'wicked' thoughts

I was walking through downtown yesterday afternoon on my way to the gym and realized I was surrounded by people scurrying to the Saturday afternoon matinee of Wicked, currently here on tour. Then I realized that it was cold and windy, temps in the low 20s -- it's winter again. Indoor activities will be providing most of our entertainment between now and April.

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And we are falling right into indoor scheduling.. This week, for instance: Joan is treating us to Wicked tickets this Wednesday, then Thursday we're going to see Joan Baez.

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Then next weekend, something I always look forward to: the new James Bond movie comes out... and then....

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All kinds of good stuff to fill up the winter months... But, wow. It's such a long time til April. It sure was hard to put on a winter jacket again.

the 9th of October, many years later

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my son, Tom..... 27 years old today. wow!

*****

My sister, the autograph hound: Joan called me last night from New York, where she is enjoying her semi-annual Broadway trip. She was standing outside the stage door at the theater where she had just seen (all of) Daniel Radcliffe (from the Harry Potter movies) in Equus, waiting for him to come out and sign her program. Earlier she had seen the new production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons and had gotten autographs from cast members including Patrick Wilson, John Lithgow, Katie Holmes, and Dianne Wiest. Tonight she goes to see Patti LuPone in Gypsy, which she first saw last spring and which she loved so much she just had to see again.

She raved about All My Sons, and I was a bit envious after having just seen last week a great production of another of Arthur Miller's plays (this one from 1955), A View From the Bridge, at the Guthrie Theater here in Minneapolis.

08.08.08 @ 8

I was at the coffeeshop at 8 this morning to see Jack. It's his last day on the job. He's been the manager of the shop for the last several years, and we can always depend on him for a smile and some friendly chat. He's a young, vibrant guy, obviously too talented to be a coffeeshop manager the rest of his life, is going back to school -- to the University of Minnesota (just down the street) to study theater. Another starving actor, or maybe not? Still, it's sad to lose one of my coffeeshop friends.

As I write this, I'm sitting at the Volkswagen dealership, waiting while my GTI has its 20,000 mile checkup. Across the lobby, the TV is on. In a far-away time zone, the Olympics opening ceremony is happening right now to be followed, of course, by two weeks of Summer Olympics. I'm a casual Olympics observer, will watch some gymnastics, maybe some diving.

The opening ceremonies, which I find mostly annoying anyway, will be re-broadcast tonight on American TV. We'll miss it. We have tickets for the Jungle Theater, at 8 o'clock -- Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Maybe one of these years, we'll see Jack up on stage.

*****

Brett Favre ended up with the New York Jets?? Jerry, an avid Jets fan (sporadically), doesn't know what to think.

gin!

No, not gin, the liquid kind. Gin: the card game.

My son Tom and I last Saturday night were listening to the new Madonna CD, Hard Candy. I'm a little too old for Madonna, Tom maybe a little young for Madonna (he's 26), so she's a good place for us to meet in the middle (This is an OK CD, not as good as her last one [Confessions on a Dance Floor]). Tom comes over most Saturday nights and we play games with Jerry and listen to music, and Tom stays over. He is a card-playing fanatic. We usually play Hand & Foot or Golf, unless we play dominoes instead (Mexican Train Game), and he and Jerry almost always beat me. Last week, though, we were playing Gin, which Jerry and I were in the mood for since we had just seen the play The Gin Game the night before at our favorite local theater, the Jungle. Our enthusiasm for this production must have carried over or maybe Madonna put him into an agreeable frame of mind, because somehow we talked Tom into going with us to see it if we would go for a second time. No, I think it's the Gin.

I called Jon, my other son (mid-thirties, somehow!), and asked if he would go with us too. Jon is very into arboretums (arboreta?), zoos, art museums, architecture, and music, and I would love to be able to pass on to him (and Tom) an appreciation for live theater too. I know -- Papa, don't preach, but I'm happy to say that tonight we are heading back to the Jungle with the boys and my sister Joan (already a theater enthusiast) for more Gin Game, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with them.

And somehow I won the game, too. First time I've won a game since October.

it all ended much too soon

A less hazy weekend, as I try to wean myself off medication and avoid the knife by trying massive doses of herbs and vitamins and eye of newt and other voodoo. Tomorrow I start back working out at the gym. Optimism!

And a relatively active weekend compared to vegetating on the sofa. Went with Jerry and Joan last night to see Frankie Valli (and the would-be Four Seasons) at Mystic Lake Casino. Hey, Frankie at 74 still puts on one heck of a show. So his voice isn't quite what it used to be, so what? You try singing falsetto for 50 years and see how your voice holds up! And so what if these newest Four Seasons are young enough to be his grandsons and none are from New Jersey? We had a tremendous evening being entertained by this Jersey boy, a month after seeing the current Broadway version of his story that took place some 45 years ago (See my April 13 entry).

Then we wandered into the casino, where Joan won nine hundred bucks on the slots!

This afternoon, thinking we were doing something quieter, we went to see the Theatre in the Round's excellent new production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Quieter, ha! Three and a half hours of dysfunctional-family arguments (condensed, thank goodness, from the usual four and a half hour version)!

and now, with music playing on the stereo, a beautiful Sunday evening...

ah, weekends....

you can take the boy out of Jersey, but ....

oh, what a night...

There is some sort of weird Jersey pride when you grow up in New Jersey. Maybe it's a defense mechanism for dealing with all the jokes, the put-downs. I don't think that's it, though. I think, and I know I'm speaking only in generalities, that there is some sort of innate loyalty that Jerseyites develop that is not common to people from other places. I haven't lived in NJ for 32 years, yet I still think of myself as a Jersey guy, and when I go back, it's still home. Transplants from other places don't seem to feel quite the same about where they are from or how they deal with relationships, with family, with friends...

So, naturally, as a Jersey boy, I was looking forward to seeing the Broadway musical, Jersey Boys, which is the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (and, of course, I've always liked Frankie Valli) and what it means to be a Jersey Boy. A touring production is here in Minneapolis now, and we went to see it last night. It's a great show, way better than those other "jukebox musicals". Afterward we went to a benefit reception that included the chance to hang out with members of the cast of this production. I've worked this week what seems to be a hundred hours, so I've been hovering somewhere in between exhaustion and hyperactivity. This was a chance to party into the night with pretend Four Seasons after seeing such a fun show.

It was all just too good to be true. We all need our rewards.

on the street where we live

It was the 50th anniversary London touring company version of My Fair Lady that we went to see last night. Great sets, casting, Matthew Bourne choreography, all that. But Joan and I, being the trivia nerds that we are, wanted to see Marni Nixon playing the non-singing role of Henry Higgins' mother. Normal people may not know that Marni Nixon, decades ago, was the "singing voice" of Audrey Hepburn in the movie version of My Fair Lady, as well as the dubbed singing voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, and others. One of the oddities of movie musicals in the 50s and the early 60s was that a marquee-name actor would get the roles, not actors that could actually sing. Marni Nixon finally got her face (and voice) on film as one of the nuns in The Sound of Music.

Before the theater, Jerry, Joan and I had a wonderful dinner, Cuban cuisine, at Cafe Havana. It was sort of our "farewell, Fidel!" dinner. Say what you will about Castro, but he outlived all his contemporaries and overlapped ten U.S. Presidencies.