Just in time for the new year, this blogger is on strike and will not update until JJ updates: no ifs, ands or buts.
Seen here, the tree in Rockefeller Center last week. The transit authority was on strike for three days, costing the city a billion dollars. Let's hope this strike isn't as costly.
er... I mean, touching children's hearts, one at a time. A little departure from the standard EA(t) A(t) (j)OE'S fare, I'd like to get inrospective tonight. I spent the day doing two performances for elementary schools in Chicago and Milwaukee. Anyway, after the show I was heading to the boy's bathroom to change (you know, little toilets, short sinks, low mirrors) and this kid who was one of our volunteers stopped me, essentially with the following:
"Um, I just wanted to say thank you for picking me to be in your play. I really tried my best and I wanted to be really good. I never get picked to be in the school plays and I was nervous I wouldn't get to be in this one, but then you picked me and I tried my best. You were really good and I had a really good time. Thanks for picking me."
Maybe there is something to this. Maybe the past nine weeks have been worth something and leading up to this? I don't know, just a thought.
Kudos to the Michigan Theatre for providing a real space to perform, rather than elementary and middle-school gymnasiums. Yeah, the photo is dark, but, at least it's a picture, right?
Anyway, back in Chicago tonight through Tuesday afternoon... and then, the long drive to the City.
And, what the heck is the cause of the common cold? Dude, someone needs to figure it out and remedy the situation. I'm finished. I hate it. I've always hated it, and though I've been able to better avoid it than when I was a kid, come on! Not good enough. I want it gone--erased--purged--finisimo!
Watch Arrested Development tomorrow night on FOX @ 8/7c. Do it. No excuses. Or, at least turn your TV onto that station and then don't watch. I dare you.
Next time: pink elephants in tutus.
And this is what I get for taking an internet test to tell me whether I'm masculine or feminine: I scored 73 masculinity and 53 femininity: "Androgynous." Wowza. I "scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles."
And, they provided me this nifty picture. Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne-Moss (methinks?).
Oh, and I saw KING KONG. It's epic. It will appeal to the billions of Americans who want to see CGI dinosaurs attacking humans. Some funny lines. It was over three hours long. At least I got out of the hotel for a while.
Sad and sudden news this week as we mourn the loss of two great actors: Tim Douglas Jensen and John Spencer. 
Tim had been living in New York having graduated from my alma mater fifteen years before me... I was lucky enough to have studied with him for a semester and learned quite a lot about the business. He was a gifted director, teacher, actor and writer, his one-man show SHOES had been performed across the city and state. Another director I've worked with posted this memorial to Tim, who passed away last weekend from bronchitis complications.
Spencer died today in LA from a heart attack, four days before his 59th birthday. Most widely recognized for his role on The West Wing, "his work on the show was rewarded with an Emmy Award win for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series both in 2002 and five consecutive nominations, including last year’s." He appeared on Broadway in Execution of Justice (1986) and Boom Boom Room (1973).
Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre production of after the quake adapted and directed by Frank Galati from the stories of Haruki Murakami is brilliant. It's simplicity is where it wins the audience over a hundredfold. From its style to thematic elements, costumes to scenery, direction to diction, the storytelling comes across crystal clear in the tales of the super frog who saves Tokyo from an earthquake and a fiction writer who invents bears who share honey pies and salmon. Knowing nothing, I got a rush ticket and found myself in the third row center, consumed by this beautiful and haunting story starring Aiko Nakasone and Hanson Tse [seen here]. If I had to choose one thing which I found the most exciting, though a difficult decision, I would guess it would be the music. I have had some experience with musical theatre (grin) and found the music here to be more integral to the plot and story and characters than in almost any MT piece I've come across. The cello and koto were seamlessly and, perhaps more importantly, successfully integrated into Galati's adaptation.
Genius work, and I'm thrilled I had the opportunity to see it--my first Steppenwolf (let alone Chicago) production. Since Philly's ADRIFT IN MACAO has closed, go see this, now playing through February 19.
The longest sit-down on our tour, Egg and I have been in Omaha since Wednesday evening, having driven I-80 from Des Moines, stopping, of course, at the World's Largest Truck Stop. Since that time, I've seen four films, one play and three shopping plazas. I've encountered some rude people and some nicer people. I've dealt with highs of -1 to mid thirties, snow and ice to chilly and sunny. In all, I've found Omaha to be a nice place, easy to navigate, lots to keep you occupied, etc.
Meryl Streep is a genius and in PRIME, which I finally got around to seeing, she is absolutely brilliant. Notice her character choices and nuances, psychological gestures, ticks, et al. One of the finest actors alive no doubt, she should win every award in the book for this role. (I've only been so facinated recently with one other performance, Cate Blanchett in THE AVIATOR -- a horrid film, but a performance to be studied and learned from. Streep is the same in this flick.)
Too bad I'm dumb. I didn't understand SYRIANA. Damn. It was pretty though.
Next time: reasons I wish I were in solitary confinement.
"She's got a great personality though."
Online dating match service sites. Hmm. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, I swear just for curiosity's sake. So, I checked one of them out [the names have been changed to protect the innocent]. It only took me about forever to answer all of the questions they posed. So, okay, click: "find match." Well, out of 8 million people registered, only five of them were compatible with me apparently. However, to meet them, it's only a mere $59/month for the service. Oh well, Katie-the-insurance-adjuster-and-supposed-love-of-my-life, I guess we weren't meant to be.
And that, friends, is another lesson from Professor Beedow. Scams. Life is a series of scams. Do not fall victim as I did ... ahem, I mean, as I went undercover this afternoon to study and find an answer for you ... to the online dating match service sites. Dr Love, no, my readers and I will not participate in your farcical, obnoxious, scamming, expensive, mindless, impersonal, electronic, over-the-counter, fill-in-the-bubble, true-or-false, what's-wrong-with-me love fest of internet insanity. Have a good one, folks. Now, go out, get yourself a chocolate milkshake and fall in love, but don't tell me about it. Unless she's got a single sister and you pick the one who looks like cutie pie here. [And, if she's number 817, can you imagine what number 1,817 is like? Wow. Now she'd be a beaut.]
Richard Gere and Flora Cross
The film BEE SEASON, based on Myla Goldberg's novel of the same name, is a joy... an excellent diversion into the life of a spiraling family dynamic. Knowing nothing about it, thanks to the studio's non-publicity for this film, I went expecting a story about a spelling bee, akin to 2002's SPELLBOUND. I was never more wrong (well, except for thinking THE ICE HARVEST would be a good time [and no, I'm not even going to give you a link to this one]). Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche are spell-binding, pun intended. See it.
Some themes/lines/thoughts:
"What happens when you close your eyes? Do you see what I see?"
"Let God flow through you."
"God has left us out."
"We can fix what was broken--we're none of us alone."
"Nobody's mother needs her to win anything."
"...To reach beyond myself, to know the world as whole again, and like the ancient mystics, God would fly through me and we would be together."
A father obsessed... a family obsessed. Yikes, a strange twist. What is going on? All of them are alone, separate and not involved with each other, but running parallel story lines. The strain of relationships and life is too much for all of them
All the four characters deal with the same things in separate, distinct and parallel ways: the strain of life, relationships, family, religion, God, and gods. And, no matter one's beliefs or personal ideas, one FEELS for these characters. We, as audience, are drawn into the story, into their home and their lives. It is a REAL FILM--wow, it makes us think, feel, move, breathe. It was excellent.
The biggest problem I had is the ending--yes, it was the perfect move, the right decision, but come on! We have realized this is a thinking movie, we're not going to get by sucking down a cola and popcorn--oh no!--we'll have to think. OK, so we figured that out about a third of the way through the film. So why at the end are we beaten over the head with this idea? We would have figured it out and made sense of it, beautiful sense of it, without all the fanfare. Oh well.
Sage wisdom for the day: playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote that "ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."
That's serious. Coming up, how I learned to stop worrying and get a date with a model from PROJECT RUNWAY.
And, lastly, you've got to love Catherine Zeta-Jones on a Letterman repeat tonight: "I have never played golf in high heels with my bosoms hanging out, but here we go."
But seriously, what IS the deal with time zones? Having spent most of my life on Eastern Standard time, I never realized what a change it would be to move into a Central Time Zone location. What is it about these people? Do they just want to go to bed earlier, so they petitioned the television industry and clock makers of the world to give them everything an hour earlier than everyone else gets it? (Mind you, it's essentially the same moment in the grand scheme of life, but an hour earlier on the clock.) Why is that? But then, out on the Pacific coast, they have to wait long dreadful hours in the grand scheme of life to get what they want to watch on the tube. It doesn't make sense to me. And who decides these things? I just read that from 3 Feb 1942 to 30 Sep 1945 most of United States had daylight savings time all year, it was called "War Time." What?! War Time? Who came up with that one? And what did people think about it? And what time did their favorite radio programs come on? Regular time? War time? Daylight savings time? Mountain time? What about the Amish? What kind of time do they have? And are their seconds always as long as the seconds people in Houston have? And what's a New York minute?
I also just figured out how old I am as I wrote that exact word, not taking into account time zones and daylight savings time on this interesting website: I am 8,340 days, 21 hours, 54 minutes and 56 seconds old. Or, 22 years, 10 months, 1 day, 21 hours, 54 minutes, 56 seconds. That figure can be converted into the following units: 720,654,896 seconds; 12,010,914 minutes (rounded down); 200,181 hours (rounded down); 1,191 weeks (rounded down). More importantly, who cares?
Oh well. Next time, instructions on capturing an ocean and putting it inside a seashell.
Got pulled over for throwing a banana peel out the window the other day in Washington County, Wisconsin:
COP: “Do you know why you’re being pulled over today?”
BEEDOW: “Uh, no.”
COP: “What did I see you throw out the window back there?"
BEEDOW: “Oh, a banana peel.”
COP: “A banana peel… I’ve got a squad checking it out. You’re telling me he’s going to find a banana peel?”
BEEDOW: “Yes.”
COP: “OK, wait in the car for me.”
We wait in Jonesy [the minivan] for a few minutes. Another squad car arrives. The officers converse.
COP: “OK, he found it. You can go.”
Also, Oprah was a class act on Dave Thursday night. Dave, too, was on his best behavior, giving her majesty many opportunities to talk about "serious topics" like what she's doing to save South Africa. To close the interview, Dave walked Oprah across the street to the theatre for the opening of her musical, The Color Purple. Isn't that something how we're all calling it her musical? Goodness.
Next time: how to avoid arrest for contraband by distracting the sheriff with your new hot pink hat and scarf combo.
