Fool's Gold Coast

All That Glitters 124

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: Pericles by William Shakespeare [and possibly George Wilkins], ed. by Suzanne Gossett.

Movies
SAW: Badlands.
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: Kito [on account of it was his birthday week].
KITO'S SELECTION: Outbreak (dir. Petersen, 1995) [one of his faves for some reason].
MINE: Adventures in Babysitting (Columbus, 1987) [ditto; see "Glitter," below, for my favorite scene].

Art
SAW: Erik deBat: Risk & Reward (Renaissance Blackstone Hotel) [I liked Diabolic Self Portrait best].

Current Interests
Kito, Broadway divas, comedy, Chicago theater, my day job, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, my sisters, movies, books, creationists, England, my dog Lucy, mortality.

Fool's Four
FOUR CELEBRITIES WHOM PAST HAIRCUTS HAVE MADE ME RESEMBLE:
1. Mia Farrow.
2. Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
3. Newt Gingrich.
4. Tavi Gevinson.

Foolish Flashbacks
TWO YEARS AGO: "A young man who has his whole death in front of him."
"'And' is not part of the infinitive! 'And' means 'in addition to.' It's not 'Try and get some sleep,' it's 'Try to get some sleep.' To! To! To! To! To! To! To! Please try to get some sleep!"" (Deborah Eisenberg)
FOUR YEARS AGO: Altman's Nashville: "an all-star comedy without the jokes."
"One of the sadder things, I think, / Is how our birthdays slowly sink" (Philip Larkin).

Glitter
Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Prop Thtr's Arizona, No Roosters in the Desert and Porchlight Music Theatre's The King and I are in the current Chicago Reader.

The Gold Mine 126: May 4, 2007

Stuff I've dug up.

Here's an excerpt from a diary entry I wrote on today's date four years ago. I was 27.

Friday.5.4.2007.Home.12.22am. Kito's birthday shenanigans scheduled for tonight. Dinner, then hours and hours of tedious debauchery. Who started the custom of marking the day of your birth by punishing your liver for a full 24 hours (and beyond)? With each passing week I seem to grow less fond of drinking and reveling and such. I was never exactly Keith Richards, of course, but at least I could find something enjoyable in stupefying myself now and then. Or is that even true? Did I ever actually enjoy it, or was it just something I occasionally did?

I wrote this shortly before my first encounter with a Kito birthday. On the day before my fifth commences, I can tell you that my projection of a 24-hour celebration, even with that "and beyond" parenthetical qualifier, comes short of the mark by a country mile.

On an unrelated note: later in the same entry I described some people I had recently met as "a confederation of haughty man-whores fairly reeking of alcohol and water-based lubricant."

Sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to people.

ELSEWHERE:
My reviews of Promethean Theatre Ensemble's Bury the Dead and The Neo-Futurists' Performing Tonight: Liza Minnelli's Daughter are in this week's Time Out Chicago.

Hybrid

I got a haircut on Saturday. To get an idea of the new look, imagine what the offspring of Mia Farrow and a lesbian would look like. Strangely enough, I count this as an improvement in my appearance.

[Confidential to Josh: only kidding!]

Future Tense

The Sortes Virgilianae, or Virgilian lottery, is a method of divining the future from Virgil's Aeneid. You point at a passage at random and it foretells your future. The lottery became popular during the latter days of the Roman Empire, when a series of barbarian invasions made Magic 8-Balls especially hard to come by.

Since I recently purchased a copy of Robert Fagles's translation of the poem, I decided to try the soothsaying method for myself. Closing my eyes and opening the book at random, I placed my finger on the following lines from the end of book nine:

But a whole battalion marching out of the camp
comes massing hard against him--not even Juno
dares reinforce his power to counterattack.

That can't be good.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of the American Demigods' Erratica and Prologue Theatre Company's Ribbon around a Bomb are in the current Chicago Reader.