So another Slapdash has come and gone and I wanted to write up my thoughts.  I had every intention of writing this last night when I got home from the theater, but the long day finally caught up with me and it just didn’t happen.  Thus these reflections, being just under 24 hours old, may be a bit incomplete, a bit scattered, like a dream you try to describe a week after. 

As an overall experience, we definitely built on what we learned from the past two SDFF’s, and that goes not only for LGT, but for all the returning SDFF participants.  We seem to be building up an amazing crew of veteran Slapdashers, the folks who just keep coming back.  I know the feeling because I’m one of them.  Nothing quite like a big group leap of faith.  There’s just such an amazing buzz that builds when a mass of people get together and focus their energies on creating something brand new for no other reason than the joy of creating it.  When you’re in the theater and you’re working your scene over and over, and all around you are folks doing the same, and in the back of your mind you know that you go up that night with this script that you just got handed that morning, that just strips all the bullshit away. 

As for my own personal experience, well, comparing this year with the past years is a bit of an apples vs. oranges proposition since this is the first year that I took on only one role (actor) in the day’s madness, instead of being a crazy man and writing all night and then acting the next day.  But as always, I had a great time.  I loved my role, I loved getting to wear a tuxedo, and my fellow castmembers and director were badass.  Every year, there’s always a sense of cast unity, by which I mean the whole SDFF cast, not just the individual play casts.  This year though, that sense seemed to be enhanced by like 10 times.  I don’t know what it was, if it was the huge backstage at Arts on Real where everybody could hang out together during the show or if it was the AC or the fact that there were a lot of returning Slapdashers that weren’t stressed out because they knew it was all gonna come together, but everybody seemed really tight.  The encouragement and overall positive energy coming from everybody was just constant.  Not to mention the HUGE FRICKIN AUDIENCE!!!  That laughed at EVERY JOKE (even when me and Mariana started to drop our lines)!!!  After the show, I was amazed at just how many people were there, it was a sea of humanity…at least, a sea the size of Arts on Real. 

Anyhow, big thanks to everybody who participated and who came out to watch.  Can’t wait for next time.Â

I just poured the last cup of coffee from the coffee pot in the break room, but didn’t start another pot brewing. 

Considering that I brew up an average of about one pot per day around this place, I don’t really see my coffee karma dropping too low any time soon.

---

Comments

ex-Coffee Man

2005-03-29T17:08:52.000Z

When I was addicted I would have perhaps been forced to kill you with a coffee stir for even posting this. Now do I don’t care…

Julie

2005-03-29T17:19:38.000Z

Dude, I came in this morning and the coffee pot was completely empty.  Not like, well there’s a half cup left, so it’s debateable…  but BONE DRY.  Did you sneak in my office and do this instead of in your own?  I was pissed because, like you, I often make a full pot.  Even though I only drink one cup.  I suspect it was Neil.  He makes really shitty coffee and has been publicly humiliated for it, so I bet once he drank the last cup, he just snuck off without making more.  I guess I’ll cut him a little slack, as this morning he regaled me with not one, but TWO stories of his daughter playing with her poo.  She’s got an obsession with this and I have heard many stories about her poo-adventures.  I liked the one he told this morning where she ran downstairs after pooing in the bathroom and leaving her pull-up on the floor and then ran downstairs to the kitchen and started rubbing her butt (which was covered in poo) on their plant saying, “it’s cold, it’s cold!”  Once they finally figured out what was going on, they ran upstairs to discover more poo-mess in the bathroom. 

How did we get from coffee to poo?  i do not know.

Your Boss

2005-03-29T17:46:15.000Z

So that was you who left the coffee dry.

So I went to the Staple Comic Expo this weekend with my friend Mark who is looking to break into the world of online comics.  The idea was to hand out business cards for his website to all in attendance whilst perusing the various wares being offered at the booths.  This is only the second comic book convention I’ve ever been to, the first of which was sometime in junior high (known as “middle school” to you younguns) at the convention center in Houston.  This one was in the Elks Lodge off of Barton Springs, which seemed an odd setting for a comic convention, but whatever.  I didn’t spot a single person in a costume of any kind.  Perhaps this was because this was an independent expo with little to no representation from any major publishers, but I would have expected to see at least one or two folks show up in something resembling a costume, even if I didn’t know who or what the hell they were supposed to be.  There was one chick sitting at a booth sporting a 1940’s bottle blonde Gwen Stefani kind of get-up, but I don’t know if that was a costume or a fashion commitment.  There was also some guy wearing a Wolverine tee-shirt who had super long frizzy Logan-style pork-chop sideburns, but again, I think this was less of a costume and more of a permanent everyday look for this guy.  If it was a Wolverine costume, it needed lots of work. 

So we succeeded in handing out a buttload of cards, checked out all the booths, and sat in on a panel discussion about the field of webcomics, which featured several people who hold varying levels of prominence in this field.  I must say, I had no idea that webcomics were so huge or that they held such an enormous fanbase.  Throughout the discussion, my mind drifted a bit towards theater and how it compared/contrasted as an artform to what these panelists were talking about.  I find it hard not to do this whenever I listen to people talk in depth about any artform, no matter what it is.  I just start thinking about theater and how it relates to what I’m hearing.  Once again, I was reminded that one of my favorite elements of theater is also the element that I find the most frustrating: it is a 100% live experience.  It is scheduled at a certain time at a certain place.  In order to take part in it, you have to be at that place at that time or else you miss out.  You can’t rent it and watch it at home.  You can’t buy the CD and listen to it in your car…yes, I know, listening to a CD and seeing music live are two entirely different experiences, but I think you understand what I’m driving at.  If you practice theater and you want your art to connect with people, you have to get them to the theater on time.  There is no other alternative.  If you write a book or draw a comic or paint a painting or make a film, people could see it years, decades, fuck, centuries from the time that you create it, and they can do so pretty much on their own schedule, and they can connect to it.  Less so with theater.  Sure, you can write a play and somebody might produce it years from now, but again, they gotta get the folks in to see it.  Now as I said before, this is also one of my favorite parts of theater.  The kind of connection that occurs between artist and audience when they are actually in the same room at the same time focused on the same thing, well, that just can’t be faked or manufactured or reproduced.  It gives the phrase “you just had to be there” a stronger meaning.  It’s the difference between seeing a band live and listening to their CD, between watching “Steel Magnolias” the movie and “Steel Magnolias” the play.  I’m not saying anything new here.  Hundreds if not thousands have said it before me, and if you’re reading this and you practice or like theater, it’s undoubtedly something you yourself have thought or talked about or written your thesis about, but it’s still a good thing to ponder from time to time.

---

Comments

Bill

2005-03-11T04:36:01.000Z

Theatre is precious because it only happens once.  A show might run for six weeks, but no two shows are ever the same.  A different pause here, more inflection there.  The same words and meaning but each night a different show.  Amazing.  If theatre immitates real life in anyway it’s that each moment, each show, happens once.

I had a similar dissappointing convention experience.  I went to a Star Trek con when I lived in Washington.  It was held in the basement of a Holiday Inn, which seemed appropriate since many of the attendee’s lived in their parents basements.   But there wasn’t a single costume donned, which was half the reason I was there.  What kind of half assed Trekkies were these.  My dad ended up buying, and wearing, a pair of pointed ears trying to inspire others.  It didn’t work.

Anonymous

2005-03-14T08:45:29.000Z

Hey Travis,I was just looking by some blogs and I came across yours,how captivating.Whoa!You like Pantera(R.I.P Darrel “Dimebag” Abbot” and Deftones…how cool!Well,I hope you keep on writing,you know how to catch peoples attention.By the way,did you arelly take a live chicken to work?

Would someone please explain to me why I have Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” stuck in my head?  It’s been there all morning and I don’t know why.  Did I hear it recently?  I guess there are worse songs to have stuck in my head.  Maybe reading this will get it stuck in your head too!  Here’s the lyrics to help it get stuck:

Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick,
And think of you
Caught up in circles confusion -
Is nothing new
Flashback - warm nights -
Almost left behind
Suitcases of memories,
Time after -

Sometimes you picture me -
I’m walking too far ahead
You’re calling to me, I can’t hear
What you’ve said -
Then you say - go slow -
I fall behind -
The second hand unwinds

Chorus:
If you’re lost you can look - and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you - I’ll be waiting
Time after time

After my picture fades and darkness has
Turned to gray
Watching through windows - you’re wondering
If I’m OK
Secrets stolen from deep inside
The drum beats out of time -

Chorus:
If you’re lost…

You said go slow -
I fall behind
The second hand unwinds -

Chorus:
If you’re lost…
…Time after time
Time after time
Time after time
Time after time

---

Comments

AshMita

2005-03-03T15:41:35.000Z

It’s cause the song was used in Napolean Dynamite which we watched two nights ago and I made the comment that I loved Cyndi Lauper when I was a kid and used to lay in bed at night playing her tape (alternated with the new age tapes, of course).  And then I reminisced about her hairstyle in the video for that song…ya know the checkerboard shave job on one side of her head.

E

2005-03-03T17:31:57.000Z

Dude, very weird.  I’ve had the same song stuck in my head all morning too, only I’ve never seen Napoleon Dynamite.  It must be true.  The mind meld…it has begun!

There’s nothing to beware really, that’s just the title.  I realized I had sat here for a full minute trying to come up with the title for a silly blog post.  I’ve been known to take even longer to come up with subject lines for emails.  And titles to plays or other creative writings?  Shit, that involves a walk through the desert to induce visions of flying lizards and gun-toting midget kings and whatever else before I can even begin to think about the title. 

ANYWAY.  My last post was getting a bit stale, especially since it was about I Am Alpha, which is now closed, so here’s a fresh one.  I saw The Jinn this weekend and most truly enjoyed it very much.  I was actually a bit surprised that I liked it as much as I did since I knew going in that it sorta kinda involved the old story about genies coming out of lamps who grant wishes and all that.  And while I suspected at the outset that Kirk Lynn would certainly put a new spin on it, it seems sometimes that even that device, the whole take an old myth/tale/fable/story and rewrite the rules around it to make it new and fresh, even that seems to be getting a bit overdone…but that’s probably just me.  But thankfully, this play did not have a tired or used-up feel about it at all.  It felt very much alive and sparkling and energetic the whole way through.  Yes, it involved a genie (who shortened his title to jinn) and yes this genie lived in a lamp (which somehow smoked on command), and yes he granted wishes to all who held him.  But, as with any story where human beings are granted their every base desire on command, the characters had to confront the fact that they didn’t really understand what it was that they really wanted, and that what they thought they wanted wasn’t really what they needed to be fulfilled and have a life worth living. 

I can honestly say that this sentiment spoke to me on a level that not much else has as of late.  I’m hardly an old man yet, nor do I feel that I have attained some level of wisdom that is beyond my years or anything, but I am standing at a new point in my life where it feels that new changes and realizations are taking place.  Call it a sort of emotional or spiritual taking-stock of sorts, but whatever it is, it definitely involves reviewing what it is that I really want out of life.  And it’s a good thing, a healthy thing.  I think I’m pretty familiar with what it is that I DON’T want.  I think I’m like a lot of people in this day and age in that I am more familiar with what I wish to reject rather than that which I wish to embrace.  But you can’t define yourself solely by that which you reject, by what you hate.  Life is not just about destruction.  It’s about building too.  You can tear down and rip away and expose all you want, then what are you going to build in its place?  I guess this is at the core of the questions I’m asking myself these days.  My last play provides a pretty good illustration of this.  Now let me be clear: I am extremely proud of I Am Alpha.  I put a lot of work and a lot of myself into it, I felt that I grew as a writer, and I love what came out of it.  But watching it night after night, I came to realize that what I had given voice to in that play was the side of me that sneers and rolls its eyes and makes smart-ass observations about all the things that I consider to be stupid and petty and wrong.  In other words, that which I reject.  Now this is not to say that I think I did something wrong here or that I am in any way, I don’t know, ashamed of it.  Not at all.  ‘Cuz that would be stupid.  Other people may have gotten something else out of it entirely, and that’s cool, hell that’s GREAT.  But this is my POV on it.  The point is that I know what I don’t like and what I don’t need and what I don’t want.  And I think I can express those things and that I have expressed them.  Most of my writing, including I Am Alpha, has some kind of tragic ending because doing otherwise has always felt somehow dishonest or forced.  I’m typically drawn towards writing around darker subject matter with barely a nod towards that which I feel is good and right and beautiful.  And in the future, I will probably still be drawn towards the dark side of things, but at the same time, I think I’ve sort of outgrown the whole “angry young man/everything is shit” way of seeing the world and expressing myself.  Part of me growing up is me growing as a writer.  I don’t know when I’ll write another play or what it’s going to be about, but I do know that next time out, whatever it is, I want to really create something beautiful.  Goddammit, would you look at how long this fucking post is already?  This started off as a mini-review of The Jinn (go see it, by the way) and ended up being a review of what’s going on in my head these days.  And I keep rambling because I’m trying to make myself clear and I can just imagine what any number of people might be thinking I mean by all this and dammit, no, you’re getting the wrong idea, no I didn’t mean that at all, I meant to say, okay wait, let me start over…no wait.  Just kidding.  No starting over.  I’m just gonna leave it as is. 

Whew.

Hey!  To all you freaks out there peddling girl scout cookies, whether ye be actual girl scouts standing out in front of a Blockbuster video or HEB grocery store harassing all those who enter and exit said establishments with your colorful boxes of calories, or whether ye be parents of girl scouts who bring large boxes containing smaller boxes of assorted flavors of cookies to the office to sell off to the various cube-dwellers and who discuss the horrors of being a a girl scout parent during girl scout cookie season with other parents of girl scouts while riding up the elevator in the morning and making me listen to ye: Educate yourselves!  Come see LGT’s newest piece of work, I Am Alpha, and learn more then yeever knew even existed about the demographics and marketing strategies of cookie sales as perpetrated by members of paramilitary all-girl organizations and their parents.

---

Comments

Julie

2005-01-28T20:44:55.000Z

You have access to Girl Scout Cookies?  I love Girl Scout cookies.  Pick me up a couple of boxes of samoas (I will NOT refer to them by their new pagan name “Carmel delites”) and I’ll be your best friend!

So here’s a hypothetical for all you good people.  Can two people remain friends after one of them tells the other, in all seriousness, that he or she is going to hell?  This is hell the afterlife, as in lake of fire, gnashing of teeth, eternal torment, not like Wal-Mart on “Bring All Your Kids Day” which isn’t so much hell, but more like evidence that evil truly does exist and walks among us.  And this isn’t because one of the two friends is Hitler or Karl Rove or anything, we’re talking about two perfectly nice, social, even very helpful and caring people.  It’s just that one of them, the one who is allegedly on their way to the everlasting fires of Abbadon, simply does not share the religious beliefs of the other.  Can a friendship survive that?  How might that affect their relationship?

---

Comments

Julie

2005-01-19T19:29:02.000Z

If both parties agreed to disagree, and just never bring up the subject, then I think you could certainly continue to be friends.  I’ve been friends with all sorts of people who didn’t agree with my beliefs on a number of issues, and we’d just avoid that topic of conversation.   But if this friend has told you, “you are going to burn in hell if you do not repent and accept my religion as your own”, I don’t know that the friendship can survive.  If your friend is following the credo of their religion, they probably will be trying to convert you constantly, and you may always feel like they have an ulterior motive.  This would put a definite strain on the friendship.  So who is it, huh, you can tell us?

tarv

2005-01-19T19:46:58.000Z

It really is just a hypothetical inspired by events that I heard about recently, and it got me thinking.  Sorry, no dirt.

Tara

2005-02-01T08:41:42.000Z

I knew a guy in High School, he was the only one I knew that played magic, so I gave him my Beta cards when he moved away cause I didn’t need them anymore. Um, that wasn’t the point. The point is that he was some flavor of “Born Again”. I believe he had been “pagan” at some point so I’m sure that helped, but he was decidedly on the Christian side of the fence when he left.

He was absolutely, without question, positive that my lack of faith in The Almighty Spawn of Virgin Mary Christ was going to result in my going to Hell when I died. We were friends. It never got in the way, so that either made him a really good, or really shitty Christian depending on who you ask. We talked religion sometimes, but mostly we just knew what the other person believed.

He was fun to hang out with. He felt that despite my being a godless heathen I was a basically good person, with a hysterically dark sense of humor, and he could handle that. I guess he came from the lead by example crowd, and not the beat heathens with crosses crowd.

So it can work. But I think it’s probably more the exception than the rule. Oh yeah, his name was Reese. See, I didn’t even make him up.

I share a birthday with Rush Limbaugh!  Ew ew ew!!!  Fuck! 

Oh well.  It’s also Rob Zombie’s birthday.

---

Comments

Steve

2005-01-19T14:20:55.000Z

Dude I also share the same birthday and it’s Howard Sterns birthday too and Kristie Alley and Melany Chrisholm (whoever the fuck that is..) And Oliver Martinez (not positive who that is either)

…that I had the same birthday as Howard Stern of all people.  Fucking capricorns.

---

Comments

Sharon

2005-02-08T18:46:56.000Z

Just in case you have forgotten … your mom is one of those “fucking Capricorns” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

South Asia:  150,000 people killed by a tsunami.  Homes destroyed.  Villages wiped out.  Survivors left homeless and grief-stricken.  Monstrous health crisis.  This disaster will affect the region for years to come. 

Austin, Texas USA:  My coworkers hold extensive discussions surrounding the super-low prices that can probably now be found in South Asian resorts (those that weren’t destroyed anyway).  Quotes such as “it’ll be safe in a few weeks” and “now’s the time to go!” are passed across the table.  No mention of the death or destruction, for it is lunch-time and that would be impolite. 

Assholes.

---

Comments

Julie

2005-01-05T18:56:11.000Z

That is disgusting!  Did you rip off their shirts and check their backs for control panels?  Because only an evil robot could think about that sort of thing.  That is sick!  Wouldn’t it be nice if those bastards did go and then  a tsunami came up on the shore and sought out only them.  Yeah that would be sweet.

ashmita

2005-01-07T19:55:43.000Z

http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature.html

An article titled “Wish you were here: pondering the ethics of Tsunami Tourism”

Julie

2005-01-10T17:35:04.000Z

This is a bit different, if you ask me.  This guy already had a trip planned and now has the dilemma of whether to cancel it or not, as opposed to someone who is seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the tsunami for cheap travel.  Still, I can’t imagine going, although I wouldn’t make a moral judgement on someone in his situation who did.  It seems like it would be the world’s most depressing vacation.  I can’t imagine holding on to the illusion that I was in paradise, surrounded by grieving inhabitants, rubble, and mass graves.