One More Downer Note Before '07 Is Out...

This is infuriating. Or depressing. Or both.

In Brooklyn, a woman gets a ticket for having her dog off the leash, tries to pay it, but the court is backed up so it gets thrown out but never logged as such. Then she gets pulled over on foot for jumping the turnstile in the subway (she says the Metrocard machine wouldn't accept her payment and nobody was to be found to help her) and when they call in her info, she's got a warrant out for her arrest for the off-leash thing!

That's annoying and all, but it's just the tip of the WTF iceberg as she is thrown into the holding cell where she spends a full 24 hours:

There seemed to be a giant amount of racial profiling going on -- alot of woman in the cell were just picked up wrongly and booked for supposed violations. (Open bottle of alcohol.) It seemed that they wanted to put as many black folk in the system as possible. I grew up in brooklyn in the 70s . My dad grew up here. I am not a naive, knucklehead from a transferred suburban bubble. This "pick up anyone for anything and process them for it" as my lawyer informed me, was a Guiliani mandate. It is racist. It has divided this city and it is making this place a plasticized suburb that I don't think I have the heart to remain in. It is disturbing to watch these rich kids prance around Smith Street, when 2 blocks away, there is a cell where you are held without communication, water, food and logic.

Read the full story here. (from the Gowanus Lounge)

It gets vicious in the comments section, with people taking sides and laying blame. Does the punishment fit the crime? Technically, she was not punished. Yet. She was in the process of being booked, being "put in the system".

In my opinion, that's the worst part.

I was arrested once. Got pulled over in Dunstable, MA (read: Middle of Nowhere) for going 36mph in a 25mph zone around the cow farm. In the same way as the story above, the cops ran my license and just as it seemed they were going to let me go, it turned out my license had been suspended for something (minor and dumb*) that happened in college. I had gone to court, settled everything up and WAS NEVER TOLD that my license had been suspended. This was over TWO YEARS before the night of my arrest.

I was cuffed, my car was towed and off to Jail I went. Luckily, I was in the cushy suburbs of Massachusetts and my stay in the booking area was brief. They actually had to call a woman in to frisk me-- there were only men on duty, so they called Kathy in for the job. She roused herself up from in front of her wood stove and raced down to find me. The criminal.

I never actually ended up in a holding cell. My "mugshots" were polaroids. I'd love actually to see them-- I remember smiling, because that's what you do when you're having your picture taken. The guy took one picture. He said he had to take another, so I turned 90° to the right. This seemed to confuse him.

Cop: What are you doing?
Me: This is my profile. For the second mugshot.
Cop: Yeah, you can just face front.
Me: Huh?
Cop: Yeah, just facing front is ok.
Me: LOOK! I'M SORRY! I've only ever seen this on Night Court. I fully expected to be in here with a bunch of hookers and midget circus clowns! This is just not my night.

All ended up just a-ok, and in retrospect, it's a funny story. But if I were anywhere else but the cushy vanilla 'burbs, I can only imagine what my tale might have been.

I hate the smell of disinfectant. And I'm not a fan of crackheads, either.

*I'll tell you that story, but you're gonna have to buy me a drink.

Ciao, 2007! Bring it on, '08!

Had a lovely Xmas up here in Binghamton with Will's family, and started out the season's travels with a visit to my people up in Massachusetts where an equally lovely time was had.

As far as Loot with which we honor the birth of the Savior, I was gifted some pretty neat stuff: (in no particular order)

• The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) by Peter Sagal, the host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! (as if I needed a How-To guide on this topic! But seriously, a really fun read.)
• a nice new day-planner (this was the hands-down favorite of the OCD geek that lives inside of me)
• a crock pot (to Will's dismay-- he loathes the name and demands it be called a "slow cooker". Do you see what I go through?! Secretly, though, I can't wait to start a-stewin' with this gift from his sister and her boyfriend)
• a crock pot cookbook, a soup cookbook and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (anyone want to come over for dinner? I've now got a great recipe for brains...)
  
• a new yoga mat and bright shiny satchel in which to carry it
• some big, dangle-y and very fancy handmade earrings
  

Will scored guitar 2 ways: Guitar Hero (to be played on the Wii that never arrived... we've got a trip to the Nintendo Store on the horizon!) and an acoustic number I got him so he could become proficient in real life as well as in video games.

After all that über-stimulation, we've had over a week of delicious tuning out: no cell phone, just a smidgen of internet, not knowing what day it is... Lots of reading. Watched the director's cut of Blade Runner (which I had not yet seen), 3 out of the 5 Planet Earth discs (the caves are gross but the mountains are Rad!). Did lots of thinking about just how I'm going to organize things for 2008.

Big Plans, my friends. Good stuff.

Also, we just saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Fun. Funny. Blatant. Oddly, in the later parts of the movie, John C. Reilly spent a lot of time looking like Tim Robbins. Lots of funny cameos. Eddie Vedder looks just as dreamy at I thought he did when I was 16. (think what you will, my formative years were the 1990s)

We're back in the city tomorrow. Got to clean out the old apartment, have one last 2007 party blast, then back to work.

Happy New Year to all.

Every Once in a While...

Something on the Post Secret Blog really stands out to me.

I was almost named Tammy after the Debbie Reynolds movie. I like to think my father put his foot down on that one, but I'm not sure really where my given name came from...

Red Velvet Madness!

Hi Friends and Readers

As many of you may know, I am leaving the apartment in the East Village for real on 1/1/08.

Up for grabs is my very boudoir-esque Red Velvet Living Room Set. Yes, a complete set.

In a sad-sack coin toss, Will's fancy "grown up" furniture won the space in our new living room, so I'm looking for a home for this vintage red velvet that has been somewhat of a family heirloom since 1973. (yeah, my family loved disco).

All told, it's a couch, a chair, coffee table, 2 end tables (all with handy storage inside) and two very fancy beaded lamps.

It's in good condition. All you'd need to do is get in touch and come get it by January 1.

Please feel free to pass this on to friends.

The Toughest Job I've Ever Had

I have done many things to earn money, lo these 15 or so years I've danced in the world of employment. Some things I loved, some things I was good at, some I hated but was good at, some passed the time and supported a serious shopping habit, and so on. I've been a waiter, a bartender, a cater-waiter, a public school substitute teacher, an office-flunky, a real estate pusher, a nanny, a game-inducer, a fake patient, a flower-buncher and so on.

I've plugged away as an actor and been occasionally rewarded for my efforts, though that is a continual daily battle.*

But the hardest job I've ever had, by far, went down this past weekend when I served as the entertainment at little Sean Riley's fifth birthday party.

My dear friend, the lovely and talented Katie Brack, helped me out, playing "robot" to my "mad scientist". (the party theme was robots, we're not just, like, weird)

My first flaw was overthinking the whole thing. We had a soundtrack and all of the robot's lines were pre-recorded and mixed to have a, well, robotic sound to them. Genius, right?

Wrong.

Ever been in a room with 25 five-year-olds hopped up on toys and apple juice? It's loud. The sound was drowned out immediately-- I guess I didn't equalize the recording, so all of a sudden, Katie became a mute robot as the excited kids overpowered our teeny speakers.

My instinct around excited children is to get more excited! It's like when you see a puppy who is all excited and wagging its tail, you tend to speak in that high-pitched sound and not stop until its bouncing around. Not that I think kids are like puppies, but they all tend toward bouncy.

The first thing I forgot was that these kids are smart as whips. They cannot be fooled. Don't bother trying. I should have learned this lesson from doing the Dr. Nebula show at the Museum. Kids in New York know more than I did when I was their age. Christ, these kids know more than I do now!

The plan was to have the robot make a big entrance. The party was held in a party room off of the 7th floor outdoor deck, so I figured it would be neat to have Katie enter from outside. Only problem was when I went outside to get her, the door was locked from both sides (fancy magnetic locking system). So ran back inside, made some off-the-cuff comment about what great security they had in the building and dashed through the room and down the hall to where Katie was waiting. We entered and she began her robot dance.

One minute and thirty seconds doesn't sound like a long time when you're making a playlist, but when you're dancing like a maniac, it's an eternity. Note to self: all dance numbers should be kept to under 30 seconds.

Our next hurdle was the fact that these kids were just not buying the fact that Katie was a robot. No suspension of disbelief in the 5-and-under set. No, sir.

"She's not a robot, she's a human!"

Once one of them said it, they all said it. 25 five year olds chanting:

"She's not a robot, she's a human!" "She's not a robot, she's a human!" "She's not a robot, she's a human!"

It was like bad sci-fi, man.

I chose to ignore it and trudge forward with the show we had planned. As we were about to start a series of visual recognition games, the birthday boy tugged on the sleeve of my labcoat (yeah, I was in costume complete with helmet and nerdy glasses) and said in the sweetest most heart-melting voice ever:

"Robin, why did you change?"

I was the first to arrive at the party to help set up, and now all of a sudden I'm running around trying to kid wrangle looking like a chem-lab escapee. I'm telling ya, the kiddoes are smart.

Ultimately it worked out ok, although what I thought would last between 20-30 minutes maybe eeked out to ten. But the parents were happy, and Sean's mom told me this past weekend that the teacher said that the kids were talking about the crazy robot all week in school. Phew!

It was a really fun gig in retrospect, but I never had that level of panic when asked to do an Excel spreadsheet, pretend to have a headache or make a martini.


* I came really close to booking a promo gig for CBS yesterday. The clients really seemed to like my read and the casting director pulled me aside on the way back to the waiting room to say "you're really good at what you do. I have to call you in more." But the spot records today and I didn't get the call. Big bummer. The compliments are nice. Really nice, and rare. But you know what else is nice? A big fat paycheck. With residuals. I plan on making residuals a big part of my life in 2008. Resolution #1! Zing!

Mr. Movie Trailer, Stricken

You definitely know his voice. Not a lot of people know his name or what he looks like. But Don LaFontaine is the Voiceover Actor that all other Voiceover Actors aspire to (read: he's got the steadiest of gigs and makes more loot than anyone in the business).

Well, put your trailer recording on hold for a bit, because it seems that Don had something of an odd thing happen that left him (hopefully only temporarily), as he puts it, sounding like "a demented Munchkin" :

Last Wednesday, November 18th, I went to Cedars Sinai Hospital for a minor surgery, an outpatient procedure, which meant that I was to be discharged from the hospital after a couple of hours in recovery.

It didn't quite work out that way.

When I was wheeled down to the recovery area, my wife immediately noticed that my face was swollen. Very quickly thereafter, I blew up like the Stay Puft marshmallow man.

What had happened was this-- (and here the causes differ, depending on if you're talking to my surgeon or to me)--

My version: During the procedure, my left lung was nicked.

My surgeon's version; After the procedure, while in recovery, I must have coughed, and coughed hard enough to blow a small hole in my lung.

Whichever is true, the end result was the same--Pneumothorax, the presence of air or gas in the pleural cavity, the result of a collapsed lung.

Read the rest of the article here.

If anyone is recording a movie trailer and just can't wait for the Big Guy to get better, might I suggest the smooth vocals of a certain lady dear to you and me? I'm just sayin'...

Crap Nobody Needs for Xmas

Consider it an "anti-xmas list" of sorts...

• A voice-activated shopping list
  
• A microwavable teddy bear
• A $400 necklace made out of wood (on which to knock for luck-- with diamonds!)
  
• Leather Flower Vases ($295 each)
• Personalized Ice Cream ($49.95 for a 1/2 gallon)

And the list goes on.

If you're feeling generous and considering making donations at this time of year, check in with Will's cousins in Africa. Bebeth and her husband Mark are in South Africa after a stint in the Peace Corps and Courtney and her fiáncé Arthur are volunteering with an NGO in Tanzania.

They ask us to simply think before we wildly unload our crap to be sent off to the motherland, and they have written about it here (Courtney) and here (Mark, who puts it ever so sweetly, Africa doesn't need your junk).

Upcoming-- Tuesday, 18 Dec 07, 8pm

A reminder, friends and lovers of truly experimental theater and text:

Julia Lee Barclay is coming to town next week to present a reading of a new work, Besides, you lose your soul or the History of Western Civilization. Julia wrote Word to Your Mama, which I performed in London and New York back in 2003. Nearly everyone from that show, plus a couple of others who worked on the early stages of Julia's work will be involved in the reading.

I'm excited to get back together with everyone. And if Julia's work in London has continued down the same path, I imagine that Tuesday will offer a lot of surprises. Please join us if you can-- 8pm at The Brick. Here's the official invite:

You are cordially invited to attend a
performative-response to

Besides, you lose your soul or the History of Western Civilization
a new stage text
written and directed by
Julia Lee Barclay

performed by:
Bill Aitchison, Fred Backus, Maggie Cino, Nicole Higgins, Daniel O'Brien, Robin Reed, Julie Shavers and Eva van Dok.

December 18, 2007 at 8:00pm at The Brick 575 Metropolitan Ave. in Williamsburg
(between Union Ave and Lorimer St.) – take the L to Lorimer Street or G to Metropolitan.
For detailed directions, go to The Brick’s website www.bricktheater.com.

This event, the first manifestation of this new text and the first time Barclay has shown her work in New York since 2003, features an extremely talented veteran cast who have worked with Barclay over the years in NYC and London. They have experience with her style of working improvisationally with text, gesture and theatrical space, so this event will be more a performative response to Barclay's new text than a traditional reading - more jazz jam than chamber recital.

“Besides, you lose your soul” is the last line of an interview of a U.S. Army officer from a New Yorker article about the inefficiencies of the use of torture for gathering accurate information. Besides, you lose your soul attempts (with the humor that results from certain failure) to search through the remnants of Western Civilization in order to find out who's to blame for the creation of the individual soul (that can apparently be lost or recovered) which can lead to those we do not recognize being branded soul-less. It's a bumbling cut-up detective story searching for clues as to how to get out of this mess. ‘This mess’ meaning the use of God v. Godless (soul v. soul-less) to justify the ruthless realpolitik of all the unholy Holy Wars (on Terror, on the Godless Infidels, on the Axis of Evil, on women’s bodies, etc.). We will fail of course, but perhaps we will stumble onto something in the course of our struggling that can open up a door to...not sure where really.

Julia Lee Barclay is a self-exiled New Yorker living in London in full flight from the Bush administration. She accidentally started a theatre company in 2004 from a month-long lab, which has been called Apocryphal Theatre (www.flyingoutofsequence.org). Apocryphal (meaning "of dubious authorship or authenticity") has since produced plays and experimental lab showings in theatres, art galleries and music venues internationally. Work created in collaboration with Bill Aitchison under the name AB has been commissioned and produced in Finland, Germany and Portugal. Before fleeing to London in 2003, she lived in NYC where her work was awarded, published (Plays and Playwrights 2001) and produced in many venues and festivals, such as The Present Company, HERE (American Living Room), Mabou Mines, Ohio Theatre (Soho Think Tank) and FringeNYC.

After the performance, we would be happy if you stayed to give us your feedback.

Because Why Not Start the Week Off Goofy?

I don't watch Saturday Night Live much at all anymore, but their Digital Shorts seem to get passed on by a link in an email, and the ones I've seen (ie Dick in a Box) have been pretty funny.

I just started perusing the beta version of a new online TV thingie (I think) called Hulu, and found this one, cleverly titled "People Punched Before Eating".

Happy Monday! I'm off to audition for a gum commercial (and maybe punch a few hungry suckers!)

Au Revoir, Parapluie at BAM

I saw this show at BAM the other night, and I can't recommend it strongly enough! Here, an excerpt from my review:

Stop reading this right now, go to bam.org and get tickets for this show. If you know any children, get them a ticket too—it will immortalize you in their memory years on end, that amazing show you brought them to see that expanded their imaginations beyond any heretofore seen parameters. They will thank you.

And if you can’t make it while they’re at BAM, book your tickets to Sydney. Yes, Australia. You know you’ve been meaning to get there-- it’s the next stop on their tour. In other words: this is one you do not want to miss.

I’m serious. Au Revoir Parapluie (Farewell, Umbrella) is simply inspiring, the dream from which you won’t want to wake. Not since reading C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a child have I gone on a more fantastical journey into a timeless and fully captivating world.

The rest of my review is here.

Buy tickets here.
Watch a video preview (but not if you're going to see the show-- the surprises are so delightful!) here.

It runs through 12/16.

High Rents Drive Out Artists. Duh!

It’s an old story, but let’s hear it again: Up go the rents, out go the artists. A new report from the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia's Teachers College makes the case that New York real estate values are driving artists to lower-cost cities and that the city’s cultural capital is endangered, according to an article in today's Sun.

(From Brownstoner, via the New York Sun)

And they're really just touching on visual artists here. The artists interviewed were between the ages of 62 and 97. I moved here when I was 23, lucked my way into a rent-stabilized roommate situation in the East Village which skyrocketed (but was still "a deal") when my lease-holding roommate moved out. That apartment today, a 3-BR on Avenue C, which rented for about $1750 in 1997, rents at over $3000. And yes, we had a mouse problem when they were gutting the storefront last year to make room for a bank. Now that neighborhood is filled with places like this.

I wonder if there are kids moving here today the way I did-- with less than $1000 to my name (like, In The Whole World-- no secret savings accounts or parental stipends), but naïve enough to figure that it could work. Nearly ten years later, rents have skyrocketed beyond all semblance of control, but most acting jobs still don't pay enough to actually live here, nevermind comfortably. The theaters I worked in, bundled in my winter coat because the window got smashed or the proprietor didn't turn on the heat, have all gone or are going condo or have been replaced by bars or restaurants. Luckily, some have found new homes (Collective Unconscious) and new places created in Williamsburg (the Brick, the Battle Ranch) and Long Island City (the Chocolate Factory), to name a few.

An open letter to people who have to ask this question: Yes. We need affordable housing. Even if we are white, college-educated kids who come from what used to be the middle class. We are your waiters. We are your bartenders. We are your office temps who shut down Excel when you don't know how. And unless you plan to really jack up how much you tip, save us a place to live.

Really. Are the tourists going to want to keep coming to visit to see all the Hedge Fund Managers in the city?

I'm telling ya, Berlin is looking really good right now. Where did I put those German language tapes?

Attention Stand-up Comics and Handcuff Manufacturers

Advertising on cop cars. This should be fun. Wait. Might there not be some sort of morality issue here?

If Jackson Pollack Went Digital

Fun time-passer.

via Stumble Upon.

Oh, Weather!

Did you guys know that it still snows in the Northeast?! Amazing!! Geez, yesterday I was all excited that the leaves had finally started changing. One day of fall, then *BOOM* full-blown winter.

Where's my snow tube?

Nostalgia

A friend of mine emailed the other day about an art show she was involved in in Chicago. I emailed friends of mine in Chicago to let them know. I haven't talked to this one friend that I met back in my Northampton days for a while, so I checked in on his website.

I remembered that he had turned me onto this band, whose 1998 album I still listen to today, some ten years after it's release-- some songs are on my top played list on my iPod. I remembered that they had played this bar in the East Village when I first moved to the city, so I looked around the internet to see if they were still doing New York gigs.

Sadly, they disbanded in 2002, each moving onto other projects. The lead singer and über personality of the group has added an interesting new facet of his career. The bassist has done some solo stuff and joined another band, in which the drummer of the defunct band is also a member. That drummer has also done solo stuff. But the band I remember seeing at the local drink (also now defunct, or rather, turned into a, um.... nicer place?) is gone. A passing of time, of sorts.

I had a lot of fun during my three + years in Northampton. It was a college town, with it's cultural heart built by Boston and New York artsy refugees and it's primary twenty-something residents in the mid-to-late 90s when I was there were a mix of guys in bands, townies, college kids. We all worked in the same handful of local restaurants and ran to last call at the same handful of bars each night.

I had nary a care in the world when I lived there, so I always look back on my time there with a daydreamy lovingness. There are small pockets of Brooklyn that remind me somewhat of Northampton. I think that's why I like it so much here.

Now, I guess I'll return to my regularly-scheduled life. *sigh*