I know Catteries can be uncomplimented on the internets — say, the same way “cat washing” can cause angina for some, but, Janna and I both argue from direct experience, that washing your Cat gives that baby a new life, and unrequited rights in a whole fresh world of cleanliness — and yes, if you want a purebred cat, you’re probably going to have to deal with a Cattery.
In the Fall of 2004, I was teaching a course at Rutgers University in Newark called “From Page to Stage” where the idea — as I was teaching the course — was to take original scripts written in class and present them in live performance to learn how the process of active creation worked.
The final project was a series of group presentations where students shared their lives as they were living it — and the alarming result of one racially diverse group was: “Newark in Black and Blue.” That group’s bruising presentation was tough and blunt and dramatic and I decided we had to record that performance in audio so we could preserve the truth of the moment.
Continue reading → From Page to Stage: Newark in Black and Blue in 2004
“When Sunny Gets Blue” is one of the greatest Blues/Jazz songs ever written. You can sing it slow and creeping with an oozing loss, or you can snap it up and make the song fast and raspy. The lyric is especially keen — you can take it as a comment on a personality, or a conundrum of living in the sunshine when the world is dark around you:
When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gray and cloudy,
Then the rain begins to fall, pitter-patter, pitter-patter,
Love is gone, so what can matter,
Ain’t no new lover man come to call.
Many of us probably have a Sunny or two in our lives — some versions gloomier than others, but today, I want to share a 10-second memory of a ray of sun. Her friends and co-workers call her “Sunshine” and the name fits her without a fog.
Continue reading → When Sunny Gets Blue and Sunshine Blows Through the Blues
Over the last 15 years or so, I have designed a lot of websites and many original logos. The logos have evolved over the years, and so have the websites, but many of my main logos have been in use since 2005 and, sometimes, you need to make a change in order to get a fresher look and feel for your personal brand.
The problem with changing one logo in a pride of online properties is that one logo modification tends to cascade into necessary, widespread, cultural changes so everything blends and works better in an overall aesthetic eye appeal.
Here’s a photograph of me that was taken by a Rutgers theatre student of mine in 2004. I had no idea she was taking my photograph, and when she later offered to give me the digital photograph, I was both delighted and thrilled that she captured me so succinctly unaware. Yes, the photograph is blurry and slightly out of focus — but so was I at the time of the taking.
The studio walls are painted to look like a green and bluish sky for an in situ production. My coat is to my left and that garish white triangle is a coat hanger. The theatre chairs are backward and broken on the floor because the empty space was in the process of being stripped down and made into part of the Department of Education. My face and hands are blurry because I’m taking notes in performance.
Beanie Blue was born to be a Queen, but she sure didn’t feel like one.
It was hard for her to get up in the morning — when the world was awakening to bright sunlight, Beanie was caught in the darkness of her oversleeping un-dawning mind — and it made her so sad she did not want to get out of bed in the morning.
Continue reading → Beanie Blue, Queen of the Undernight: Ten Sentence Story #165
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