The other day, someone asked me if I was tolerant of other religions and instantly, like a reflex, I responded "I grew up in a house with two different religions. I have a lot of love and respect for other curls. I love and respect religions of all kinds."
Was that true? It certainly fell out of my mouth in a blur but wasn't something I was aware that I'd been thinking about.
Granted, the day before, I found myself in a church, forehead covered in ashes, lighting a candle for my grandma's patron saint, St. Anne - because Sicilians still do patron saints - in an express church two blocks from my office in midtown. That's a pretty big gesture for a lapsed Catholic who identifies these days as agnostic and doesn't even believe buy the whole Jesus bit.
What happened? While I'm fairly confident that the power of Christ did not compel me, something did.
Was I longing for old traditions? Was I missing the structure of my childhood routine? Was it Catholic guilt dragging me to church on Ash Wednesday? Was it therapeutic? Have I totally lost it?
The truth is that it's probably a slightly less melodramatic version of all of those things. In the end, I don't think it matters. I know I've been much more sympathetic lately to people who practice any religion. There was a time when I felt incredibly alienated by the Church. There didn't seem to be a place at the table for me.
I dig Pope Francis. He's a leader. He's bent and remolded the church not only so that it reflects the progress we've made, but so that it reminds me of the comfort I used to get from church, even when I didn't believe in everything that was said.
In the middle of Pope Francis saying all of these welcoming things and redrafting Catholicism into the peaceful and loving belief system it was always meant to be, someone else who is supposed to be a leader of mind has been tearing him apart, primarily on Twitter.
I don't believe in everything the church does, I'm not about to start going to mass every week, and Catholics still have a world of progress to make.
In the end, it's a community. The church - like us - is learning to be more loving, more inclusive, to find and use its voice. And that's worth supporting.
So, I was on Facebook when I saw a meme that inspired this blog post, but now that I'm actually ready to blog about it, I can't find it! Oh life.
Anyhoo- Mexican vanilla meme, I don't need you!
I never really gave my paleness much thought. As far as I could remember, I was never trying to be "white" or Mexican. I was just naturally pale because I despised the sun and didn't want to tan. Truth. In high school, I would wear cardigans in 100ºF weather because I didn't want to tan. But this was only because I liked being pale. It's only now as an adult that I've realised being a "pale Latina" is a thing!
I read this interview with John Lequizamo where he talked about how there was a time where only "light skinned Latinos" were being cast in Hollywood. I can't speak for the Hollywood experience, but I can say that in the 3 years I've been working here in Britain, the opposite has been true for me, in the sense that I don't look "Mexican enough". Or what the world now perceives Mexicans to look as. For the record, I am officially half Mexican, thanks to my father. In fact, both grandfather's were Mexican, and I would say my grandmothers, and mother, are of Mexican descent.
So, what does it mean to be "Mexican Vanilla"? Well, according to my friends, it makes me more commercial. But what it really means to me is nothing and everything, simultaneously. I am not defined by the colour of my skin, and neither should you be. I am me. I am generations of Latina women who loved, lost, and struggled. I am proud of all that I am, and all that I'm not.
Hello world. I've been so stressed out these days. Still, I will be able to post something here. Again, thanks to Crazytown for the opportunity.
Today's lesson is about adaptations. Last December I attended a night of short plays put on by "ANDTheatre" (앤드씨어터) in beautiful Incheon, Korea. This set of plays impressed me very much. They were based on Korean short stories of the 1930s. Well, one of them started with "Rum and Coca Cola" and ended with "Creep." Neither one of these songs are from the 1930s.
Told you it was in December.
I saw a very eclectic approach to adaptation I'd never seen before. They did a superb job. And now for a tangentially related video:
Koreans covering Creep. Welcome to Korean parody comedy. I feel your pain. Trust me, ANDTheatre was much better.
So, armed with a new influence, i.e. "you can still do anything you want and make it cool" for adaptation, I occasionally get inspired. A few weeks ago (I think) I remembered Washington Irving's The German Student.
I googled "Washington Irving memes"
He said "tool" and "constant use." Cue Beavis & Butthead. #tongue
If you don't know the story, I'll summarize:
Nerdboy lives in Paris during the Terror. He meets a nice girl - literally in his dreams. He then meets the same girl crying on the street. He takes her home. They instantly fall in love. He goes out in the morning - gotta buy furniture for the love nest - comes back. She's dead, minus a head. Turns out she was a victim of the Terror. But at the very end, the narrator says he heard the story from an asylum inmate - just giving the thing a skewed unreliable narrator thing.
I originally set out to adapt the thing in the era it was set: French Revolution Block Party. It really didn't lend itself to that, or rather maybe I didn't know what I was doing.
But something did hit me: we will be having our own little Reign of Terror - it will give new meaning to the phrase "White Terror" - I decided to set this play in the near future where president Trump is busy executing drug dealers, Hispanics, LGBT folks and anyone else he hates.
Even though the French Revolution is always a badass setting, putting this story in the near future makes it more immediate.
My theory about the French Revolution being a badass setting...let's put "during the Reign of Terror" or "in the French Revolution" after the titles of some well-known plays:
The Pirates of Penzance in the French Revolution.
August: Osage County during the Reign of Terror.
The Piano Lesson in the French Revolution.
Hamilton during the Reign of Terror.
Dracula in the French Revolution.
And so on. Now the play is set close to our time. The guillotine serves to inspire terror....let's look at a real one from 1794 briefly.
Now to the meat of the story - I decided that this German student would be a woman and she'd be lesbian (that's like two awesome things in one or something). There are multiple reasons for this:
More female actors than male actors.
Sometimes you get "LGBT"-themed calls for scripts.
Trump can be a scary beast when it comes to LGBT rights.
In the story, our German heroine, Friede, could quite possibly be a victim of his Imperial Basketball/fish-faced hatred. She needs to lay low.
I'm also working on outside vs. inside. Do the lights go down? Does she say "it's so cold outside." Any suggestions will help.
Ah, Wilderness! Just kidding. Ah, Headlessness! Now that I think about it, this Irving fella likes decapitation. Anyhow, how do we show a headless girl at the end? Chutes and ladders? I thought about hiding the actress' head with blankets. I asked my wunderkind buddy Ardon Smith for some ideas. Right now blankets it is (or are). Also, anyone with suggestions, please toss them my way.
I should link you to the play. It is unfinished. This bothers me. That audiobook version of the Adventures of the German Student is longer than my play. Cry. Here it is.
BRYAN STUBBLES is a playwright and sometime screenwriter as well as Crazytown's most eligible bachelor. His ten minute masterpiece Trump vs Kahlo isavailable here. His one-act play The Wicked Life of Patience Boston had a reading in West Virginia in December 2015 as well. The Noose had a performance at the Great Salt Lake Fringe last summer.
10 minute plays Hera and Juno Go Shooting and Rudi and Azalea Go Fishing were performed at Grass Valley, California's Nugget Fringe Theatre Festival in January.
Brine Shrimp Gangsters will be published this year by Smith & Kraus.
Because now is as good a time as any to learn the new national language. By Jennifer Anderson (actor/singer/девушка)
Last week on MSNBC, California representative Maxine Waters sat down with Chris Hayes and the rest of the nation for some good, old fashioned Tea Time.
Since the Kremlin Klan has already influenced elections, probably won the Patriots the Super Bowl again and gave the Best Picture Oscar to La La Land, we're not that far away from having to learn the Cyrillic alphabet like Mr. Garrison had to learn the Canadian one.
So why not beat the rush and start learning some Russian now? As someone who's attempted to learn the Slavic language once when she was bored on a cruise ship 7 years ago, I feel like I can lend some helpful tips and tricks for mastering this tough and cryptic language.
1. Just skip the voice stuff. I literally got stuck saying the Russian version of "hello" for 35 minutes before I just gave up an moved on. We won't need to say "hello" in new Russia anyway.
2. Imagine the weird looking letters as the bones of our founding fathers turning over in their graves to help you remember them. For example, the Cyrillic B...
...kind of looks like Benjamin Franklin hanging his head and crying into his protruding belly.
3. Let the pictures remind you of happier times, like this one:
Brick by brick By Joanna Syiek (Director/Producer/Blogger)
If you're the kind of person who loved The Lego Movie and also memorizes show albums in less than a week, there may be an Instagram account you need to see. Broadway Bricks puts together the LEGO versions of your favorite Broadway casts with adorable aplomb and astounding attention to detail.
And also, if you want more meeting of worlds, LEGO Movie 2 will be a musical. The company and Warner Brother recently announced their plans:
JOANNA SYIEKhas a penchant for original theatre work, clean graphic design, and really good Indian food. She directs around the City of Angels and writes about nourishing creativity, Broadway favorites, and talent obsessions over on her blogging home. www.thoughtsontheatre.wordpress.com
...Baby iguanas. Seriously though, read on. By Alisha Giampola (writer/performer)
This week, we learned that we might be living in The Matrix. After a totally crazy last minute envelope mixup at the Oscars, America went from thinking the highest film award honor of Best Picture had gone to preposterously over-hyped and under-whelming La La Land to realizing that it had actually gone to the deeply moving, amazingly written, and incredibly beautiful Moonlight (strong opinions mine). This alternate reality scenario in which the best possible outcome happened to be actually true, got most of us wondering "can we go back and maybe check that presidential-election-envelope again?"
But no, you-know-who is still currently the 45th person to hold the highest office in our land, and daily proves himself to be just a genuinely revolting human. On Monday, he realized that healthcare (as an entire concept) was much more complicated than anyone could possibly have ever anticipated. No really. Then he had a joint session of congress and basically said things like how he will "promote clean air and clean water" while literally earlier today he issued an executive order to withdraw the Clean Water Rule. No really.
I will say that his complete lack of knowledge of the American system of government has encouraged myself and a whole lot of other people to get significantly more knowledgable ourselves in order to appropriately arm ourselves to intellectually fight back. If you haven't already availed yourself of the amazing Indivisible Guide which has been breaking the internet recently, may I recommend that you find a local group and get active? My husband, Daniel, whose preferred coping method is something I like to call Extreme Organizing, formed a local Indivisible chapter in our neighborhood. You can check ours out at our website here, and come join us for a meeting if you're interested! Our group is called the New York Indivisible Action Council, or the NYCIA Council. Haha. (Say "NYCIA Council" out loud and feel free to enjoy the little ecumenical-historical joke I made purely for my own entertainment.)
With the awards season wrapping up and the resistance honestly just getting started, it's been a pretty busy time. If you've also been busy, and a little overwhelmed with the state of the world, may I recommend checking out the new season of Planet Earth?! Like you need to do this immediately. We watched the first two episodes (Islands and Mountains, respectively) last night and we literally shrieked like children seventeen times. I swear at one point Daniel and I were both yelling "FASTER FASTER FASTER!" at baby iguanas on the screen.
OMG OMG OMG OMG. (Watch the full trailer for Planet Earth II here.)
Have a great week, Crazytown. And remember: even a baby iguana can outrun a pack of snakes. (Is it a "pack" of snakes? No. According to this, it is several possible things, all of them creepy. But a group of rattlesnakes is called a "rhumba", which is absolutely fantastic news.)
ALISHA GIAMPOLA is an NYC based actor/teacher/writer who, just like you, had to Google whether or not that was Mel Gibson's girlfriend or daughter and, just like you, was deeply mortified to find out that she was his WIFE. EMAIL HER | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | OTHER POSTS BY THIS AUTHOR
In an unfortunate turn of events on Sunday evening, one group of filmmakers found themselves to be the victims of the worst kind of live award show snafu - a winner announcement mishap. And when I say victims, I am not referring to the cast and crew of La La Land. By Annissa Omran (Writer/College Student)
It's reasonable to assume that most of those who make up the loyal Crazytown readership watched the 89th Academy Awards this past Sunday. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 32.9 million viewers tuned in to the big event. Those of us who watched to the very end, throwing caution to the wind and blatantly ignoring the fact that we'd end up getting a shockingly short amount of sleep, lived through the historic moment that will forever overshadow Bonnie and Clyde as the most iconic pairing of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
La La Land was announced as the winner of the prestigious Best Picture category. But this was not the case. It was in fact Moonlight, the little engine that spectacularly could, chugging on up from low budget obscurity and the unlikely setting of urban Miami.
A lot of people focused on how courageous it was of the La La Land crew to graciously turn over their awards after the mistake was announced. Many spent time discussing how it must have felt for them to taste success and then have it taken from them in a flash.
I, however, don't see it that way.
Of course that must have been uncomfortable for them. It was a very awkward and disappointing moment that nobody would ever want to experience. However, this is a group of people who worked on a film with FOURTEEN Oscar noms. They had a 30 million dollar budget.
Moonlight had eight nominations and a budget of 5 million dollars. That is 1/6 the budget of La La Land, the supposed loser in this situation.
But that's not even really my point I want to make. The point I want to make is that a film about the coming of age of a homosexual black boy in a low income neighborhood in Miami rightfully beat out a medium budget, splashy Hollywood film about two White People trying to Make it in the BizTM. And yet all we are talking about is faux pas. The blunder. The mix up.
Moonlight deserved its shining moment of individual glory. Instead it was relegated to being lumped with another film in the headline of a next-day news story. How many years have minorities had to wait for a triumph like this - and they don't even get a full, comfortable speech.
I personally was so disappointed by the announcement of La La Land as Best Picture that I turned off the tv and left the room. If it hadn't been for the fact that I happened to then walk into another room where the Oscars were still playing, I might have missed that fateful moment where the mood shifted and ecstatic faces turned to a sea of confusion.
I was happy, but I was saddened.
So, if I can offer up any advice at all - perhaps in your next water cooler discussion, when someone brings up "that thing that happened at the Oscars," make and effort to bring up the content of the actual winning film. Many people haven't seen Moonlight to begin with. And many people, like me, tuned out the minute Best Picture was announced, whether it be out of disgust, disinterest, or just the fact that they had an early meeting the next morning. So we don't really know how many people actually saw the rightful winners take the stage and say their piece.
ANNISSA OMRAN is currently a college student and eternally a writer. An old movie aficionado, her interests include show tunes, singing loudly, and singing show tunes loudly. She also provides a (dramatic) running commentary on the life of a young writer. EMAIL HER | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | OTHER POSTS BY THIS AUTHOR
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