Fool's Gold Coast

Rust Belt Paris

This weekend Kito and I will be celebrating our fifth anniversary in the City of Love--Indianapolis. I'll resume posting at this site after I return to Chicago. In the meantime, here's the only song I can think of that mentions the Circle City.

Have a lovely weekend and I'll see you soon.

Keys to Happiness

On Tuesday Kito and I managed to lock ourselves out of our apartment without our phones or any good ideas for getting back inside. Kito's proposal: buy a ladder, prop it against the wall of our building, climb up to our second-floor apartment, pry open the window, and either 1.) explain ourselves to the police or 2.) wait for the ambulance.

Fortunately, Jewel was still open, so I used the pay phone inside to call the BFF, who happens to have one of the four numbers I still have memorized (the other three belong to my mother, my late grandmother, and my cell phone). The BFF gave me the number of a locksmith, who showed up a mere 15 minutes later and picked the lock on our front door with surprising and rather unsettling speed. The rates now strike me as a little high for 17 seconds of work, but at the time I was willing to pay any amount to express my gratitude and relief.

I imagine the preceding sentence could also have been uttered by anyone who has ever contracted the services of a prostitute.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Bailiwick Chicago's Violet and Lifeline Theatre's The Count of Monte Cristo are in this week's Chicago Reader.

TV Watching Schedule 2011

The fall television season is underway, which means it's time for me to share my TV watching schedule with you for some reason. Here are the shows currently on my TiVo's to-do list:

Sunday
The Simpsons (Fox) [never say die!]
The Good Wife (CBS)

Monday
Warehouse 13 (Syfy) [but I think the next episode is the season finale]

Tuesday
Glee (Fox) [but I hate it with my whole heart]

Wednesday
Top Chef: Just Desserts (Bravo) [I am so hot for head judge Johnny Iuzzini]

Thursday
Community (NBC)
Parks and Recreation (NBC) [my favorite show on the air!]
Project Runway (Lifetime) [I'm rooting for that hot Asian girl]

I'm also still finishing up Upstairs, Downstairs. The gang has finally reached the Jazz Age, so it can't be much longer now.

ELSEWHERE:
My review of The Building Stage's Moby-Dick is in this week's Time Out Chicago.

State of Play

A week or so ago, I was at a game night where one of the games was an off-brand version of Catch Phrase. When one player received the word "Arkansas," this is how she described it:

"Hick state. I think Bill Clinton's from it."

Inasmuch as I am from it, too, I did not enjoy this. How you gonna write off an entire state like that? I mean, we gave the world Mary Steenburgen, for crying out loud!

The Last of the Mohicans

My mother has gone back to her maiden name after nearly 40 years of living as a Thompson. Though she was happy, she says, to take my father's name when she married him, now that the marriage has dissolved she wants to release the past and forge a new life, and she doesn't want to do that with somebody else's name. In short, sisters are doin' it for themselves.

I know that it's her decision to make and that, furthermore, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet even if the name were "stinkweed" or "skunk cabbage," and on Valentine's Day we'd tell our friends, "Oh, it was so romantic! He gave me a dozen long-stemmed stinkweeds!"--or we'd talk about people dancing the tango with skunk cabbage clenched in their teeth and no one would bat an eye because that's just the way things would be.

It still feels strange, though. I can remember a time, not too long ago, when everyone in my family--my parents, my three sisters, and I--all had the same last name. All of a sudden I look around and my father and I are the only ones left. I feel like the last of a dying breed.

Well, this seals it. From now on, my dog Lucy is taking my name and that's final.

Thompson for life, yo.

Shameless

Last week the BFF sent me an email that read, "The difference btw you and me is that you will put a photograph of yourself wearing a bib online for the world to see, and I will not."

Correction: I will put it online twice.

ELSEWHERE:
My review of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Clybourne Park is in this week's Chicago Reader.

All That Glitters 131

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

Books
READ: The Tempest by William Shakespeare, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan; Animal Farm by George Orwell [pigs are jerks].

Movies
SAW: Our Idiot Brother; Contagion [finally! acknowledgment that Gwyneth Paltrow is a plague on the planet]; The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T [see Glitter, below, for a clip]; The Red Balloon and White Mane.
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: Straight People Pretending to Be Gay.
KITO'S SELECTION: Partners (dir. Burrows, 1982).
MINE: Cruising (Friedkin, 1980) [I know it's supposed to offend me and all, but I found the depiction of Sodom's seamy underbelly kind of hot].

Music
LISTENED TO: Dolly Parton, Better Day [I like "Country Is As Country Does" best].

Art
SAW: Matt Irie, "You Are the Vanishing Point" (Ebersmoore); "Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945" (Art Institute Chicago) [lots of ratlike Hitlers getting stabbed with bayonets].

Television
WATCHING: Top Chef: Just Desserts (Bravo), Project Runway (Lifetime), Warehouse 13 (Syfy), Glee (Fox) [but it's on thin ice].

Current Interests
Theater criticism, the gays, black folk, comedy, The Real Housewives, attractive men, musicals, conservatives, travel, animals.

Fool's Four
WAYS I HEARD "NEWFOUNDLAND" PRONOUNCED IN CANADA:
1. NEWfndlnd.
2. NewFOUNDlnd.
3. NewfndLAND.
4. New Finland [Kito].

Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "Have You Met Chris Jones?"
TWO YEARS AGO: "FOUR SUPPOSED TEARJERKERS THAT DO NOT MAKE ME CRY."
FOUR YEARS AGO: "Two shows that make light of the sometimes dark and desperate urges of the human heart. And crotch."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "Now that Slater has shown his behind on Nip/Tuck and Mark-Paul Gosselaar has shown his on NYPD Blue, only Dustin "Screech" Diamond and Dennis "Mr. Belding" Haskins need drop trou', and I can die a happy man."

Glitter

ELSEWHERE:
My review of Circle Theatre's Urinetown is in this week's Time Out Chicago.

The Gold Mine 132: September 18, 2004

Stuff I've dug up.

Here's a passage from a diary entry I wrote on today's date seven years ago. I was 25.

9.18.04. Saturday. Night. Home.
Saw Dee today for the first time in ages. She's in town to visit her old college pals--her first time back in Chicago since graduating from Northwestern more than two years ago. It was great seeing her. We went to Millennium Park and the Berghoff, and then walked through a Celtic festival, ate ice cream by Buckingham Fountain, and finally sat by the lake for a bit. A very Chicago-y afternoon.

Dee her regular wry self. She works for VH-1 now and has begun dating her first white guy. She seems to think I have too few friends and that I am wasting my life at the day job (no argument there). But I think she still finds me funny and charming, so what else matters?

Very difficult to say goodbye.

As it happens, I haven't seen her since.

Wicked

The other day, I gave some money to a street person sitting on the sidewalk beside the Starbucks at Lawrence and Broadway. Immediately afterwards, a mustachioed man in a souvenir Wicked t-shirt materialized as if out of nowhere.

"I have to say something," he said. "I lived in San Francisco for many years, and one of the reasons there are so many homeless people there is that people like you give them money. I know you're trying to be generous, but you enable them. I'm sorry, but I had to tell you that."

First of all, I think he might have missed the message of the show whose merchandise he was sporting--that message being, "Don't be an asshole to people who are different than you are, whether they be green-skinned gravity defiers or down-on-their-luck street people."

Second, the person to whom I gave money--money which would have otherwise sat in a jar on my dresser for God knows how long--was clearly crazy. I seriously doubt that my not giving her my loose change would finally be the wakeup call she needed to pull herself up by the bootstraps and enroll in law school.

Sorry, but I had to tell you that.

Chicago Fun-Times

So much of what appears in newspapers bores me to tears. It's always "length of school days" this and "solve this sudoku puzzle" that. But last week, while I was out of town, the Chicago Sun-Times (motto: "We don't know why we still exist either") ran an article seemingly tailor-made to appeal to my particular interests. Even the headline sounds like something I might utter into the darkness during some sleepless night: "So, What's in Hedy Weiss' Closet?"

I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this piece of journalism, penned by Hedy Weiss herself, is the best thing that has ever happened to me. In it, she talks about how she doesn't own jeans and pretty much only wears dresses "even though I came of age at a time when women made pants something of a political statement" (take that, Hanoi Jane). She confesses to a shoe obsession stretching back to a childhood craving for Capezio ballet flats. She says she once "spent months on a long, secretive, fruitless search for a chemise-like slip like the one worn by Julie Christie in the movie Darling." Oh my God, I thought I was going to hyperventilate.

My favorite part, though, is when she talks about how she "devised a style a male friend [READ: big ol' queen] would later describe as 'Power Victorian' (though 'Power Edwardian' would be more accurate). That meant dresses with long, flowing skirts, cinched-waisted jackets, lots of velvet and Liberty prints; granny boots." I mean, on the one hand, why did a major metropolitan newspaper think we would give a shit about the sartorial choices of its theater critic? But on the other, far more important hand, I GIVE A DEEP AND ABIDING SHIT.

Having discovered, then, that the Sun-Times has evidently made a commitment to answering all of my most nagging questions, I here submit some headlines for stories I would like to see in the near future:

So, What's in Hedy Weiss's Medicine Cabinet?
What Is Hedy Weiss's Earliest Memory?
Is Hedy Weiss Interested in Sharing an Egg Cream with Me and Talking about Cute Boys?
So, What's in Hedy Weiss's Garbage Can?
and
How Come Whenever a Cell Phone Rings during a Play, Hedy Weiss Glares at Me as Though I Am Responsible? Or Am I Imagining Things?

And you thought print was dead.