Immediately following our week in Tempe, we drove to Tucson to stay with my mom & her husband for a night. Then we flew to Denver for a few nights to see Angie’s family for Christmas (or what counted as Christmas in the Reed family manse), while Butley stayed behind with my mom for some desert R&R. The Reeds and Ogborns showed their customary hospitality and we ate, drank, were merry – in spite of the looming threat of Papa Reed’s karaoke machine. And we did a very good job of negotiating an early exchange of gifts and Christmas cheer. Santa was, no doubt, caught by surprise by our early celebration, but he would have been proud, nonetheless.
Back in Tucson, where a very enthusiastic Butley greeted us, having enjoyed some quality time with two newly-taken ill housemates and all the movies and couch potato time that comes along with winter colds. Mom & Jim unfortunately had to cancel their trip back East to Bethlehem with Marisa, John, Julian & Michele, but it was regrettably the right call to make. And again, we celebrated Christmas with Mom & Jim, if in a much more subdued way, with Chinese takeout & a copy of “Wall-E”. Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m wearing m new jersey & loving it.
And then began – THE BIG DRIVE.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Tempe
Driving down from Los Angeles, the thing that struck me most about the terrain, as it got increasingly desert-ed, was the flood of memories that came back to me of my time spent living in Phoenix for three years. Nights driving through the red rocks in my pickup (yes, dear readers, I had a Nissan quarter-ton with mag wheels & a boomin’ stereo) listening to music and smelling the desert air. The mountains on the horizon that all look like fallen elephants, their rough, pockmarked skin cracking in the ungodly heat. The first comic impressions I had of the vaguely Warner Brothers saguaro cacti (missing only Wile E. Coyote to make the picture complete – “you mean they really look like that?”) which later gave way to the equally comic impression that I might, at some point, ever really feel at home there – and not merely familiar – which is an entirely important distinction to make.
When I lived in Phoenix, I worked as a clinic assistant at Planned Parenthood of Central & Northern Arizona, and I also served as assistant director for the Positive Force Players, PPCNA’s critical-issue teen theater company. We did skits about drinking and driving, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, STD’s, etc. And now here I am, on the national tour of SPRING AWAKENING, And as we pulled into Tempe, staying at the very same hotel (The Twin Palms – directly across from Gammage Auditorium) where I stayed the prior year with the tour of TWELVE ANGRY MEN, thought I to myself, “The more things change…”
Tempe was a good time. I got a chance to see my friends Darlene Long & James Hoenscheidt, both former actors with the PFP, that I worked with in Phoenix. They’re all growed-up now and living adult lives with kids, mortgages, and the like. (I still remember when Darlene was getting in trouble for writing “SLUT” in weed killer on her nemesis’ lawn. You gotta respect that kind of ingenuity…) Darlene’s now a dispatcher for the Scottsdale Police Department. James is a stand-up comic and a dad – two professions which surely enjoy a certain symbiosis.
Of particular note was our Saturday trip to my ol’ standby - the F1 Racetrack, where even the most manly of drivers can look like dweebs in their go-karts & jumpsuits. Darlene, James, Angie, Alon (our cellist), and Marques (our drummer) came along & we burned some serious rubber for a couple races.
When I lived in Phoenix, I worked as a clinic assistant at Planned Parenthood of Central & Northern Arizona, and I also served as assistant director for the Positive Force Players, PPCNA’s critical-issue teen theater company. We did skits about drinking and driving, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, STD’s, etc. And now here I am, on the national tour of SPRING AWAKENING, And as we pulled into Tempe, staying at the very same hotel (The Twin Palms – directly across from Gammage Auditorium) where I stayed the prior year with the tour of TWELVE ANGRY MEN, thought I to myself, “The more things change…”
Tempe was a good time. I got a chance to see my friends Darlene Long & James Hoenscheidt, both former actors with the PFP, that I worked with in Phoenix. They’re all growed-up now and living adult lives with kids, mortgages, and the like. (I still remember when Darlene was getting in trouble for writing “SLUT” in weed killer on her nemesis’ lawn. You gotta respect that kind of ingenuity…) Darlene’s now a dispatcher for the Scottsdale Police Department. James is a stand-up comic and a dad – two professions which surely enjoy a certain symbiosis.
Of particular note was our Saturday trip to my ol’ standby - the F1 Racetrack, where even the most manly of drivers can look like dweebs in their go-karts & jumpsuits. Darlene, James, Angie, Alon (our cellist), and Marques (our drummer) came along & we burned some serious rubber for a couple races.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Los Angeles (the last 3 weeks)
Gentle readers,
After our last entry, one might think we had, by this point, reverted to gelatinous blobs of goo, spineless and mindless, uninspired and near-retired, punctuating our nightly catechism of teenage angst with a scroll through available network programming, concerned primarily with whether this week's episode of "The Biggest Loser" was sequentially in step, so that the contestants for whom we were rooting were not suddenly the victims of a midnight Big Mac Attack and have resumed their rotund proportions.
Proudly I can assure you - this is not the case.
Not that we didn't indulge in the frequent nightly movie - nights often became early mornings as we finally got see such-and-such which we had never gotten around to seeing when it was in the theaters nor which never made it onto our Netflix queue. But the vast number of friends whom we hadn't seen in months or years, or even decades, kept us out of our Echo Park cocoon and a home-theater-home rut.
Allan Heinberg, whom I hadn't seen since Yale and who's now a successful writer & producer in LA, was among the list. And although we had to reschedule three times because of his work, we did finally manage to meet at Ammo, a cool Hollywood cafe with one of the finer musical atmospheres I've enjoyed in awhile.
Also there were David Wiater, Alison Tatlock, Karl Gajdusek and Larissa Kokernot, sporting the vintages of UCSD, Yale, and marital attachment thereto, are married (Dave & Alison, Karl & Larissa) and living in a duplex just south of Hancock Park which they bought, live in, and manage cooperatively in an arrangement which sounds like it would just never work and yet apparently works quite well, paying bills and handling child-care for their three kids (Dave & Ali's daughter, Iris, and Karl & Larissa's boys, Kade and Nick) all with no particular prescription or corporate entity but just old-fashioned neighborly cooperation.
And I had lunch with Debra Pasquerette, formerly of Positive Force Players and now of the Geffen Theater Educational Department, who has managed to curb an addiction to something like forty animals (cats, dogs, birds, turtles, lizard) to a far more manageable fifteen or so, re-homing the others to various other caring folks.
Angie and I had coffee and dessert at the home-cum-museum of one of Los Angeles' most art-friendly actors, Alan Mandell, where he regaled us with stories of his latest theatrical triumphs and whom I briefed on the goings-on of our other Twelve Angry Colleagues.
Steve, Vicki, and Caden Cerveris were the generous hosts of a fine Thanksgiving repast which we attended, by which we were stuffed, and from which we were sent rolling home like two over-ripe peaches. We had seen Steve and my cousin Lani the week before, when they came to see the show. And then at Steve & Vicki's place, we also saw my cousins Pam & Frank Arianna, who were in town for the holiday, and their daughter Lisa and her boyfriend. Lisa and Pam later came to see the show and, according to Lisa's account, her poor, Pittsburghian mother managed to survive the au courant onslaught of sex, nudity, and suicide that is our humble little play. Somehow I think Pam probably had heard of sex before, however.
Leslie Tamaribuchi, of Phillips Exeter Academy lineage, whom I have seen not infrequently from time to time since but whose wry sense of humor is always a treat, had coffee with me at Delilah's, Echo Park's premiere resource for coffee and rhubarb pie. And I also coincidentally met & onlyslightlybriefly caught up, in between water bowl refills for her dogs, with Jennifer Martinez, a residential college-mate of mine from Yale and whom I had seen only once or twice since in similar "HeyitsgreattoseeyoubutyouknowIgottarun" circumstances. One of these days, we're actually going to sit down and have coffee & catch up for real, I'm sure.
David Marko (Yale, again), and his wife Jill, came to see the show & took us out afterwards to Yang Chow, a restaurant with a memorable dish of "slippery shrimp" in LA's Chinatown. Dave also kindly lent me his ex-CBS-exec-and-current writer's wisdom
I ran into Alicia Roper in the Ahmanson parking garage, of all places. (I saw her in her car, looking for a parking place, and did the old "I'm just walking back to make sure I locked the car," walk until I could verify it was her. I'd be a good P.I., I know it.) We made plans for lunch later the following week and she took me to Philippe's, an old-skool, french-dip sandwich shop with a sawdust floor and a complete, yet inscrutable, wall-mounted menu which I HIGHLY recommend to any and all visitors to LA's revitalized downtown area. As for suggestions, all I can say is - get the mustard. Seriously. Get the mustard.
I saw my friend Virginia Louise Smith, transplanted New York City actress, wife of author Charlie Huston, and mother to the just-slightly-older-than-one-year-old-Clementine - one of the more glamorous faces in a city full of glam. And I must say, the future's looking pretty bright for both of 'em.
We saw Angie's friend Christina Chang, another of the glamorous faces that the city has to offer. And over drinks at Kendall's, the standard post-Ahmanson hangout, we discussed the all too easy, all too reflexive, and all too overdone, knee-jerk criticism of Los Angeles by New Yorkers. And it was at Kendall's that we also saw Barry Papick, who is rounding a year's tour of duty in The Boychick Affair, a semi-improv show which is clearly doing something right, to last so long.
David Costabile was in town, shooting yet ... another ... commercial. We had drinks with him and Henry Stram (whose role I understudy in the show) at Kendall's, and the king pitchman let us in on the Great Costabile Secret for finding seemingly unlimited work in commercials. And the secret is .... well, you'll just have to get David to tell you...
Also guests at our show, Sabra Malkinson and her husband Chris Goodwin would have stayed longer, but for the need to relieve their babysitter, as their one-year-old daughter Allie was demanding their imminent return.
Also, we cannot let slide a memorable field trip with the voting majority of the cast to the home of Kate Fuglei (Angie's understudy) and her husband, Ken LaZebnick, after the show our last Saturday night there. At which home we found waiting for us a vast and meticulously-filled order from In-N-Out Burger, with special insight as to their 'secret menu' from sons Jack and Ben, and a DVD of "Superbad" for a cinematic capper to the aforementioned gastronomic orgy.
And the last night we were there, after all the family and friends, all that remained was for the two as yet unmet canine cousins, Butley and Steve's dog Marley, to finally get a chance to run around Steve's pad and for Butley to chase Marley as Marley chased his ball. The two made good friends, and though the visit was a bit impromptu and last minute, it served to close the book on our social agenda as I thus became my own dog's chauffeur for his own family visit.
Whew. Guess we were as busy as I thought.
Beyond that, I have only to recount daily walks with Butley in Elysian Park, a tardy attempt to catch the live gig of Kyle Riabko and Jared Stein at a local venue in town, and various brief errands run in & around the hood, to complete the full picture of our remaining time in LA. You stick around long enough, you'll pick up a few friends; and we're fortunate enough to have more than our share to enjoy, and their visits all made for a very homey, if busy, time catching up with them as much as we'd been catching up with our 'down time' at home the previous three weeks.
And can you believe - no pictures of any of us.
And so, with the calendar pages turning, we set our sights on Tempe and the last gig before our two week layoff. check back with us next week, and we'll hopefully have some photos for you next time. But until then, many thanks to everyone who made our time there so pleasant.
Cue sunset. Roll credits. Slow fade to black.
After our last entry, one might think we had, by this point, reverted to gelatinous blobs of goo, spineless and mindless, uninspired and near-retired, punctuating our nightly catechism of teenage angst with a scroll through available network programming, concerned primarily with whether this week's episode of "The Biggest Loser" was sequentially in step, so that the contestants for whom we were rooting were not suddenly the victims of a midnight Big Mac Attack and have resumed their rotund proportions.
Proudly I can assure you - this is not the case.
Not that we didn't indulge in the frequent nightly movie - nights often became early mornings as we finally got see such-and-such which we had never gotten around to seeing when it was in the theaters nor which never made it onto our Netflix queue. But the vast number of friends whom we hadn't seen in months or years, or even decades, kept us out of our Echo Park cocoon and a home-theater-home rut.
Allan Heinberg, whom I hadn't seen since Yale and who's now a successful writer & producer in LA, was among the list. And although we had to reschedule three times because of his work, we did finally manage to meet at Ammo, a cool Hollywood cafe with one of the finer musical atmospheres I've enjoyed in awhile.
Also there were David Wiater, Alison Tatlock, Karl Gajdusek and Larissa Kokernot, sporting the vintages of UCSD, Yale, and marital attachment thereto, are married (Dave & Alison, Karl & Larissa) and living in a duplex just south of Hancock Park which they bought, live in, and manage cooperatively in an arrangement which sounds like it would just never work and yet apparently works quite well, paying bills and handling child-care for their three kids (Dave & Ali's daughter, Iris, and Karl & Larissa's boys, Kade and Nick) all with no particular prescription or corporate entity but just old-fashioned neighborly cooperation.
And I had lunch with Debra Pasquerette, formerly of Positive Force Players and now of the Geffen Theater Educational Department, who has managed to curb an addiction to something like forty animals (cats, dogs, birds, turtles, lizard) to a far more manageable fifteen or so, re-homing the others to various other caring folks.
Angie and I had coffee and dessert at the home-cum-museum of one of Los Angeles' most art-friendly actors, Alan Mandell, where he regaled us with stories of his latest theatrical triumphs and whom I briefed on the goings-on of our other Twelve Angry Colleagues.
Steve, Vicki, and Caden Cerveris were the generous hosts of a fine Thanksgiving repast which we attended, by which we were stuffed, and from which we were sent rolling home like two over-ripe peaches. We had seen Steve and my cousin Lani the week before, when they came to see the show. And then at Steve & Vicki's place, we also saw my cousins Pam & Frank Arianna, who were in town for the holiday, and their daughter Lisa and her boyfriend. Lisa and Pam later came to see the show and, according to Lisa's account, her poor, Pittsburghian mother managed to survive the au courant onslaught of sex, nudity, and suicide that is our humble little play. Somehow I think Pam probably had heard of sex before, however.
Leslie Tamaribuchi, of Phillips Exeter Academy lineage, whom I have seen not infrequently from time to time since but whose wry sense of humor is always a treat, had coffee with me at Delilah's, Echo Park's premiere resource for coffee and rhubarb pie. And I also coincidentally met & onlyslightlybriefly caught up, in between water bowl refills for her dogs, with Jennifer Martinez, a residential college-mate of mine from Yale and whom I had seen only once or twice since in similar "HeyitsgreattoseeyoubutyouknowIgottarun" circumstances. One of these days, we're actually going to sit down and have coffee & catch up for real, I'm sure.
David Marko (Yale, again), and his wife Jill, came to see the show & took us out afterwards to Yang Chow, a restaurant with a memorable dish of "slippery shrimp" in LA's Chinatown. Dave also kindly lent me his ex-CBS-exec-and-current writer's wisdom
I ran into Alicia Roper in the Ahmanson parking garage, of all places. (I saw her in her car, looking for a parking place, and did the old "I'm just walking back to make sure I locked the car," walk until I could verify it was her. I'd be a good P.I., I know it.) We made plans for lunch later the following week and she took me to Philippe's, an old-skool, french-dip sandwich shop with a sawdust floor and a complete, yet inscrutable, wall-mounted menu which I HIGHLY recommend to any and all visitors to LA's revitalized downtown area. As for suggestions, all I can say is - get the mustard. Seriously. Get the mustard.
I saw my friend Virginia Louise Smith, transplanted New York City actress, wife of author Charlie Huston, and mother to the just-slightly-older-than-one-year-old-Clementine - one of the more glamorous faces in a city full of glam. And I must say, the future's looking pretty bright for both of 'em.
We saw Angie's friend Christina Chang, another of the glamorous faces that the city has to offer. And over drinks at Kendall's, the standard post-Ahmanson hangout, we discussed the all too easy, all too reflexive, and all too overdone, knee-jerk criticism of Los Angeles by New Yorkers. And it was at Kendall's that we also saw Barry Papick, who is rounding a year's tour of duty in The Boychick Affair, a semi-improv show which is clearly doing something right, to last so long.
David Costabile was in town, shooting yet ... another ... commercial. We had drinks with him and Henry Stram (whose role I understudy in the show) at Kendall's, and the king pitchman let us in on the Great Costabile Secret for finding seemingly unlimited work in commercials. And the secret is .... well, you'll just have to get David to tell you...
Also guests at our show, Sabra Malkinson and her husband Chris Goodwin would have stayed longer, but for the need to relieve their babysitter, as their one-year-old daughter Allie was demanding their imminent return.
Also, we cannot let slide a memorable field trip with the voting majority of the cast to the home of Kate Fuglei (Angie's understudy) and her husband, Ken LaZebnick, after the show our last Saturday night there. At which home we found waiting for us a vast and meticulously-filled order from In-N-Out Burger, with special insight as to their 'secret menu' from sons Jack and Ben, and a DVD of "Superbad" for a cinematic capper to the aforementioned gastronomic orgy.
And the last night we were there, after all the family and friends, all that remained was for the two as yet unmet canine cousins, Butley and Steve's dog Marley, to finally get a chance to run around Steve's pad and for Butley to chase Marley as Marley chased his ball. The two made good friends, and though the visit was a bit impromptu and last minute, it served to close the book on our social agenda as I thus became my own dog's chauffeur for his own family visit.
Whew. Guess we were as busy as I thought.
Beyond that, I have only to recount daily walks with Butley in Elysian Park, a tardy attempt to catch the live gig of Kyle Riabko and Jared Stein at a local venue in town, and various brief errands run in & around the hood, to complete the full picture of our remaining time in LA. You stick around long enough, you'll pick up a few friends; and we're fortunate enough to have more than our share to enjoy, and their visits all made for a very homey, if busy, time catching up with them as much as we'd been catching up with our 'down time' at home the previous three weeks.
And can you believe - no pictures of any of us.
And so, with the calendar pages turning, we set our sights on Tempe and the last gig before our two week layoff. check back with us next week, and we'll hopefully have some photos for you next time. But until then, many thanks to everyone who made our time there so pleasant.
Cue sunset. Roll credits. Slow fade to black.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Los Angeles (the first 3 weeks)
One would assume, what with the lack of entries for the last three weeks, that we had been busily gadding about the City of Angels, taking meetings with agents, reading for casting directors, discussing upcoming film projects and pilot episodes with hot new directors whose cutting edge vision is about to burst open the format of television as we know it. Understandable - wildly talented as we both are, it would make perfect sense that such endeavors might be draining all our time.
Or we might be spending day after day sunning ourselves on the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice, bronzing ourselves for the long winter months ahead, flagrantly flaunting our director's direct mandate to stay out of the sun, as we're playing (or standing by to play) Germans in the winter of 1891.
Or we might be taking the opportunity to elevate our cultural standards with daily trips to the many museums, galleries, and art schools which populate this New York of the West, this San Francisco of the South, this Mexico City of the North, this American Shanghai.
Or we might be exploring hitherto undiscovered parts of the many surrounding State and National Parks in the area, camping like a couple from the cover of the Orvis catalog, backpacked dog in tow, bicycles on the back of our very, very Vermonter Subaru Forester, and whose only major decisions consist of whether to scale one more peak before turning around and heading back to the city in time for the show.
You might think all of these things.
And as I sit here on our sofa, finishing a beer and looking over at my wife who sits, in much the same position as do I, laptop astride her lap, Heinecken Light to the right, kitchen clocking ticking softly in the background, and looking next at our dog who is demonstrating his newly adopted pastime of staring at himself in the mirror, a habit which causes this humble, superstitious journalist to assume with much certainty that there are, indeed, ghosts right here in the material world, I can safely and without doubt, assure you of the following:
All of those assumptions would be deeply, mightily, charmingly, but woefully, wrong.
You see, my wife and I, having been married for just shy of four and a half years (check the mirror for a few more grey hairs, all our wedding attendees), and having spent nigh on two of those years apart, either with me being on my previous tour, or either one of us being out of town at any one of the finer, lesser-known regional theatres of this great nation [ed. note: one might, at this juncture, justifiably question my use of the term 'out of town', when said idiom suggests a certain geographic regularity to which I can only sheepishly lay claim], and being blessed in our current housing arrangement with one flat screen television, one leather couch, one satellite dish hookup, and one foot-warming dog, have stumbled upon, re-discovered, and are now making thorough re-evaluation of that most American, most Western, most married of nightly endeavors, that which involves three basic choices- HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime - and three basic beverages - soda, wine, or beer. It is in the exploitation of these six options, and the many permutations which might result, that we have, in this pinnacle of Southern California culture, this Cannes of the Southwest, reinvigorated our sagging commitment to the apathy of the urban inhabitant.
We watch tv and we can admit it.
OK - sure, we've visited my Uncle Donny and my Aunt Paulette a couple times, we've spent the day in Venice walking along the beach and dining at a refined, organic restaurant, we've had snap peas and goulash at a vegan restaurant on Sunset, we've attended a basketball game, gone for bike rides in the neighborhood (well one, anyway), taken the dog for hour-plus walks in Elysian Park every morning, attended a Halloween costume party and met a couple friends from college (while making, canceling, and rescheduling appointments with three times as many others), gone shooting at an LA pistol range(!), and even attended a taping of "The Price Is Right," but all of that seems so faint in my memory of the last three weeks compared to the nightly ritual in which we've gleefully engaged, one for which I felt guilty until my wise wife reminded me that this was exactly what we had been missing for so long - sitting down, catching a movie fifteen minutes in, having a drink or two, and soaking in the thrilling monotony of geographic irrelevance. We could be (and will be, soon enough) in Boston, Chicago, or East Lansing, and there would be nothing in this singular experience which would be significantly any different, no mater where we were. And we sit, talking through the movie, or reading about the actors', the director's, the writer's credits on IMDB, or giving Butley's apparent thoughts voice (apparently, he sounds like an over-educated Lenny from "Of Mice and Men"), or surfing the internet for ... well, I'm not even sure what, at this point, nor were we, after ten or twelve trackpad clicks away from the original goal...
And yet - here we are, in Los Angeles. And here you are, faithful gentle reader, paying heed to our misadventures with what I now know to be something between boredom and true anticipation, and I feel it my duty, my solemn trust, to maintain a thorough account of our time here spent in the wilds of America, even if it be wildly domestic, and so I begin...
WE DRIVE
So the drive down from Portland to LA was pleasantly uneventful. We took our time, and as the sun set and we meandered ever southward, we began to consult the GPS, the AAA book, the Motel 6 guide, all in hopes of finding a good waypoint at which to rest our weary travelers' bones until resuming the drive the following day. It was around this time that my cousin Lisa just happened to have sent an e-mail about our blog, and the thought dawned on us that we could possibly visit her and her lovely family and stay overnight there, renewing both vigor and family connections in one evening. Thanks to her and Leonard's generosity, we did just that, with Lisa even being so kind as to fire up the steam room for us on our arrival, and as we settled in for the most refreshing steambath after a day of driving I've ever had, I had a newfound appreciation for the hospitality code of the great American West. It couldn't have been a lovelier place to stop. That morning Lisa cooked a king's breakfast for us and, rested & fed, we returned to the drive. Even Butley seemed better for the morning's walk on the trails outside Lisa's house.
WE ARRIVE
We got to Los Angeles with no problems, around 5:30 that evening and found our corporate rental, at the Baxter 5 Apartments in Echo Park, and Michelle, the owner/manager let us in. It's a great place to stay and we can recommend them highly to anyone coming to LA, and especially anyone working at the LA Music Center (the Taper, the Ahmanson, Dorothy Chandler, the Disney Music Hall), as it's literally 10 minutes away, all surface streets, and all very manageable. The apartment complex itself is nestled in a section of LA that was known a few years ago as having gone through an amazing transformation, and although now its change may be old news, we are its newest beneficiaries. Funky coffee shops, like Chango, Fix, or Delilah's dot the stretch of Echo Park Avenue that runs North from Sunset to our little place, there are community services like the fabled "Magic Gas" station, the Echo Park Cyclery, run by downtown bike messengers (hence its evening- & weekend-only hours, perhaps), and funkified little clothing shops that seem the respite of keepers whose style grows organically from the environment, rather than invading and supplanting it with their own preconceptions. And so, you have cool clothing stores with the same ragged exterior metal gate across the front door, coffee shops with the same cracked concrete out front and shiny new espresso machines inside, and fresh paint on preserved facades. The ethos seems to be "restore" not "rebuild" and it feels all the less intrusive a gentrification, because of it.
The Baxter 5 is directly across from the Elysian Heights Elementary School, a public school which, apparently, gets pretty good marks from our friends who've got kids of that age and have, of course, been plugged into the grapevine. Angie and I just assumed it was only fitting, as - for one reason or another - we always seem to be staying directly across from a school, no matter where we are, be it 78th Street, Inwood, or Echo Park. You'd think it was a message of some kind, but Butley knows better. He's about all the dependence either of us seem to be willing or able to manage.
The apartment is really comfortable, and notably so for the price we paid. For what works out to little more than the corporate rate the SA cast is paying at the Kyoto Hotel downtown, near the Ahmanson, we've got a full kitchen with new appliances, a living room with nice hardwood floors and too-comfortable leather couch (too comfortable, as in too inviting), a little office are off to the side, and a bedroom with a semi-private gated patio through French doors that we share with one other apartment and which serves as an occasional outdoor dining option or reading room, in good weather.
WE TRY NOT TO CONNIVE
We are particularly thankful for the apartment as it was a last-minute replacement for another Craigslist rental that fell through at the last minute. In retrospect, we dodged a bullet with great fortune, but at the time it was an incredibly frustrating process to have to deal with. (Even writing about it, my shoulders tighten at the thought of recounting the long story, but I'll be brief.) In a nutshell, the timeline runs like this:
• Mid-October: we secure a two-bedroom house, with a small yard, to rent in Hollywood. Looks nice, the woman who owns it is very dog-friendly. A video editor with her own business. We'll call her Lucy (because she's frickin' bonkers and I fear a slander lawsuit if I give out too much information online). We send the full rental amount, plus a deposit. We sign & return a contract. She cashes our checks. We assume everything's good to go.
• A week later, she e-mails to say that she's sold her other property in New York sooner than she thought she would and and asks whether we have any other options for staying in LA. She hasn't sent us our keys yet. We say no, and can we get the keys? She says sure, no problem, just asking, she'll stay with the ex if we need to.
• A few days later, she says that the other options aren't going to work and can we talk about it. This is three days before we're supposed to get to LA. We say we'll talk about it after we get the keys - send us the keys - NOW.
• We get the keys, and the same day we have a tense conversation with her in which, after my attempt doesn't go well, Angie gets on the phone and they agree it would be better for us to consider another option Lucy has found for us. We call the other place (the Baxter 5) and agree to cancel the agreement with Lucy.
• We get to LA and Lucy says she'll send the check for the refund. It's incomplete, as it's lacking the $500 deposit we had initially made. Also, Angie's attempt to have a conversation with her about the $108 we paid for a gym membership (for a gym which was within easy walking distance to her house and which is now 9 miles and a 30-minute drive away from the Baxter 5), has resulted in a snarky, snide, and dismissive e-mail about how ridiculous it is we would even ask such a thing, and don't we know it's LA and everyone drives for hours in this city and blah, blah, blah, has left us fed up. When she returns Angie's call, Angie doesn't mention it and just asks her to send the $500.
• We wait another week for the $500, which we eventually get. In the meanwhile, Lucy's sending us threatening e-mails about returning her keys, about how we've had them long beyond what is fair and reasonable, how her brother is a policeman and he says it's illegal and constitutes a breach of contract (a contract which she broke in the first place) and threatening legal action if the keys aren't returned. We're very straightforward with her - we'll return the keys when we get full reimbursement, and the day we deposit the check, we return the keys by certified mail.
• Lucy sends another e-mail. Where are my keys? We tell her we sent them, that you can trace them with the tracking number, that the post office has already attempted one delivery and left a notice. Why did you send them certified, she asks, I'm not in town. We tell her, in light of her threat of legal action, we needed proof of her receipt, and that we consider the issue resolved.
We haven't heard back from her since, and hopefully she'll be back in time to retrieve them at the post office. In the meanwhile, we've finally been repaid and, except for the gym fee, we've lost nothing but time, patience, and a little faith in our fellow human beings. But this story may not be over and we'll see if she's able to get them in time or if they end up getting returned back to New York, in which case we'll have to send them again and probably suffer through more paranoid e-mail from her before we send them again. There are many more twists and turns to the story - my favorite being what we've learned about her supposed resume - which consists of two credits on IMDB, neither of which are particularly flattering - but you don't need to hear anymore than you've suffered through already. The bottom line is: she's nuts and we're really lucky we never ended up there in the first place.
WE THRIVE
Like I said, until getting to LA, our time was somewhat occupied with adventures, seeing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of cities we had either never been to before or hadn't been to together or which simple held areas we hadn't really explored all that much. In getting to LA, neither of us felt particularly strongly the need for expedition, excursion, or examination - instead we sort of let the city come to us.
I accepted an offer to go shooting with a friend from college, Dave Marko, at the LA Pistol Range and was treated to up close & personal time with a .38 Special, a 9mm Glock, and a .357 Magnum. Because what red-blooded American male doesn't want to blown holes in a poor defensive target downfield at least once in his life (or in my case twice)? And frankly, whether it was a natural ability or good practice with first-person shooter games as a kid, I gotta say - I had pretty good luck. The target, not so much. But it felt like such an LA thing to do...
We visited my Uncle Donny and Aunt Paulette, just south of Century City, who also had come to our opening night party here in Los Angeles - a big event for Paulette who, hobbled by a foot injury months ago and not recovered yet, has rarely left the house in months. But if naked singing suicidal adolescents can't get you out of the house, then really - what will?
We went for a walk on a Monday in Venice Beach, where we found all the mixed nuts that place is known for. Dinner at the Three Square Cafe & Bakery was a highlight of the day. As was a stop at The Stronghold, one of many new upscale shops just a few blocks in from the shore, where we cased the joint for Angie's early Christmas present to me, a pair of blue jeans that may well herald a new dawn of pant-wear for me. Normally, I'm not a big believer in high-priced fashion jeans, but these are neither plastered with a name or insignia, nor the result of some cutting edge couture - in fact, they are uber-retro, being milled on the same machines, with the same stitching and brads, and same cut, styling, dyeing techniques, etc. as the first pairs worn by gold panners of oldendays. I gathered, from the prices at the shop, that while the gold panners might not have found much in the hills, they were clearly wearing small fortunes on their bottom halves, but the reality is that a single pair of really good jeans is probably the most-worn item in many people's wardrobe (certainly mine) and it makes sense - if they really feel good and you know you'll wear them day in and day out - to lay out some bread. And this place will repair and tailor the jeans for life, if you want. And it wasn't like we were mortgaging the house - just deciding between jeans or a new iPod. In any event, I like 'em, that's for sure. And Angie doesn't have to listen to me gripe about not having a decent-fitting pair of jeans, anymore, which is probably a wise investment in marital harmony as well...
We also met a fellow with another blue-nose pit bull that was, at 95 pounds, half-again as big as our little 65 pound monster. Rocco was his name, and he was a dead-ringer for Butley's big brother. Very sweet as well, and utterly knackered by the warm-weather walk his owner had him on, but I still wouldn't want to stand between him & his dinner.
Those blue things you see on his collar are weights his owner uses to build up his neck. He says he shows him, not for pulling or other less savory competition, but just as a fun way to meet other dog-lovers. I guess it works, 'cause this beast had a musculature that rivaled California's Governator. At any rate, Butley thought about it, but decided he likes his slimmer physique. Better for long car rides.
We also had a chance to join other members of the cast for a unique venture - another item for the "I never thought I'd be doing THAT" column. We sang the national anthem for an LA Clippers basketball game! It was a fun endeavor, and a great game that was up in the air for four quarters until the Clippers lost by a single three-point shot in the last 30 seconds of the game. But the really novel part of the evening came afterwards, when we stayed after most of the crowd had left and the LA Dodgeball Society held their Final Championships on the same court.
Yes, Virginia, there is an LA Dodgeball Society. It's a (and I stress this word) casual association of alternative-types in every sense of the word who nonetheless have marshalled their forces into formidable legions of strangely-clad, stone-faced, fierce competitors of this favorite schoolyard game.
And when the whistle blew to begin the games, there was much mayhem to be had - remarkably gratifying after the carefully regimented basketball land of travelling restrictions, shot clocks, holding penalties, and other hide-bound rules...
It was a great 'stumble-upon' kind of adventure, because it certainly wasn't on the bill. We would never have know about it, but that one of our cast members is friends with one of the players and had the inside scoop on where to sit, which team to root for, and the like. We only stayed for about half of the evening, though, because we were spent from the day and we had to conserve our energy for the marathon that was to come.
Or should I say 'Come on Dooooowwwwn!"
Yes, after spending three years in San Diego, and many months in Los Angeles proper, we finally went to the taping of a television show. And not just any show, but a game show. And not just any game show, but The Price Is Right. About 25 of us from the show were there. It was a ridiculously long day - we had to be there by 9am for a 1pm taping. We sat outside in a large holding area until they finally tagged & interviewed, photographed, warned not to be relatives of CBS employees or CBS employees ourselves, waited in another area, and then another, and then finally loaded in like weary sheep to the studio.
Where all of a sudden, music was blaring, lights were flashing, as we were all laughing at how high-school-prom all the decorations and set pieces looked, how small the studio really is, and how the whole thing felt like a junior varsity version of what we imagined it to be like. But we were cheering and yelling "Higher!" "Lower!" "No, no, $1,450, not $1,675!!" along with everyone else until I was glad I was an understudy who (likely) didn't have a show that night because my voice sounded like ten miles of rough road.
Jared Stein, our musical director & conductor, was actually called up and the first winner, bidding closest on an assortment of camping gear which he won't actually receive until up to three months after the January 29th air date (check your local listings) and for which he has little precious little use, not being a camperly sort of guy, but dammit he WON it, and we cheered like we were comrades storming the Winter Palace. THEN, he was eligible to win ... yes, you guessed it ... "A NEW CAR!" Well, a truck, actually. And came damn near winning that, but unfortunately guessed a couple numbers wrong and ... well, you know the sound ... wah-wah-wah. Ah well - what the hell was he going to do with a new truck on tour anyway, it's not like he's ready to drive the rest of the tour, and the taxes would have been about $6,000, and while he could have turned it around and sold it, it's probably more hassle than it's worth anyway. But just watching our own vegan, baggy-pantsed, hip-hop capped, and totally disoriented Jared up there, trying to think clearly while a studio full of people were screaming like huns, bidding on a bright, shiny red Ford F-10 pickup is a memory I'm glad I'll keep from our stay here, that's for sure.
So - three weeks down and, as I write this, two & a half to go. I think I've covered most of the highlights. I guess there was a little more than tv and couch-napping. My regrets for the overdue, overlong nature of this last entry, but I didn't know anyone was actually reading this thing until I started getting e-mails asking for the next installment. Whaddya know - we've got a following. So listen, my children, and ye shall hear, of the yearlong ride of we three here...
Or we might be spending day after day sunning ourselves on the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice, bronzing ourselves for the long winter months ahead, flagrantly flaunting our director's direct mandate to stay out of the sun, as we're playing (or standing by to play) Germans in the winter of 1891.
Or we might be taking the opportunity to elevate our cultural standards with daily trips to the many museums, galleries, and art schools which populate this New York of the West, this San Francisco of the South, this Mexico City of the North, this American Shanghai.
Or we might be exploring hitherto undiscovered parts of the many surrounding State and National Parks in the area, camping like a couple from the cover of the Orvis catalog, backpacked dog in tow, bicycles on the back of our very, very Vermonter Subaru Forester, and whose only major decisions consist of whether to scale one more peak before turning around and heading back to the city in time for the show.
You might think all of these things.
And as I sit here on our sofa, finishing a beer and looking over at my wife who sits, in much the same position as do I, laptop astride her lap, Heinecken Light to the right, kitchen clocking ticking softly in the background, and looking next at our dog who is demonstrating his newly adopted pastime of staring at himself in the mirror, a habit which causes this humble, superstitious journalist to assume with much certainty that there are, indeed, ghosts right here in the material world, I can safely and without doubt, assure you of the following:
All of those assumptions would be deeply, mightily, charmingly, but woefully, wrong.
You see, my wife and I, having been married for just shy of four and a half years (check the mirror for a few more grey hairs, all our wedding attendees), and having spent nigh on two of those years apart, either with me being on my previous tour, or either one of us being out of town at any one of the finer, lesser-known regional theatres of this great nation [ed. note: one might, at this juncture, justifiably question my use of the term 'out of town', when said idiom suggests a certain geographic regularity to which I can only sheepishly lay claim], and being blessed in our current housing arrangement with one flat screen television, one leather couch, one satellite dish hookup, and one foot-warming dog, have stumbled upon, re-discovered, and are now making thorough re-evaluation of that most American, most Western, most married of nightly endeavors, that which involves three basic choices- HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime - and three basic beverages - soda, wine, or beer. It is in the exploitation of these six options, and the many permutations which might result, that we have, in this pinnacle of Southern California culture, this Cannes of the Southwest, reinvigorated our sagging commitment to the apathy of the urban inhabitant.
We watch tv and we can admit it.
OK - sure, we've visited my Uncle Donny and my Aunt Paulette a couple times, we've spent the day in Venice walking along the beach and dining at a refined, organic restaurant, we've had snap peas and goulash at a vegan restaurant on Sunset, we've attended a basketball game, gone for bike rides in the neighborhood (well one, anyway), taken the dog for hour-plus walks in Elysian Park every morning, attended a Halloween costume party and met a couple friends from college (while making, canceling, and rescheduling appointments with three times as many others), gone shooting at an LA pistol range(!), and even attended a taping of "The Price Is Right," but all of that seems so faint in my memory of the last three weeks compared to the nightly ritual in which we've gleefully engaged, one for which I felt guilty until my wise wife reminded me that this was exactly what we had been missing for so long - sitting down, catching a movie fifteen minutes in, having a drink or two, and soaking in the thrilling monotony of geographic irrelevance. We could be (and will be, soon enough) in Boston, Chicago, or East Lansing, and there would be nothing in this singular experience which would be significantly any different, no mater where we were. And we sit, talking through the movie, or reading about the actors', the director's, the writer's credits on IMDB, or giving Butley's apparent thoughts voice (apparently, he sounds like an over-educated Lenny from "Of Mice and Men"), or surfing the internet for ... well, I'm not even sure what, at this point, nor were we, after ten or twelve trackpad clicks away from the original goal...
And yet - here we are, in Los Angeles. And here you are, faithful gentle reader, paying heed to our misadventures with what I now know to be something between boredom and true anticipation, and I feel it my duty, my solemn trust, to maintain a thorough account of our time here spent in the wilds of America, even if it be wildly domestic, and so I begin...
WE DRIVE
So the drive down from Portland to LA was pleasantly uneventful. We took our time, and as the sun set and we meandered ever southward, we began to consult the GPS, the AAA book, the Motel 6 guide, all in hopes of finding a good waypoint at which to rest our weary travelers' bones until resuming the drive the following day. It was around this time that my cousin Lisa just happened to have sent an e-mail about our blog, and the thought dawned on us that we could possibly visit her and her lovely family and stay overnight there, renewing both vigor and family connections in one evening. Thanks to her and Leonard's generosity, we did just that, with Lisa even being so kind as to fire up the steam room for us on our arrival, and as we settled in for the most refreshing steambath after a day of driving I've ever had, I had a newfound appreciation for the hospitality code of the great American West. It couldn't have been a lovelier place to stop. That morning Lisa cooked a king's breakfast for us and, rested & fed, we returned to the drive. Even Butley seemed better for the morning's walk on the trails outside Lisa's house.
WE ARRIVE
We got to Los Angeles with no problems, around 5:30 that evening and found our corporate rental, at the Baxter 5 Apartments in Echo Park, and Michelle, the owner/manager let us in. It's a great place to stay and we can recommend them highly to anyone coming to LA, and especially anyone working at the LA Music Center (the Taper, the Ahmanson, Dorothy Chandler, the Disney Music Hall), as it's literally 10 minutes away, all surface streets, and all very manageable. The apartment complex itself is nestled in a section of LA that was known a few years ago as having gone through an amazing transformation, and although now its change may be old news, we are its newest beneficiaries. Funky coffee shops, like Chango, Fix, or Delilah's dot the stretch of Echo Park Avenue that runs North from Sunset to our little place, there are community services like the fabled "Magic Gas" station, the Echo Park Cyclery, run by downtown bike messengers (hence its evening- & weekend-only hours, perhaps), and funkified little clothing shops that seem the respite of keepers whose style grows organically from the environment, rather than invading and supplanting it with their own preconceptions. And so, you have cool clothing stores with the same ragged exterior metal gate across the front door, coffee shops with the same cracked concrete out front and shiny new espresso machines inside, and fresh paint on preserved facades. The ethos seems to be "restore" not "rebuild" and it feels all the less intrusive a gentrification, because of it.
The Baxter 5 is directly across from the Elysian Heights Elementary School, a public school which, apparently, gets pretty good marks from our friends who've got kids of that age and have, of course, been plugged into the grapevine. Angie and I just assumed it was only fitting, as - for one reason or another - we always seem to be staying directly across from a school, no matter where we are, be it 78th Street, Inwood, or Echo Park. You'd think it was a message of some kind, but Butley knows better. He's about all the dependence either of us seem to be willing or able to manage.
The apartment is really comfortable, and notably so for the price we paid. For what works out to little more than the corporate rate the SA cast is paying at the Kyoto Hotel downtown, near the Ahmanson, we've got a full kitchen with new appliances, a living room with nice hardwood floors and too-comfortable leather couch (too comfortable, as in too inviting), a little office are off to the side, and a bedroom with a semi-private gated patio through French doors that we share with one other apartment and which serves as an occasional outdoor dining option or reading room, in good weather.
WE TRY NOT TO CONNIVE
We are particularly thankful for the apartment as it was a last-minute replacement for another Craigslist rental that fell through at the last minute. In retrospect, we dodged a bullet with great fortune, but at the time it was an incredibly frustrating process to have to deal with. (Even writing about it, my shoulders tighten at the thought of recounting the long story, but I'll be brief.) In a nutshell, the timeline runs like this:
• Mid-October: we secure a two-bedroom house, with a small yard, to rent in Hollywood. Looks nice, the woman who owns it is very dog-friendly. A video editor with her own business. We'll call her Lucy (because she's frickin' bonkers and I fear a slander lawsuit if I give out too much information online). We send the full rental amount, plus a deposit. We sign & return a contract. She cashes our checks. We assume everything's good to go.
• A week later, she e-mails to say that she's sold her other property in New York sooner than she thought she would and and asks whether we have any other options for staying in LA. She hasn't sent us our keys yet. We say no, and can we get the keys? She says sure, no problem, just asking, she'll stay with the ex if we need to.
• A few days later, she says that the other options aren't going to work and can we talk about it. This is three days before we're supposed to get to LA. We say we'll talk about it after we get the keys - send us the keys - NOW.
• We get the keys, and the same day we have a tense conversation with her in which, after my attempt doesn't go well, Angie gets on the phone and they agree it would be better for us to consider another option Lucy has found for us. We call the other place (the Baxter 5) and agree to cancel the agreement with Lucy.
• We get to LA and Lucy says she'll send the check for the refund. It's incomplete, as it's lacking the $500 deposit we had initially made. Also, Angie's attempt to have a conversation with her about the $108 we paid for a gym membership (for a gym which was within easy walking distance to her house and which is now 9 miles and a 30-minute drive away from the Baxter 5), has resulted in a snarky, snide, and dismissive e-mail about how ridiculous it is we would even ask such a thing, and don't we know it's LA and everyone drives for hours in this city and blah, blah, blah, has left us fed up. When she returns Angie's call, Angie doesn't mention it and just asks her to send the $500.
• We wait another week for the $500, which we eventually get. In the meanwhile, Lucy's sending us threatening e-mails about returning her keys, about how we've had them long beyond what is fair and reasonable, how her brother is a policeman and he says it's illegal and constitutes a breach of contract (a contract which she broke in the first place) and threatening legal action if the keys aren't returned. We're very straightforward with her - we'll return the keys when we get full reimbursement, and the day we deposit the check, we return the keys by certified mail.
• Lucy sends another e-mail. Where are my keys? We tell her we sent them, that you can trace them with the tracking number, that the post office has already attempted one delivery and left a notice. Why did you send them certified, she asks, I'm not in town. We tell her, in light of her threat of legal action, we needed proof of her receipt, and that we consider the issue resolved.
We haven't heard back from her since, and hopefully she'll be back in time to retrieve them at the post office. In the meanwhile, we've finally been repaid and, except for the gym fee, we've lost nothing but time, patience, and a little faith in our fellow human beings. But this story may not be over and we'll see if she's able to get them in time or if they end up getting returned back to New York, in which case we'll have to send them again and probably suffer through more paranoid e-mail from her before we send them again. There are many more twists and turns to the story - my favorite being what we've learned about her supposed resume - which consists of two credits on IMDB, neither of which are particularly flattering - but you don't need to hear anymore than you've suffered through already. The bottom line is: she's nuts and we're really lucky we never ended up there in the first place.
WE THRIVE
Like I said, until getting to LA, our time was somewhat occupied with adventures, seeing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of cities we had either never been to before or hadn't been to together or which simple held areas we hadn't really explored all that much. In getting to LA, neither of us felt particularly strongly the need for expedition, excursion, or examination - instead we sort of let the city come to us.
I accepted an offer to go shooting with a friend from college, Dave Marko, at the LA Pistol Range and was treated to up close & personal time with a .38 Special, a 9mm Glock, and a .357 Magnum. Because what red-blooded American male doesn't want to blown holes in a poor defensive target downfield at least once in his life (or in my case twice)? And frankly, whether it was a natural ability or good practice with first-person shooter games as a kid, I gotta say - I had pretty good luck. The target, not so much. But it felt like such an LA thing to do...
We visited my Uncle Donny and Aunt Paulette, just south of Century City, who also had come to our opening night party here in Los Angeles - a big event for Paulette who, hobbled by a foot injury months ago and not recovered yet, has rarely left the house in months. But if naked singing suicidal adolescents can't get you out of the house, then really - what will?
We went for a walk on a Monday in Venice Beach, where we found all the mixed nuts that place is known for. Dinner at the Three Square Cafe & Bakery was a highlight of the day. As was a stop at The Stronghold, one of many new upscale shops just a few blocks in from the shore, where we cased the joint for Angie's early Christmas present to me, a pair of blue jeans that may well herald a new dawn of pant-wear for me. Normally, I'm not a big believer in high-priced fashion jeans, but these are neither plastered with a name or insignia, nor the result of some cutting edge couture - in fact, they are uber-retro, being milled on the same machines, with the same stitching and brads, and same cut, styling, dyeing techniques, etc. as the first pairs worn by gold panners of oldendays. I gathered, from the prices at the shop, that while the gold panners might not have found much in the hills, they were clearly wearing small fortunes on their bottom halves, but the reality is that a single pair of really good jeans is probably the most-worn item in many people's wardrobe (certainly mine) and it makes sense - if they really feel good and you know you'll wear them day in and day out - to lay out some bread. And this place will repair and tailor the jeans for life, if you want. And it wasn't like we were mortgaging the house - just deciding between jeans or a new iPod. In any event, I like 'em, that's for sure. And Angie doesn't have to listen to me gripe about not having a decent-fitting pair of jeans, anymore, which is probably a wise investment in marital harmony as well...
We also met a fellow with another blue-nose pit bull that was, at 95 pounds, half-again as big as our little 65 pound monster. Rocco was his name, and he was a dead-ringer for Butley's big brother. Very sweet as well, and utterly knackered by the warm-weather walk his owner had him on, but I still wouldn't want to stand between him & his dinner.
Those blue things you see on his collar are weights his owner uses to build up his neck. He says he shows him, not for pulling or other less savory competition, but just as a fun way to meet other dog-lovers. I guess it works, 'cause this beast had a musculature that rivaled California's Governator. At any rate, Butley thought about it, but decided he likes his slimmer physique. Better for long car rides.
We also had a chance to join other members of the cast for a unique venture - another item for the "I never thought I'd be doing THAT" column. We sang the national anthem for an LA Clippers basketball game! It was a fun endeavor, and a great game that was up in the air for four quarters until the Clippers lost by a single three-point shot in the last 30 seconds of the game. But the really novel part of the evening came afterwards, when we stayed after most of the crowd had left and the LA Dodgeball Society held their Final Championships on the same court.
Yes, Virginia, there is an LA Dodgeball Society. It's a (and I stress this word) casual association of alternative-types in every sense of the word who nonetheless have marshalled their forces into formidable legions of strangely-clad, stone-faced, fierce competitors of this favorite schoolyard game. 
And when the whistle blew to begin the games, there was much mayhem to be had - remarkably gratifying after the carefully regimented basketball land of travelling restrictions, shot clocks, holding penalties, and other hide-bound rules...It was a great 'stumble-upon' kind of adventure, because it certainly wasn't on the bill. We would never have know about it, but that one of our cast members is friends with one of the players and had the inside scoop on where to sit, which team to root for, and the like. We only stayed for about half of the evening, though, because we were spent from the day and we had to conserve our energy for the marathon that was to come.
Or should I say 'Come on Dooooowwwwn!"
Yes, after spending three years in San Diego, and many months in Los Angeles proper, we finally went to the taping of a television show. And not just any show, but a game show. And not just any game show, but The Price Is Right. About 25 of us from the show were there. It was a ridiculously long day - we had to be there by 9am for a 1pm taping. We sat outside in a large holding area until they finally tagged & interviewed, photographed, warned not to be relatives of CBS employees or CBS employees ourselves, waited in another area, and then another, and then finally loaded in like weary sheep to the studio.
Where all of a sudden, music was blaring, lights were flashing, as we were all laughing at how high-school-prom all the decorations and set pieces looked, how small the studio really is, and how the whole thing felt like a junior varsity version of what we imagined it to be like. But we were cheering and yelling "Higher!" "Lower!" "No, no, $1,450, not $1,675!!" along with everyone else until I was glad I was an understudy who (likely) didn't have a show that night because my voice sounded like ten miles of rough road.
Jared Stein, our musical director & conductor, was actually called up and the first winner, bidding closest on an assortment of camping gear which he won't actually receive until up to three months after the January 29th air date (check your local listings) and for which he has little precious little use, not being a camperly sort of guy, but dammit he WON it, and we cheered like we were comrades storming the Winter Palace. THEN, he was eligible to win ... yes, you guessed it ... "A NEW CAR!" Well, a truck, actually. And came damn near winning that, but unfortunately guessed a couple numbers wrong and ... well, you know the sound ... wah-wah-wah. Ah well - what the hell was he going to do with a new truck on tour anyway, it's not like he's ready to drive the rest of the tour, and the taxes would have been about $6,000, and while he could have turned it around and sold it, it's probably more hassle than it's worth anyway. But just watching our own vegan, baggy-pantsed, hip-hop capped, and totally disoriented Jared up there, trying to think clearly while a studio full of people were screaming like huns, bidding on a bright, shiny red Ford F-10 pickup is a memory I'm glad I'll keep from our stay here, that's for sure.
So - three weeks down and, as I write this, two & a half to go. I think I've covered most of the highlights. I guess there was a little more than tv and couch-napping. My regrets for the overdue, overlong nature of this last entry, but I didn't know anyone was actually reading this thing until I started getting e-mails asking for the next installment. Whaddya know - we've got a following. So listen, my children, and ye shall hear, of the yearlong ride of we three here...
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Portland
Little to say about Portland, not because it wasn't a memorable time, but my computer's suffering some maladies and soon after I arrived I had to take it to the local Apple Store whose very tattooed, dyed, and Gus Van Sant-esque "Mac Genius" sent it off for repairs to Houston and I didn't get it back until I was in LA, the following Wednesday. Oh...and by the way, it's still sick and waiting for another part to arrive at the Los Angeles Apple Store, at which point, there will be yet more time without it while they make the (hopefully successful) repairs. (I gotta say, I never had these kind of problems when Mac had Motorola chips, but ever since they moved to Intel chips, I seem to run into problems kinda often.)
At any rate, yours truly is writing this from his wife's machine - also a Mac, but an apparently well-constructed one - and is trying to catch up a bit, so - all that to say, pardon my paucity of memory.
The first memory molecule of Portland in October, though, is that Portland does Fall like few cities I've seen before. To wit, I offer Exhibit A:
Let it be noted that although I have all sorts of software that can heighten contrast, intensify color, change the sharpness of most photos, I made not a single change to this photo. It's from a walk in Washington Park, which sits on a hill on the Eastern edge of the city. It's more than just redwoods one finds in Portland, but actually there is all manner of floral fantasia. Known as Rose City, Portland sports a garden of roses in Washington Park the size of an arena football playing field with varieties of whose names I thought were a joke, or perhaps little nicknames given by the gardeners until Angie told me that they were, in all likelihood, the particular names of those particular strains of roses given by botanical wizards whose entire life is about cultivating that one unique strain whose name they can personally lay claim to for all perpetuity. And here I am, content with buying daisies at the bodega on the corner.
But they were stunning and fragrant beyond the barriers of even my apathy, and as the three of us strolled around, we stumbled onto a photo shoot with two pleasant young fellows, twins, who had the placid confidence of people who were famous but yet enjoyed enough anonymity that members of the cultural middle class like Angie and me would only recognize that they must be famous but not be able to identify them.
They were dressed in matching grey suits, dark shoes, and open-collared white shirts. Naturally, as we passed by, their palette matched Butley's perfectly, a detail that wasn't lost on the photographer, who asked if we could pass by with Butley in the frame, for some color-scheme underlining. We did so a few times, and then stood by while they stood holding Butley's leash, smiling for the camera (charming lads, but I think Butley stole the shot, frankly). And as they stood there, camera snapping away, we asked what the shoot was for, what kind of work they did, they answered (plainly, to Angie's mind, smugly coyly to mine), "Oh, practically nothing, actually. We write."
Little did we know, though we were soon to find out as we walked away and having made a furtive call to the Spring Awakening culturati, Henry Stram, that they were Matthew & Mark Polish, two biblically named brothers whose work as independent film writers & directors is being touted as that of next generation Coen boys. What they were doing in Portland, I don't know, but apparently the photo shoot was for an upcoming issue of New York magazine in which the two lads will be profiled.
So, those of you who have subscriptions to New York, keep an eye out for the profile, and perhaps you might catch a glimpse of our dog in passing, if not in full grin. Leave it to us to work for ten years as actors and have our dog's photos in New York before our own. But it's fine, it's only my dog. It's not like it was my brother or something...
Housing in Portland was at La Quinta Inn, just over the river in the Irvington section of Portland. We stayed there on our own, Butley-banned from the company housing option, and it worked out just fine. La Quinta (or La Keen-ta, for the culturally specific readers of this humble blog) was clean, spacious, simple, and chee-ee-eep. After the Quality Inn in Seattle (aka, the Squalidly Inn), it felt like an upgrade, and with parking and daily walks down by the river or around the funky eastern neighborhood where the Burger Kings and Wendy's were at least adjacent to funky cafés and restaurants that, by Portland standards, were probably mundane but, to our tastes, had all the hip of NYC's west village without the cramped tables and grouchy waitresses, we were well-lodged. Of note were Milo's City Cafe and Rimsky Korsikoffee (no link available), where the Edgar Allen Poe-themed house-turned-cafe has tables that may - or may not, depending on your selection of them - be the one that slowly, slowly, slowly turns or slowly, slowly, slowly rises & sinks or slowly, slowly, slowly slides into the wall and back out again and which has a bathroom with the most elaborate rendition of what life underwater at the edge of a pier must be like, complete with a sunken Poe mannequin laying on the floor in a canoe, staring at you as you go about your business.
We also sampled the wares of Voodoo Donuts, a hole-in-the-wall donut shop in Portland proper, just down the street from the Paris porn theater, whose marketing slogan is, shamelessly, "The magic is in the hole." That's one of them. The other t-shirt logo you can get, the one I didn't buy for Angie or me, describes its pink-box-packaging with the phrase, "Good things come in pink boxes." And yes, you can buy undies that read the same.
Audiences in Portland, like audiences in Seattle, like audiences in San Francisco, like audiences in San Diego, loved the show. And every night we strode past long lines of autograph-hunting teens, centenarians, and everyone in between as they ignored me, smiled in mild recognition at Angie, and then beamed in glee at the arrival of any of the kids from the show. Yes, it's true. We're not only the veterans of the cast, we're the doddering relics of an earlier age, and it suits us truly quite fine as we get home to walk the dog, open the wine, and turn on HBO all that much sooner.
One fun field trip we took was to visit the monastery where two, yes, two uncles of our assistant company manager, Chris Recker (a child in a family of fourteen kids, and whose parents also shared such distinction), both serve as brothers at Mt. Angel Monastery, a Benedictine retreat where Chris's uncles (he calls them 'muncles') help run one the country's foremost seminaries and keep, along with all their bretheren, to a beautiful life free from just about everything our show talks about - sex, kids, angst, suicide, pregnancy, nudity, etc., etc. And yet they were as fun and charming as any monk might be, answering every question we had about when they actually decide to use their hoods and whether they wear underwear under their robes.
They also took us to lunch at the Glockenspiel Restaurant & Pub, where we were treated to a rousing 5-minute performance of North America's largest glockenspiel, followed by wienerschnitzel and the local brew. The muncles also gave us all candles from their monastery, and every time we light them we feel just that little bit holier. (Of course, I might also note that they gave them to us after feeding us all full of wienerschnitzel and beer - seems like the monks have learned at least a little about the multi-tasking use of devotional implements. So, with all that wind-making German cuisine, we had sins for which we needed great redemption.)
There's a lot about Portland that's redolent still of a bygone time preserved in both functional and decorative ways.
You get the sense of Portland being a cooler, if meeker, sibling to its Northern neighbor, Seattle. Like where all the remaining grunge kids (who didn't land recording contracts) or loggers (that didn't sell their acreage to a paper processing plant) ended up. Still keeping it real, even if only because they never quite got the opportunity to sell it for fake. It's a place I wouldn't mind spending a couple weeks - or a couple months - more. In another life, or another career, or another job, perhaps. But I think we were both glad for the chance to get some sense of the layout of the place. And we were doubly glad to have the chance to soak up as much Fall as we could before heading South for the next six weeks, to a megalopolis where Fall is something that sells greeting cards and serves as a backdrop for horror movies but is otherwise unknown: Los Angeles.
And so, with that in mind, I hope you enjoy a little taste of the Fall of which we drank so deeply, just one short week ago... (Guess I didn't have so little to say about Portland after all...)
At any rate, yours truly is writing this from his wife's machine - also a Mac, but an apparently well-constructed one - and is trying to catch up a bit, so - all that to say, pardon my paucity of memory.
The first memory molecule of Portland in October, though, is that Portland does Fall like few cities I've seen before. To wit, I offer Exhibit A:
Let it be noted that although I have all sorts of software that can heighten contrast, intensify color, change the sharpness of most photos, I made not a single change to this photo. It's from a walk in Washington Park, which sits on a hill on the Eastern edge of the city. It's more than just redwoods one finds in Portland, but actually there is all manner of floral fantasia. Known as Rose City, Portland sports a garden of roses in Washington Park the size of an arena football playing field with varieties of whose names I thought were a joke, or perhaps little nicknames given by the gardeners until Angie told me that they were, in all likelihood, the particular names of those particular strains of roses given by botanical wizards whose entire life is about cultivating that one unique strain whose name they can personally lay claim to for all perpetuity. And here I am, content with buying daisies at the bodega on the corner.
But they were stunning and fragrant beyond the barriers of even my apathy, and as the three of us strolled around, we stumbled onto a photo shoot with two pleasant young fellows, twins, who had the placid confidence of people who were famous but yet enjoyed enough anonymity that members of the cultural middle class like Angie and me would only recognize that they must be famous but not be able to identify them.
They were dressed in matching grey suits, dark shoes, and open-collared white shirts. Naturally, as we passed by, their palette matched Butley's perfectly, a detail that wasn't lost on the photographer, who asked if we could pass by with Butley in the frame, for some color-scheme underlining. We did so a few times, and then stood by while they stood holding Butley's leash, smiling for the camera (charming lads, but I think Butley stole the shot, frankly). And as they stood there, camera snapping away, we asked what the shoot was for, what kind of work they did, they answered (plainly, to Angie's mind, smugly coyly to mine), "Oh, practically nothing, actually. We write."
Little did we know, though we were soon to find out as we walked away and having made a furtive call to the Spring Awakening culturati, Henry Stram, that they were Matthew & Mark Polish, two biblically named brothers whose work as independent film writers & directors is being touted as that of next generation Coen boys. What they were doing in Portland, I don't know, but apparently the photo shoot was for an upcoming issue of New York magazine in which the two lads will be profiled.
So, those of you who have subscriptions to New York, keep an eye out for the profile, and perhaps you might catch a glimpse of our dog in passing, if not in full grin. Leave it to us to work for ten years as actors and have our dog's photos in New York before our own. But it's fine, it's only my dog. It's not like it was my brother or something...
Housing in Portland was at La Quinta Inn, just over the river in the Irvington section of Portland. We stayed there on our own, Butley-banned from the company housing option, and it worked out just fine. La Quinta (or La Keen-ta, for the culturally specific readers of this humble blog) was clean, spacious, simple, and chee-ee-eep. After the Quality Inn in Seattle (aka, the Squalidly Inn), it felt like an upgrade, and with parking and daily walks down by the river or around the funky eastern neighborhood where the Burger Kings and Wendy's were at least adjacent to funky cafés and restaurants that, by Portland standards, were probably mundane but, to our tastes, had all the hip of NYC's west village without the cramped tables and grouchy waitresses, we were well-lodged. Of note were Milo's City Cafe and Rimsky Korsikoffee (no link available), where the Edgar Allen Poe-themed house-turned-cafe has tables that may - or may not, depending on your selection of them - be the one that slowly, slowly, slowly turns or slowly, slowly, slowly rises & sinks or slowly, slowly, slowly slides into the wall and back out again and which has a bathroom with the most elaborate rendition of what life underwater at the edge of a pier must be like, complete with a sunken Poe mannequin laying on the floor in a canoe, staring at you as you go about your business.
We also sampled the wares of Voodoo Donuts, a hole-in-the-wall donut shop in Portland proper, just down the street from the Paris porn theater, whose marketing slogan is, shamelessly, "The magic is in the hole." That's one of them. The other t-shirt logo you can get, the one I didn't buy for Angie or me, describes its pink-box-packaging with the phrase, "Good things come in pink boxes." And yes, you can buy undies that read the same.
Audiences in Portland, like audiences in Seattle, like audiences in San Francisco, like audiences in San Diego, loved the show. And every night we strode past long lines of autograph-hunting teens, centenarians, and everyone in between as they ignored me, smiled in mild recognition at Angie, and then beamed in glee at the arrival of any of the kids from the show. Yes, it's true. We're not only the veterans of the cast, we're the doddering relics of an earlier age, and it suits us truly quite fine as we get home to walk the dog, open the wine, and turn on HBO all that much sooner.
One fun field trip we took was to visit the monastery where two, yes, two uncles of our assistant company manager, Chris Recker (a child in a family of fourteen kids, and whose parents also shared such distinction), both serve as brothers at Mt. Angel Monastery, a Benedictine retreat where Chris's uncles (he calls them 'muncles') help run one the country's foremost seminaries and keep, along with all their bretheren, to a beautiful life free from just about everything our show talks about - sex, kids, angst, suicide, pregnancy, nudity, etc., etc. And yet they were as fun and charming as any monk might be, answering every question we had about when they actually decide to use their hoods and whether they wear underwear under their robes.
They also took us to lunch at the Glockenspiel Restaurant & Pub, where we were treated to a rousing 5-minute performance of North America's largest glockenspiel, followed by wienerschnitzel and the local brew. The muncles also gave us all candles from their monastery, and every time we light them we feel just that little bit holier. (Of course, I might also note that they gave them to us after feeding us all full of wienerschnitzel and beer - seems like the monks have learned at least a little about the multi-tasking use of devotional implements. So, with all that wind-making German cuisine, we had sins for which we needed great redemption.)
There's a lot about Portland that's redolent still of a bygone time preserved in both functional and decorative ways.
You get the sense of Portland being a cooler, if meeker, sibling to its Northern neighbor, Seattle. Like where all the remaining grunge kids (who didn't land recording contracts) or loggers (that didn't sell their acreage to a paper processing plant) ended up. Still keeping it real, even if only because they never quite got the opportunity to sell it for fake. It's a place I wouldn't mind spending a couple weeks - or a couple months - more. In another life, or another career, or another job, perhaps. But I think we were both glad for the chance to get some sense of the layout of the place. And we were doubly glad to have the chance to soak up as much Fall as we could before heading South for the next six weeks, to a megalopolis where Fall is something that sells greeting cards and serves as a backdrop for horror movies but is otherwise unknown: Los Angeles.
And so, with that in mind, I hope you enjoy a little taste of the Fall of which we drank so deeply, just one short week ago... (Guess I didn't have so little to say about Portland after all...)
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Seattle
First day in Seattle was a bit sleepy. Or a lot sleepy.
Having arrived in town the night before, we were a bit worn out. And as the rainymistygrey stalked the streets, leaking light through the cell block number 5 window of our hotel room, it was all the more encouragement to just take the dog out to pee and head right back in and under the covers.
Also, Eva Maciek, our wardrobe supervisor, is the other dog owner on the tour, and her dog Crackers, freshly angst-riddled from ungodly loud jets in San Francisco's naval airshow for fleet week, and from the flight from San Fran to Seattle, needed a watcher for the day, which we were only too happy to oblige. And so, Crackers, Angie, Butley, and I all chillaxed in bed (or around it) watching Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," feeling like the rainy Salem weather matched that of Seattle's quite nicely. Crackers in particular enjoyed the comfort of a stinky pair of shoes...
Being back in Seattle, I found the "Twelve Angry Men" poster we left here two years ago. And, of course, it's the same dressers, who all remembered spraying us down with spray bottles every night before the show, trying to make it look like the hottest day of summer in the middle of a Washington winter evening. The next day we went for a walk around Pike Street Market -
- home of monkfish-throwing seafood merchants, cheap but beautiful flowers, specialty shoppes (that can only be spelled with the extra "-pe" at the end), and the original Starbucks store which, to walk into, closely approximates the sense of walking directly into page seven of the Orvis catalog.
We visited Scobie Puchtler, oh he the mechanical magician of Yale University/Prism Kiteworks/youwantitibuildit fame, and saw the very cool alternative school he teaches at full time now, Puget Sound Community School. And somewhere between teaching classes in building an actual radio-controlled airplane model, designed & fabricated by the students themselves with his supervision, and renovating a brand new building they're relocated themselves to, he finds time for a proper homelife with his wife Sarah and son Brayden.
We took Butley to a park near where Scobie lives, the Gas Works, which is an old industrial site where coal used to be converted to natural gas. It was highly, highly toxic until the city set about reclaiming it, de-toxifying what they could, sealing up what was best left alone, and re-sodding everything until now it stands as an amazing testament to the possibilities of urban renewal. it's about the size of three football fields, and the old mechanical architecture still lying around is both haunting & beautiful, adding a uniquely historical identity to the park.
We returned to the Gas Works couple days later, to give Butley a chance to tear up some grass and burn off some energy. We met this great couple whose frisbee-fetching dog was a good playmate for Butley, and spent about an hour chatting about a Vaudeville festival they run annually here in Seattle - apparently the largest of its kind in the world. It's called the Moisture Festival because of the fact that it's a Springtime event in Seattle, but being a vaudeville festival, there's probably more to it than that. At any rate, we were all good & tired by the end of the day and stopped to pose for photo before heading home to rest up for the show.
Also, as we were immediately adjacent to Fremont, Seattle's answer to Berkeley, CA, we drove by the "Fremont Troll," a sculpture underneath a major bridge in Fremont where a local artist was commissioned to craft a substructural inhabitant for the community. Apparently there was some disagreement between the artist and the mayor and, after a failed attempt to have his work finished by another person, the mayor dragged the original artist back to finish the job. The original artist, somehow incensed at the imposition, decided to add his Volkswagen bug, filled with concrete, to the troll's left hand. So, in the photo, you get a sense of the fellow's size by knowing that the VW in his hand is real - and that's an actual hubcap for his left eye...
We visited the Experience Music Project, the brainchild and beneficiary of Microsoft's Paul Allen, on a company visit. After joining the kids for the requisite high-school-musical-esque recording of a SPRING AWAKENING in the museum's "record a CD exhibit", Angie and I went exploring. I, of course, ended up downstairs in the Science Fiction Museum. Way cool, particularly to see the original props & costumes from Blade Runner, the manuscripts of various original sci-fi classics, and the exhibit on changing images of utopia & dystopia in sci-fi over time.
Sunday morning, joined Angie's friend Dan Tierney for breakfast back in Fremont at Norm's Eatery & Ale House, a dog-friendly restaurant that has everything for the perfect Sunday afternoon: great food, beer on tap, big comfy sofas, flat screen television, and lighting that just makes you want to stay and stay. But we had a matinee, so..
We've been enjoying our daily walks around the Seattle Center, right next to the hotel.
It's a big tourist park and centralized location for Seattle Repertory Theater, the Intiman, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, etc. And there are more shoppes (yes, the -pe again), carnival games & rides, a boarding platform for the Monorail, and a big fountain that does synchronized water shows to orchestral greatest hits. (NB: I have no idea who the guy in the jester's hat is...)
After our last show, Angie and I went up to the top of the Space needle and had a last look around the city, lit up as it was night.
Meanwhile, with all this travel, Butley's decided - he's going into sales.
Having arrived in town the night before, we were a bit worn out. And as the rainymistygrey stalked the streets, leaking light through the cell block number 5 window of our hotel room, it was all the more encouragement to just take the dog out to pee and head right back in and under the covers.
Also, Eva Maciek, our wardrobe supervisor, is the other dog owner on the tour, and her dog Crackers, freshly angst-riddled from ungodly loud jets in San Francisco's naval airshow for fleet week, and from the flight from San Fran to Seattle, needed a watcher for the day, which we were only too happy to oblige. And so, Crackers, Angie, Butley, and I all chillaxed in bed (or around it) watching Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," feeling like the rainy Salem weather matched that of Seattle's quite nicely. Crackers in particular enjoyed the comfort of a stinky pair of shoes...
Being back in Seattle, I found the "Twelve Angry Men" poster we left here two years ago. And, of course, it's the same dressers, who all remembered spraying us down with spray bottles every night before the show, trying to make it look like the hottest day of summer in the middle of a Washington winter evening. The next day we went for a walk around Pike Street Market -
- home of monkfish-throwing seafood merchants, cheap but beautiful flowers, specialty shoppes (that can only be spelled with the extra "-pe" at the end), and the original Starbucks store which, to walk into, closely approximates the sense of walking directly into page seven of the Orvis catalog.
We visited Scobie Puchtler, oh he the mechanical magician of Yale University/Prism Kiteworks/youwantitibuildit fame, and saw the very cool alternative school he teaches at full time now, Puget Sound Community School. And somewhere between teaching classes in building an actual radio-controlled airplane model, designed & fabricated by the students themselves with his supervision, and renovating a brand new building they're relocated themselves to, he finds time for a proper homelife with his wife Sarah and son Brayden.
We took Butley to a park near where Scobie lives, the Gas Works, which is an old industrial site where coal used to be converted to natural gas. It was highly, highly toxic until the city set about reclaiming it, de-toxifying what they could, sealing up what was best left alone, and re-sodding everything until now it stands as an amazing testament to the possibilities of urban renewal. it's about the size of three football fields, and the old mechanical architecture still lying around is both haunting & beautiful, adding a uniquely historical identity to the park.
We returned to the Gas Works couple days later, to give Butley a chance to tear up some grass and burn off some energy. We met this great couple whose frisbee-fetching dog was a good playmate for Butley, and spent about an hour chatting about a Vaudeville festival they run annually here in Seattle - apparently the largest of its kind in the world. It's called the Moisture Festival because of the fact that it's a Springtime event in Seattle, but being a vaudeville festival, there's probably more to it than that. At any rate, we were all good & tired by the end of the day and stopped to pose for photo before heading home to rest up for the show.
Also, as we were immediately adjacent to Fremont, Seattle's answer to Berkeley, CA, we drove by the "Fremont Troll," a sculpture underneath a major bridge in Fremont where a local artist was commissioned to craft a substructural inhabitant for the community. Apparently there was some disagreement between the artist and the mayor and, after a failed attempt to have his work finished by another person, the mayor dragged the original artist back to finish the job. The original artist, somehow incensed at the imposition, decided to add his Volkswagen bug, filled with concrete, to the troll's left hand. So, in the photo, you get a sense of the fellow's size by knowing that the VW in his hand is real - and that's an actual hubcap for his left eye...
We visited the Experience Music Project, the brainchild and beneficiary of Microsoft's Paul Allen, on a company visit. After joining the kids for the requisite high-school-musical-esque recording of a SPRING AWAKENING in the museum's "record a CD exhibit", Angie and I went exploring. I, of course, ended up downstairs in the Science Fiction Museum. Way cool, particularly to see the original props & costumes from Blade Runner, the manuscripts of various original sci-fi classics, and the exhibit on changing images of utopia & dystopia in sci-fi over time.
Sunday morning, joined Angie's friend Dan Tierney for breakfast back in Fremont at Norm's Eatery & Ale House, a dog-friendly restaurant that has everything for the perfect Sunday afternoon: great food, beer on tap, big comfy sofas, flat screen television, and lighting that just makes you want to stay and stay. But we had a matinee, so..
We've been enjoying our daily walks around the Seattle Center, right next to the hotel.
It's a big tourist park and centralized location for Seattle Repertory Theater, the Intiman, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, etc. And there are more shoppes (yes, the -pe again), carnival games & rides, a boarding platform for the Monorail, and a big fountain that does synchronized water shows to orchestral greatest hits. (NB: I have no idea who the guy in the jester's hat is...)
After our last show, Angie and I went up to the top of the Space needle and had a last look around the city, lit up as it was night.
Meanwhile, with all this travel, Butley's decided - he's going into sales.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Last week in San Francisco - Driving to Seattle
Apologies for the delay in posting, gentle readers. You may attribute it to the following:
1) Packing a corporate apartment full of six weeks' worth of accumulated unpacking,
2) Placing same apartment's worth of belongings into a car still left out in Berkeley,
3) Fifteen hours and 800 miles of driving or stopping/eating/relieving/dog walking between San Francisco & Seattle,
4) A remarkable amount of lethargy which, after said packing, loading, and driving, can have a cumulative effect when combined with the following,
5) Seattle weather, mid-Fall, full rain and gray matter until just yesterday.
Our last couple weeks in San Francisco were great. We sampled some more of the local cuisine, and we entertained yet more family, as Angie's brother Brian and his wife Tammy came into town - Brian once again sponging off the largesse of FedEx to 'dead-head' his way to our little corner of the world. Lest you be mistaken, Brian was not donning tie-dye and driving a VW bus to follow a favorite band, but instead exercising his right as a FedEx pilot to catch a free ride, making or a much cheaper trip to wine country for him and Tammy, who apparently brought a small vineyard back with them. They met us after a show one Sunday night and the four of us had a late dinner at Rue St. Jacques. Brian practiced his French, confident that one day he will in fact have use for the Rosetta Stone CD's he bought & assiduously studied, while Tammy and Angie charmed our host & the owner, a significantly tattooed Frenchman a good playlist on his iPod who cheerfully let us stay long after they had shut their doors...
My cousin Lisa brought Alyssa again and also her mom Nancy, this time. Afterwards we all went out to The Hidden Vine for a drink (where we also met Henry Stram, Kate Fuglei, and Ben Lively from our show). it was nice to finally meet Nancy, and I happened to have my computer with me, so I spent the evening showing Nancy, Alyssa, and Lisa photos of family gatherings from the East Coast branch.
And the final week, the adults all went out to Berkeley for dinner at Chez Panisse, which I knew nothing about but which Henry and Kate were all excited about because of it being Alice Waters' restaurant (who, apparently among cognoscenti, is well-regarded for her insistence on using locally-grown food, on working with farmers use ecologically-sustainable farming techniques, and yadda yadda kinda stuff). I will say, for the record, it was durn tasty. Pretty reasonably priced too. And nestled as it is in lotus-eating Berkeley (or as Peter Foley calls it, Berzerk-ly), it was a very whole-grain-goodness evening through and through.
Now I know what you're thinking - that all we did while we were in San Francisco was eat out. But the reality is I just learned how to paste links in this blog and the restaurants are most of the things that have websites, so it's just easier to write about them. I mean, we did make sure to take advantage of what the city had to offer, but we made good use of our kitchen back at the apartment, don't worry Mom.
The last week in San Francisco passed a bit like a blur, and when the weekend came, neither Angie nor I was remarkably inspired to do a very good job of packing. But we got the stuff in the car well enough, and after the matinee on Sunday (there was no evening show), we headed North to Seattle. We got about four hours of road behind us by the time we decided to pull off for the night. Thanks to the GPS, we just looked up the hotels immediately on the way, and ended up at the Cave Springs Motel, a very cool, old-timey, black-and-white-memory-inspiring kind of roadside hotel nestled a couple miles off the I-5 in Dunsmuir, CA and in the shadow of Mount Shasta, as we discovered the following morning (and as we had suspected that night, looking out into the black sky and trying to discern whether the white fluff on the horizon was clouds or snowfall - turned out to be the latter).
Cave Springs has been in the family for generations, having started around something like 1929. The current owner/manager (yes, his actual name is Louis Dewey) is a former dancer, having trod Hollywood and Vegas stages before returning to the very place he grew up, as the scion of the former owners of Cave Springs. The whole story is on the website, and if you like - after reading this tome - you can read that one as well.
Very simple rooms, but well-taken care of. High ceiling, king-sized bed, railroad-style motel straight out of "The Grifters," but with a 1970's Holiday-Inn-cum-hunting-lodge panache. And directly adjacent to a beautiful state park, with a prototypical babbling brook, replete with plaques placed in honor of all the fly-fishers who harvested the waters there in days gone by. In fact, the whole little area is well-aware of all its history, not for any particular selling point but just because, one gets the sense, that it's a community that's small enough to have its history written nearly completely, and just large enough to have people there still who care.
We took Butley on a great walk that morning, and we got the photos to prove it.
Then we headed on. Monday was the big day of driving. Eight hours of driving, probably. Stopped in Ashland, OR for lunch. Somewhere you would have thought would have been dog-friendly enough to let you bring your dog into the patio seating area of a restaurant. But no, Ashland has a city-wide ban on dogs at any eating establishment. So we got salads at a groovynuttyhomegrown shoppe and ate in the park. Butley, as always, made fans out of every simple passer-by.
And once in Seattle, we unloaded into our hotel room at the Quality Inn - which we've re-named the "Squalidly Inn". In a nutshell: two double beds, NO drawers (that weren't immediately in front of a bed and rendered inoperable), one miserable little window overlooking the highway, a bathroom that looked like it had been recaulked a few too many times, no tub, no fridge, no microwave, and no room to move around.
Tired as we were, we just said the hell with it and crashed. The next day, though, we made sure to find another room. We went to the front desk & explained our situation to the goth-chick attendant. "Oh, yeah, the pet rooms suck," she said plainly and empathetically. When we told her just which pet room we were in, she empathized still further. "Oh yeah, that room REALLY sucks." Long story short, under cover of a late-night hour and a manager's distraction, she upgraded us from a room that was miserable to one that is simply decent, but it felt like first class to us after where we'd come from and we've enjoyed its legroom, its bath tub, its view of the Space Needle, and its desk (o ye luxury of luxuries).
So, here we are, in the Emerald City, the Sleepless City, the home of grunge music, caffeine as a food group, and flannel as formal wear. Stay tuned for our misadventures in this town next week, gentle readers.
1) Packing a corporate apartment full of six weeks' worth of accumulated unpacking,
2) Placing same apartment's worth of belongings into a car still left out in Berkeley,
3) Fifteen hours and 800 miles of driving or stopping/eating/relieving/dog walking between San Francisco & Seattle,
4) A remarkable amount of lethargy which, after said packing, loading, and driving, can have a cumulative effect when combined with the following,
5) Seattle weather, mid-Fall, full rain and gray matter until just yesterday.
Our last couple weeks in San Francisco were great. We sampled some more of the local cuisine, and we entertained yet more family, as Angie's brother Brian and his wife Tammy came into town - Brian once again sponging off the largesse of FedEx to 'dead-head' his way to our little corner of the world. Lest you be mistaken, Brian was not donning tie-dye and driving a VW bus to follow a favorite band, but instead exercising his right as a FedEx pilot to catch a free ride, making or a much cheaper trip to wine country for him and Tammy, who apparently brought a small vineyard back with them. They met us after a show one Sunday night and the four of us had a late dinner at Rue St. Jacques. Brian practiced his French, confident that one day he will in fact have use for the Rosetta Stone CD's he bought & assiduously studied, while Tammy and Angie charmed our host & the owner, a significantly tattooed Frenchman a good playlist on his iPod who cheerfully let us stay long after they had shut their doors...
My cousin Lisa brought Alyssa again and also her mom Nancy, this time. Afterwards we all went out to The Hidden Vine for a drink (where we also met Henry Stram, Kate Fuglei, and Ben Lively from our show). it was nice to finally meet Nancy, and I happened to have my computer with me, so I spent the evening showing Nancy, Alyssa, and Lisa photos of family gatherings from the East Coast branch.
And the final week, the adults all went out to Berkeley for dinner at Chez Panisse, which I knew nothing about but which Henry and Kate were all excited about because of it being Alice Waters' restaurant (who, apparently among cognoscenti, is well-regarded for her insistence on using locally-grown food, on working with farmers use ecologically-sustainable farming techniques, and yadda yadda kinda stuff). I will say, for the record, it was durn tasty. Pretty reasonably priced too. And nestled as it is in lotus-eating Berkeley (or as Peter Foley calls it, Berzerk-ly), it was a very whole-grain-goodness evening through and through.
Now I know what you're thinking - that all we did while we were in San Francisco was eat out. But the reality is I just learned how to paste links in this blog and the restaurants are most of the things that have websites, so it's just easier to write about them. I mean, we did make sure to take advantage of what the city had to offer, but we made good use of our kitchen back at the apartment, don't worry Mom.
The last week in San Francisco passed a bit like a blur, and when the weekend came, neither Angie nor I was remarkably inspired to do a very good job of packing. But we got the stuff in the car well enough, and after the matinee on Sunday (there was no evening show), we headed North to Seattle. We got about four hours of road behind us by the time we decided to pull off for the night. Thanks to the GPS, we just looked up the hotels immediately on the way, and ended up at the Cave Springs Motel, a very cool, old-timey, black-and-white-memory-inspiring kind of roadside hotel nestled a couple miles off the I-5 in Dunsmuir, CA and in the shadow of Mount Shasta, as we discovered the following morning (and as we had suspected that night, looking out into the black sky and trying to discern whether the white fluff on the horizon was clouds or snowfall - turned out to be the latter).
Cave Springs has been in the family for generations, having started around something like 1929. The current owner/manager (yes, his actual name is Louis Dewey) is a former dancer, having trod Hollywood and Vegas stages before returning to the very place he grew up, as the scion of the former owners of Cave Springs. The whole story is on the website, and if you like - after reading this tome - you can read that one as well.
Very simple rooms, but well-taken care of. High ceiling, king-sized bed, railroad-style motel straight out of "The Grifters," but with a 1970's Holiday-Inn-cum-hunting-lodge panache. And directly adjacent to a beautiful state park, with a prototypical babbling brook, replete with plaques placed in honor of all the fly-fishers who harvested the waters there in days gone by. In fact, the whole little area is well-aware of all its history, not for any particular selling point but just because, one gets the sense, that it's a community that's small enough to have its history written nearly completely, and just large enough to have people there still who care.
We took Butley on a great walk that morning, and we got the photos to prove it.
Then we headed on. Monday was the big day of driving. Eight hours of driving, probably. Stopped in Ashland, OR for lunch. Somewhere you would have thought would have been dog-friendly enough to let you bring your dog into the patio seating area of a restaurant. But no, Ashland has a city-wide ban on dogs at any eating establishment. So we got salads at a groovynuttyhomegrown shoppe and ate in the park. Butley, as always, made fans out of every simple passer-by.
And once in Seattle, we unloaded into our hotel room at the Quality Inn - which we've re-named the "Squalidly Inn". In a nutshell: two double beds, NO drawers (that weren't immediately in front of a bed and rendered inoperable), one miserable little window overlooking the highway, a bathroom that looked like it had been recaulked a few too many times, no tub, no fridge, no microwave, and no room to move around.
Tired as we were, we just said the hell with it and crashed. The next day, though, we made sure to find another room. We went to the front desk & explained our situation to the goth-chick attendant. "Oh, yeah, the pet rooms suck," she said plainly and empathetically. When we told her just which pet room we were in, she empathized still further. "Oh yeah, that room REALLY sucks." Long story short, under cover of a late-night hour and a manager's distraction, she upgraded us from a room that was miserable to one that is simply decent, but it felt like first class to us after where we'd come from and we've enjoyed its legroom, its bath tub, its view of the Space Needle, and its desk (o ye luxury of luxuries).
So, here we are, in the Emerald City, the Sleepless City, the home of grunge music, caffeine as a food group, and flannel as formal wear. Stay tuned for our misadventures in this town next week, gentle readers.
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