enough energy to our matches the previous week. We played Dinner at Joe’s and it did get big laughs, mostly because Craig was given the character of the volunteer’s dog. We also played Foreign Movie, and the other team played Five Things, and Blind Line, and Forward/Reverse, but I cannot for the life of me remember what else we played. It wasn’t a bad show, either, I’m just blanking on it. Oh! Stunt Double.

Last night was fun for me because I got to try something new. My team played Dinner and Joe’s and we also played Slo-Mo, and Lil J and I did the commentary for it, which we’ve never done before (either of us), but it wound up being really funny, with no dead time, and I think using an English accent for it was a good choice. We played five things - only got to three, but the audience loved it. The other team played Arms Expert and Blind Line and Stunt Double.

Went out for a late dinner after the show, and then was talking with a troupemate in the garage, afterward, and there was this massive spider crawling up one of the posts, and he and Fuzzy want to play with it. Rather, he went to play with it and Fuzzy snapped pictures. It was about an inch long, not including legs, tapered body, white spots on abdomen, big fangs, and turned and hissed when troupemate poked it with his umbrella.

I stayed in the car and watched.
I don’t DO spiders.

No idea what we’re doing today. Maybe a movie. Maybe just hanging around the house.

It’s a rainy afternoon, and rainy afternoons are good for being quiet and puttery.