Theatreview: Buyer & Cellar, Rattlestick Playwrights, New York

I went into Buyer & Cellar expecting light comedy (yep) and not much else (nope). Don't get me wrong—I believe fervently in the value of light comedy. My dissertation was on the value of comedy, which was one reason I wanted to see this show. Another was the cast—Michael Urie, whom I have loved since the first season of Ugly Betty. The main reason, though, was that Buyer & Cellar is a fantasy about a young gay man who serves as the sole retail worker in the underground mall in Malibu that houses Barbra Streisand's personal collection of stuff. Some of the other subjects of my dissertation were young people, queer people, and collectors—not to mention divas, Los Angeles, and musicals; this show was made for me.

Urie, as would-be actor Alex More, is both fantastic and fabulous, which are complementary (and complimentary) qualities in an actor. He has a rapid-fire energy to his monologue and purpose to his movement that kept the show active and gripping despite a narrative that features long stretches of Alex sitting in Barbra's basement alone, bored. When he isn't alone, when he relives interactions with his boyfriend, with Barbra, with various other characters, his dialogue with himself changes tempo to match the situation. He speeds up to debate with his queeny would-be-screenwriter boyfriend, Barry; slows down for duels with Sharon, the manager of Barbra's vast compound; and grinds nearly to a halt for the heart of the play, Alex's encounters with the lady herself. The pauses that mark the pas de deux between Alex and Barbra never break the show's momentum, instead ratcheting up the comic anticipation that marks most of Buyer & Cellar.

For Buyer & Cellar is filled with jokes that I got, that most of the audience got, just a split second before the punchline. Quotations from lyrics, references to earlier moments in the show, commentary on gayness, Jewishness, Los Angeles-ness, popular culture, all are predictable, but in the best way possible. Each punchline feels like the ideal next step, rather than a disappointing inevitability, and makes us feel smart for getting the joke. Jonathan Tolins' script plays to his audience—which on Friday night in the West Village was the expected mix of gay men, middle-aged Jews, and other theater folk—and its familiarity not only appeals to our egos, but also primes us to be quite startled when he wrenches the play in an unexpected direction. The comedy is comforting, and the breaches in it shake that comfort just enough to allow us to see through the gap to the pain, anger, and philosophy that underpin Buyer & Cellar, as they do most comedy.

Barbra's and Alex's emotions give Buyer & Cellar weight beyond what one might expect in a gay Streisand fantasy, but they rarely weigh the play down. At 95 minutes without intermission, it skips along quite lightly, though the denouement drags just a hair. Pretty good pacing for a play inspired by a supremely static coffee table book, My Passion for Design, written and photographed by Streisand in 2010. Alex carries a post-it-festooned copy of the book onstage at the opening of the play, reading from it and showing us photos of some of Streisand's more outlandish outbuildings; the book is a catalogue of Barbra's personal collections of furniture, clothing, knick-knacks, and grounds. Out of Streisand's glossy paean to her own material wealth, Tolins draws not only the obvious critique of her self-aggrandizing lifestyle—a critique he makes with acid wit through the exquisitely campy Barry—but also an explanation or two of what might underlie that lifestyle (both figuratively and literally) and what might result from it when it brushes up against the lives of ordinary people.

It is only fair to admit that there were moments when the show was less than perfect. There were times, towards the end, when it slowed down too much. There were occasions when Urie relied too much on his eyes and eyebrows for characterization or emphasis. But these imperfections, these moments when the show stretched a bit too much in timing or in facial expression, highlighted the consistent quality of the rest of the evening. If you will pardon the mildest of puns, everything that Buyer & Cellar was selling, I bought, and would buy again. Like Barbra, even when we already own what we are there to examine, we find it more satisfying in the hands of a capable seller.

Downtime Update

Hi, internet friends. It's been a long time, hasn't it? I turned into a doctor and then I abandoned you. I'm sorry about that.

The main reason I've been so scarce is that the boyfriend and I got ourselves the best puppy in the history of puppies. Her name is Angela, and she loves you. She loves everyone and everything. Even her erstwhile nemesis, the dustbuster, is now a treasured companion. If you are a dog person and are in the DC area, come meet her!

The other reason I've missed so many months is that I took an involuntary break from reading and writing anything of any length. Grad school seems to have burned out my internal word processor for a while; I have only recently replaced the battery.

In my absence, I've been busily getting rejected by jobs and fellowships, from one-year research fellowships to two-year teaching gigs to a tenure-track position. I want to thank the institutions that have bothered to actually tell me that I was rejected: Duke, CUNY Baruch, Princeton, the Smithsonian. I want to shame the institutions that decided all us rejects could find out on our own: Virginia Commonwealth, Tufts, and presumably Western Michigan, since it's been a very long time since applications closed there. Honorable Mention to a job that I applied for that pre-rejected my application because my PhD won't be officially conferred until UCLA wraps up in June—they didn't care that my dissertation is defended and submitted and accepted and that there is literally nothing else I need to do to obtain the degree. I already bought the silly hat and the wizard robes, for crying out loud.

On to better news: I have secured myself a part-time research job. It's not enough to live on, but it's enough to quell my worries when I watch my bank account slowly collapsing like a flan in a cupboard, as Eddie Izzard would put it. I'm hoping it leads to more work in the future, and I'm working on supplementing it with other things.

To that end, I've decided to start amassing some theater and movie reviews. I've never done reviews before, at least not officially, so it's going to be a bit of a rough start. Hopefully they will eventually be solid enough that I can get work as a critic on the internet. My first attempt is a review of Buyer & Cellar, which I saw on Friday night; I'll post that here soon, and take comments from anyone who has feedback (I'm looking at you, Dr. Ellis). Collaborative writing is always better than writing in a vacuum. And less dusty.

Musicalologist, PhD

I defended my dissertation. My committee approved it.

I have a few edits to make here and there, but all minor (footnote explaining that Nathan Lane isn't Jewish, paragraph connecting Bakhtin's reduced laughter to Hobsbawm's invented traditions, reinstating the edited-out reference to Mary Hunter's opera buffa work), and then it's done.

Damn it feels good to be a doctor.

BIG NEWS

I am off to Los Angeles today to defend the dissertation on Monday.

Hopefully, I will be rewarded for this with A PUPPY WHEN I GET HOME!

Details to follow once she is confirmed.

Capital

So, I am submerging myself in a pool of job postings. It's not a sea, really, because there aren't all that many, but it's definitely a pool. Right now, I'm doing my best to find gainful employment as a musicologist in Washington, DC, because damnit I like living in one place at a time, and damnit I like living in the same apartment as my boyfriend instead of 3,000 miles away in a different time zone. As all you academics out there know, this locational specificity shrinks the pool.

First on the Washington-area docket is the Smithsonian postdoc application. I haven't the foggiest idea whether this is competitive and cutthroat or unknown and therefore relatively gettable. All I know is that once I navigated the labyrinthine web of dead links and unfortunate font choices that is the SI website, I found some amazing collections and fascinating-looking scholars (their research looks fascinating, that is) that/who seem like they could be really helpful with my next book project. Fingers crossed.

Next, paid summer internship at the Library of Congress. Also awesome stuff, awesome people, but sadly limited to just the summer. Le sigh.

After that, I think it's adjunctville for a while. I haven't finished looking for other academic things to apply to, not by half, but I need to get into the adjunct market as soon as I can to make sure I'm on everybody's list for someone to hire to teach anything and everything related to music, theat-er/re, comedy, teh gay, gender, writing, and soup. I'd love to teach a "Why is Soup so Awesome?" class. That would be delicious.

And then, non-academic jobs. There are lots of those in DC, comparatively speaking; we have an economy there. Hooray for local pork? Maybe teaching music lessons after school somewhere? Maybe the vegan bakery is hiring? Maybe a library needs a shelver or a circulation desk worker, or a used bookstore needs an anything, or a local theater needs an inexperienced dramaturg(e). Temporary work is fine, and any of these could lead somewhere fun eventually, or be fun for a while. Yes, boyfriend, I know I need to further my career; don't worry. I am definitely going to work on doing that even if it isn't my job. Publishing my work, presenting at conferences, editing the dissertation into a book, etc.

I don't need to reassure my father; he doesn't read the internet.

If any of my lovely internet friends knows anything about work I could do in DC, preferably in the musicological sphere, let me know. After the academic job deadlines I know about pass (mostly January 7th and 15th), I'll be looking for more things to apply to.

Grading

The only thing keeping me from tearing my hair out while I grade is Ella singing Cole Porter. Here, you can keep your hair too:

Bright spots

So, grading is happening. You know what feels great? When a student who resisted your advice for weeks (months?) and who rolled her eyes constantly and who was certain she had nothing to learn but then later despairs and becomes intensely frustrated by her own work turns in a damn good senior thesis because she actually absorbed what you were saying and used the sources you recommended and ended up really caring about what she was writing and put all that research toward her own ideas.

It's nice to remember that I chose this field because I love teaching. Sometimes they learn, and sometimes you can see that they learned because of what you did for/to/with them. That's what it's for, right?

Maybe she's just sucking up to the guy grading her, and doing it really well. She did cite my dissertation. But I choose to believe that she's actually learning and thinking and growing. And I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people.

Wait, that wasn't what I believe. That was a quote from The Book of Mormon. Close enough. That's my grading soundtrack.

Dead ends

My youngest cousin has graduated from college. He finished school and moved home, at loose ends for a while, trying to become an environmental journalist in an environment hostile to (print) journalists. He managed to get an internship at the Sierra Club in San Francisco, CA, which I believe he will start soon. Unless he's already started. I'm excited for him, and I can't wait to see what he does with his adult life.

My youngest cousin is from Newtown, CT. He has an amazing adult life in front of him, because he was not shot and killed when he was five, or six, or seven. He went through his entire childhood without once being brutally murdered for no apparent reason by a total stranger. I hope he goes through his entire adulthood the same way.

My second youngest cousin is his brother, also from Newtown, CT. He has been an adult for some years now, and is happily living in New York with his girlfriend. I don't know quite what he does, since he's in the big blank world that I do not understand called Business (or is it called Finance? Banking?), but he has an independent, adult life that he enjoys, because, as a child, he was not brutally murdered for no apparent reason by a total stranger.

Their parents, my aunt and uncle, still live in Newtown, CT. My aunt teaches at Sacred Heart, and gave a final exam today before she knew how bad things were. My uncle is a pediatric pulmonologist at Danbury Hospital. According to my aunt, he went to the hospital as part of their emergency response team, but they didn't have much to do. Because there weren't wounded people, for the most part. The children and the adults who were shot were nearly all dead before they could be taken to the hospital.

Before today, Newtown, CT was unheard of. The center of town in Newtown is the flagpole. There are more UCLA undergraduates than there are residents of Newtown. Now, Newtown is on the map,  because children died there, violently, needlessly.

Do you know who else lives in Newtown, CT? Suzanne Collins. She's the author of the Hunger Games trilogy. You know, those books about children dying violently, needlessly. It's not ironic, but it's eerie. I can't help but think of those fictional children, since I don't know the names or faces of any of the real children.

This isn't any kind of reasoned argument. This is a list of statements, because I am beyond thinking. Children are dead. Adults are dead, at least some of whom died trying to protect those children. None of this had to happen. All of it did happen.

I talked about weeping blood in my last post. I would cry tears of blood every day for the rest of my life if I could undo this. Painful, burning tears. That would be no price at all to pay.

I can't think of anything else to say. Zilpha Keatley Snyder wrote the Green Sky trilogy over thirty years ago. These children died before they were old enough to read it. That breaks my heart. Read it, please, to your children, or to any children you know. Teach them about corrosive violence. If they live long enough to hear you.

Moving forward

So, the dissertation is (for now) done. That means it's time to move into job application world for the next few days, until the students turn in their last senior thesis drafts on Friday, and I go back into grading world. Since job applications are so soul sucking and demoralizing, I'm jumping at the chance to work in any other way, and I'm actually looking forward to grading world. Sad, isn't it? Right now I'm enthusiastically helping a former student with grad school applications because I'd rather help ease her soul-sucking demoralization than leap headlong into my own.

The next job application is pretty easy, since it's just a slightly different version of the only one I've done so far, a postdoc teaching first-year writing. The one after that is incredibly easy, since it's just emailing a CV. Once those are done, however, it's full-tilt musicology job applications until I weep blood.

Okay, that's obviously a melodramatic presentation of my situation. I have actually wept blood before, on three occasions (eye surgery is soooo not fun), and this will be far less physically uncomfortable. However, I think I would prefer physical pain and discomfort to this process. I'm not particularly good at competition or at telling people why they should want me. I'm much better at telling other people why they're awesome, and at coping with pain. Not really related skills normally, but both reasons why I don't wanna do this.

Anyway, time to dive in. Wish me luck. Listening to Turn of the Screw is going to keep me focused on the task, I hope, and not distract me like all the Audra McDonald I just listened to...

Completion

Yesterday, at 12:40 PM Eastern Standard Time, I submitted my dissertation to my committee. It feels very strange to be done with it. I celebrated by unpacking the kitchen stuff in the new apartment.

That's all I've got right now.

Changing planes

Just a quick hit to let y'all know that I have moved to DC. Thanks to heroic efforts by the boyfriend and some of the greatest friends in the world, my move out of the old place was a snap and my move into the new place is well underway and seems easily within reach—I got to skip the moving to Arlington step in my moving progression!

Right now I'm sitting in the delightful Coffy Café a few blocks from my lovely new home, grading students' rough drafts of their senior theses. I had to take a break to announce my arrival because Microsoft Word crashed just as I was saving one student's comments and edits and I got very irritated. I regraded her, and am about to start the next, because the sooner I finish the sooner I get to go to go to Smoke and Barrel for teatime lunch!

I'll post for real once the grading and dissertation are done.

Things

Internet friends, I have been absent from the blog for a while. Things have happened since then, things I intended to write about. Like a big national conference in my field that I went to. Like a really important election. A lot of things happened.

But now instead of writing about those things, I am writing about these things:

1. My dissertation needs to be done, edited, footnoted, coverpaged, signed, sealed, and delivered to my adviser by December the 7th.

2. I need to move out of my apartment and into the Mysterious X's apartment here in LA by December the 1st, out of her apartment and into the boyfriend's apartment in Arlington, VA by December the 4th, and out of his apartment and into the new apartment in Washington, DC that the boyfriend and I will share by December the 10th.

Those are the things. You will note that within the span of ten days, I have to move three times and finish the dissertation. There are no other things. Except that on the first of those ten days, I also am singing in a concert. And before, during, and after those ten days, I have a lot of grading to do. And for eight days before those ten days, I will be traveling to the east coast and cannot be packing up here.

This is why I have eaten a lot of Tootsie Rolls and have drunk a lot of tea and have not done a whole lot beyond writing dissertation in the last week. I'm about ten to twenty pages shy of a first draft, and I have about three weeks to get from there to done with a last draft.

Donations of brain cells and sanity gladly accepted. Also please take my furniture and household goods. They are free.

I'm here about the voting

I just got my official Sample Ballot in the mail. It made me think some things.

1. Why did nobody tell me that I can vote for ROSEANNE BARR for president!? Peace and Freedom Party, you just made my day.

2. Despite my worries about the new open primary system, my senator and representative are both in one-on-one Democrat v. Republican races. That is reassuring and also depressing.

3. Hooray, there are no judges to vote on! No hours of painful internet research!

4. BALLOT MEASURES OMG. We have eleven state measures and three county measures. I still don't understand how they label these: Propositions 30-40, A, B, and J. J is the confusing one; why not C? I haven't read through all of them in detail yet, but initial thoughts are:

30: Yes. Increased income taxes (and, sadly, some sales taxes) to fund public education? PLEASE!

31: I have no clue. It seems needlessly complicated. I'm guessing it's bad, since it includes the phrase "decreased...revenues of $200 million annually."

32: HELL FUCKING NO. This is the "unions can no longer make political contributions but everybody else can" measure. Do I even need to explain why that is a huge problem?

33: No. It reads like insurance companies saying "Let us charge you more money for your car insurance. We swear it'll be good for you."

34: YES, YES, YES. Repeal of the death penalty. I collected signatures for this one. There are so, so, so many reasons why the death penalty is morally indefensible, from racially biased sentencing to its inherent abandonment of the entire concept of rehabilitation and human improvement. I didn't support the assassination (without trial, no less) of Osama Bin Laden, and I don't support state-sanctioned assassination (with or without trial). There isn't even an actual God; there shouldn't be humans playing God in His infinite absence.

35: Yes...? Human trafficking is bad. That seems to be the point of this, but I can't quite tell what it claims to do about that fact.

36: Yes. Three strikes law applies only for serious or violent felonies. There are, again, many reasons to doubt the efficacy of the prison industry in "keeping us safe." It's all a question of who is included in, or excluded from, the word "us." I favor a more inclusive "us," and a less populated prison.

37: Yes/No? I have no idea the "specified ways" in which plant or animal genetic material needs to be changed for this law to come into effect. My friend the plant geneticist is highly skeptical of GMO labeling in general. My favorite LA restaurant is actively supporting this proposition. The use of the word "natural" in food marketing already nauseates me; restricting its use seems good, if only for my personal gastrointestinal equanimity. I need to look harder at this particular one.

38: No. This is the other version of Prop 30, but it excludes funding colleges, and doesn't specify the taxes it will use to raise the money. I am deeply suspicious.

39: Yes! Requires businesses in California to pay taxes in California! Uses that revenue for clean energy projects! Please, please yes!

40: Oh, who the fuck knows. Approve the redistricting maps of the entire state? What if I don't like the new 33rd district? Do I vote no, or do I decide that the other districts all look good and that outweighs one bad one, so I should vote yes? I will probably vote yes because I like maps, unless somebody can give me a compelling reason to vote no or abstain.

A: Should the county assessor be appointed instead of elected? I am asking honestly; I don't know what that job even does.

B: Better sexual health for porn actors? Sure! Condoms for everybody!

J: Sustain the sales tax already increased in 2008 to fund the expansion of subway and light rail? If I'm reading this right, YES PLEASE! I'm going to see my sister when she's in Pasadena next weekend solely because there is now the Gold Line that will get me home. I support the idea of turning the twenty-year project into a five-year project. That means it might be done within the next ten years!


Those are my thoughts. Please explain to me which ones need more work; most of them are only half baked right now.

Deadline

It is set. I am defending my dissertation on January 7th at 9 AM Pacific Standard Time. Now it feels real.

If you are free (and in Los Angeles) on the evening of January 7th, join me at Eleven in West Hollywood for Musical Mondays aka chapter three of my dissertation.

Eleven is the place, not the time. The time is something like 7 or 8. We can work out those details later.

Taking steps

Two big things.

1. I emailed my dissertation committee to schedule my defense. The date isn't set yet, but two of the four have already replied with their conflicts, so picking a date seems imminent. Yikes.

2. I emailed my landlady to tell her I'm moving out by December 1st. I'll still be in LA for a few days after that, visiting my dog friend Boomer and his human companions, but I have an official move out day. Yikes again.

I can see the next phase of my life looming in the distance, staring me down. I shouldn't have talked with my advisor about Westerns so much yesterday; I keep wondering who will shoot first. For now, I'm going to do what I need to do to prepare for leaving/defending, which means writing my last chapter and gradually sending things I don't need to Dad's house or to the boyfriend's apartment. And dealing with the irritation of someone hacking my debit card to buy protein supplements.

Whoever got my debit card number spent $277.55 at a nutritional supplement website. All I can think of is this. And some giant body builder in a tacky velvet jacket whispering sweet nothings to his Jay Robb brand strawberry flavored egg white protein (which is a real thing that website sells). I hope they're very happy together.

Go West

Hey, west coast friends--I'm here!

I landed at LAX this afternoon right around the time that the space shuttle Endeavour also landed at LAX. I got to ride inside the plane; Endeavour had to ride on top. I guess it never heard of checking in the day before.

No real news to report other than that, which was awesome. Also, I got my Hugo's ginger lemonade fix, which makes me very happy. Ginger + lemon + sugar + water + ice = perfection.

If you are reading this and are also in Los Angeles, we should hang out! Call/text/tweet/email/carrier pigeon me.

Back to the Blag

Hi, hypothetical readers of my moribund blog! Today I "finished" the first draft of my fourth dissertation chapter, the one I was reading for when I last posted almost two months ago.

Four down, one to go! If I'm on top of my shit, I should be able to have a "complete" draft of the dissertation by the end of October. That is my goal.

You'll notice scare quotes around "finished" and "complete." My dissertation is about musical comedy and the absence of conclusion, so it's really hard for me to wrap things up. Also, I keep thinking of other things to add but I don't want to add them until the dissertation is accepted as a dissertation. There will probably be interludes in between chapters in the final version, or at least the chapters will be much longer.

Long chapters make things academic, like long words or long, scraggly beards.

I am going to celebrate sending this chapter draft to my advisor by investigating the forthcoming fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons because shut up I get to choose how I want to celebrate. Then my boyfriend will come home and we will have celebratory dinner or something. Tempeh and mizuna, maybe. And Scotch. Shut up again; it's my party and I'll have strange tastes if I want to.

But you don't have to take my word for it

So I've been doing a lot of reading for my dissertation. I'm working on the chapter that I've been dreading, Chapter One, also known in academic circles as the Theoretical Grounding for everything else I write. That means reading what other academics have written and explaining why what I'm writing is totally based in their Very Important Ideas and not just being Pulled Out Of My Ass.

In the course of reading the Very Important Work On the Meaning Of Laughter also known as Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, I have discovered:

jokes about asses (both donkeys and anuses)
snark about Stalin disguised as snark about the Catholic church
grand pronouncements about the Renaissance as the pinnacle of all laughter throughout history
funny old-fashioned translations ("gay" for "happy;" "swab" for what I believe should be "douche")
odd asides about the campiness of pre-16th-century monastic humor
irritating uses of the royal "we"

It's not as bad as I thought it would be, though I have a constant desire to remind the translator that Bakhtin is discussing jokes about shit and sex; is "the material bodily lower stratum" really the best phrase to use?

On the other hand, it's not as good as Wayne Koestenbaum's The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, which is ridiculous and has pictures and uses the phrase "duck-mouth" a lot.

Having made it through the first 150 pages out of 450 (introduction and chapter one), I am putting down Rabelais to start Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, which promises to be just as pleasant and just as annoying, from what I recall of it. At least this book wasn't his dissertation, so it hopefully won't have as many long arguments with everyone who has every written anything relating to the author he is discussing.

I would like to point out, by way of advertisement for my own dissertation, that it will not be 450 pages long.

Mood swings

This past weekend I attended the wedding of my first friend in the world, and I performed the wedding ceremony of my best friend for nearly two decades. It was a pretty magical, if hectic, weekend. I think they both found amazing life partners who have become my friends in their own right.

Today I heard that Grandma's cancer has taken a turn for the worse.

I'm not sure I can handle another death yet. Am I allowed to say that? It's been less than two years since Mom died. I don't want to lose her mom, the matriarch of my family for as long as I can remember. I don't know how to handle that.

I know self-pity isn't useful or justified, but couldn't I have had two days of happy after the weddings? Maybe I'm overreacting; maybe things aren't as bad as they sound. But they sound bad.

Slow, unsteady, but winning the race

I have sent a draft of chapter two to my advisor, and he has said to put it aside for now and look at it when I review the whole dissertation! That means that three out of five chapters now have "complete" drafts.

I am slightly behind my planned schedule, but I think that's ok. My advisor also okayed turning an old seminar paper into the germ of chapter one, which means I'm about ten pages into it before putting metaphorical pen to digital page! I'm imagining it'll be about forty pages when it's done, so that's a quarter of what I need. The next step is a lot of reading, which is easier, in many ways, than writing.

My progress has been in fits and starts rather than a smooth, even flow of prose. No matter how I try to adjust this, it seems to be how I write. Work, work, work for a few hours—then take a day off. Oh well. I think it's accomplishing what I need it to accomplish.

My plan for chapter one is to have a complete draft by August 15th, just over a month from now. We shall see if that happens. After that, it's chapter five all the way until it's done. Hopefully on September 30th. Then I will return to each of the extant chapter drafts and see what I have wrought.

This incredibly dull blog post has been brought to you by academia. Now, for something lighter, you should watch this video again, because it is the best: