Author Archives: admin

baby steps

{09 May 2007}

i’m a big believer than a woman should own her own tools. i’m not talking about a circ saw or anything, but just the basics, whatever basics mean to you. it means that when you want to hang a picture frame you don’t need to guy down the hall to come over and do it. i hate feeling helpless, and as a rule, i try not to.

i was feeling good about such things today when i fixed a few bits on my bike that had come loose. my folks gave me a bike for my birthday earlier this spring, i picked it out and overall it’s a nice sturdy used bike in good shape, but after a couple of weeks of riding it there were some minor things coming apart – the kickstand fell off, the seat was wobbly, the front reflector hanging loose. i had been meaning to take it by the bike shop where i bought it, thinking that they’d probably tune it up for me if i asked nicely. but i got home from work today and wanted to use it this evening, and didn’t relish the thought of riding all the way to the bike shop without a seat. so i dug out a crescent wrench, some hex keys, a screw driver, and managed to put things right, and was pleased with myself for the effort as much as the result.

lately i’m making a concerted effort to drive my car less: still commuting cross town to work, but leaving it parked the rest of the time, and taking public transit or, even better, my bike. the nice weather is making such a resolution much easier to keep, and i’m quickly getting bolder about biking in traffic, a thing that a few weeks ago i was totally scared of doing. the not driving plan, like not eating meat, is born of a variety of reasons rather than one particular conviction.

1) financial: with gas at $3.50/gal in the city, driving less is kind of essential for financial reasons, plus my car, with 92,000 miles on it, isn’t getting any younger and i am a long way from being able to make payments on a new one.

2) environmental: i jog these city streets nearly every day and when the wind blows just right, choke on the smog and fumes. one of the best features of a city is that everything is close together (relatively) and linked by public transit. driving everywhere seems like i’m missing the point of living in a city.

3) sanity: i am not a nice person when i’m behind the wheel. i’m generally pretty patient when it comes to public transit; it’s all out of my control, whether it runs on time or not, so i just sit back and do my crossword or read and get there when i get there. but i’m the opposite when i’m driving my own vehicle. perhaps because there is the illusion of control, i’m constantly looking for the fastest lane, the most efficient route, the way to make the stoplight at ravenswood and irving park turn just a little faster. and then parking? don’t even get me started. i hate feeling like my vehicle owns me. i never, however, experience that sort of incredible hulk rage when i’m on my bicycle even tho it takes longer to get where i’m going.

4) political: one could argue that politics are pretty deeply entwined with the issue of environmentalism and lump these two items together, but given that our country has been fighting a war over oil for the past five years i think this gets its own item number. there’s a girl i see biking around campus a lot with a sticker on the back of her bike that says, “it doesn’t take war to power my bike.” given that i don’t bicycle exclusively or anything, i don’t think i can really get on my high horse like that, but i like her message. and she looks like she probably does echew petrol-based private transportation all of the time, so good for her.

for me, it’s baby steps. it’s karma, it’s the golden rule: i want to live in a better world so i have to start by reforming my own habits, one tiny step at a time. most of us, myself included, don’t have what it takes to make revolutionary changes in our lives. and i find it really easy to feel helpless in the face of something as huge as global warming or thousands of innocent civilians dead over oil prices and legislation for clean energy DOA in congress. but, at the risk of turning this whole post into a cliche, this is what marathon training is teaching me. the thought of running 26 miles isn’t just impossible, it’s absurd. i don’t spend very much time thinking about the upcoming race, in fact, because it’s just too daunting. instead, i get up every morning and i tie my shoes and i go out for 4 or 5 or 6 miles. at the end of the week i’ve run 20 miles. at the end of the month i’ve gone 80. by the time i get to marathon day, i’ll have logged almost 700 miles. and what’s 26 more in the face of 700? that’s how we accomplish big things. in small, unremarkable steps. so: i ride my bike on weekends. i don’t eat red meat. i buy cruelty-free beauty products. i recycle my kitchen trash. baby steps. maybe next year i’ll bike to work once a week, go completely veggie, use biodegradable soaps or start a compost heap. things i can’t do this year will no longer be out of my grasp.

handy internet link of the day:

{04 May 2007}

http://www.gethuman.com/: how to talk to a human a quickly as possible on the 500 most common tech-support and service call centers.

cause, is it just me? as soon as i start speaking to a call center robot i feel myself getting defensive. i get my hackles up even before there’s a problem. i generally try and escalate my call to a human as quickly as possible. directory trees are for suckers.

tortoise malaise

{}

the tortoise is not well.

i don’t know what he needs. i have followed all of the directions for the care and feeding of a tortoise, but he’s stopped eating and spends all of his time hiding under a log in the cool corner of his habitat. when we take him out for a walk he is animated and moves around, but mostly seems to be aiming for the nearest dark corner where he can hunker down and hide again.

what do you do with a tortoise who won’t eat?

it’s not clear whether or not the director is going to cut the live tortoise from the play, but i have some concerns as to which will come first: the tortoise getting cut, or him dying from malnourishment or some other form of (unintentional) neglect. the cast adores him, i dread the thought of having to tell everyone morla croaked on my watch. i’m really very kind to animals, just ask my pampered, spoiled cat.

we also decided that it would be prudent to have a tortoise shell that looks like the real tortoise on hand, so that we could have the live one on stage for opportune moments, and swap the shell in during times when the cast needs to not be distracted/upstaged by a live animal. after an exhaustive internet search, i was able to purchase a red-footed tortoise shell of approximately the same size from, and i’m not making this up, skullsunlimited.com. with overnight shipping, the shell cost almost as much as the live tortoise did. plus, as an added bonus, i’m now subscribed to the skulls unlimited international catalog. i can file that with my cabela’s shooting catalog. this is what i get for making work purchases on my personal credit card. frequent flier miles (here i come, berlin!)and a lot of weird magazine subscriptions.

morla the star tortoise

{01 May 2007}

we are producing Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia right now, and the script calls for a live tortoise. since live animals don’t really fall into anyone else’s job description, that means that they’re my problem. i’ve learned a lot about tortoises in the past week.

our guy is a red-footed tortoise. they traditionally hail from south america, although ours came from a petsmart in the suburbs of chicago (and was likely bred in captivity). we have named him morla, after the wise tortoise in the neverending story. so far morla spends most of his off-stage time hiding under a log in the make-shift tortoise habitrail i built in the corner of the production office, but when i take him outside for a walk in the lawn he’s pretty darn cute.

{27 April 2007}

M and i caught the vienna teng concert at schuba’s last night. she was kind enough to put us on the guest list, which made me feel cool. i mean, schuba’s is a teeny tiny venue that holds about 100 people, so it’s not like i was on the guest list at house of blues (altho, come to think of it, BETTY put me on their list there once, too…), but my sorry ego will always get a kick out of being on a guest list just about anywhere.

anyway, the show was really solid and beautiful, and vienna’s percussionist played some pretty freakin’ weird awesome instruments, including this thing that i’ve looked all over the net for but can’t find a name for it. it basically looks like a big, brass top (the kind you’d spin), with lots of thin rods running up the outside of it. when you draw a bow across it, it makes that eerie, high-pitched horror-movie squeal you get just before something bad happens to the heroine. applied judiciously, and it’s spine-tingling. hopefully someone will comment this post and tell me what that is, or even better, send me a link with a better picture than what i can give in words here.

M, who later in the evening confessed to having been a full-on 80’s punk in his teens, and even now wears converses and a ramons t-shirt, gets points for accompanying me to a late show on a weekday night and only looking a *bit* drowsy at one point. and he did ask me to copy her CDs for him. but you should have seen his face when we walked into schuba’s and saw rows of chairs set up on the floor of a concert hall where i think he’s more accustomed to standing-room-only rocking out. “i told you it was adult-contemporary,” i said to him. he nodded and observed that as a straight white couple we were pretty far out of the room’s demographic. “lesbians, asian women, and the men who love them,” is i think how he characterized the room. which was accurate, but not complete. the audience spanned three generations and crossed gender, social, racial and intellectual boundaries in a way that made the room inclusive, rather than exclusive. sort of the way i think about new york city. i love the sense anonymity that i feel when i’m in new york, as if, no matter what i do/say/wear, i will never stand out or feel completely alone in a city as huge and diverse as new york. i really dig artists whose work can bring together a group of people across demographic boundaries that often prove divisive. live performance, whether it is theatre or music or something else, is compelling to me because it’s about the communion that takes place between audience and performer, and between the audience members themselves. a work of art was created, existed, was experienced, and, being ephemeral, will never exist in the same form again, and that shared experience is what makes live performance a profound thing: i was there. you were there. we experienced that moment in a way that will never exist again, and that is something we have in common from this point forward. from there we are punk rockers and lesbians, parents and children, lovers and loners, musicians and the musically-inept, artists, writers, teachers, professionals, black, white, asian. the couple sitting to my left were talking computer science QA blogs between sets; the woman to my right, seated close to her girlfriend, wore a t-shirt that said, “my boyfriend bought me a ford.”

gore wuss

{26 April 2007}

anyone who’s ever tried to watch a horror movie (or a medical drama) with me knows that i’m a gore wuss. while i don’t mind getting shots or having blood drawn terribly, i can’t bear to watch a needle pierce the skin – even on television, i have avert my eyes for that moment (so i probably don’t have what it takes to be a heroin addict…) and don’t even get me started on my phobias about vomit.

so it’s odd, then, that i find myself sporting a sort of bravado when it comes to real life blood and gore. not that i have been face-to-face with a truly life-threatening emergency, but working in and around theatre and scene shops, i do see injuries. a forehead split open down to the bone, dry wall screw through the fingernail, a broken wrist, broken collarbone.

yesterday our TD came into the production office and said, “does this need stitches?” and he had sliced deeply into the top of his wrist with a chisel. when he flexed his wrist the wound gaped open. since it wasn’t bleeding a lot, there was no immediate danger, and we decided that stitches wouldn’t probably do anything that butterfly bandages couldn’t also do, plus it would require hours and hours spent in the emergency room. so i had him wash the wound out really well, taped it closed with butterfly bandages, then covered the whole thing with a bandage and ran medical tape over the top around his wrist to hold it all on. of course, since he went back to work in the shop for the rest of the afternoon (talk about bravado), the tape only held in place for a few hours. but i re-bandaged it at the end of the night and by the next day it seemed to have knit together. driving someone to the hospital for stitches and filling out worker’s comp paperwork is part of my job here, but closing up wounds doesn’t exactly does fall into my list job responsibilities. but i often force myself to look at or ask about an injury i guess as a way of testing my own mettle.

none of this makes me think that i’d want a future in medicine (germ-phobic, remember) but for some reason i like the fact that i’m surprisingly cool when i’m actually faced with blood and i don’t get totally grossed out. this is good, since my line of work requires people that are good in crisis situations (typically more of the set-is-on-fire sort of thing, but still). the thought of how i’ll handle the next emergency (be it a heart attack in the audience or an actor knocking himself out on stage) is the source of many an anxiety dream, but then i always seem to surprise myself in the moment.