You can never please an astronomer

The best thing about being interested in amateur astronomy while living in Seattle is that you don't have to waste a lot of time actually looking at celestial objects. Seems we've been griping for months now about a dearth of cloudless evenings. Well, it's been beautifully clear for the last couple of nights. But have we set up the telescopes? NO -- it's about 12 degrees out there! Normally a long, clear winter night is just the thing, but temperatures in the teens are just too low.

And... the monthly meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society, scheduled for the evening of Dec. 17, has been canceled due to threat of snow.

But you can read about astronomy! Weisenheimer is the editor of The Webfooted Astronomer, the newsletter of the Seattle Astronomical Society. The December issue (PDF) is particularly good!

The carnage is horrible. You must look.

I enjoy the Apostrophe Abuse blog. One of today's posts is a record setter. Only one apostrophe was abused, but there is plenty of other grammatical violence going on. At least 10 errors made it into a 15-word note. (If we were nit-picking we could ding 'em for a couple more.) I wonder if the camper ever sold.

Another hilarious post from last week was about a sign advertising the price of panty hoe's. That's gotta hurt.

Cool surprises in "The Moon is Down"

On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon I paid a visit to Powell's Books. I picked up a 1942 version of John Steinbeck's novella The Moon is Down. The book is no first edition or anything; the dustjacket lists its publication price as $5, and I bought it for $8.95. That's not much of a markup for 66 years. I just love Steinbeck, and enjoy having some vintage copies of his books around.

There are a couple of interesting things about this particular tome. First, tucked into the front cover is a reprint of a review from Book-of-the-Month-Club-News which, according to its last page, was printed about the size of the book at the suggestion of book club members "so that it can be pasted, if desired, to the flyleaf." This one isn't pasted, it's in there loose. The review, written by Dorothy Canfield, notes at one point that

Steinbeck's hastily written story is probably not first-rate literature, will probably not go down in literary history as one of the masterpieces of the art.

To which I ask, "Who the blazes is Dorothy Canfield to pick at John Steinbeck?" Sure, she may have invented Montessori and served on the BOMC committee for a quarter century (according to Wikipedia), but please.

The other interesting item is a note on the back of the dustjacket, pictured at right. The note suggests that, once you're finished reading the book, you should mail it to Atlanta, location of the "Army Libraries," because the men in the services could use some good reading. That's ironic; the story of The Moon is Down is clearly war propaganda and everyone takes the invaders to be Germans, but Steinbeck doesn't actually name the town that's invaded or the invading country. At its core, the story is about the futility of invading and occupying another country. I wonder if anyone mailed their copy in, and if Army Libraries passed it along to the front.

One last observation from the same note: it says that book postage is 1 1/2 cents per pound. The Moon is Down can't weigh much more than a pound, as it's a hardcover but only 188 pages. I've half a mind to mail it in and see if it gets there for two cents! In the same way, I'm always tempted to grab subscription cards from old magazines and see if I can still get them for just 32 cents per week.

The Moor the merrier

Back in early October Weisenheimer saw Othello at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and in a review written by my Sweetie, the Scorer, we opined that the Tragedy of the Moor was in the lower quartile of works by the Bard. Today, the young upstarts at Seattle's Balagan Theatre have us re-thinking that opinion. Last night we saw Balagan's production of Othello, directed by Ryan Higgins, and came away delighted.

Our main beef with The Moor is that for a supposedly great military leader he's awfully easy to dupe. But Mike Dooly's Iago gets inside the head of Johnny Patchamatla's Othello in an exchange my Sweetie points out from Act III, scene iii, in which Iago says of Desdemona,

She did deceive her father marrying you, and when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks, she lov'd them most.

Iago plays on Othello's own insecurities, planting seeds of self doubt about the Moor's worthiness to marry Desdemona in a way that we've never seen come off quite so well on the stage before.

Part of the reason may be that the Balagan cast has the advantage of intimacy. While at OSF Othello was played in the 1,200-seat outdoor Elizabethan Stage, Balagan is a tiny basement black box on Capitol Hill that might seat 100. Swordplay in your lap is theater up close and personal.

That is to take nothing away from virtuoso performances by Patchamatla and Dooly. Patchamatla has the main Othello prerequisite, i.e., fabulous pipes. He's pumped some iron in his time, too, and was a commanding presence on the stage. He was able to temper his jealous rage with some true feelings of remorse and sadness. Dooly makes his Iago the most nearly likable of any I've seen. He plays the villain with a true warmth and charm, and everyone he manipulates is his best, dearest friend. Sure, Iago is a cretin, but Dooly pulls some looks in the end as if to suggest this wasn't the way he wanted it to turn out at all; that he really wanted everyone to wind up with egg on their faces, not in a pile of corpses on Desdemona's bed. (The text doesn't support that interpretation; after all, it is Iago who, in Act IV, suggests that poisoning is too good for Desdemona and that Othello ought to strangle his wife.)

The set was spare, with the main props being several wooden boxes that served as modular furniture. In a great touch, director Higgins has Iago be the only one to move the boxes. As the villain manipulates all of the characters, so too is he the one manipulating the stage itself, getting all the boxes to where they need to be for each scene. Even during the prelude Dooly was wandering the stage moving the boxes from place to place. He was planning every step of the way.

The rest of the cast were solid and real. Weisenheimer would especially single out Nik Perleros as Cassio, Terri Weagant as Desdemona, and Jason Harber as Roderigo.

Sadly, the final performance of Othello is tonight. But Balagan shows great promise. It's a relatively new company being run by a youthful lot willing to go out on a limb. In January they'll be staging Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. A play. Within a play. Within an insane asylum. Check it out.

You're driving me batchit

Ken Levine has been running a great contest on his blog. The Daffy Definition Kontest asked readers to send in definitions to the verification words they were required to enter to post a comment on the blog.

Unfortunately, the kontest ended Thursday. Today I got "batchit" as a comment verification word.

I'm not absolutely certain what batchit is, but I bet Robin carries one in his utility belt.

Rep's blog includes cool audience reviews

BACKSTAGE @ SEATTLE REP: Audience Responses - boom

Check out the Rep's blog. It features an audience response video made in what they call the Talk-it-out Booth. It used to be called the Rep Confessional, which I think is really a better name. But the responses are fun, and the video for boom includes remarks from playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.

It's interesting to see how organizations are beginning to make good use of all this newfangled "Web 2.0" stuff.

World ends with big laughs at the Rep

The Seattle Rep bills its current production of boom, by playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, as "a comedy about the end of the world." And sure enough, you know you're in for an apocalyptic nightmare when the pre-show musical selections include such songs of gloom and dread as REM's "The End of the World as We Know It," "S.O.S." by Abba, "I Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King, and even the Carpenters' "Close to You."

Wha-what?? Carpenters? Yes. Remember the lyric, "Why do stars fall down from the sky..."

In boom, it's not a star that falls, but a comet that slams into Earth, just as predicted by Jules, a geeky, gay, and somewhat scattered biology grad student played with great flair by Nick Garrison. Though nobody believes Jules when he predicts catastrophe, he makes preparations anyway. His lab is in an old bomb shelter, he lays in an ample supply of bourbon, food, tampons, and diapers, and uses a Craig's List personal ad to lure a young co-ed into his shelter for the purposes of peopleing the planet post apocalypse.

Unfortunately, the date he gets is Jo, played by Chelsey Rives. Jo, a journalism major who is always behind deadline, plans to use her one-night fling as the basis for a magazine article on fleeting happiness. Jo has no interest in bearing even one child, much less being mother of the entire human race. The comet hits. Jo and Jules are trapped in the lab.

Hilarity ensues, and we get to watch. It's all overseen by Barbara (Gretchen Krich), something of a narrator and one-woman Greek chorus. When she's not griping about the management she's pulling levers and banging the drum, and not slowly. To say more would spoil the punch line -- and you're a genius if you see it coming.

Weisenheimer loves both Garrison and Rives (pictured at right in the production photo by Chris Bennion). Garrison was incredible in an over-the-top performance as the Emcee in Cabaret at The 5th Avenue earlier this year, and also played a gender-bending Feste in Twelfe Night at the Rep this past season. We were in row two at the Rep's Leo K theatre, an intimate house to begin with, the better to be riveted by Garrison's wide range of facial expressions and idiosyncracies. (Though at one point, when Jo observes that "You don't have 'gay' eyes," he responds "I'm wearing contacts.") He really nails (so to speak) the sometimes slapstick, fidgety, socially inept savior of the race. Rives is a ball of fire as Jo, who chronicles each of her hundreds of suicide attempts in the lab, all of which fail (though one was pretty close.) She's a whirlwind who has a chip on her shoulder, and we're pretty sure it was there before the end of the world. Weisenheimer also enjoyed her performance as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at Intiman this year. She also was in The Lady From Dubuque at the Rep last year. She's a marvelous talent and one to watch.

boom, directed by Jerry Manning, has been extended through Dec. 21. Go!