Category: uncategorized

Members of the Avenue Q cast were on Live with Regis and Kelly yesterday morning as part of a “Broadway Week” segment. They sang “I Wish I Could Go Back to College” (otherwise fine, but the opening applause drowned out the vamp, so Stephanie D’Abruzzo missed her cue; she quickly recovered, truncating the second line of the song). And John Tartaglia and Stephanie came back on later with puppet versions of Regis and Kelly. Rick Lyon was Gelman. (And I’d be remiss were I to leave out Jennifer Barnhart.) Very cute. Puppet Kelly to the real Kelly: “Hey, aren’t you Faith Ford?”

Other shows featured this week are Wonderful Town, Little Shop of Horrors, Caroline, or Change, and Bombay Dreams.

Bill Clinton’s book My Life is out today, and most reviewers think it’s a big rambling yawn. (Could someone have at least jazzed up the title?) What a shame. Not exactly One Hundred Years of Solitude, I guess. I’ll judge for myself. I ordered my copy online yesterday, and it should arrive in a couple of days.

[Update (23 June): Slate reads My Life so you don’t have to (“The Condensed Bill Clinton” via kottke.org).]

One year ago today, Thom and I met for the first time. (Did we ever pin down an “anniversary” date?) Last year, after leaving comments on each other’s blogs and e-mailing back and forth for a while, we decided to meet up at a Kinsey Sicks concert at the Birchmere. Neither of us considered it a date, but–looking back, it was rather date-like; I even remember when we said our goodbyes in the car, thinking, “Do I kiss him?”–it’s turned into one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

How do you measure a year in the life? How about love?

So I’m getting back to the library books I borrowed a couple of weeks ago, and am now reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I haven’t read any Woolf before–I remember To the Lighthouse being on the syllabus for my freshman “civ” class in college; alas, like so many assigned texts, it went unread–but I’m liking her prose (despite her almost-obsession with semicolons). It has a poetic flow, almost like it’s meant to be spoken rather than read. I find myself lingering over phrases and turning them over in my head. Right now I’m about ten or so pages into it, and apart from its iconic opening line (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”), which as an aside evokes for me the perpetual motion of the movie The Hours, the following is my favorite passage so far. Go ahead, read it aloud. Relish it.

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Ahh.

More aside: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway inspired Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was adapted for the screen by David Hare, whose play The Blue Room I am seeing tonight. Oh, the curious happenstance.

Isn’t it interesting and rather frightening how sometimes one tiny event, otherwise innocuous, can just set you off? After work the other day I went to my pièd-a-terre to check the mail and so forth, then got on the Metro to meet Thom at Pentagon City as usual. The train I was on stopped between stations for a while, and when it arrived at Foggy Bottom, the driver told us we had to off-load the train. Now this has happened before, and normally I’m rather laid-back–que será, será–but I was surprised to find myself frazzled. What’s going on? How long were we going to be here?

I, along with hundreds of fellow passengers, got off the train and joined hundreds more waiting on the platform. My tolerance for swirling, massive crowds of Metro commuters has been slowly diminishing over the past few months. Maybe I should take after Sarah Vowell:

The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens and I kept whispering under my breath “we the people, we the people” over and over again, reminding myself we’re all in this together and they had as much right–exactly as much right–as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

I was already running late, and remembering that my cell phone doesn’t receive a signal in the Metro–a plague on your house, Sprint PCS!–I scrambled for change and went and stood in line for a pay phone–fifty cents? why, back in my day…–to call Thom and apprise him of the situation.

A minute or so later, while I was still standing in line, the train that had been off-loaded and just sitting there was back up and running, and letting people board again. A little exasperated, I got back on, and resumed my journey. When I finally got home, I just started crying. Again I surprised myself with my visceral reaction. I couldn’t explain it. Had a variety of smaller, manageable stresses just given way under the featherweight of a Metro delay? In those few moments of underground confusion, I felt so stuck, lost, disconnected. And now I was so happy to be home. “We the people, we the people…”

Aside: Metro has just approved a fare hike, effective June 27. Great.

Earlier today, I went out to the Trader Joe’s on Wisconsin Avenue to get lunch with some of the girls from work–I make it sound like a secretarial pool; just call me Millie Graydon–and there I picked up a “Mid East Feast,” a package containing falafel, tahini, hummus, and tabouli, with pita bread, perfect for lunch on the go. Yum. While it’s not spectacular–the falafel is a bit dry and hard from refrigeration–it’s still pretty good. Especially after walking in the midday heat and humidity, when hitherto all you’ve had to eat is a bagel.

Speaking of food, this month’s Washingtonian magazine contains its annual “cheap eats” review of the best bargain restaurants in the area.

A bunch of links about which I’ve been meaning to blog but around to which I haven’t gotten:

• Our cat Alex is so well-behaved when it comes to, uh, the litter box. Slate contributor and cat-owner Emily Yoffe is not so lucky; my favorite phrase in the whole article has to be “CSI: Cat Pee” (“Dirty Litter Secret” in Slate, 15 June).
• You know I do love a nice piece of luggage. Seth Stevenson reviews six brands of carry-on suitcases (“It’s in the Bag” in Slate, 3 June).
• As part of its “get your history straight and your nightlife gay” campaign, the Philadelphia tourism board has released a TV commercial aimed at gay tourists (2 June). Aside: The other day, perusing the HRC magazine, Equality, I came across an especially cute ad for Mitchell Gold–all their ads are cute, I know–so I visited their website and it turns out they have an archive of all their ads. Nice.
• The Economist presents the latest version of its Big Mac index, which measures cross-country purchasing-power parity in terms of Big Mac prices (“Food for thought,” 27 May). Of the initial countries surveyed, the Philippine price is the cheapest ($1.23), meaning the peso is the most undervalued against the dollar. The most expensive is in Switzerland at $4.90. When the survey’s additional countries are taken into account, the least and most expensive Big Macs are in Morocco ($0.26) and Kuwait ($7.33), respectively.
• I suppose it’s no surprise that many teachers struggle to make ends meet. Dave Eggers offers a reflection, and presents a few moonlighting teachers in their own words (“Reading, Writing, and Landscaping” in Mother Jones, May/June).

Wow. The Madonna concert on Sunday night was off the hook. More on that in a moment. The whole day was gay, gay, gay. Thom and I went downtown to Pennsylvania Avenue and caught the last hour or so of the Pride festival… where we took our pants down. Well, we ran into Thom’s friend Paul, who was working the Utilikilts booth, and we tried on some kilts. You know we’re all for men’s unbifurcated garments. They didn’t have one in my size right there, but now I know what size and length to get online. So yeah, we had a nice time strolling along, stopping here and there to check out a few of the booths.

When the festival wrapped up, we headed up 7th Street in search of dinner. Jaleo was packed, so we walked around the corner to Austin Grill instead, where they were already getting into the groove: Madonna songs were playing in a loop on the loudspeaker. (Aside: the two people at the table next to us were having a conversation about the musical Wicked, which one of them had seen and was animatedly describing to the other. I kind of wanted to chime in, but I can never get myself to jump into other people’s conversations, you know?)

So the event of the evening was the Madonna concert at the MCI Center. It was amazing. We were sitting in section 110, in the second row up from the floor, and I have to say, though we were a bit past mid-court, our slightly elevated seats must’ve been better than the (I’m assuming more expensive) floor seats in front of us, especially for us height-challenged people.

The show got started at about 8:30 p.m., and then for two hours it ran nonstop like a well-oiled machine. (Insert innuendo here.) Madonna looked and sounded great. And with the stunning video-art projected onto the huge screens, it was a feast for the senses. Talk about reinvention. Practically every song, old and new, had a new spin: reimagined, rearranged, renewed. “Into the Groove” with bagpipes… and a cameo by Missy Elliott on video? “Die Another Day” as a tango? Yes, you say, bring it on. And such energy. I was up and dancing and singing for most of the show; however, partway through I painfully realized that at the volume I was singing along and cheering, I would lose my voice by the end of the night. So I eased up on the high-pitched squealing. (A hardcore fan in the row in front of us was a bit more enthusiastic; she was kind of scary.)

I’ll save myself the trouble of writing a song-by-song review, and instead link to Andy, who has a comprehensive, spot-on rundown of the L.A. concert, which had basically the same set list. (The entire show seems so meticulously ordered and orchestrated that I can’t imagine it varying much on the road.) The Post review is somewhat lukewarm, but recognizes this was no mere rock concert: “measured in verve, nerve, and technical wizardry, it’s hard to leave this epic extravaganza feeling anything less than awe.” True.