Next Monday I’ll be reading the ninth chapter of my book The Starting Gate at St. Andrews Bar And Grill in Green Lake. This chapter is titled “Bars: A User’s Guide”, and offers a brief review of the rules everyone should know when availing themselves of that venerated technology, the public house. As reward for close attention paid, I will offer a bonus virtual visit to the Zig Zag in the time of the incomparable Murray Stenson, the most perfect cocktail experience anyone could hope for.
Here’s a quickie excerpt:
Just as there are certain poems that can only be best understood once you have learned more basic poems, Murray will strike the uninitiated as a rather average bartender, friendly, unimposing, as eager to pull you a draft as he is to stir you a handcrafted cocktail. In fact, Murray has a joke he loves to tell:
A few years back a bunch of guys, maybe five, came into the Zig Zag after a Seahawks game. The first four all ordered different fancy cocktails. The fifth guy asks for a Jack and Coke. His friends erupt in outrage. “You can’t do that here. Don’t you know what this place is? This is that place for fancy cocktails. The Zig Zag. And that’s Murray.
“Oh, okay, okay,” the guy says, throwing up his hands in surrender. “In that case, I’ll take a Crown and Coke.”
Murray tells that story, I’m sure, to deflate a little of the pomposity that has blown up around the cocktail scene over the last decade or so, but also to let you know unequivocally that, if you order a Jack and Coke, he’ll happily make you the best goddamned Jack and Coke you’ve ever had.
And here are the details:
When: Monday, November 3, at 8pm Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103 Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes. Why: Why not?
When I decided to travel to Quebec to see this upcoming production of Louis Slotin Sonata translated into French, I thought to myself, “Well, this experience will certainly be new, but what will it be like?” I had so little idea that, even though I wanted to write about it in advance, I couldn’t.
And then came this trailer…
What I love about it is that its director trusts the play so much that he leans exclusively into the power of the words, and the power of the actors to speak them, to sell it to a potential audience. Of course, because there are no “staging landmarks” for me to follow, I am delightfully disoriented. On my first watching of it, I only really gained my bearings when an actor started speaking Hebrew. Ironically, once he heard the Mourner’s Kaddish, this born-and-raised Irish Catholic boy felt on familiar ground.
It’s a fundamental and powerful truth of theatre that the spoken word is orders of magnitude more primal than the written. Plays are not literature. They are an altogether different form of art.
Seeing my words transformed into another language, and then transformed again back into life by these captivating actors, gives me chills. The good kind.
This past Saturday, the CW became the last broadcast television network to cut Saturday morning cartoons. The CW is replacing its Saturday cartoon programming, called “The Vortexx,” with “One Magnificent Morning,” a five-hour bloc of non-animated TV geared towards teens and their families.
Those of us who remember the age of three and only three networks, also recall fondly that, once upon a time the only way you could watch animated cartoons was to wake up on Saturday morning and catch what ABC, NBC or CBS had on offer. Here is what a typical Saturday line up looked like when I was my son Keelans’ age. It includes classics like Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker mixed in with more circa 70’s fair, like The Scooby Doo/Dynamutt Hour, and a personal favorite, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which came on so late, 12 noon, that my mom was usually hectoring me by that time to get outside because I had already wasted too much of “perfectly nice day” watching that “idiot box.”
“But Mom! It’s Fat Albert!”
Birth of an Institution
Happily, theatre—as specifically embodied by director/producer Jim Jewell— did not let the tradition of Saturday morning cartoons go gently into the good night. Instead, Jewell saw the demise coming, and made a plan to fill the gap with short plays written by teams of local Northwest playwrights and their kids. “Saturday mornings used to belong to kids,” says Jewell. “I remember waiting all week for that one day I could binge on cartoons for hours. So, we wanted to try and create that same feeling with some fun live theater, and what better way to understand what kind of art kids want to see than engaging them in the creation of it?”
The results of Jewell’s brainstorm will be making their world premiere over three Saturdays this November, at the Pocket Theatre [http://thepocket.org/] on Phinney Ridge in Seattle.
My sons, Declan and Keelan, and I teamed up to write “Magical Man and the Space Needle of Hideousness”, just one episode in the continuing adventures of Magical Man and his million-plus year sojourn in our paltry four palpable dimensions.
MAGICAL MAN: I call myself Magical Man. Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t say my actual name in your universe. There aren’t enough dimensions.
I’ve been in your world for one million very, VERY boring years.
Today I will do what I have waited all those years to accomplish. Confront Roger Wickersham, bring him to justice for his transgressions. . . .
It certainly doesn't hurt that Cody Smith and Samuel Hagen will be staring as Magical Man and Roger Wickersham, Evil PhD, respectively.
Other playwright/kid combinations include:
“Don’t Touch That Dial!” by Penelope Venturini and Marcy Rodenborn
“Roderick Saves the World (or at least the Day)” by Finn Judd and Maria Glanz
“Feline Fitness” by Olivia and Jim Jewell
“The Family Jynx” by Jack and Joe Zavadil
The plays will be brought to life by a talented ensemble, including Val Brunetto, Sam Hagen, D’Arcy Harrison, Cole Hornaday, Kacey Shiflet, and Cody Smith, with a special guest appearance by Paul Shipp. Co-directed by Shawn Belyea and Jim Jewell.
Here are the details broken out real simple like:
What? Saturday Morning Cartoons – Live!
Who? B-Sides & Rarities, a Partner Project of The 14/48 Projects, in association with Pocket Theater
Where? The Pocket Theater, 8312 Greenwood Ave N
When? November 8, 15, 22 @ 10:30am
How? Tickets for Saturday Morning Cartoons are available at The Pocket Theater website (http://thepocket.org/see/) and are $10 adults/$5 kids online (or $14/$7 at the door). Seating is general admission and all children MUST be accompanied by an adult
Parents, I promise you a good time will be had by all!
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