Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

theatre

Success to the Successful Thistle Sifter!

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In the theatre program at Drexel we had one particularly favorite vocal warmup, which we did before every show i ever acted or teched. It went like this:

Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.

Now, if Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb,
See that thou, while sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb.

Success to the successful thistle sifter!

Much like Homer Simpson’s classic “I am so smart! S-M-R-T” (which i hear least once a week in my corporate office), the Theophilus jingle has stuck with many of us theatre kids, none more so than Elise and i. Whenever we overcome a major household obstacle we are known to proclaim loudly, “SUCCESS! To the successful thistle sifter.”

The charm of the phrase comes, i think, from the fact that sifting thistles by hand is a sortof thankless excercise to take joy in.

Well, as of this post WordPress is (somewhat) unbugged and live on ck.com. And that was not a thankless endeavor. I’m going to write a whole Blogger-to-WordPress walkthrough soon (yeah, and that Bonarroo walkthrough, too), but the thing that really sticks out is that there was an actual, tangible, workable answer to every single question i had through the installation process – right down to the last issue that was keeping me from going live. Most of those answers came directly from the WordPress Support wiki.

Thank you for your patience with me as I spent a few days to complete the changeover. I’m like a kid-on-Christmas with all of these new features to play with – especially categories. Please continue to comment whenever you find something broken, especially if it’s broken in a well-rendered browser like Firefox.

I Don’t Know What I Hope

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We’ve experienced a bout of radio-silence here in July because I was preparing for a role in what turned out to be a sold out production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It amazed me on many levels. As it turns out, I still can act, and not so terribly, either. Also, who would have thought that the girl I threw peanuts at in the lunchroom nearly a dozen years ago would be producing and directing me in a play where she stars as my mother. Certainly not i. In a cool turn of events, we got advance coverage in City Paper without a sneak preview, even if they plagiarized some web sites for the blurb.

Work continues to be work. I moved to a new position as of today. Work was the same (work), only verifying what I had already guessed: life is not your title, it’s what you make of it.

I have come back around to Gawker, the snide NY Scene slash celeb gossip internet rag. I don’t know why I have come back around to it. I do know why i have come back around to it – they were covered in RS, which I fetishize, and their EIC Jessica Coen is sorta hot (not pictured in the web article) (wow, lends a lot of credibility to my opinion as a Journalism major, eh). Yes, this means I’m only about a year-and-a-half behind the prominent web-trends. I really need to work some good individual weblogs back into that. Time to hook up Thunderbird’s RSS feeds.

Not sure what else to say, really. I have now been doing this for 1822 days, which means in about half a year I’ll have been doing it for 2000. That’s a lot of days to do something. More on that later this week.

Anyanka

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One day i will be able to watch the finale of Buffy and not cry every time Anya is on screen.


If only we could get a little teevee running the finale at the side of the stage, i could cry in the play.

There Once Was A Boy Named Pierre

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Last night I had a read through for a play where I am 12 years old (and Gina’s son. Ha!). All weekend I thought about what it would be like to be twelve again, but with all the hindsight I have now because that is what I’ll have to be on stage.

It’s hard. I can’t remember that pre-adolescent moving without self-consciousness, and saying what came to mind with no thoughts as to what people would think, and being convinced that everything was logical and true and black and white.

In the thinking about that I’ve been thinking a lot about who I was at twelve, and leading up to twelve, and how I was both very like and completely unlike my character, Paul.

As such, the next few posts will be peppered with a sort of autobiographical reflection that I’m not really known for on here. Please just bare with me, and try to imagine me but more rational and tinier (but with just as big of a head).

I suspect I’ll do a fare share of creative re-imagining of my past not as deceit but just because this stuff has been bouncing around in my head for so many years that I only know how to tell it this way, which is maybe not quite the way it originally happened.