a few candid shots

just thought you'd like to see what my work day world looks like these days.

i'm starting to have a lot of fun but that's usually when everything comes to a crashing halt and the show closes and its time to go home. the truth is, this is the vacation i really needed. and there's more work waiting for me when i get back to the city. thank God. more on that later. in the meantime...


this is my station. it's very very basic. thankfully, i don't need much -- in part because i know what i'm doing when i put on make-up.


this is what i look like when i'm almost finished. the dress i wear is strapless. i bundle up until i have to go on because it's always freezing backstage.


here's a glimpse of the guy's dressing room, about 20 minutes before the show starts. that's ryan with the mandolin, by the way. he plays the big bopper, amongst several other parts. in the opening, he's in "the hayriders" a country band that plays on a live broadcast out of lubbock, tx.



this is buddy holly and the crickets : (from l to r) devon on bass, chris on drums and eric as buddy on guitar.


this is lauren, the wardrobe mistress.


this is becky, the wig mistress.


this is lisa, the wig/hair designer.


this is sam, the dresser who lives under my skirt. my strapless gown has a petticoat that has to be readjusted when i put it on, so she gets down there and yanks it into position. what a gal!


the costumes get mended and cleaned constantly. needless to say, there's no food or drink allowed in the dressing rooms and there's no eating anything while you're wearing one. not even gum.



this is me and jermaine, noshing on oatmeal chocolate chip cookies at intermission in our underwear. he has got to be one of the funniest people i've ever met. we were on the bridge with carl for the top of act 2 (the three of us do a jingle for astoria cigarettes, which is apparently where buddy holly got the melody for "that'll be the day") and the stage managers kept flashing a light on us, to make sure that we were all there. so out of nowhere, jermaine blurts out, can't you see that we're all up here? what do you want us to do, open our eyes wider and smile? there was a pause, and then we couldn't stop laughing. i told him that he must've had a side of fruit of islam with his black power cereal that morning. trippy.

earlier today, he and mario gave me a bottle of newfangled strawberry gatorade that said "fierce!" on it. (i love strawberries!) needless to say, i have no intentions of ever opening it. speaking of mario...


here he is, working his magic. believe it or not, he looks exactly like john leguizamo. or fred ward. i can't decide which. he plays ritchie valens so well, the little old ladies have been calling the office asking about him. he says if there's a hot meal in it for him, he's down. i promised the local lady librarian that i would bring him into the library to sign her program. she's seen the show at least three times and i know she doesn't believe me. when i told him about it, i said oh -- i should have told her to bake you something! and for a moment he looked genuinely sad and said yeah, you should have.


this is daryl, the choreographer. she just graduated from nyu's tisch school of the arts with a musical theater major. i don't know how she puts up with my two left feet.


this is me and my friend, sitting inside green shutters cafe.


and last but not least: this is my favorite lunch (l) from the green shutters cafe (r) (that's what it looks like as you turn the corner to enter from parking) -- the most perfect cobb salad imaginable. everything is fresh, crisp and delicious. the cold things are cold and the hot things (the chicken, the bacon) are hot. yum.

this is where i work

my friend in repose at emerson park
Originally uploaded by queenesther.

the theater i'll be performing in sits snugly in emerson park, on the edge of lake oswego. all of it is breathtakingly gorgeous. the river that runs through the city takes you all the way to canada, which is surprisingly nearby. when the sun is shining, this is a lovely place. no wonder this was a stop on the underground railroad. no wonder harriett tubman went to canada, retrieved her parents and brought them back to live here, in a house that's right up the street from where i stay.

auburn is a weird place. wierd, wierd, wierd.

there's a 24 hour wal-mart, there's a taco bell and a wendy's and a mall with a food court and a bass pro-shop. there's even a 24 hour wegman's for good measure, to give wal-mart a little competition. rite-aid. mc donald's. lots of stuff i glimpse and recognize from someplace else. that kind of stuff carries it own sadness, for the way that it's destroying communities and the general health and welfare of the populace. mostly, there are a neverending parade of old buildings and houses that i've never seen before, with their bay windows and turrets and elaborate verandas and massive back and front yards, that make everything seem worn and strange. and haunted. if it's true that things carry the energy of the person or the thing that was there before, these edifices are weighed down with so much history, they practically glow with an ethereal presence that shimmers with otherworldliness. and so i am fascinated. and because i love history as much as i do, i am intrigued and entralled and genuinely curious about this little town and every victorian house i see. but there is a lot of sadness here, the kind that permeates you from the inside out. it feels like somebody died.

welcome to the northeast, my friend wisecracked.

he arrived on monday to see wednesday's opening night performance. although i was at the theater most of the time doing ten out of twelves (scheduled for two days in a row), we managed to spend some quality time together at emerson park where the theater is located, walking around oswego lake and sitting and taking in the day. he said that i sounded like a five year old because everytime i saw a bird, i thought it was a duck.

Funny thing. There were inmates from the local prison tending to the grounds at the entrance to the theater when we were on our way to the lake. I forgot my camera and went inside to retrieve it. One of them said hello to me as I passed by. I smiled at him and spoke. He was smaller than the others and brown skinned, with long kinky brown hair. I expected him to say something. why shouldn't he? it's our black thing.

As i exited the theater, another one pulled his shades down to the tip of his nose with one finger as he held a weed trimmer in his other hand. I had shades on, so I could watch him watching me. He looked like the kind of hayseed I’d seen a million times over: skinny legs stuck underneath a round belly that made him look like a bullfrog standing up; greasy hair that was a little too black, with the kind of white skin that tans a little too easily; rolled up sleeves, an upturned collar and a tilt in his walk. Prison wasn’t going to kill his style. Oh, no. He gave me a long slow stare, like i had him hypnotized, just to let me know that he was looking and he liked what he saw. When I got within 3 feet of him, he said hello politely, and I smiled and greeted him. All of the prisoners stopped working to watch this exchange. Even the guard in the car was paying attention. I had absolutely no idea why.

My friend says they’re from jail, not prison, for stuff like bounced checks -- but there is no jail here. I guess he was taking the bite out of us walking through the park with them drifting around and tending the grounds, and the strong possibility that I would see them again. As it turns out, Becky the wig lady told me that when she got here, she was told that she'd probably never see an inmate because most of them are in prison for life. I couldn’t help but wonder what each of the inmates that I saw working quietly in the sun did to end up there.

My friend and I can't seem to agree as to whether or not we're in the suburbs. he thinks we are because the countryside to him is when you have to drive for two or three hours to get to a grocery store and you shop knowing that you're stocking up for the next month or two. he cites his favorite locations in new mexico as examples. i think we're in the countryside because although there are houses and backyards and such, there is farmland and farm equipment everywhere, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and space. i cite my uncle's place in walterboro as an example of what i mean. semi-rural? semi-suburban? i can't tell from here. when i think i'm in the suburbs, something around me feels like the countryside and vice versa. Back and forth.

my friend was trying to say that this was our first visit to the suburbs together, the suburbs being a bastion of normalcy and decorum that we don't have in the city and certainly not a city like our fair metropolis. the truth is, new york city is basically a monochromatic strip mall, filled with college students, fashion victims and dilletantes posing as musicians and actors, almost all of them anglo and almost all of them from somewhere else. there is no multicultural explosion of ideas and politics and cool. take a walk through the lower east side on a saturday night. it's like a portal from somewhere in the midwest opened up at the corner of stanton and ludlow and let out all these screaming drunken white twentysomethings that are living the new york city that they saw on sex and the city. not that there's anything wrong with that but who else could possibly afford it?

auburn feels wierder than new york city ever did. more authentically wierd. new york city is where people go to affect the kind of wierdness that's in a place like auburn on an ordinary day. i used to believe that the real freaks and wierdos lived in new york city but now my theory is that they've either retreated to small towns like auburn because they know how bogus new york city really is or they’ve never left those places to check any of it out because the new york city that they’re imagining is way more dangerous and edgy than the one that actually exists. That’s the reason why a lot of people I know never left home to do their art. They were completely intimidated by everything they’d seen in the movies or heard from the people who returned home because they couldn’t cut it.

my friend says that sometimes he wants to disappear to a town like this and live in a big cool house and do his art. i think that's the right idea. famous people do it all the time, mostly because once you establish yourself with what you do, you can live where ever you want. when carole king was at the height of her fame with the album tapestry, she moved to idaho with her second husband and raised her two kids. oleta adams lives in kansas city. julia roberts lives on a ranch in new mexico. and everybody knows where demi moore lives.

i would love to live in a big old victorian house here but my friend says if i can't take the cold weather in the city, i definitely couldn't take the snow upstate.

Today is another 12 hour tech rehearsal – noon to midnight – but hopefully we’ll wander through emerson park again and then to green shutters café for a cobb salad. My friend is convinced that they make the best food in town. He's right, so far.

So many ducks, so little time.

the rehearsal space

the rehearsal space
Originally uploaded by queenesther.

this has been the largest room of my work space for the initial 12 days of rehearsal in auburn, new york for "the buddy holly story." it's a gym on the 2nd floor of westminster presbyterian church, a stone's throw away from where i live -- a place called king's court, interestingly enough. right next door is queen's court. i think they're both haunted. actually, i think everything here is haunted -- but that's another conversation.

there are two other spaces in the church to flesh out movement and vocals respectively -- the loft and the junior room, where we all first met -- but this is the one where the rock and roll happens. and it needs to be. a part of what makes this show so wonderful is the fact that the music comes alive right in front of you -- not with any of the traditional trappings of musical theater like an orchestra pit but with guitar, drums and upright bass. really simple, straightforward stuff.

it's all been kind of refreshing for me, actually. listening to these three chord rock songs that are on the radio all the time, recorded by everyone. i first heard "it's so easy" by linda rondstadt when the eagles were her backing band. and i first heard james taylor singing "everyday" -- it still blows me away that buddy holly wrote that song. it has me rethinking my songwriting and song structure. not that it needed an overhaul but i'd like to give that three chord magic a try. there's something fresh and uncomplicated about it. maybe my ears needed a vacation. i know i did.

no one can figure out my part in the show when i tell them that i'm in it. here's a big fat clue: buddy holly and the crickets were the first all white act to play the apollo theater in harlem. i play the singer that shares the bill with them. i get to look beautiful and sing two or three songs with this massively huge showstopping moment in a gorgeous strapless gown. it's an unexpected moment and it ends the first act, so it's got to be action-packed. and it is.

my part is called "the apollo singer." go figure.

fever in, fever out

the fever broke.

everything was pushed back by an hour today and then we did a run through this morning with notes. after the lunch break, we reviewed the second act and worked on all the back-up singer movement stuff. everything is so much tighter than everyone thought it was, and i feel ultra-confident about everything that i'm doing. clearly, this week's hard work has paid off. thank God i'm not freaking out anymore. tomorrow we do a run through for the producers late in the day. it's starting to feel like fun.

i think everyone went drinking at a bar somewhere nearby. alcohol? ha. not me. i'm watching basic cable and giving myself a manicure/pedicure while noshing on stouffer's lasagna, all by myself, with my baby taylor within easy reach. and i'm in heaven! it's criminal, how happy i am right now. yessir, folks -- it just don't get no better than this.

the strange thing is, just about everything is closed already because it's memorial day weekend. the ymca won't open up until tuesday. sam's is definitely closed. and the mall is just not an option. i guess the more patriotic you are, the more likely you are to shut things down and put your flag out as soon as the weekend hits, so everyone will know whose side you're on. (and there's flags all up and down their main street.) in the city, everything will be closed but only on monday -- and everything only means "official" things, like banks and the post office. it's moments like this when i realize that nyc has spoiled me rotten. i'm so used to getting whatever i want whenever i want. when it's 3am, i can hit the post office and send packages, i can go to a bar or eat a meal or lounge in a cafe if i feel like it, i can hit the gym. i can even go bowling. i can even take public transportation to get to whereever i'm going. not so in auburn. or anyplace else that i can think of.

i hope i won't want anything before tuesday.

Fever Pitch

We open The Buddy Holly Story at The Merry-Go-Round Playhouse next Wednesday. I've never even seen the place. I don't even know where it is. We do a run-through for the producers on Sunday. It’s Friday and we have yet to run through the entire show. We’re rehearsing every day, every single day, no let up, no day off. My friend shows up on Monday for 3 days. What kind of fun are we going to have in Auburn? The victorian architecture fascinates me and Harriet Tubman's house is up the street but I have yet to venture past the Wegmans a few blocks away. I've been that busy.

I’m way more stressed than I think I am. I have moments when I wake up abruptly in the middle of the night in a panic, convinced that I’ve forgotten something vital. I know that feeling very well. It first came to me as a temp in my early years in NYC, working in some crummy law firm in midtown. I would wake up in a cold sweat, unsure as to whether or not I actually sent the fax to Helsinki or if I cc’ed all of the people on the list or if that package went out FedEx or UPS – or if it went out at all. Maybe it didn’t get sent and they’d find out that I was responsible and I’d get canned. My heart would be pounding like there was a hammer in my chest trying to bang its way out. Seriously. It’s that feeling all over again.

I’m not eating all that much, either. I’m not eating at night because of my acid reflux. If I nosh past 9pm, I run the risk of losing my voice. I’m not singing much but I am singing at the top of my range. I have to be careful. And yeah, I cut the junk food completely. I just don’t have time to sit around and chew on anything. Not even gum. I’m drinking a lot of water because there’s a cooler at the rehearsal space and nobody cares if I tank up all day and before I go home in the evening. I usually work out before and occasionally after rehearsal, to get that freak out feeling off of me. I don’t go to sleep easily. I don’t wake up easily. Food is no fun. And the guitar isn’t fun yet. It’s still work. The only thing I really enjoy is sleeping.

Once this musical is on its legs and all of the movement is in my body, this will be a lot of fun. I can turn my attention towards refining the songs that I’ve written for the cds I want to produce and figure out what else I want to get out of my summer. Like a really happy birthday at the end of June. Some serious beach time with my friend. A nice lump sum of money in my ING savings account. Well-organized receipts. My driver’s license.

Still and all, there are moments when I am blown away, imagining that Harriett Tubman walked these streets so close to her home. This is the place where she lived free. And here I am, right up the block. All I can think is, it's not in a book. It's not in a made-for-tv movie. I always knew that it was true but all of a sudden, it's real. She's real. Slavery really happened. And it didn't happen all that long ago. That's an astonishing thing.

so far, so good

Although I’m supposed to rehearse from 10am – 6pm, that’s not written in stone at all. When I come in depends on what they decide to work on first. There have been some days when I’ve been able to have my entire mornings all to myself. The cast is small, everyone is friendly and works hard, the town and its surroundings are kitsch enough to keep me interested and I get to live alone, which is turning into more of a luxury than I can handle. A lot of the cast members live in the same housing situation – six of them in one unit, I was told – so there’s a lot of bonding that’s going on that I’m not a part of, which is kind of a relief. I’m basically a shy person and aside from the everyday niceties of hello and goodbye, I’m happy to run back to my place and do my finger excercises. I didn’t come here to make friends, although it would be a beautiful thing if that happened. I’m treating this like a fat farm. I came here to get out of the city and get my body back. My friend says I’m losing weight. So far, so good.

The interesting thing about rehearsals is that it’s a very basic rock and roll set up onstage – and that never happens in musical theater. The last half of the second act actually recreates Buddy Holly’s last show in Clear Lake, Iowa. The music is usually in a pit between the audience and the actors. So there are musicians onstage with the actors and some of them are actors and some of them are musicians with one line here and there and some of them are just musicians who are just reading their way through it. Most of the songs are three and four chord ditties, like Oh Boy. And yeah, I’m learning how to play them on guitar, just for fun. I actually brought my guitar in so I could tune it and the MD let me use his tuner (I’m going to get one just like it – you clip it to the headstock and it tunes by vibration) and let me have as many picks as I wanted.

One thing, though. Recently at the impromptu dinner party right before I skipped town with kimson and gabe and my friend at a. bistro, kimson asked me what I did all day, because I don’t have a day job. He wasn’t being snide, either. He genuinely wanted to know. In retrospect, I don’t know if I answered him very well. Now I’m wishing I had. It would explain a part of what I’m going through right now.

Much of my life as an actor is all about maintainance and upkeep. The growth is constant. And it’s a full-time job. I’m always working towards some minor improvement that leads to conquering a major thing. I know some singers who are proud of the fact that they’ve never had a voice lesson or don’t know how to play and instrument or can’t read music (One friend used to point at lead sheets and say, “That may as well be Chinese.”) But it was Betty Carter who said that every vocalist should know their way around a keyboard. The payoff for me is when I get a gig like this and I’m given a stack of sheet music – and I understand it. But I wouldn’t have that understanding if I hadn’t sat down and plunked away at my piano every other day for the past 6 months or so. And I have to admit -- learning how to play the guitar is changing my life. By being leaner and stronger physically means that I’ll photograph differently and that’ll make me more viable for film and tv work. So I work out every day to get there and to maintain it once I have it. And then there’s auditioning. Anyone that’s unemployed treats getting a job like a full time job until they get one. Smart actors are no exception. You hone your job skills by taking class, learning monologues, building your repertoire vocally until you have a book that’s filled with songs from every genre. Learning to sing if you don’t know how, because knowing how to do more than one thing well means you’re more likely to work. These things are hard to quantify to someone that’s used to punching a clock to make a living.

I think doing this show would be a really difficult moment for me to get through if I hadn’t done the day-to-day work that most straight (working joe) people don’t’ understand when I tell them that I don’t have a job. I never know how much I’ve progressed until I’m put in a situation where I have to deliver. And wow. I’ve grown a lot. I need to give myself some credit. I need to work harder.

I need to learn how to drive.

it's all a blur...

On Saturday morning, I took a train back to NYC to sing in a wedding at Gramercy Park. I had to. When JC told the bride and groom that I would be unavailable, they said that they wouldn’t hire the band without me. JC didn’t have to twist my arm for long. it was great money -- but that 6 hour train ride would be bloody torture. And as if a round-trip rough ride weren’t enough to look forward to, my head was filled with springtime allergy-related snot and mucus. Auburn was freezing and in bloom. I could hardly breathe. My portable medicine chest came in handy but every night as I went to bed, I felt as though I was only holding something at bay for the moment. if I didn’t find something to knock it out completely, it would knock my voice out. Needless to say, I have no understudy. We rehearse for 12 days. It’s only a two week run.

I don’t have anything that strong in my arsenal. Fortunately, Shell White did. And because she’s such a California hippie, it’s all natural – Buried Treasure ACF. She said their daughter Tigerlily woke up coughing like she had tuberculosis a few weeks ago. They gave her some of this stuff and a few days later, she was fine. They sent it to her teacher at her day school when she had the same symptoms. Same results. I was desperate enough to try anything short of a booster shot and steroids from my voice doctor – that’s always a last (but sometimes necessary) resort. JC gave me a little package at the gig – the bottle of stuff, some herbal tea, some zinc lozenges. I took a dose immediately and again at bedtime as directed. The next morning had me practically vomiting up phlegm. Now that’s what I call results.

But that’s the end of the story.

First of all, I was exhausted. The train station was in Syracuse, more than 30 minutes away. Someone was to pick me up at 8:30am but I was afraid that I’d oversleep so I asked my friend to call me when he got home from work at the crack of ass. He decided to call me while he was still there, for some strange reason – then he puts Scotty the Blue Bunny on the phone. After an introductory “wake up!” that was loud enough to make a dead man roll over, he launches into “There’s Got To Be A Morning After” at the top of his lungs, after which he goes into this long winding rant about how wrong it is that this ditty isn’t in the Poseidon remake. When my friend got back on the phone, he actually wondered why I was, in his words, “a little crabby.” I was wondering why he was, in my words, a little clueless. Am I in trouble, he said in a tiny voice. How could he be? He did what told him to do. All that was left to do is sieze the day. The Y opened at 5am. I always figure that the best way to fight sickness is to exercise. So I put in about an hour on an exercise machine and I lifted weights. Oy.

I ended up getting to the train station in time to watch the 8:30am to Penn Station leave, then finding out I should have caught it because my 9:20am would be arriving at 10:50am. Nice. All I could think was, if I knew how to drive, this would have taken 4 hours...

Once I got to the gig, everything smoothed itself out. They got married at the arts club which is an absolutely gorgeous place to tie the knot. In no time at all, guests started to arrive, the open bar began to flow and delicious things began to flow from out of the kitchen. To be completely honest, I’m still thinking about the lobster rolls. The food was spectacular. A nice touch: towards the end of the evening, the groom went to each band member, thanked them for a wonderful performance and tipped them fifty bucks. The bride let me take a bouquet home to my friend, who complained sweetly that his little place is starting to smell like a blooming greenhouse, thanks to last week’s private gala.

You’re living the life of a superstar, he remarked, jet-setting all over new york state. You’d better get used to it.

Hmm, I thought. In a way, he’s right. That benefit we did on Monday in Brooklyn garnered an invitation to play a private party at The Pierre Hotel this Wednesday. They didn't want the band without me (is this a running theme or what?) so they agreed to pay my travel expenses to make sure that i wouldn't say no. it'll be over before 10pm. i wonder what they'll serve? I’m already rethinking the way I pack things in general and the ideal piece of carry-on luggage.

this time, i'm flying in. thank Jesus.

i'm gone to auburn

i spent the last few days in nyc organizing my closets and changing out my seasonal clothes, picking up some last minute things (like stocking up my medicine bag), mailing things i'd need to my new address (like a humidifier -- so important!) and throwing things away. i was sad to leave my friend but i had to come back on saturday for a private party at the arts club in gramercy park and again on the following wednesday at the pierre hotel so of course we figured our way around how we'd see each other. very sweet.

on sunday, we went to a. bistro in brooklyn for a farewell dinner, sort of -- ralph and i closed the place down the night before, believe it or not (yes, the food is that wonderful) -- and ended up sharing a table with two people i hadn't seen in a long time -- kimson (i met him at ubo back in the day) and gabe (i met him through garland). kimson is directing the venture brothers, one of my favorite cartoons on adult swim. gabe is in film and he's bicoastal. both of them are as cool and as geeky as ever. we did all kinds of catching up and bonding. at the end of the night, gabe took a picture of all of us in front of the restaurant. it was beautiful. the only one missing (besides ralph, of course) was garland.

the benefit with the band on monday night, packing on tuesday. all of a sudden, there was no time left and i found myself on a six-hour train ride headed upstate, to syracuse. it was exhausting and i don't know why. there was plenty of room around me seating-wise but for some reason i was surrounded by several spectacularly overweight people who wouldn't stop eating and cracking jokes. i had nothing but a large flask of bottled water, which i sipped judiciously to keep my throat from drying out. it was also freezing cold and that meant no sleep at all. little did i know -- the cold was something that i'd have to get used to, and quickly. auburn is quite close to canada. it won't warm up until i'm ready to leave.

while awaiting my luggage, i met a fellow castmate chris who's also a drummer. almost everyone in the show plays an instrument, sings and acts. matt, our contact from the theater, was right on time and in no time at all, he took us to our living quarters. i'm staying in an old mansion that was built in 1840 called king's court. there's another building next door called queen's court that's just as arcane and stately. my room is sparse but roomy, with old otherworldly touches, like sconces, that dot the walls. ugly carpeting. lovely bathroom. and i can't argue with a kitchen with a microwave, no matter how old and tiny the oven is. the kicker? i live alone. completely and utterly alone. i can come home from the theater, pull the shades and watch adult swim naked while i practice guitar and eat raspberries. in my world, it simply doesn't get much better than that.

here's an interesting detail: auburn is a 35 - 40 minute drive from syracuse. there's no shuttle service. a cab ride would cost something like $60. the trip would have taken all of four hours from nyc, door-to-door. God, that train ride really wore me out. all of a sudden, probably for the first time in my life, i sincerely wished that i could drive.

i've decided to make the most of my time here. the role that i play is so small that i want to do something constructive with my downtime -- like writing more songs, practicing guitar, rethinking my goals and priorities and getting my body back.

by the way: i don't have body issues. i know the just right size and weight for me. a part of the way i maintain it is by fitting into my clothes every season. i simply don't have the money to buy clothes whenever i get too big for my britches. and when i do have money for new clothes, i buy the size i know that i'm supposed to be. i'm either fighting to get it back or fighting to maintain it but staying a certain size and weight is an everyday struggle. some people don't have to excercise. they can eat their way through a block of cheese and not gain an ounce. unfortunately, that's never been my story. it's hard work. it's not fun. i don't enjoy it. but the results -- good health, lower cholesterol, energy to spare and a leaner stronger frame -- are irrefutable.

the benefit in brooklyn

jc hopkins
Originally uploaded by queenesther.

this is jc soundchecking in brooklyn with the biggish band and me for the brooklyn children's museum benefit on monday. pretty swanky stuff. i wore a headwrap and a gown that made everyone say i looked like a young nina simone. the schlossbergs were there -- they presented him with an award -- and a lot of other local nationally renown dignitaries. just as i was geting situated, who should pass by but john schreiber, one of the producers for harlem song. what a shock! we caught up, of course. he's a wonderful guy.

they had sandwiches for the band in a tiny green room far from the maddening crowd -- but trumpet player mark mc gowan and i mingled with the ho polloi instead and noshed on fresh fruit, crudite and, amongst other things, the crabcakes that never seemed to stop coming until we were called to the bandstand. i didn't think i'd eaten that much, but by the time i was ready to sing, i was stuffed.

it's even better than you think it is...

picnic nosh
Originally uploaded by queenesther.

my friend's birthday was yesterday. unfortunately, i woke him up with his birthday present (i was too excited to wait until the afternoon) -- a genuine honest-to-gosh spirograph, with all of its parts, right down to the original (totally dried out) pens. how 70's is that? he couldn't believe i found one. frankly, neither did i. the kicker? i took him to the battery for a picnic of white wine and oysters. i don't drink, so we got some tea for me on the way there. and we didn't bring the plastic wine glasses i had because he was afraid that the park police would take the wine away (which was italian and evidently, very good). i wanted it to be a take from that quote from hemingway's novel a moveable feast. when i made his birthday card, i put this in it:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank the cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans."

i want my friend "to be happy and make plans." so far, so good.



interesting thing. the cooler of a dozen or so oysters turned into a horn of plenty when i realized the african in the market that helped me pick them out gave me much more than i actually paid for. i love it when that happens...

the truthiness hurts

i love the way the media is ignoring stephen colbert and the speech he made. everyone is jumping on the internet to see exactly what the deal is, while the conservatives are trying to explain it all away. what mr. colbert did was a wonderful piece of political theater/performance art. when i saw it, all i could think was:

1. who was the bonehead that booked him? whoever he is, there's no way that he could still have his job...
2. what gigantic balls of steel stephen colbert must have, to get up there and basically say what no one else in the media has up to this point -- and
3. wow -- art really can change the world.

in the meantime, here's the complete transcript of the speech (just in case you'd rather read it than see it), a website that kind of sums it all up (http://thankyoustephencolbert.org) and two articles from salon.com: "the truthiness hurts" and "making colbert go away"...

-------------------------------------------------------------

"The Truthiness Hurts"

Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

By Michael Scherer


May 1, 2006 Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the Secret Service let him so close to the president of the United States.

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the D.C. press corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, "Tonight, no one is safe."
Colbert is not just another comedian with barbed punch lines and a racy vocabulary. He is a guerrilla fighter, a master of the old-world art of irony. For Colbert, the punch line is just the addendum. The joke is in the setup. The meat of his act is not in his barbs but his character -- the dry idiot, "Stephen Colbert," God-fearing pitchman, patriotic American, red-blooded pundit and champion of "truthiness." "I'm a simple man with a simple mind," the deadpan Colbert announced at the dinner. "I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there."

Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the "critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." Colbert's jokes attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."

It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth.
Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery "détournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our "freedom fries," have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the face of the president and some of the press, who, like myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand.

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing."

So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

A day after he exploded his bomb at the correspondents dinner, Colbert appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes," this time as himself, an actor, a suburban dad, a man without a red and blue tie. The real Colbert admitted that he does not let his children watch his Comedy Central show. "Kids can't understand irony or sarcasm, and I don't want them to perceive me as insincere," Colbert explained. "Because one night, I'll be putting them to bed and I'll say ... 'I love you, honey.' And they'll say, 'I get it. Very dry, Dad. That's good stuff.'"

His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing.

Just don't expect him to be invited back to the correspondents dinner.

Making Colbert go away
The docile press corps was offended when Stephen Colbert dared to expose Bush's -- and their own -- feet of clay. But how to respond? Voilà: "He wasn't funny."
By Joan Walsh

The only thing worse than the mainstream media's ignoring Stephen Colbert's astonishing sendup of the Bush administration and its media courtiers Saturday night is what happened when they started to pay attention to it.

The resounding silence on Sunday and Monday was a little chilling. The video was burning up YouTube, and Salon hit overall traffic heights over the last few days surpassed only by our election coverage and Abu Ghraib blockbusters. But on Monday, Elisabeth Bumiller's New York Times piece on the White House Correspondents' Association dinner kvelled over the naughty Bush twin skit but didn't mention Colbert. Similarly, other papers either ignored the Comedy Central satirist or mentioned him briefly. Lloyd Grove in the New York Daily News pronounced that he had "bombed badly."

Three days later, the MSM is catching on to Grove's tin-eared take on Colbert's performance. Belatedly, it's getting covered, but the dreary consensus is that Colbert just wasn't funny. On Tuesday night, Salon's Michael Scherer, whose tribute to Colbert is everywhere on the blogosphere (thank you, Thank you Stephen Colbert), got invited to chat with Joe Scarborough and Ana Marie Cox, who showed themselves to be pathetic prisoners of the Beltway by passing along the midweek conventional wisdom: The lefty blogosphere can argue all it wants that Colbert was ignored because he was shocking and politically radical, but the truth is, he wasn't funny, guys! And we know funny!

Regular Joe told us he normally races home to watch Colbert. So the problem isn't Joe's conservatism -- Joe's a congenial conservative, a fun-loving conservative, which is why he has Salon folks on all the time (thanks, Joe!). Cox showed why she's the MSM's official blogger by splitting the difference. She pronounced Colbert's performance "fine" but giggled at the left for its paranoia that he'd been ignored for political reasons. Cox and Scarborough mostly just congratulated themselves on being smart enough to get Colbert every night at 11:30, but savvy enough to know he wasn't completely on his game last Saturday. They barely let Scherer speak.
Similarly, the sometimes smart Jacques Steinberg must have drawn the short straw at the New York Times, where there had to be some internal conversation about the paper's utter failure to even mention Colbert on Monday. After all, his sharpest jokes involved the paper's laudable NSA spying scoop, and a funny bit where Colbert offered to bump columnist Frank Rich if Bush would appear on his show Tuesday night -- and not just bump him for the night, but bump him off. How could the Times not notice?

In Wednesday's paper, Steinberg wrote about Colbert's performance with the angle that it's become "one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere" -- and only quotes Gawker as an example. He also wanders into the land of comedy criticism to explore the assertion that Colbert wasn't funny, but quotes not a comic, but New Republic writer Noam Scheiber. Scheiber (who has contributed to Salon) takes a liberal version of the Scarborough approach. "I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years," he wrote on the magazine's Web site. "I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert's entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert's problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn't very entertaining." Chris Lehman makes the same point in the New York Observer, arguing it was a comic mistake for Colbert to fail to break character.

It's silly to debate whether Colbert was entertaining or not, since what's "funny" is so subjective. In fact, let's even give Colbert's critics that point. Clearly he didn't entertain most of the folks at the dinner Saturday night, so maybe Scheiber's right -- he wasn't "entertaining." The question is why. If Colbert came off as "shrill and airless," in Lehman's words, inside the cozy terrarium of media self-congratulation at the Washington Hilton, that tells us more about the audience than it does about Colbert.

Colbert's deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny."

This is a battle that can't really be won -- you either got it Saturday night (or Sunday morning, or whenever your life was made a little brighter by viewing Colbert's performance) or you didn't. Personally, I'm enjoying watching apologists for the status quo wear themselves out explaining why Colbert wasn't funny. It's extending the reach of his performance by days without either side breaking character -- the mighty Colbert or the clueless, self-important media elite he was satirizing. For those who think the media shamed itself by rolling over for this administration, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colbert's skit is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Stephen Colbert!

"they" think they're onto me...but they're not!

the powers-that-be removed the stephen colbert white house correspondence dinner videos from the youtube.com website because of copyright infringement so unfortunately the links in my last post don't work any more -- but here's where you can see all of it, anyway. and you should. they're hilarious.

http://video.freevideoblog.com/video/AAC7FA18-2DDC-4D3E-B1BB-9D6CBD83E27F.htm

cut and paste, kids. cut and paste.

Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Correspondent's Dinner

sorry to pre-empt my nyc life but i had to put these up. this event got virtually NO press coverage in the states. and why should it? colbert basically hands the president his head on a stick after roasting him so thoroughly, even the republicans couldn't stop laughing. colbert is a genius. i'm a massive fan. these are kind of long (about 7 minutes each or so) but remember, "they" don't want you to see it (they're yanking it off the internet everywhere they can) -- which is exactly why you should take a look.

part one





part two




... and last but not least, part three

another (commercial) audition: swiffer

i've got an audition for swiffer later this afternoon at liz lewis casting and all i can think about is the fact that rosa, my iranian eyebrowist, has gone to the middle east until may 24th, to visit family and friends. by the time she gets back, i'll be doing a show upstate. i have to let her cousin do them -- and frankly, she's not as good. but anything else is a crap shoot. i definitely can't do them myself. and i have to get them done. my face looks strange/not as "finished" when my eyebrows aren't done. not exactly the ideal way to face down a camera for a commercial audition. *sigh*

i miss rosa a little. she and i would have these really lovely talks about iran and how homesick she is, how much i missed my brother who's stationed there and what his life must have been like. she vacationed in south carolina along the coast last year with her family and had a wonderful time, which thrilled me to no end because nobody up here knows how beautiful it is down south -- especially the isle of palms, where she stayed with friends. she's always trying to get my pound cake recipie out of me. maybe i'll bake one for her when she comes back.

i haven't let anyone else touch my eyebrows in well over five years. she's that good.

oh, well. sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. that's what i'm going to do this afternoon before the audition, when i go to the dayspa and put myself in someone's hands. i'm going to pray that there's an angel leaning over their shoulder, guiding them. if they're handling most of rosa's clients, i'm sure they'll probably be praying the same thing.

photo op!

here's some more RENT photos from the cast alumni party at frederick's, courtesy of broadway.com. enjoy!

RENT and me

ten years ago i was headed into my sixth year of living here. i was running around like a chicken with my head cut off -- working as many as four jobs to make sure that my rent and bills were paid. then, exhausted, i would throw whatever was left of me into my art. by then, i had figured out how to create and develop my own work. a ten minute monologue with music about one of my freak neighbors for PS 122's avant-gawd-a-rama had turned into my first one person show. eagerly, i threw myself into developing another idea. guitarrorist elliot sharp and i had formed an acoustic duo -- he wanted to call it "frogs for snakes" after some obscure blues lyrics but i wanted to call it "hoosegow" and somehow i talked him into it -- and released a critically acclaimed cd, mighty, on homestead records. i would perform with james "blood" ulmer a lot -- but it would be awhile before we would record anything together. i was in and out of bands: singing standards, swing, jump blues. anything and everything. somewhere in there, i was busy gigging out and creating my own sound, and getting better at writing songs and lyrics. in retrospect, what i had wasn't that good but i loved the process and i was improving all the time. or rather, i was becoming more myself in the art that i created. the art was looking and sounding more and more like who i really was, not what anyone wanted me to be or what i felt i had to make myself into, to get over on anyone, to be popular or to make money. in the moment, that seemed to be all that mattered. that, and surviving nyc.

they say that when you come to nyc as an artist, things take off immediately or they happen within five to seven years. i knew that something was about to happen. but what?

i don't know how i heard about the audition for the first national tour of RENT. i know that i saw a blurb about it on the evening news, along with interviews of people who'd driven in from as far away as california and who were camped out across the street from the public theater on lafayette street, waiting for the doors to open so they could be seen. i remember having a feeling that i would get that show right then. it's the same feeling you get when you know that someone is going to be your friend when you meet them, with nothing to prove you right. you feel it and you just know.

i remember going down there to audition and seeing a line of pup tents and sleeping bags and people dressed up like caricatures of the original cast, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee and singing and being "on" for news cameras and waiting and waiting and waiting. the line went from the door of musical theater works across the street from the public theater all the way up the street, around the corner and down past mc donalds on broadway, on and on and on, finally ending in front of tower records some three or four city blocks away. not an organized one-person-behind-the-other line. there were a jillion people and they were all over the place. i saw that line and i thought, there's no way i can be seen for this today -- i have to go to work! that's when i thought, i've done all i can. if God wants me to be in this show, He's going to have to figure out a way for me to get in. i put my headshot and resume in the appropriate box and i left.

believe it or not, they called me. it seems that the dramaturg that was sorting through the headshots had seen my very first one person show and remembered me, and suggested that i come in. an audition and five callbacks later, i'm in the original cast for the first national tour of the hottest show on broadway and i did it with no agent, no manager, no representation of any kind. understand the odds here, folks: they saw over 6,000 people in five cities and they only needed twenty one. and i got it. you don't necessarily have to beat odds like that to originate a role. more often than not, you're only auditioning against a few others, not thousands -- especially if it's non-union or for no money because it's a workshop. my role? basically, i had gwen's part: i was the bag lady (et. al.) and i sang the seasons of love solo but i also understudied joanne jefferson.

here's the kicker -- every cast is supposed to be a visual reflection of the original and the part i was auditioning for was a big girl's role. at the time, gwen must have been a 16/18 at least. i was a size 6 on my way to a size 4. why didn't i get typed out ? you know -- when they look at you and decide if you're right for the role or not. according to director michael grief and music director tim weil, they heard me sing and they changed their minds.

interestingly enough, jonathan larsen's official title for that role is "voice of heaven."

all of a sudden, i was no longer non-union. all of a sudden, i was a professional actor. all of a sudden, my parents got off of my back. after years of listening to them complain about my life and how i was wasting it, their abrubt silence was deafening. wierdly, they knew all about RENT. they'd seen the 20/20 special about jonathan larsen and his demise and the audition made the news where they were in atlanta. they couldn't believe i actually got the part. as a matter of fact, my father didn't believe it until i showed him the contract. but that's another story...

i was making more money than i ever had in my whole life. i was in AEA (for theater) and SAG (for film/tv). i had health insurance. i had a pension, fer cryin' out loud. and groupies. it was very strange. in a way, it still is.

i got a callback (and then some...)

i found out this morning that i got a callback for that north bank commercial audition i did on monday. that's wonderful news -- especially when they give you the shoot dates and ask that you be put on hold. (if i get it, i'll be in boston for 4 days. wow, boston. i haven't been back there since i left RENT. i wonder if everything is right where i left it?) hey -- i got a callback. yippee!

when i called my agent to confirm the callback time, he congratulated me for making the cover of the arts & leisure section of the new york times. huh?! it's for the RENT 10th anniversary celebration/benefit performance. evidently, someone snapped the just-right shot as all of us -- ten years of cast members, though certainly not all of us by a long-shot -- were onstage for the specially rearranged seasons of love reprise. he said that although there are a lot of people onstage, he couldn't miss me. i was right out front, very nearly center stage: black cocktail dress, cleavage and all. what?!

photo op and full new york times article below -- you tell me if you can pick me out or not. i'm going to run out and get a paper, for posterity and all. and my grandmother.

in the meantime, i've got an audition for the broadway musical high fidelity this afternoon. more details coming soon. stay tuned.

A NY Times Article about the RENT anniversary...

Another Season of Love: The Original Cast Reassembles for a 'Rent' Anniversary

Joan Marcus

Cast alumni of the original production of "Rent" joined Monday at the Nederlander Theater in a semistaged version of the show, celebrating the 10th anniversary. Droppable audience names included Senator Charles E. Schumer and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who praised "Rent" as exemplifying "culture, community and creativity."

Over the years, as the musical "Rent" has reached milestone after milestone — playing around the world in more than 200 productions from Boise to Little Rock to Reykjavik — the thousands of people who have been affected by this vibrant, gritty and compassionate work may well wonder what its creator, Jonathan Larson, would have thought of it all.

Another milestone came on Monday night. The original Broadway production of "Rent" opened at the Nederlander Theater 10 years ago this Saturday. That production, directed by Michael Greif, was an almost-intact transfer of the initial production at the New York Theater Workshop, which had opened three months earlier.

To celebrate the anniversary the original cast members reassembled, rehearsed for two days and performed the show in a semistaged version at the Nederlander on Monday. The event was a benefit for the New York Theater Workshop, for Friends in Deed (a support organization that gave comfort to several of Mr. Larson's friends dealing with H.I.V. infections.), and for the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation, which was set up by his family after the enormous success of "Rent."

Before the performance, the co-chairmen of the benefit told the star-studded audience that more than $2 million had been raised. Also addressing the crowd were Senator Charles E. Schumer and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who praised "Rent" as a timeless work exemplifying "culture, community and creativity," in the mayor's words, and saluted the show's vast contributions to New York's theatrical life.

Once again you could only think, "Would Jonathan ever have imagined all this?" Mr. Larson, who wrote the music, lyrics and books for his stage works, struggled for more than 10 years to get a producer to take a shot at one of his shows. Now he was being posthumously thanked for giving Broadway a creative and economic boost. "Rent" is the seventh longest running show in Broadway history.

I count myself among those who were personally affected by Mr. Larson's work, because of the inadvertent role I played in the last hours of his life. In 1996 an editor at The Times tipped me off to the opening of a rock musical, inspired by "La Bohème," which transplanted Puccini's struggling bohemians from Paris in the 1830's to the East Village in 1990's. So on Jan. 24 I went to the New York Theater Workshop to see the dress rehearsal of "Rent," which was scheduled to open in February.

That performance was pretty ragged, with technical glitches and a misbehaving sound system. But I was swept away by the sophistication and exuberance of Mr. Larson's music and the mix of tenderness and cleverness in his lyrics. After the show Mr. Larson and I sat down for an interview in the tiny ticket booth of the theater, the only quiet space we could find amid the post-rehearsal confusion. For almost an hour, this sad-eyed and boyish creator talked about his approach to songwriting, his determination to bring the American musical tradition to the MTV generation, and about friends struggling with H.I.V. infection who had inspired the show.

We shook hands, he went home to his ramshackle walk-up apartment in the West Village, put a kettle on the stove to make some tea, then collapsed and died of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35.

Understandably I have felt a little protective of "Rent" ever since. Four years ago, curious to see how the show was faring, I took in a performance at the Nederlander and was dismayed. The young and handsome cast was full of talent. But the sound system was blaringly loud. The show was pumped up with a rockish brashness that seemed forced, as if the presenters, afraid that the subtlety of Mr. Larson's score would be lost on young audiences, had opted to bludgeon them into submission.

On that last night of his life Mr. Larson spoke of his desire to bridge the world of musical theater, which has championed the artful mingling of words and music, with the world of rock, which feeds on pulsating rhythms and visceral power. He wanted his score to have rockish energy. But lyrics were everything to him, and he wanted the words to be audible, not buried in buzz-saw speaker noise. "The bane of my existence is that I'm relying on electronics, and I'm only as good as my sound board operator," he told me that night.

My guess is that Mr. Larson would have been pleased by the film version of "Rent" directed by Chris Columbus, released last year. I went to the film with trepidation. To me "Rent" is a triumph of theater. But adapting a musical for film inevitably involves opening it up, as this movie did with street scenes filmed on location in New York. Onstage the death of Angel, the endearing drag queen, is depicted abstractly with billowing sheets and a circle of bereft friends. In the film the scene is made literal, set in an intensive care unit. The filmed "Rent" seems a safer show than Mr. Larson may have intended. Still, every word in every lyric is audible, every voice in the complex choral numbers comes through, and the richness of Mr. Larson's harmonies works its magic.

The producers were worried at first that the original cast — many are in the film — would look too mature. But just as in Puccini's opera, there is no reason the circle of friends in "Rent" cannot be in their early 30's rather than their early 20's. They looked terrific in the film.

The original cast members looked more than terrific when they walked onstage on Monday night to the screeching ovation of the audience and lined up in a row to sing the show's disarming anthem "Seasons of Love."

Though this performance was not intended for review, I can say that that the cast did itself proud. Understandably, as actors fumbled for lines now and then, the event became as much an affectionate reunion as a straight-ahead performance. But moment after moment brought you back to the early days of "Rent" when the show's honesty and power were so stunning. Adam Pascal, the original Roger, the punk band singer and songwriter at the heart of the show, has lost none of his sexiness and charisma. His voice, at once raw and plaintive, especially when he lets a note swell with earthy vibrato, soared in "Glory," the ballad that seems like Mr. Larson's premonition of his own death: "One song/ Glory/One Song/Before I go/Glory/ One song to leave behind."

The crowd broke into frenzy when Daphne Rubin-Vega, as Mimi, the S&M club dancer who falls for Roger, straddled the railing of the stage's upper level to sing the gritty "Out Tonight." Idina Menzel as Maureen and Taye Diggs as Bennie (who are now married and have both gone on to thriving careers) could not resist bantering during scenes that brought them together. The audience loved it. Anthony Rapp was again the ideal Mark, the loose-limbed and insecure video artist who believes so strongly in his community of friends. Though Jesse L. Martin is by far best known these days for his role as Detective Edward Green on "Law & Order," he looked elated to be singing and playing the good-hearted Tom Collins, who falls in love with Angel. And the slight-framed yet dynamic Wilson Jermaine Heredia, who won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Angel, again disarmed the audience with his cross-dressing dance number "Today 4 U."

At the end of the evening the original cast retreated to the rear of the stage and the current cast appeared to sing "Seasons of Love." They looked like fresh-faced kids playing grown-up roles. Then the stage filled with dozens of actors, all former members of "Rent" casts who joined in the song, until, at the end, everybody hugged everybody. Afterward there was a reception at Cipriani on East 42nd Street, where the original cast members were swamped by autograph-seekers and you could see celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi chatting with the mayor.

For me the original production at the 150-seat New York Theater Workshop will never be topped. The intimacy of the space allowed the performance to have subtlety and clarity, while still packing a rocking wallop. But "Rent" has become something bigger than Jonathan Larson ever imagined.

	Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Crowds at the Nederlander Theater Monday hoping to see "Rent."

yikes-a-doodle-doo!

i'm tired.

i wore myself out at the RENT 10 year anniversary performance and party last night. it was too too much: seeing everyone all together, all at once, all of a sudden. who knows how long it will take for me to truly process all of it. i'm standing in the light of day and i'm still overwhelmed. expect photos and a nice long rant about it real soon. in the meantime, my friend says he saw me on NY1 earlier today, singing the seasons of love finale. are you sure it was me, i asked. uh-huh, he mumbled. geez. i wonder if they got me before or after i was bawling my eyes out. *sigh*

in the meantime, i have an audition tomorrow afternoon for * get this* Hi-Fidelity. that's right, you heard me the first time -- the movie with john cusack that was a book written by brit nick hornby is about to be a broadway musical, believe it or not. the protagonist's backdrop and life began in london, then it moved to chicago and now it's going to be a new york story. it's a universal story, really: a thirty-something guy's love life examined with a really cool indie soundtrack as its sidekick.

of course, there's a black girl in it -- that is, if they choose to cast it that way...

and no, i still don't have my voice back 100% yet. whatever i had vocally got shot right out from under me during the performance last night. only time and sleep with lots of water will give it back to me -- unless i go see dr. scott kessler, vocal specialist to the stars, who can give me a booster shot in the bum and a tiny envelope of steroids that will restore my voice by the following day. unfortunately, i don't have the small sack of gold that i'd need as payment for his services. and yes, he's worth every nugget.

another (commercial) audition: north bank

i have to say this: commercial auditions freak me all the way out because most of what it takes to get the gig has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with your "look" -- and God help me but what that means is an ever-evolving thing for me as a black woman. another blacktress broke it down for me in plain english one day as we were waiting to be seen for an american express commercial that's running incessantly right now: for movies, they like black girls with straight hair; for commercials, they prefer black girls with natural or "texturized" hair. problem is, i have hair that no one understands, except africans and very progressive african-americans. i think it's because film is usually about the fantasy (and let's face it, in most of america, straight hair is also what's considered to be prettier) and commercials are for the everyday moments, like clipping coupons or taking care of the kids. her suggestion: have hair that white people can understand -- especially if it's natural. if they don't understand it, they're afraid of it. and what they're afraid of, they won't hire. now does that sum up everything that's wrong with this country racially/ethnically or what.

i get a lot of callbacks for commercials but hey, look at me: i'm a size 6 which reads as "co-ed" or "young mom"; i have my own hair and nails which reads "real" or "sincere" (whatever that means); and i wear a minimum amount of make-up, for a clean, fresh-faced appearance, which reads "young". nobody cares how old i actually am. all they care about is what the camera says. the camera says that i'm in my early to mid-twenties. if i gained weight, it would definitely say something else.

a few months ago, my manager told me that if i weighed 75 more pounds, i'd work all the time. i know that he's right. my friend knows an actress that's agonizing about whether to lose the weight that she'd gained after a sudden illness. it seems that ever since she's gone from a 4/6 to a 16/18, she's been working non-stop. most of the big black women i know work all the time. but weight gain isn't an option for me. i think the reason why i don't have (and have never had) any health problems whatsoever is because i live at the gym, i eat very well and i pop vitamins after every meal. why trash all that for a paycheck? but i digress.

like i said, with most commercial auditions, they look at you and decide if they want you before you even open your mouth. but then once you make the first cut, all of the other things come into play. like being able to readjust for the camera, hitting your mark and -- oh, yeah -- acting. i got rid of all of my wierd nervous facial ticks and twitches when i did the it factor. six months or so of cameras following me around all the time pretty much did the trick. now i can readjust effortlessly, thank God.

this one was for north bank, at liz lewis casting in chelsea. (never heard of 'em. must be a regional thing.) they know me there and they like me a lot. i get seen for something there at least once a month and i usually get called back, so when i go in its like a mini meet 'n greet, which is nice. actually, getting called back but not getting the job isn't so horrible as my friend joan cargill loves to say, because at least i'm being considered for the job. an audition means i'm showing up, i'm here. a callback means i'm in the running, i'm in the game, i'm in play.

so when i came in, the guys at the front were friendly and cool (that always puts me at ease). one of them was playing the hook to the andy williams' song born free on an endless loop. i was like, whoa -- you're way too young to know who he is and why he's cool and he was like, whoa -- i'm way to young looking to know. it's all about what you look like, isn't it. and then he winked at me. (too-shay...) as he took my photo, he told me that everyone was supposed to sing that line in the audition. ha-ha, i thought, i know the whole song. (how sad is that?) this is going to be a hoot.

and it was. i went in with all of my things as props, turned to a wall as if i were making a point of purchase, and then i turn around and burst into song like julie andrews because i feel so free about my banking choices, now that i'm with north bank. no lines. just me singing born free a capella and looking genuinely elated -- but in a not theatrical/not cheesy/realistic way. "sing it the way you would if you just burst into song in real life," the agent suggested helpfully. and God help me, but all i could think about was mary poppins.

and then it was over. how could i fret about it? my hair was probably all wrong. (too black, too strong...) besides, i am to perform in the RENT 10th anniversary show at the nederlander tonight. i'm still trying to figure out what i'm going to wear!

so tell me something i don't know...

Your Power Level is: 86%

You have all the tools you need to be a success - both professionally and personally. You'll probably go beyond reaching your goals. You'll change the world (at least a little).

How Powerful Are You?

she-driver

i went to the dmv the other day on 34th and 6th, up the street from the manhattan mall. someone told me that it would be easier to get things done there instead of at the one uptown on 125th street. it sounded like a great idea—i didn’t even know that there was a dmv there. i went there in the early afternoon. what a zoo. all of humanity was there in its unwashed glory, in lines that looped back on themselves endlessly and somehow never moved. they snaked their way throughout the room, creating a kind of orderly confusion that was absurd. of course, i didn’t stay. but i did figure out what i had to do to get a learner’s permit and what forms of ID i had to bring with me upon my return. (my utility bill? you betcha!)

i didn’t think that i’d have to exert this much effort to do something this simple but i don’t care what it takes. i’ve decided to give myself a driver’s license for my birthday. that means i’ve got until june 30th to pull it off. my friend says he’ll gladly give me driving lessons in a parking lot deep in the heart of new jersey—it’s where he grew up, so he knows all about it—but i have to get my learner’s permit so we’ll be practicing legally. i have to skip town for a month in the middle of may so i don’t necessarily have that much time. and there’s a class that i’m required to take, too. yeesh. and of course there are fees. more money i don’t have.

but somehow i know that it’ll be worth it, if only to wipe that smug, smarmy look off of my entire family’s face and end once and for all the endless comedy routine that erupts whenever my name and the word car is mentioned in the same sentence.

that’s my real birthday present. that’s what i really want: to silence the peanut gallery.

oh and by the way—you maybe wondering why didn’t i learn how to drive before now, because it’s such a rite of passage for teenagehood and i’m waaaay past all that and everybody’s got one and i don’t. actually, i’ve got three good reasons. just for the record, here they are:

1. from what i observed as a kid, being able to drive a car meant that i was handy for running errands. it didn’t mean that i had any real degree of freedom. i couldn’t do what i wanted to do, just because i had a driver’s license. the only thing that would give me that freedom was leaving home. clearly a jet airliner was in order, not a car. everybody wasn’t thinking like me. i know plenty of people who haven’t left their hometown yet.

1. i have spent most of my adult life in nyc—a place that has an excellent transportation system. owning a car is expensive, anyway. nevermind paying it off or the gas or parking issues. usually, you have to pay for a place to keep it when it’s not in use. i usually walk to where i’m going. when the weather’s warm, i ride a bike. most of my friends who live elsewhere drive everywhere—and they look it.

1. when i did live in texas as a college student, i rode a motorcycle—and i didn’t need to have a driver’s license to ride one. i needed a motorcycle license.

See more progress on: learn how to drive a car

effing brilliant

another audition: imagine tap

it was all laid out for me and i did everything that i was supposed to do: i was to sing blues music (a walk in the park for me if there ever was one) but i brought sheet music anyway and made sure that it was well-marked. i had extra headshots. i looked fantastic even by my own exacting standards, thanks to those late-night runs in the park. (i'm finally starting to see progress, thank God.) everything was in place -- except for my voice. it left me sometime in the night as i slept fitfully, thanks to post nasal drip from my raw nose and a lack of humidity in my room. unusual, because i kept my humidifier running constantly but i didn't realize that it had run out of water. a vocal audition with no voice. believe it or not, i showed up anyway. ballsy, right?

but i had to. it was for a show that was in development -- and i want to originate work, not replicate it. gwen called me for this one. zane mark is the md and darryl waters is involved as well. john would be playing piano for the audition. i figured it would be like old home week (we all worked on harlem song together) -- and it was. immediately, i was completely at ease -- which left me free to concentrate on giving zane what he needed in terms of intent, phrasing and throughline. (trust me -- there's way more to singing than opening your mouth and having pretty notes come out.) when i left, i knew that he was satisfied with what i did, even if i ended up sounding like macy grey.

when is this thing going to clear up? my ear aches, my head is full of snot and my throat is sore. i have a gig on friday night and i'm supposed to do wfuv's idiot's delight on saturday...

tomorrow, already

i've got a pretty cool audition tomorrow. if i get it, it'll fill out the rest of my summer nicely. the wonky news is, i've got an earache, a raw nose and lots of mucus. i don't know what happened to me. change of seasons, maybe. something is infected and my body is fighting it all the way. they want a blues song and they want me to be prepared to sing a gospel number -- not a problem, unless i have no voice. but strangely, my throat is unaffected.

everybody's got their home remedies. here's mine: i'm going to walk to midtown from west harlem for church service, do a shot of wheatgrass before i get there, get some odwalla superfood and some orange juice from whole foods on the way back uptown, make it to easter dinner with my friends, pop vitamins and medicine and go to bed early. and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

happy easter!

after church service in the middle of the afternoon, i went to a lovely easter dinner party uptown, in one of those glorious, sprawling pre-war apartments on riverside drive. i love to cook and bake but i was told to not bring anything except an appetite. there were candles everywhere. it was casual, intimate and fun. and delicious: cream of asparagus soup followed by a salad and then rack of lamb with bundled string beans and herb roasted potatoes. i ate way too much. unfortunately, my friend couldn't be there. he had to work. how sweet that everyone missed him.

after dinner, someone pulled out a guitar and we passed it around, so there were a lot of wonderfully spontaneous moments for singing and playing as we all drifted in and out of conversation and continued to sip coffee and nibble on sweets. not one chocolate bunny in sight, unfortunately -- but i did bring enough kindereggs for everyone, which had all of us furtively putting together our toys after the cognac settled in, in spite of the german directions.

what a beautiful night.

"Marriage Is For White People"

this is an interesting article that rosa c. forwarded to me last week. i emailed it to all the black folks i could think of and got such strong feedback that i thought i'd blog it. bon appetit.
------------------------------------------------

"Marriage Is For White People" by Joy Jones
Washington Post March 26, 2006

I grew up in a time when two-parent families were still the norm, in both black and white America. Then, as an adult, I saw divorce become more commonplace, then almost a rite of passage. Today it would appear that many -- particularly in the black community -- have dispensed with marriage altogether. But as a black woman, I have witnessed the outrage of girlfriends when the ex failed to show up for his weekend with the kids, and I've seen the disappointment of children who missed having a dad around. Having enjoyed a close relationship with my own father, I made a conscious decision that I wanted a husband, not a live-in boyfriend and not a "baby's daddy," when it came my time to mate and marry.
My time never came.

For years, I wondered why not. And then some 12-year-olds enlightened me.

"Marriage is for white people."

That's what one of my students told me some years back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in Southeast Washington. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title.

"That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children."

"Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."

And that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."

He's right. At least statistically. The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.

How have we gotten here? What has shifted in African American customs, in our community, in our consciousness, that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable?

Although slavery was an atrocious social system, men and women back then nonetheless often succeeded in establishing working families. In his account of slave life and culture, "Roll, Jordan, Roll," historian Eugene D. Genovese wrote: "A slave in Georgia prevailed on his master to sell him to Jamaica so that he could find his wife, despite warnings that his chances of finding her on so large an island were remote. . . . Another slave in Virginia chopped his left hand off with a hatchet to prevent being sold away from his son." I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today, according to sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin.

Traditional notions of family, especially the extended family network, endure. But working mothers, unmarried couples living together, out-of-wedlock births, birth control, divorce and remarriage have transformed the social landscape. And no one seems to feel this more than African American women. One told me that with today's changing mores, it's hard to know "what normal looks like" when it comes to courtship, marriage and parenthood. Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage. Moreover, in an era of brothers on the "down low," the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one's fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman.

"A woman who takes that step is bold and brave," one young single mother told me. "Women don't want to marry because they don't want to lose their freedom."

Among African Americans, the desire for marriage seems to have a different trajectory for women and men. My observation is that black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their age are more likely to enjoy playing the field. As the woman realizes that a good marriage may not be as possible or sustainable as she would like, her focus turns to having a baby, or possibly improving her job status, perhaps by returning to school or investing more energy in her career.
As men mature, and begin to recognize the benefits of having a roost and roots (and to feel the consequences of their risky bachelor behavior), they are more willing to marry and settle down. By this time, however, many of their female peers are satisfied with the lives they have constructed and are less likely to settle for marriage to a man who doesn't bring much to the table. Indeed, he may bring too much to the table: children and their mothers from previous relationships, limited earning power, and the fallout from years of drug use, poor health care, sexual promiscuity. In other words, for the circumspect black woman, marriage may not be a business deal that offers sufficient return on investment.

In the past, marriage was primarily just such a business deal. Among wealthy families, it solidified political alliances or expanded land holdings. For poorer people, it was a means of managing the farm or operating a household. Today, people have become economically self-sufficient as individuals, no longer requiring a spouse for survival. African American women have always had a high rate of labor-force participation. "Why should well-salaried women marry?" asked black feminist and author Alice Dunbar-Nelson as early as 1895. But now instead of access only to low-paying jobs, we can earn a breadwinner's wage, which has changed what we want in a husband. "Women's expectations have changed dramatically while men's have not changed much at all," said one well-paid working wife and mother. "Women now say, 'Providing is not enough. I need more partnership.' "

The turning point in my own thinking about marriage came when a longtime friend proposed about five years ago. He and I had attended college together, dated briefly, then kept in touch through the years. We built a solid friendship, which I believe is a good foundation for a successful marriage.

But -- if we had married, I would have had to relocate to the Midwest. Been there, done that, didn't like it. I would have had to become a stepmother and, although I felt an easy camaraderie with his son, stepmotherhood is usually a bumpy ride. I wanted a house and couldn't afford one alone. But I knew that if I was willing to make some changes, I eventually could.

As I reviewed the situation, I realized that all the things I expected marriage to confer -- male companionship, close family ties, a house -- I already had, or were within reach, and with exponentially less drama. I can do bad by myself, I used to say as I exited a relationship. But the truth is, I can do pretty good by myself, too.

Most single black women over the age of 30 whom I know would not mind getting married, but acknowledge that the kind of man and the quality of marriage they would like to have may not be likely, and they are not desperate enough to simply accept any situation just to have a man. A number of my married friends complain that taking care of their husbands feels like having an additional child to raise. Then there's the fact that marriage apparently can be hazardous to the health of black women. A recent study by the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank in New York City, indicates that married African American women are less healthy than their single sisters.

By design or by default, black women cultivate those skills that allow them to maintain themselves (or sometimes even to prosper) without a mate.

"If Jesus Christ bought me an engagement ring, I wouldn't take it," a separated thirty-something friend told me. "I'd tell Jesus we could date, but we couldn't marry."

And here's the new twist. African American women aren't the only ones deciding that they can make do alone. Often what happens in black America is a sign of what the rest of America can eventually expect. In his 2003 book, "Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men," Andrew Hacker noted that the structure of white families is evolving in the direction of that of black families of the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black families were headed by a husband and wife, compared to 90.9 percent for whites. By 2000, the figure for white families had dropped to 79.8 percent. Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960. So my student who thought marriage is for white people may have to rethink that in the future.

Still, does this mean that marriage is going the way of the phonograph and the typewriter ribbon?
"I hope it isn't," said one friend who's been married for seven years. "The divorce rate is 50 percent, but people remarry. People want to be married. I don't think it's going out of style."

A black male acquaintance had a different prediction. "I don't believe marriage is going to be extinct, but I think you'll see fewer people married," he said. "It's a bad thing. I believe it takes the traditional family -- a man and a woman -- to raise kids." He has worked with troubled adolescents, and has observed that "the girls who are in the most trouble and who are abused the most -- the father is absent. And the same is true for the boys, too." He believes that his presence and example in the home is why both his sons decided to marry when their girlfriends became pregnant.

But human nature being what it is, if marriage is to flourish -- in black or white America -- it will have to offer an individual woman something more than a business alliance, a panacea for what ails the community, or an incubator for rearing children. As one woman said, "If it weren't for the intangibles, the allure of the lovey-dovey stuff, I wouldn't have gotten married. The benefits of marriage are his character and his caring. If not for that, why bother?"

joythink@aol.com