Fame or Famine

Living with a performance artist is not easy; just ask me. Then ask my husband. Then ask my mother, and my father-in-law’s girlfriend and his ex wife. Then my father and his wife and my husband’s grandmother. There are so many of us in my extended family who do some version of performance art, and all of us are delightful and intense and interesting and intelligent and very, very difficult to live with.
If being a performing artist takes a sort of manic, suicidal zeal and intensity then living with one takes infinite patience and understanding, …read more

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This past Friday, June 24th, Andy and Charlie and I moseyed down to the Oak Park Festival Theatre to see their rendition of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, directed by Jack Hickey.
Despite my very best efforts to be a hideous crank and judgy about everything I could get my hands on, I found very little to dislike about the show. It was a concept piece, but only in the barest of bones, and the simplistic set and casual costuming made it easy to look past the convention to the performances. There was a minimalist element to the production …read more

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News from MoveOn.org regarding PBS funding: It’s a Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood :
We are delighted that we were able to help restore some of the cuts made to NPR and PBS. – Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.org
I called my congressman to thank him for representing me in his voting. If yours voted the way you preferred, please express your thanks to them.

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Or: if you fall off that bike you’ll never forget how to get up and ride it again right off a cliff.

Every business has a shelf-life, and performance art is no exception. In fact, it pretty much exemplifies the rule. In an industry where one is routinely valued against the rest of the playing field one has to know the most recent and newest in “thing” to be rewarded with work.
To be clear, the shelf-life problem isn’t with talent, which is something inborn, but with training, which everyone needs. Many people make the mistake talent …read more

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I would like to introduce you to Ella. She is a performing artist in the Chicagoland area and is currently involved in several projects. This series will be a series about her life, hopes, dreams and fears and will attempt to illuminate just what a person takes on when they make the decision to become a performance artist.
I will be checking in with her weekly to get her current thoughts, her personal history, and to ask her to answer any questions you may have regarding choosing performance art as a life’s work. Feel free to …read more

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or: Sometimes you get what you hope for
On Friday, April 30, 1999, I went to one of my favorite swing clubs, Liquid, to see a band called The Ray Gelato Giants. At H2G2 I posted a review of the show.
It’s been over six years since I first laid eyes on the trombonist in that band. Six years since he very sweetly, and with much drunken aplomb, assured me that he was going to marry me. True to his word, after much of my needling and prodding, he did marry me two years later to the day. He …read more

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Here is the question you have to ask yourself: Why would two people, normal to all appearances, with advanced senses of humor and brains by the bucketload, ie… my parents: Why would these two people not understand that Napoleon Dynamite is one of the funniest movies to be released so far this millennium?
I mean, a guy gets hit in the face with a steak.
From Preston, Idaho comes Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a new kind of hero complete with a tight red ‘fro, some sweet moon boots, and skills that can’t be topped. Napoleon lives with his Grandma and his …read more

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Or: Let us all bow our heads and vomit
What is it about celebrity relationships that spur the darkest recesses of human imagination and obsession? One could certainly make the argument that only the lowest, most base human beings follow the romantic lives of the rich and famous, but one, based on all available evidence, would be lying. It’s like saying that only tired, overweight housewives read romantic novels. It’s just not true. The greater portion of the population enjoys a little gratuitous smut.
So we’ve tittered over the antics of Bennifer and oohed and hmmmmmed at every …read more

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PBS Funding Cut by US House Panel – Reuters
“This year, PBS’s news shows came under attack for allegedly having a liberal bias — a charge the group’s president denied. Conservatives also complained about a recent children’s show in which some of the characters visited a farm in Vermont that was run by a family headed by two women.”
–Richard Cowan
I suppose that the government believes that if it is going to be paying for something it might as well pay for something that supports its position. Publications or programming, art of any kind, requires funding and backing. I have …read more

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Much like the trend for giving people what they already know that gave birth to the horrible-70’s-sitcom as movie (I’m looking at you, Brady Bunch), there has been a recent spate of books, some modern, some classic, recreated in movie form. Books have long been a screenplay source, and there seems to be a cyclical nature movie source material; original works give way to films of books give way to original works. From the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to Under the Tuscan Sun and from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, the current popular book-as-movie cycle shows no sign …read more

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