Tuesday Excerpt...and an Apology...

Friday night, instead of free-writing, I went to the Skyview Drive-In to see Wall-E and Get Smart. Wall-E was definitely the better of the two, but Get Smart did have its moments. I liked a lot of the nods to the original series but, let's face it, Steve Carell, as hilarious as he can be, is no Don Adams. But back to the matter at hand, that being the blog.

The air conditioning unit outside our house sits on a concrete slab on the side of a hill, and to our dismay we discovered last week that with all the recent rain, the concrete slab has started pitching down the hill a bit. And, of course, the rotting crumbling railroad tie retaining wall wasn't going to hold. So, we had a grandiose plan for the backyard, part of it being an overhaul of this section of the yard. I thought a quick fix was in order, but then I realized that, what the hell, why not go for it and do what we want? Well, Kathy had already come to this decision because she's much more quick-witted and right about these things. So we dropped a bunch of money on retaining wall blocks, tools, rocks, etc., everything we need to build not one but two retaining walls in our back yard, to kind of step it down on that side and level out the area where the a/c unit sits. So, for the past two evenings, we've been working on tilling, digging, moving, sweating, and singing chain-gang songs. And so far, the wall is...not even remotely looking like a wall. In fact, at this point, if we get a torrential downpour (the likes of which we have in fact seen many of since March), our a/c unit will probably end up in our neighbor's yard. But we've got clear skies until Thursday-ish, so tomorrow we will work fervently to at least get enough of a wall to actually have it retain something. This also explains why I didn't free write Saturday or Sunday. That, and the suggestions were, um...well, a murder was too general, and the other suggestion was too You Don't Mess With the Zohan. But I did like the idea of making the president go away...

Right, well, there's a lot going on that I would love to talk about, but most of it has little to do with the world of writing. So, forget it, I'll get to the excerpt.

This comes from a writing exercise I did this past semester. We were supposed to write for twenty minutes about an object that held a special meaning for us. And after we were done doing that, it was all out of our system so we could write a few pages about it with some distance, as if we didn't know all of that significance.

I chose a snare drum head from the days of The Hitchhikers. And what you're getting is part of the second half of the exercise, the distanced bit.

===

from a writing exercise, March 2008

When I arrived, Alan greeted me at the door solemnly and showed me in. I was surrounded by Rob’s family, not a familiar face in the crowd beyond Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, Alan, and Rob’s older sister Maggie, who had flown in from Boston where she was at grad school. The food all tasted the same to me, the meatballs sharing a texture with the crackers and cheese. Alan pulled me aside after an hour’s worth of nervous eating and took me up to Rob’s room. He told me to take anything, any one thing, to remember Rob by. I didn’t have the heart or desire to tell him that I already had Rob’s copy of his favorite book, One Hundred Years of Solitude and a hefty portion of his CD collection, but I wasn’t about to turn Alan down. I looked around the room and saw what for me had been an enigma for some time, but that I had never taken the time to ask Rob about. It was a circular object, about fourteen inches in diameter, made of flimsy plastic and coated with something white and scratchy. It was ringed with a metal hoop that gave it its firm shape, and it had been drawn on with markers over and over, so that barely any of it was legible as I stood in the middle of the room gazing at it. I asked Alan if he knew what it was. He said it was the head of a snare drum.

I took it home with me, saying goodbye to Alan and his parents, seeking out Maggie and giving her the hug I had wanted to give her since I was in fifth grade and I thought she was so pretty. I sat in my room on my bed with the drum head in my lap and stared at it. Up close, the drawings and writings were little more legible, as they had been drawn and drawn over it seemed countless times. I didn’t recognize any of the handwriting as Rob’s, and the drawings were altogether too straight-edged to be his. I looked at my wall, saw the poster Rob had drawn for a party we had thrown and compared the drawings. There was no similarity at all; Rob’s drawings were all lazy and relaxed, the angles coming together in acute and obtuse meetings. But the drawings on the drum head were sharp, right-angled. The lines were straight, but his tended to curve slightly inward as he drew. None of the lines were smeared on the drum head, either, but Rob’s lines were almost always smeared from his left hand moving the marker or pen across the medium. I examined the drum head closer, trying to pick out phrases or meanings from the drawings.

There was a tractor drawn on the bottom, smoke creeping from its exhaust pipe, forming the words “The Farm Team.” Next to that, somebody had copied pi out to twenty digits, but many of the later numbers were obscured by a hasty scrawling of “I Like Beth.” Somebody had at one time crossed out the word “Beth” and written above it “Skittles” but the line and the replacement word had been drawn with something less permanent than the original message. I couldn’t think of a single Beth that I knew aside from a distant cousin in Texas. Somebody else had drawn what looked like three Easter Island statues on the left side, under which the initials “B.S.H.” were set out in strong block letters. In the center, a five point star had been drawn and it seemed to provide a barrier against the rest of the marker; within the star, the head was mostly white, with a few dark spots as if something had struck it, and it occurred to me that this is probably where whoever had used the drum head had beat it with his or her sticks. I continued looking around it to see if there was anything else I could read. The same hand that had proclaimed affection for Beth also had written “Do or Do Not, There Is No Try” next to the stone heads, and then the quadratic formula followed in another hand.

===

There you have it!

"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?" -Bennett Cerf

Everybody, Everybody...

Give me suggestions for tomorrow's Free Write Friday!!!!

An Open Letter to the Theater-Going Public of St. Louis

Dear Sirs and Madams,

Whilest enjoying the Tuesday performance of Mel Brooks' Tony Award Winning Musical smash The Producers with many of you, I became irked by the behavior of a select few.

Not that your behavior was the worst I have observed at a theater; no, in fact, you were all a most gracious audience. You laughed when it was funny, you clapped when it was deserved. You gaped at "Springtime for Hitler" because there is something about seeing it actually performed that is just mind-blowing and incredible. You can't believe they're actually doing that on stage. But it was as this number was finishing that I started to notice something odd. Some of you got up and left. And, not even after the song was over; some of you left just before it ended.

Did you think that was the end of the show? It wasn't, just so you know. It was the end of the show within the show, so I can see the confusion. But then, why did some of you leave before the end of the number? This bothered me just a bit, but then the action picked up again. Leo and Max read the good reviews, Roger and Carmen walked in on them fighting, Franz tried to kill them, it was all good fun.

But then, just after Leo and Max got sent to jail, as "Prisoners of Love" was starting, something else happened; more of you got up to leave. Again, as the song was starting. And through the song, even more of you got up to leave. And then once the song ended, even more of you followed suit. The actors weren't even done bowing to you, their audience, and you were leaving. Distracting those of us who wanted to let the actors know how much we appreciated the show and, trust me, angering the actors. Look, I know most of you have nine to five jobs, but those people on the stage, this is how they eat. Imagine, for a moment, that your boss expects you to finish a project. He expects you to be finished by three o'clock. It's a big deal for him, he keeps checking up, and he's apologetic about it, he's not being an asshole. He just wants to make sure that you do your normal excellent job in a certain amount of time. Imagine that ten minutes before you finish it, he announces to the whole office that he's going home for the day, and not to bother him, he'll be in tomorrow. Well, wait a minute, boss...didn't you want to check and make sure my project is done?

This isn't a perfect example, I know. But skipping out before the curtain call is like looking at most of a Picasso. Or even more accurately, like going for the first three movements of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and then leaving halfway through the fourth. Picasso painted the whole thing. Beethoven wrote the whole thing and the orchestra rehearsed the whole thing. Don't they deserve credit for what they did? Sure, Mel Brooks wrote the musical and sure, he wasn't there Tuesday night. But the musical you saw was the particular interpretation of that play by the director, artistic team, pit orchestra and cast there at The Muny that night. How dare you walk out on them without giving them their proper thanks! How dare you leave while they were in the middle of entertaining you! And sure, you may have paid for the ticket so it's not like they're entertaining you for free (unless, of course, you were sitting in the free seats), but then you didn't get the full money's worth!

Please take heed. Having written and directed two plays, having performed onstage and in the Pit Orchestra, let me tell you this about the Theatre; we give you the show, and you get the joy of being entertained. We put lots of hard work into it, and what we get out of it is your applause and your appreciation. If we can put a smile on your face, and make your hands clap, the least you can do is wait until we're able to show you how much we appreciate it by smiling and bowing. The audience may get to interact with the characters onstage, but those characters aren't the people behind them. Stay until the curtain call and bows. It's the only true moment of interaction the performer gets with you the whole night.

Thank you.

Elliot M. Rauscher
6/25/2008

Tuesday Excerpt

No fanfare, no glitz, glamour or paparazi. Just straight up fiction tonight. And before I get hit with a barage of questions...yes. This is fiction. Yes, I used my name for the narrator's character. But if I was going to do that and write a real story that really happened, I would have gone ahead and used everybody and their real names. A few things are based in fact, so if you want to know, ask me which bits are. But don't assume. Please. Fiction.

So, I love music. And I took an advanced fiction writing workshop this past semester at school. I wrote three stories; the first of which reflected my mood at the time, and it's dark and dreary and depressing and I hate it, especially the main character. Then I wrote my play, which tacked the same subject (the end of a relationship) in a much better way than what I had written as a story.

My second story was an attempt at working in current events; it dealt with a guy who is making a great living not by preying on other peoples' misfortunes, but by nonetheless benefitting from them: he works for a title abstracting company (sound familiar?) and spends his days researching properties that have been foreclosed on. I don't want to give away too much because it might be worth Tuesday Excerpting later this summer.

But for my third story, I took that love of music I randomly mentioned above and ran with it. I created a band, they're called Left Ventricle. It was the best I could come up with at the time, but that's not really important. What is important is that the band is based loosely on The Hitchhikers, but really, anybody who has ever been in a band will recognize something (I hope) from this. You may remember Joe Dubinsky of Heart Beat. Well, Left Ventricle belongs to the same universe, not one in which bands Come Together and Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day, but one in which there comes a day when The Music Dies. Like Heart Beat, Left Ventricle will never become the bands the members emulate; but like Skins from Tainted Batteries (aka Heart Beat), somebody may make it some day. Anyway, this is the most put-together portion of the story, and I'm still working on it, but, ah hell, I done introduced it enough. I give you...

===

from North for Salvation, April-June 2008.

“Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.” –Malcolm McLaren

“When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there’s a good chance the transmission is shot.” –Larry Lujack

“It’s been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.” –Robert Plant


Bingo’s tires whining on the surface of the pavement, Corey sitting next to me and I can tell he’s got one ear on the radio and one ear on the engine, and he’s only got two ears, and I can’t blame him for sparing one for Grace Slick as she seeps out of Bingo’s speakers and permeates the van, but still, I wish somebody would listen to me, and Corey (whom I’ve never seen asleep) and I are the only two awake. But he’s got his other ear listening to Bingo’s engine, which he knows better than any human could know another human. He named Bingo, he says, because when he walked onto the instant credit used car lot they advertise on late night reruns, he saw the thing, pointed, and said, “Bingo.” The name stuck, and when he sold it to us, to the band, Corey stuck too.

The mix CD Ryan had put together for the tour spins, the tracks coming at us like the pavement of Interstate 70. Ryan himself, sleeping soundlessly, head hanging back, mouth open obscenely and drooling. I can’t see Johnny, except no, John now, he’s insisting, just John, Johnny is for boys and rock stars who want to mean it. Whatever that means. I can’t take it. “Corey,” I say, pausing the music.

“End of the song first,” he says, clearly willing to listen, our first real talk ever, maybe, but he resumes the music now. Normal conversations between us regard only the placement of my drums in the back of the van so they won’t get scratched up, timetables on when Bingo will be back up and running. “Coupla minutes, boys,” he always says, be it a couple of minutes or a couple of hours away from completion. I take a moment to remember if we’ve ever had a conversation not about the van, and it comes to me; once. I had asked him what he was doing one night, two years ago, on a tour of New England we booked opening for The Slip for three weeks, and Bingo was not acting up and we had the night off in Boston. “Hang out at the hotel, I guess,” he had said, and I invited him to a baseball game, Fenway Park. The Red Sox’s miraculous season but I cheered for them, not knowing they would win that game against Cleveland and go on to defeat my home team in the Fall Classic. “Thanks, Elliot,” Corey said afterwards. “I liked that game.”

He doesn’t turn the music off, just down, but I recognize the tune as Play With Fire by the Rolling Stones and now I want to wait until the end of the song, but I don’t. “Corey, do you want Bingo back?”

“Why?” he asks, his bowl cut plastered to his sweaty forehead. He runs the back of a meaty hand across it, pushes the hair to his right temple.

“Well, I mean, so you have a car, I know how much you like working on Bingo and everything, you-“

“Why the fuck do I want this piece of shit? I stick around with you guys so it keeps running, and because you guys have a good time, I get to have a good time…so fuck it. If you’re done, I’m done. But why can’t you replace Johnny?” I think of this, briefly, but the thought is replaced by the envelope from Berklee School of music in my backpack tucked behind the driver’s seat.

“It’s not that simple,” I say. “We can’t just replace Johnny.”

Which is utter bullshit, because what is Johnny? Ryan’s the poet and he’s the composer, and I mean that, he doesn’t just string chords together, he does that too but he composes and interweaves and his voice cries with the sadness Johnny’s heart has never been able to comprehend, which is why Johnny doesn’t sing for us anymore. But Ryan has no head for the business end, and while I don’t either, I’ve at least got the stomach for working out deals with club owners and I know how to answer an e-mail. But Johnny, he played the bass, and bass players are two a penny. It was his persona that was irreplaceable, but some things are better left untouched.

I want to say all of this. Corey looks at me in the flash of a passing semi, but his eyes are glazed over. He might be high, or tired, but he has no interest in Bingo beyond the van being a ticket to some fun, and now he says “Fuck it” so finally and with glazed eyes that I can’t help thinking of that song by The Slip: “He made up his mind/can’t live knowing that there’s some other world.” Like now, Corey has no purpose.

I turn away from Corey, turn the music back up. He turns it back down.

“What are you getting at?”

“We can’t replace Johnny, so Left Ventricle’s done. He moves to Kansas City at the end of the summer, he starts his fucking bank job or whatever it is, then we’re done.”

“So start another band.” And he turns the music back up.

And he’s right, we could. And he’s also right that we could replace Johnny. Two out of three ain’t bad, at least that’s what the song says. But then there’s the envelope in my backpack, the yes inside of it, the financial benefits. The song says nothing of one out of three being worth anything.

Except back in Minneapolis, on our night off this tour, before Johnny made his announcement and became John, Ryan didn’t take the night off. And neither did I. Johnny and Corey hit up some campus bars, I sat in with an old high school friend’s band because he was celebrating his anniversary, and Ryan did an acoustic solo set at a coffee shop. Maybe Ryan doesn’t need two out of three. Maybe all he needs is himself.

***

Slamming my foot down on the gas to pass a semi, and the transmission drops a gear and Bingo kicks up speed. “Easy,” Corey says, “Bingo’s not as young as she used to be,” and he’s right, because Bingo is almost thirty years old now, ancient for a Ford Cargo van that’s been converted into a passenger van. The odometer says there are four hundred and fifteen thousand miles on the engine, a testament to the previous owner’s meticulous care and Corey’s ongoing maintenance. But everything eventually goes, even Corey’s admitted this, everything eventually stops running.

Ryan stirs in the back. “Where are we?” he asks.

“Between Kansas City and Columbia,” I say. “And we need gas soon.”

Ryan looks out the window. “Hey, alright, Porn Shop and Church alley. We need to stop? Do we want to be saved or commit unspeakable acts of sin?”

“We’re going North,” I say. “This time. Last time we came through, we turned South each time. North this time.”

“Ah, come on…that’s mostly salvation.” Ryan closes his eyes again and leans back.

“We don’t need a repeat of Johnny’s Rosary,” I say, pointing to the offending object as it dangles from the rear view mirror. It’s made of a glow-in-the dark novelty cross, mint flavored dental floss and anal beads Johnny purchased on our last trip down I-70. He wears it onstage some nights, dressed in tight black clothes and eyeliner smeared on his eyelids.

Ryan looks back at Johnny. “Should I wake him up, get his vote?”

“Fuck him,” Corey says. “He’s not part of the band anymore.” Corey turns to Ryan. “You guys aren’t gonna quit just because he’s out, right? You guys are gonna replace him, right?”

“Corey, come on,” I say, “Just let it go, we’ll…we’ll figure it all out in a couple days. After the show back home.”

But Ryan’s already made up the collective band mind. “Corey, if Johnny goes through with this-“

“John, you mean. He was pretty adamant about that tonight,” I remind him.

In the rearview mirror, I see Ryan flash a sinister glance at me. “If Johnny goes through with this, then yes, we’ll find somebody new. It’s cool.”

Corey is still agitated. “That’s not what Elliot said.”

Ryan grabs his glasses from the seat beside him and pushes them onto his nose. “Really? Elliot, that true?”

“I guess I just thought that there was no Left Ventricle without Johnny.”

“Hell, Corey, face it,” Ryan leans up between Corey and I, lowering his voice. “With Johnny gone, we’d never have to find a YMCA just so he could shower again. We’d never have to track him down at some girl’s apartment in the morning and get out of town two hours late. Think of it.”

And he was right, Johnny was the one who subscribed to the Rock and Roll lifestyle most strictly; if you spent a week with Left Ventricle expecting sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, it would suit your interest to stick close to Johnny. I could get you the Rock ‘n Roll and a few beers. Ryan could just as easily have gotten you the sex, but he’d pass on it himself. Really, for Ryan, if it wasn’t the music, there was little point. A friend of ours from another band assigned each of us an existing rock persona, somebody who had already made a name for themselves in music. Ryan got to be Conor Oberst, I got to be Max Weinberg. Johnny got to be Nigel Tufnel. “But he’s not real,” Johnny had protested at the time. “Neither are you,” Ryan had said.

Ryan leans back into his seat and rubs the gelled spikes out of his hair. “Shit,” he says. “I should just cut out with the hair product, what’s even the point? The people don’t come to look at us, they come to hear us, right?” He reaches into the back seat where I guess Johnny is lying asleep. He stabs with his hand. “Right?”

A muffled grunt comes from the back. Ryan spins around on his seat and faces back, leaning down. The gas light blinks on and I search the horizon for the beacon of a gas station.

“Are you really going to fuck us, man? I mean, really?” I look in the rear view mirror and see Ryan shift to my left as Johnny’s spectral form rises from the back seat. He’s got his shirt off and his hair is matted to the right side of his face.

“We’re not going to talk about this, Ryan.” I focus my attention back on the road but my eyes are getting tired. “Elliot, Corey, where are we?”

“About seventy miles from Columbia.”

“We got a show there?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “But I bet you want to just keep going until we get back to St. Louis, come back out for the show tomorrow night, right?”

“What time is it?”

“About three, Johnny,” Corey says.

Johnny yawns. “It’s just John now. Fuck. Where’s my phone?” I can hear him rummaging in his back pack.

“You’re still Johnny while you’re still part of Left Ventricle,” Ryan says, “Elliot, we stop in Columbia. I don’t want to give Mister Jonathan Avery Meyers a chance to shave and put on his business suit before we clear the end of this tour.”

“Fuck you, Ryan, um…uh…”

“Philip,” Ryan says.

“What?”

“My middle name.”

“Oh. Fuck you, Ryan Philip Creesey. What time did you say it was?”

A Shell sign appears from behind a tree-clad hill, about a mile away, and I put my blinker on and get back in the right lane. “Three in the morning,” Corey says again.

“Fuck. What day of the week is it?”

“Tomorrow is a banking day, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ryan says.

Johnny yawns again. “Fuck, Ryan, you’re not making me want to finish this tour.”

“I’m not making you do anything. I’m just asking for a little explanation, that’s all.”
“Not now,” I say. “Can we three just be civil until after Saturday night?” I make for the exit.

“Yeah, okay, Elliot,” Johnny says. “And how many days away is that?”

Ryan now: “It’s Friday morning now, asshole.”

I can hear Johnny punch a number into his phone. “I love Thirsty Thursdays.”

===

"I do not like to write - I like to have written." -Gloria Steinem

The Return of The Blog Guy

Hey all.

Well, I meant to blog this summer, and here it is almost the end of June and I've blogged, what, five times since school ended? Not a good start.

But that will end NOW! You get this little blurb today, and starting tomorrow, a return to the features you've come to know and love. Starting with Tuesday Excerpts tomorrow. Wednesday I've prepared quite a nice rant for you to all enjoy, Thursday a musing on holidays, and, everybody's favorite, the return of Free Write Fridays. Saturday I'll get on board with a super edition of Your Questions, Answered!.

On top of all of this, you'll be getting updates on the house (A/C sliding down a hill/water seeping into the basement, hey ho!), a little bit of politics (somebody's gotta take over for Tim Russert) and so little more!

Alright, I'll be back tomorrow. For now, just enjoy a little Mel Brooks:

Minneapolis Trip

Well, while not officially over, I can declare this road trip a great success!

First off, the trip itself was fairly uneventful, with a stop for gas sixty miles beyond where I used to stop in my Camry, so the Jetta's got some staying power. I know that thirty-seven miles to the gallon is nothing considering what some cars can get these days, and I'm not saying it's the Peel P50 with it's mileage, but still, being able to go more than 400 miles on a single tank of gas is a nice way to get around if need be.

But enough about cars, because I want to talk about bicycles eventually. But first, let me get to the point in the weekend where bicycles come in.

No, actually, before I met Kathy at the MetroLink station on Thursday, I drove down Hanley from Clayton towards the Jimmy John's in Brentwood, and the traffic was terrible. I was behind a girl on a really nice red Specialized bicycle, and I was busy checking out the bicycle. I had my windows down, and I was in the right lane, when this guy in the left lane says loud enough for me to hear, "Yeah, I'm checking out that sweet ass, too." I looked at this guy, perfect sleaze ball in a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and I explained to him that no, I was actually checking out the bicycle. He then said, "Yeah, but the hot ass in spandex doesn't hurt, does it?" The girl then turned and said, "I can hear both of you, you know." The traffic started up again, the Eclipse Creep rolled his window up, and the girl pulled over and waved me up. I still had my windows down, so I pulled up next to her and she said, "Were you really checking out my bicycle?" I replied, "Of course, that's a pretty sweet Specialized to be using as a commuter bike" (I only assumed it was a commuter bike because she was wearing a blouse and had a messenger bag that was stuffed to the brim), and she said, "You should see my Orbea at home." Those are pretty sweet bicycles, just so you know. I said to her, "I see you've got Shimano Dura-Ace then on there. Nice. And you must have the FSA carbon cranks." She said, "You could pick that out from behind me?" I answered, "The curve is wrong for them to be the Campagnolo carbon cranks." Her reply? "Do you have a girlfriend?" I should totally set her up with my friend Zach.

Anyway, storms in Iowa, driving for nine hours, blah blah...

Friday we had lunch with Greg rom Bailey Hall at Sally's on campus, got to check out the construction going on around campus, with the new Gopher stadium (for more in depth coverage of this project, consult Chris' Blog) and the other various additions to campus since the last time I was up there in 2005 (check out This Post for a brief rundown of our various road trip mishaps, including the ill-fated 2005 visit to the Twin Cities).

After lunch, we walked around downtown a little bit with my sister-in-law Jen, saw the construction of the New I-35W bridge, which is coming along very quickly and makes the St. Louis I-64 project look like it is just...dragging...on...forever...which it is...and then looked at the debris from the 35W collapse, which they have partially laid out underthe Washington Avenue Bridge. After that, we went to Cafe Ena for dinner with my bro-in-law Joe and his fiancee Shelley, drank a ridiculous amount of sangria, and then we went to Chino Latino for drinks and appetizers with some of our old MN friends (including the aforementioned Chris). It was nice to catch up with them. No, it wasn't nice. It was fantastic. I really truly miss Minneapolis, and as much as I love school at Webster, and I like my job, and Kathy loves her job, I can actually see us moving here sometime in the future (grad school, maybe). After Chino Latino, we ran across the street to Williams Uptown Pub & Peanut Bar where, we were promised, we could get a quiet and cheaper drink. Well, anything is cheaper than drinks at Chino Latino when you get right down to it, and almost anything is quieter, but not Williams...but their beer selection was unbelievable. It will be complete when they get Magic Hat IPA and Schlafly products on tap.

But it wasn't all drinks and peanuts and catching up...I also made a great reconnection with my friend Lisa, whom I haven't seen in something like five years, but who is very active in the theatre and film scene in Minneapolis. She asked me to send her some of my scripts, and without making any promises said she'd do what she could with them. Hell, any exposure is good esposure, right? I can't thank her enough for that. Yet another reason to want to move back, right?

Saturday, we finally got to see our host, my bro-in-law Paul (Jen's husband, Kathy's oldest brother), and we hung out with them playing Wii and eating some good food with Jen's parents until we went to the wedding, which was great. They got married, so the desired end result was achieved. And of course, Kathy got to see quite a few of her old classmates, so it was like a mini-reunion.

There was a girl there who looked incredibly familiar to me, and it wasn't until Kathy told me that I remembered why. I used to buy coffee from her at least three times a week at Laurie's Coffee Shop, which was just across the street from Bailey Hall. She, it turns out, makes handbags and messenger bags and sells them, which is cool because I actually do like me a good messenger bag. But what was even cooler was that her boyfriend builds bicycles. He designs and builds steel framed bicycles in Minneapolis. His name is Brad Capricorn, so his company is called Capricorn Bicycles. They are really nice looking bicycles, and I may buy one from him some time in the future. He was also a really cool guy. His website is mostly just a blog right now, but eventually Peter (the groom from the wedding) will finish designing a website for him. Should be awesome. I posted Capricorn's website in my links list. Check it out, some good looking bikes.

Overall, a great trip. We've got a BBQ going right now, so I should probably get to that. Hopefully (knock on wood) our trip back tomorrow is uneventful and safe. Hope everybody everywhere else had a great weekend!

Fox News Declares Rachel Ray a Terrorist...?

Okay, so I read this story about a Rachel Ray/Dunkin Donuts iced coffee ad on MSN yesterday, and at first I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, leave it to a Fox News political pundit to coin a term like "Hate Coture." I mean, I've seen this type of scarf on many many people, not just radical Islamic Terrorists.

In fact, I would guess that the majority of the people who wears scarves like this are not radical Muslim Terrorists, and of the Mulsim people who wear them, I would bet dollars to donuts that the majority of them are in fact peaceful people of faith, and not Radical Terrorists who hate America. So to say that Rachel Ray (or, to look at some other people mentioned in the article, Colin Farrel, Kanye West and Howard Dean) is a terrorist simply for wearing it is like saying anybody who wears shiny black knee-high boots is a Nazi, or anybody who uses white sheets for anything is a member of the KKK. Sure, some people who wear black boots might sympathize with the Nazi party. Some KKK members likely sleep on white sheets as well as wear them around. And some terrorists wear these scarves. But, seriously? Are we going to condemn everybody? Maybe we should scour the internet for pictures of Michelle Malkin and find out some of her fashion mistakes. Ten bucks to the first person who can link her to North Korea!

But I think the best part of this story is that on the MSN site, the screen capture from the ad in question shows Rachel Ray holding the coffee (like a microphone?) in her left hand while gesticulating, forefinger raised, with her right hand. You will see why that's funny below:



And now why it's funny:

Giving Up the...Golf?

I know I'm about a week behind on this story, but I wanted to give everybody a chance to catch the video before it got bumped down.

So, according to this story on NPR's All Things Considered, our Commander-in-Chimp, the Great Divider (I could keep going but I won't) has made the tremendously heart-warming and self-punishing sacrifice of giving up playing golf in solidarity with the troops fighting in Iraq. According to the original interview with Mike Allen at Politico.com, Bush stated, "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” Hmm...

Geez, you know, Mr. President, if playing golf sends the wrong signal, what about taking time off from your schedule as President of the United States of America to go down to your Crawford Ranch and relax? Is that the right signal? I mean, if we're worried about what it looks like if you play golf...

I mean, geez, if you really wanted to show solidarity with the troops, shouldn't you, I don't know, go overseas and eat only C-rations? Or shouldn't you spend fourteen months away from your friends, your wife, your daughters? At the very least, shouldn't you quit your job to put your life in danger, defending freedom while bullets are being fired at you? I mean...if you want to do that last one, I'll bet your approval rating would shoot straight up.

While we're showing solidarity to our troops by giving up golf, why don't we just show solidarity with the millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the failing economy by giving up watching movies in whatever gigantic room with a large screen exists in the White House (and don't say there is no such room, there's gotta be)? How about, as a show of solidarity to everybody who struggles to fill the gas tanks on their Honda Civics, you give up premium gasoline for the presidential stretch SUV? How about, in support of the uninsured people in this country, you give up serving Dom Perignon at State Dinners? Yeah. This could be the start of a whole new President Bush...

Seriously. The president is giving up golf. What an inspiration.

Actually, though, this is quite a strategy for setting up a lasting legacy that might illuminate him in a positive light. Imagine that I am president (as a Democrat, or at the very least not as a Republican). Let's pretend that I am elected and war erupts, and American men and women are fighting and dying overseas. That is not to say that if I were elected, I would run is into a war lickety split, but, you know, sometimes, war is unavoidable and even necessary (I am thinking of something on the scale and magnitude of World War II, not, you know, Operation Mission Re-Accomplished Again for the Third Time, or whatever we're calling it now). So imagine I am elected and we get involved in a WWII-style conflict, and I don't play golf, but this is a hypothetical universe, so in this hypothetical situation, I am a golfer. And in this particular hypothetical situation, in which I am a golfer and president during a time of unnavoidable global conflict on the scale of WWII, complete with a Nazi-like enemy who is seemingly unstoppable and ruthless and all of that and only our perseverence and sense that what we are doing is not an offense but purely a defense for all free peoples...wait, I got lost somewhere.

Imagine, if you will, that in several years' time, I am president. The country gets attacked and it hearkens back to Pearl Harbor, there is a global conflict that we now find ourselves entering to defend our freedom. Also, I am a golfer. Here we are in this war, and I go out and play golf. My Republican detractors can look back on the Legacy of Bush the Second and say, "Aha! President Rauscher is not showing solidarity with the troops! Why, the Great George W. Bush gave up golf when he took the country to war!" See? So it is a good move for the Bush administration, at least as far as long-term PR is concerned.

But what signal does this really send? Not to our country, but to our enemies...and yes, I will admit that we have enemies. They exist. We may have created some of them through our country's ridiculous and unforgivable foreign policy, but still they exist and wish to disrupt our every day lives. All they will see is that they have disrupted the life of the president to the point where he no longer plays the silly Imperialist Capitalist Infidel Great Satan game of golf. It's a victory for them, and it's a bit demoralizing on the home front.

Look, I'm not saying that President Bush shouldn't have given up golf, but to think that this gesture is a real sacrifice, to even imply that it's even remotely equal to the sacrifice of our men and women who are putting their lives on the line? No. Absolutely not, Mr. President. My opinion of you would have at the very least stayed the same if you had never given up golf. Now, you've only succeeded in lowering it.

In Time for My Sesquecentennial Post...

I give you...

Apartment Ten

We Are (Almost) Back In Business!

Well, see, silly me and my wanting to maintain a higher video quality...what was I thinking? So, I had to compress it into an mpeg2 (mpeg4 w/mp3 audio was still too big), which is just a suck, but the point is it will soon be posted to Google Video, which means once it goes through review, I can post it on the blog. Yay! A month later!

Right, so, a few new updates to the blog. First off, a new poll is coming for all of you to vote on. And then, there is of course, the updated links list. And in the interest of interesting you all, I am going to go through the links one by one and tell you what they are all about.

NPR

If you don't listen to NPR, you should, and if you do, good. My local station KWMU just came under a bit of fire for what their general manager likes to call her management style, but that doesn't change the fact that NPR itself is great. Sure, sometimes it can be a little, um, ear grating (Diane Rehm's voice), some of the hosts can get a bit sycophantic (hello Terry Gross), but all in all, it's a good source of news and entertainment. I like to play the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me online quiz every day to keep up with odd news.

...But I Am a Cyclist

You see, it's funny because I actually am a writer and not much of a cyclist. But there's a small amount of posts on there, I update very infrequently (even moreso than on here) but I get some good rants in on the state of affairs in cycling. There's also a list of links on that blog, but I won't go into them.

Turbochubs

Formerly the link read "Gerald Has Returned" but he's been returned for a while now, so I figured I'd retitle the link. Gerald's a designer, into hockey and is probably the most politically liberal of all of my friends, which is no bad thing. He's got a healthy mix of NHL, politics, and Daily Show clips interspersed with other tidbits and hilariousness. Check him out, yo.

Whiskey Tastes Better When You Have Problems

My former roommate from college, Chris and I rioted after the U of MN won hockey nationals in 2002. We also drank cheap vodka (read: he drank cheap vodka and I spent money I didn't have on Smirnoff, which I know, is cheap vodka, but if I considered that splurging, just imagine what he was drinking...), played simultaneous Dark Forces (Chris on PSOne, me on PC), pondered rearranging our room once, and he also took a video of me riding my bicycle down the hallway (at a terrifying-for-indoor-riding 26 miles an hour). But, through all of that, it seems we kind of forgot about going to class every so often, and I ended up leaving and he ended up in a little bit of trouble. But hey, you live and if you're lucky (like Chris and I), you learn and you move on with life and you stay friends and such. Check out his blog, he talks a lot about sports in the Twin Cities. Proving once again that all the sportswriters out there with their degrees in Journalism have nothing against a fan with a dangerous amount of time on his hands and a gift for the written word. Check it out.

mGk

Formerly titled "Mo and Kev and Maddy," I liked the simplicity of the look of the mGk, so I went with it. For a while, it was a blog about my sister, her husband, their house and their cat, and then it was about how my sister was dealing with her husband, house and cat while she was pregnant, and then, about a year ago (May 4th, actually, of 2007), it became all about my niece Madeline. She's adorable. Except she watches American Idol, which I just can't get down with. I gotta help that girl out with some serious Good Television Marathons. Mo, Kev, send Maddy over. We're gonna spend the weekend watching Arrested Development.

Idealism Never Goes out of Fashion

A new addition to the list, Becca is another of my Minnesota friends. Memories of her always included either Fiona Apple, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Piggly Wiggly, or her stealing various items from my room and then kicking me in the ding-ding. She's working on her Master's Degree in (appropriately enough) Middle Earth itself, New Zealand. Let's see if I can get this right...she was a clothing design undergrad, and is getting her masters in textiles? Yes? Becca, feel free to correct me if I am wrong (which I almost never am). Her blog is about life in New Zealand, with a fair amount of an emphasis on living a greener life and even, it seems, a bit about clothing design and textiles. Hey alright! Check it.

Auntie Maine

My mother's youngest sister Nora lives in Maine with her husband and two children, and there's not much to do up there in the long winter months, so they find ways to entertain themselves and, sometimes, the readers of their blog. Updates are few and far between, but sometimes you don't need an update, you can just keep reading her old posts and the comments that pop up there from, say, my mother and my other aunt. So click the link; let it never be said that "You can't get theah from heah."

TGSeale.com

A friend of mine from Webster, Tanya Seale is a fellow writer who is a bit further along in her writing career than I am. But what we both have in common is that we both got plays produced at Surfacing 2008. I really liked hers quite a bit, and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work next semester when we have our fiction workshop together. A word to those with slow interweb connections: her site is a bit of a slow loader because it's got a lot of stuff on it. But check out her blog anyway, she writes the same kinds of things that I do, only, you know, more frequently, like, you know, a good blogger.

JMG Design

Like Gerald, John is a friend from my days working in Retail. Of the four of us represented here (Gerald, John, Colleen, me), John was the first to escape to work on his garden, a passion of his which he has turned into a small business of designing gardens for people. Check it out, he's full of information about what to plant where and when, plus he's got recipes for great dinners and drinks.

These Walls Are Paper Thin...

Colleen escaped the drudgery of retail toil only to experience the drudgery of office toil. But, be that as it may, she still finds plenty to keep her mind occupied elsewhere. Lately, she's been doing the Apartment Cure, which is interesting to read about, because she divulges some secrets about how high off the ground to hang pictures and other strange tidbits you didn't know people wrote books and made websites and did bad reality TV shows about.

Annie Get Your Blog

While the link text is not the official title, I will never change it because it came to me in a moment of clear thought, and to me it seemed clever. But "What I Do Not Understand" is one of my favorite blogs; Annie's got a sweet touch to her writing style that makes me forgive her for being a Cubs fan, which is no small feat. And of the bloggers I've linked to, aside from family members Annie is my oldest friend, seeing as how we've known each other since we were like, twelve (oh my God, Annie, we've known each other more than half of our lives. That makes me feel kind of old). And what doesn't Annie understand? Well, actually, she understands quite a bit. I think it's the fact that we live in a world where so many things are understandable that shouldn't be that makes it hard for her to understand the world. If that makes sense. Also, she claims to be married to Yadier Molina, but I haven't confirmed that with either Yadi or Annie's boyfriend.

The McGrath Family

My uncle Dennis is nine years older than my cousin Brian, who is nine years older than me, and I am nine years older than my cousin Maggie. Maggie is the only one who's never lived in Minneapolis. So you know what that means? She better move there to keep up tradition. But in the meantime, you can check out the blog about Dennis' family, maintained mostly by his wife Laurie. It centers mostly on their two beautiful daughters, Mia and Mazlin, both of whom were adopted from Guatemala. Laurie's posts are often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking (but the good way, not the bad way), occasionally laced with anger (check out the recent post about Teleflora and the Today Show calling adopting mothers "Non-Mothers"), but always written from that cozy spot in Laurie's soul where she keeps her children. Ask her if she is an innie or an outie.

Post Secret

If you don't know what Post Secret is yet, you will be addicted soon.

Stuff White People Like

Um...let's see, how many items from this list have I mentioned on my blog? Well, just in this one post, public radio, the daily show, bicycling and Arrested Development. Let's see, um, we used to like Jettas but now we like the Toyota Prius (but we do still like Jettas). I think I've mentioned Free health care before. If I haven't mentioned Wes Anderson Films, I should have. Arts Degrees, Kathy and I both guilty (or rather, she is guilty and I will be guilty). Microbreweries, I love those. Writing workshops, had plenty and will have more. Coffee, I've talked about coffee. Oh, I talked about Organic Coffee once, and white people love organic food! I have Trader Joe's bags in my car, that's grouped with Whole Foods/Grocery Co-Ops as well...see? White people love being white.

The System is Down

Homestar Runner Dot Net. "It's Dot Com!" Seriously, you guys gotta check it out. Strong Bad E-mails and Teen Girl Squad are a must. And the absolute musts are Strong Bad E-Mail Dragon, Japanese Cartoon, Rock Opera, and...Tape Leg? Seriously.

Daryl Cagle

Okay, I know there are people out there who only get their news from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report (another thing white people like), but I am not one of those people. I get my news from NPR...and also from Daryl Cagle's professional cartoonist index. See, when you look at over a hundred artists' editorial cartoons, you get to see positions from each side of every major story/issue in a very quick, concise way. It works for me.

That's about it for now. Look for the video in a day or so, just gotta let it load up through Google Video and go through the process. Have a wonderful rest of your week all!

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Because I likes my quality, I uploaded the video to my computer as high quality as I could. So in addition to being seventeen minutes long (too long for youtube or Blogger video), it is also three gigabytes in size (way too large for most video hosts).

I thought I had solved this issue by finding Google Video. They have no file size or length limitations. What they do suggest, however, is to use this thing called the Google Video Uploader if your file happens to be over 100 megabytes. So, I downloaded the sucker. Tried to upload the .avi of my play. More than 48 hours later, it still hadn't uploaded onto Google Video's server from my computer. So, I tried to troubleshoot.

Google Video is telling me I should convert the file to an mpeg-4 with an mp3 audio layer, and that it should not have been shot/imported in widescreen. Suck. But, it goes on to note, it should still work. Only, it hasn't, and there has been no further help. So, for the time being, no video of my play just yet.

But, this whole looking-and-trying-to-find-a-video-host thing got me thinking; I looked at three options; Blogger Video, YouTube and Google Video. Each has distinct characteristics, advantages. For instance, Blogger Video keeps all of my content right there together. The video is not imbedded in my blog from somewhere else like YouTube, it's part of the disk space my blog takes up. For free! YouTube has the recognition, the easily-navigable website we're all very familiar with now, and high traffic for such things to become nice and viral. While Google Video has the advantage of being limitless in regards to file size and length. But the strange thing about this is...all three of these options are owned and controlled by Google. I hate to make this comparison, because I love my gmail and I dig Blogger, but Google is becoming the Internet's equivalent of Rupert Murdoch. In fact...I'm not sure, but...does Rupert Murdoch own Google? Or does NewsCorp have some sort of partnership with Google? I know NewsCorp owns myspace.com, and I know Google and myspace have partnered in the past...well, that sounds like some research I will never do. Oh well. Anyway, I guess the question I have is this: Why does one company have to offer three different brands of video hosting? It just seems silly.

Anyway, if anybody out there has any suggestions for the video, let me know. Thanks for staying tuned!

Surfacing Wrap-Up (Video to come later)

Alright, so we had a roller coaster ride this year. Two directors (one the AD) and one show out, no venue and a near void of on campus advertising, and we pulled it off.

I have to thank a not small handful of people here, so let me do that:

First, to Jenni, my original director and the original Artistic Director: You laid the foundation for the show, and it could not have been done without all the work you did. I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to see it through, but I'm sure we did you proud. And I don't just mean Apartment Ten, I mean the whole thing.

To Megan, who did her best and beyond to fill Jenni's shoes. Megan, now, when you leave, your shoes will be enourmously hard to fill. You rock and we all love you.

To Kathleen, my awesome friend, pretty much my favorite former co-worker and my favorite schoolmate, and the writer of the best show at Surfacing 2008. Thanks for organizing the cast party at the last minute. You are incredible. Just like Target was never the same after you left, Webster will never be the same without you. You've been a true friend, a confidant and always a shoulder to lean on, and you know that I've always been and will continue to be the same for you. More than just the general you rock and we love you (which is true), you absolutely rock and I love you.

To Michael Ericson, my advisor and the faculty advisor to Surfacing. Sorry for the last minute jolt, but as you became well aware eight days before the curtain went up, communication this year was next to non-existent. Your help was not just invaluable; it was infinitely more important than anything else in those crucial last few days. Thank you.

To Hannah, writer and subsequent director of Confessions of a True Romantic. You did it! This is less of a thanks and more of a congratulations, but thanks to you anyway because without you, Surfacing 2008 wouldn't have been the same. You, Kathleen and I were certainly not the only writers who cared, but I think the three of us got the full experience out of Surfacing that we possibly could have.

To the family and friends who came to see the show. I want to write, and it's because of you that I don't give up. Thank you so much for the support. I appreciate all the kind words about my play, even if I don't believe mine was the best, it was nice to hear it from you.

To Theresa, whom I met at the cast party Saturday Night. We had never met before and probably will never meet again, but that only makes your comment stand out more. For those of you who haven't heard this story, I introduced myself to her, she introduced herself to me, she asked me if I was a writer or director and of which show, and when I told her I wrote and directed Apartment Ten, her eyes got big, she grabbed her boyfriend's arm and said, "That was my favorite one! Dan, didn't I tell you that was my favorite one? That was my favorite one!" Hearing it from family is awesome, but hearing it from a stranger can be life fulfilling.

To my cast. Beth, Tyler, Sheri, and Sam. Each of you reached into your character and brought out something I didn't intend but that should not have been left out. I guess the right cast for the script can do that. Beth, thank you so much for stepping up and being my assistant, I needed you more than I think I let on. Tyler, I wish we had more nights just so I could see what else you could do with your character...taking a bite of the pizza? Ho-ly awesomeness. Sheri...what can I say, except Oh God Yes? And Sam, awkward white boys everywhere are in awe of your awkward white boy dance moves. For serious. You four were the best cast I could have possibly hoped for. Watching the other plays, looking at the people I had considered for your parts, I realized how completely different the show would have been, and I don't think it would have been half as good.

To the rest of the writers, directors and cast members not yet mentioned, you all were awesome. Thank you for not bailing when things looked grim. Four days until curtain and we still didn't have a venue, and you stuck it out. We couldn't even get into the venue until the day of, and nobody lost their cool. And look, we came through it and I made many new friends and so did you. You were all fantastic.

And, finally, last but not least, I want to thank my wife Kathy. Not just for video taping Sunday's performance, not just for showing up with three people outside the Webster University fold, but for everything else. While you had no affiliation whatsoever with Surfacing or Apartment Ten, neither would have been a success without your love and support. Thank you for believing in me, thank you for your honesty, and most of all, thank you for loving me. Sometimes I wonder why you love me, but I read something last week in a play by Neil LaBute: Don't worry about "why" when "what" is right in front of you. Okay. Sounds good to me.

Sorry for those of you looking for a review of Surfacing, I just can't do it. Stay tuned, though, I'll throw a video up here as soon as Google Video Uploader takes care of it. If you want to read a review, I suggest not going to Lanz Christian Banes' um, "story" about Surfacing at The Webster University Journal for a review as it is not in any way shape or form a review. Also, note, that I am listed as a senior and not a junior. Despite this typo, the dean has decided I am not eligible for graduation (even though I cited the saying "If it's in the paper it must be true." He says that only holds if the story accompanied by lots of complimentary colorful graphs and pie charts like USA Today). Lanz himself has a long history of not getting the story right, or of getting only half of it, or of telling an in-depth investigative piece when he should be reviewing a play festival. But enough about how much I dislike this guy. This is about my play.

Well, like I said, stay tuned, I'll post a video of it soon. It will be located at the end of this post, right...um...just a second...wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...keep waiting...hominahominahomina HERE:

(video to follow. not here yet)

Coming Attractions

Coming soon to an Interweb-Gateway-Enhanced Computeroliamatron: Updates Galore! The long-anticipated series of posts from the acclaimed writer/producer of such favorites as "You Think You Know Webster University?", The "Fall Break Blogapalooza Extravaganza," and "Your Questions, Answered: Volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5" comes this season's most exciting epic:

Elliot Is Not A Writer: The Blogpire Strikes Back!

Read as Elliot updates you on Surfacing:

Elliot: It was totally awesome, except for the botched back flipping Ninjas and the untimely pizza delivery. That poor squirrel never saw it coming.

Continue reading as Elliot restarts his Tuesday Excerpts:

from a Term Paper, Spring 2008:

...Oim a gud gohrl, Iyamm! God, just shut up, Liza Doolittle. You make me sick!

Watch as he answers your questions:

Q: Are you...do you like...you like girls right?

A: Yes, mother.

Read his All New Free Write Fridays:

And suddenly, without warning, the sentence ended before it was finishe.

Coming soon.

Surfacing!

Well, as I said before, we lost our venue. And now we have a new one!

This Friday, Saturday and Sunday (April 18-20) at Nerinx Hall, EAC Auditorium (if you come, just follow the signs). Nerinx Hall is the all girls Catholic High School next to Webster University in Webster Groves. Friday and Saturday at 7:30, Sunday at 2. It should be fun. The plays are as follows:

The Walk On - A Study in Heroics, Villainy, Innocence and Plot Twists.
One Hundred Million Dollars and The Penguin Trainer - A Treatise on Fate.
Don't Die In Teeter - A Portrait of Life and Death in Rural USA.
Confessions of a True Romantic - The Love Life and Times of A Young Woman.
Apartment Ten - A Gripping Tale of Love, Death, and Take-Out.
Cafe Deux Parfaits - Fifty Years in Four Cups of Coffee.

Things are going well with the show. I mean, we have some kinks to work out before tomorrow night, but things should be smooth. I was having trouble with some of the performances from my cast, not anything I could put my finger on, just a nagging sense of something, but last night at the dress rehearsal almost all of those nagging lingering doubts were blown out of the water. I think it was being in front of an audience of sorts that made it work. It's hard to act in front of just your director, but when you've got a room full of people, the adrenaline kicks in. I'm proud of my cast for the way they pulled it off last night.

As for the rest of the shows, they will make you laugh. Some might even make you think. Some might make you cringe and/or cry. But that's to be expected in the Theatre.

I hope to see you all there. Becca, catch a flight. Minnesota kids, it's all about the carpool. Home friends, you will be written out of my will and into my stories (and not in a good way) if you do not come. Family, you are obligated. OBLIGATED!

I will not take no for an answer.

Enjoy the show!

Okay, Joke's Over...

If you hadn't already figured it out, that last post was indeed an April Fool's Day Prank. Not the best one, but the better one I had planned fell through due to a lack of the victims being home. Silly parents.

But now, to the bad news; In two weeks, Surfacing has lost the artistic director (and subsequently, the director of my play), the venue, and an entire play due to people pulling out. Damn.

So, our Assitant Director stepped into the Artistic Directing role, and I stepped into the role of director of my play, but who knows how that will turn out. I hate directing. It's a disaster and a half. I also had to play the messenger to the writer of the play that is being taken out of the show...although we've got eight days, she may put something together, and if push comes to shove, the artistic director said we could just do a dramatic reading of it. Hmm.

As far as the venue, well, we've got some possibilities. One of them would mean cutting the Friday performance from the run, and doing only matinee showings on Saturday and Sunday. That's Stage 3. I made the suggestion of using WGHS's little theater, and now I am making it my mission to get in touch with somebody at the high school who can help me out there (any of you WGHS alumns in my audience have any ins...I know Grooms left the year after I graduated, I have no idea who the drama teacher is now). And in doing so, plus being there during the discussion of the ousted play, and having a lot of input, it looks like maybe now I am second in command. Which, really, I don't have time for.

So...to recap: Surfacing will be next weekend. Maybe Friday-Sunday, but also maybe just Saturday and Sunday. It will be at...um...TBA? And no, not TBA the band that I formed for one show only my sophomore year of high school, and also not TBA, the Bluth Family's fundraising benefit.

I would list Surfacing 2008 as a qualified disaster. But we'll see. As far as my play goes, I just need to take the reins a little more and direct them. I like what I see, but I don't love it. I need to trust them to listen to me when I tell them what I want. They can't read my mind, they can only read my script. I've got to do the rest now.

Hmm. Well, further bulletins as events warrant. Good night and good luck.

An Update

Well, folks, it has been a while. So sorry.

My cast got changed on me. For my play. Not cool. See, when I had the guys read, I was pretty ho-hum on some of them, three stood out as quality leads, but one and only one stood out as the secondary male character; John Richter. And so we cast him as the secondary male lead.

My director, though, has been not returning my phone calls/facebook messages/e-mails/smoke signals/frantic pleas of help, so I had no idea how my play was going until last Thursday when she (finally) made it to our Thursday night class, and told me "Things are going well, but I need you to rewrite the ending. Beth is not eating spaghetti off of Ben's head."

Total bullshit, that's what I wrote in my play, but I see her point...ultimately, the spaghetti would spill onto the stage, and somebody would have to then clean it up before the next play went on, which could take a while. It is, after all, spaghetti.

So last night, I ran into Beth (the secondary female lead) and asked her how it was going. She also said it was going well, and that the cast was really great, that Ben's characterization of the lead is awesome, that Sherry's moments shine, etc, so I was enheartened. Then, I saw John Richter and asked him how he thought it was going. And he had no idea what I was talking about. No clue. Hmm...

He had been cast in two plays, as a very minor character in one and a relatively minor character but with a major prescence in mine. And he's only doing the other play. My director hadn't even approached him! What the crap?

So, today, I ran into Beth again, and she said that the guy (I already forgot his name) who is playing the second male lead is...okay, but that Richter would have been perfect. I agree. He would have been.

Ugh.

But school, other than that, is going...um...crappy. Listen, all you hangers-on and faithful fews, I gotta tell you; title abstracting ain't glamorous, but it pays the bills a lot better than any dewey-eyed fantasies I may have about writing idiotic stories for the rest of my life. I'm definitely going through a quarter-life crisis, but I'm definitely coming out the other end of it realizing that I've made some good choices and some bad, and amongst those bad choices are the return to school. Well, no, but to return to school and invest so much time and effort (not to mention the cash) into a degree that will let me do what? Nothing! Continue my job title abstracting, apply to grad schools and rekindle that dying hope for another two measley years at great financial cost? And at the end? Another degree, another sixty-thousand dollars in debt, and a stack of Works by Elliot Rauscher that aren't fit to wipe snot with. Because let's face it, I am not a writer.

Alright. I'm done. My point is that after this semester, I'm dropping out of school forever. There's nothing there for me anymore. And there's no reason to stay on. I've had my fun...I got a story published at one school and I'm getting a play produced at this one, so I figured I should go out when there's nowhere to go but up. I couldn't stand falling back down after that. So no more school. No more Webster University, no more sitting in a class filled with people who every year look younger and younger (think of it...next year's freshman were born in 1990/91. I've wrecked cars older than that!), no more silly stories, no more plays. No more Tuesday Excerpts or Free Write Fridays. None of that. After this semester, I graciously hang up my quill and focus on just breathing and living life. Setting attainable goals.

So this shall be my last blog post. Fare well, readers. I will leave the blog up for a few days, to give the stragglers a chance to read these, my last words to the masses. Goodbye. And remember; in years hence, when people ask you about me, your response should be, "Elliot? Elliot is not a writer."

An Update.

You Think You Know Webster University?

Inspired by my buddy Chris' latest blog about the best of the U of M, I thought it would be a fun exercise to do a similar assessment of Webster University because I know Sports Illustrated ain't gonna do it. So, with all the best-ofs they have on their list (and subsequently, Chris has on his), I will do the exact same list about my school.

Best Sports Arena

Grant Gymnasium. Actually, it's the closest thing we have to a stadium. Imagine the gym at your local YMCA. Now imagine it with twice as many seats. Actually, I think Roberts Gym at my old high school is bigger, and it's right across the street. The high school already uses our pool, and we're already using their classrooms, so why don't we just use their gym? I'm sure there's room for us amongst their championship banner they just got to hang.

Best Pizza Shop

Imo's Pizza. While Racanellis is fine pizza, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and not as the New Yorkers do. But New Yorkers will tell you that Racanellis is not real NY style pizza. But Imos is real St. Louis style pizza. It is thin. It is greasy. It is cut in squares. It's covered with Provel cheese (not mozzerella or provelone). Now, if only Fortell's would open a location in Webster, we'd be set.

Best Outdoor Studying Area

Well, gee, I guess that depends. If you're a philosophy or English student, the best spot is either in the ivy garden outside Pearson House, or the grotto-like area behind Priest House. If you're in Music or the Conservatory, you probably like Loretto Commons, that area outside the Loretto Hilton center that always gets covered with tents and tables when the Opera Theatre opens up in May. And if you're any other student, you don't like to study outside, you study in the Jazzman cafe and drink expensive coffee, and then when you're done you go out to the Library Quad and play touch football or, if you're lazy enough and nobody's already there with a pigskin looking to put together a pickup game, you can throw the frisbee around.

Best Bar

I guess really there are no bars on campus, but there's a couple nearby. Most of them are the hoity-toity Webster Groves bars for the people who live in the WG, not for the people who go to school there. There's the RoadHouse, but that used to be Ellie Frizelli's and before that JP Fields and before that Streetside Records, so confirming that place as the best bar would be silly because it'll be gone in three years. I'd say the best bar near campus is Cousin Hugo's. Great, cheap burgers and fairly inexpensive drinks. If you go there for lunch on a nice enough day, you can get some of their BBQ which always smells tantalizingly good on my way by it if I happen to be headed that way in the middle of the day.

Best Spot for Weekend Breakfast

Einstein's Bagels. They do breakfast okay, but I hate their lunch. But their breakfast is pretty good. Or, failing that, use your meal plan at Marletto's. If you dare.

Best Laid-Back Student Hang Out

Well...there's really only the one student center, and it's being encroached upon by the small but noticeably growing Jockocracy that infests that side of campus. But I guess that'd be the place, the Student Center. They have a Blimpie and a place to get smoothies, and a giant television, and computer terminals and comfy couches. Sure. Why not.

Best Student Section

Um...let me see...student section? I guess by Chris' blog that's defined as the section at a sporting venue where the students sit. Hmm...um...Webster students go to games?

Best Pre-Game Spot

Okay...I know this list was made by Sports Illustrated, but come on! Pregame spot? We don't even have a game spot!

Biggest Reason For Excitement on Campus

Surfacing. Definitely Surfacing. Also, the Roots are coming for Springfest. Last year we had, like, Edwyn McCain or someone like that.

Best Week To Visit Campus

The week that Surfacing is happening. Or, failing that, Springfest. Nothing like the drunken debauchery that is the U of M's Spring Jam, we have a mild buzz all week from the imported beer we drink and a contact high from the smoke drifting out of the art building, and we groove to some music and forget to do our homework on Wednesday night, but other than that, it's pretty calm. Unless you're a member of the Jockocracy. Nobody can explain it, but they get super excited about Springfest and drink lots of Bud Light, and then run around the campus yelling, "Damn!" It's a little weird.

Best Off-Campus Hangouts

The aforementioned Hugos, and also Coffee Cartel in the Central West End is kind of the meeting place for all the cool kids from Webster U, Washington U and St. Louis U to gather and make fun of all the Lindenwood U, Fontbonne U and UMSL kids who are afraid they'll get mugged and run into the Starbucks across the street. The Loop is always worth a stop, and Maplewood is a happening place with new clubs and stuff. Washington Avenue is nice, if you're in that financial league. But if you're a freshman and you don't know much about St. Louis, just stick to walking to Old Orchard and going to McDonalds. Trust me. Woo yeah.

Surfacing Update and A New Link!

For those who were wanting it, here's an update on the play. Our first casting session was very disappointing. We only had ten people show up, and of those ten, only four struck me as right for any of the roles in my play. One of the guys, and three of the girls, two of which would have been great in the role of Edna (the old lady), and one of which would have been great for Melissa...until she said she was not comfortable reading a bit of dialogue (the bit that made me want to cast her in the role of course...) because that part is, um...have you ever seen When Harry Met Sally, most specifically, the scene in the deli, where Rob Reiner's mother says "I'll have what she's having"? Yeah. It's kinda like that.

And then, our second session got cancelled due to bad weather. So we had to wait a week, and then we had to contend with a basketball game.

Since when do students at Webster University care about/go to basketball games? I mean...the type of people who would audition for surfacing? It's just weird. To me, anyway. Maybe not to you.

But, we got enough people to cast all six plays (only one person doubled up on roles, the guy I wanted from the first night). We didn't get the exact cast we wanted, but we got the Edna, Delivery Man and Melissa I wanted. We got our third choice for Ben, but that's because our first choice for Ben was everybody's first choice for something. So, should be good. Rehearsals start after spring break. The show is April 18, 19 and 20 at the Loretto Hilton theater, downstairs in the black box theatre (possibly set up as a theatre in the round, which could cause problems for some of the shows but we'll work around it).

Okay, so, there's your update. And now, let me point out some new stuff. First off, I removed a couple of links from my list, most notably Memory Machine's Urban Exploration blog and Alan's Sports blog, because neither of them had been updated in quite some time. I set up a new poll so you can all help me shape my spring break plans. And I added a new link: Whiskey Tastes Better When You Have Problems. Written by my old room mate Chris, it's got all your information on Gopher Football and the daily life of an unemployed Minnesotan you could desire. Go check him out. Tell him Elliot sent ya.

It's 60 here. Last week, it was ice storming. Go figure.

Laying it On The Line

I am back on anti-depressants.

Some of you may not know that I was ever on them in the first place. Well, not in the first place. The first place was an apartment on Dale Avenue, and we moved out when I was three months old.

No no, I went on anti-depressants when I was nineteen and in danger of flunking out of college (which, eventually, did happen), and at the time I was willing to try them. It worked a bit. It helped. But after a while, I didn't like how I felt. My range of emotion was diminished. In the depths (but I don't want it to sound like they were very deep depths, because my depression was classified as "subclinical"), I was churning out between two and eight pages of writing a day. And looking back on some of it, it was emotionally raw and laced with irony and pessimism. Anger, too. Baffled confusion at a world gone mad, and me without a place in it. The medication killed the feelings. And the pages.

This time, I have not been very prolific in my pages leading up to this moment, this opening of the container and washing down the first pill moment. I've just been stressed and unhappy, but erratically so. Manic, they used to call it. Bipolar some people would say. No. Not that far. I went to the same doctor. He didn't remember me, and I remember his accent being not quite as thick. He classified me again as "Subclinical" which is a term for depression that is borderline, easily manageable but often more disruptive than full blown depression. I think last time he hit, this time he may have missed. Maybe he hit, just less solidly.

Why would I tell everybody something so personal?

A year ago last week, a good man died. He once said "There's no freedom unless you're vulnerable first." This is me being vulnerable. Being free. I just took my third pill (no no, no...I didn't just take three in a row, I got them on Monday), washed it down with the last of the Tropicana OJ, the healthy heart with Omega 3 (so I don't have to take fish oil pills), and sat down to compose this post. My cat is drinking water from his bowl, and it's time to feed him for the evening, take the trash out, and settle into bed for a little Silverblatt Chapters 10-11, Media Literacy worksheet, cuddling, and eventually, sleep. The most sought-after side-effect that I remember having from taking these the first time was that I could sleep at night. I'm looking forward to that. That's about it though.

I keep my antidepressants together; in fact, the first pill I took on Monday got washed down with my other antidepressant. I keep the pills behind the canister my coffee beans are in. I find it hilarious, the juxtaposition of these two things, but yet the power. My coffee is whole bean, organic, fair-trade. Grind it up, brew it, drink it. My pills are processed to the hilt. Developed and manufactured in a lab. Do not crush. Take whole. Yes, I started drinking coffee. A habit I am comfortable picking up. I tried smoking again. Go ahead, Mom. Call me out on it. I already called myself out. Stupid thing to do. Won't happen again. Coffee I can handle. Cigarettes belong in a fantasy version of me, the one that gets to stand in Humphrey Bogart's trench coat and punch Peter Lorre in the face with his own gun. Coffee I can handle. I have a flask. I've never used it. I don't plan on it. Cigarettes give you a light-headed buzz because they deprive you of oxygen. Alcohol impairs your ability to drive, rationalize, think, and is also a depressant. Seems like a bad idea to supplement antidepressants with booze. The drowsy eye alcohol warning should not be misconstrued as a winking eye alcohol suggestion (anyone? anyone? reference?). But coffee...coffee makes you jittery and gives you energy. It elevates the heart rate in an overabundant quantity, which I have not done since the day I found out the coffee stand in the St. Paul student center accepted flex dine (I drank FIVE chai tea lattes that day. the big ones). It is a vice that is acceptable. And, like the alcohol I restrict myself to (mostly), I have standards. That is why my coffee is organic, fair trade, whole bean. It meant I had to buy a grinder. It means I will eventually want to buy a new coffee maker. But it's there. And I use it.

To close, I will give you the lyrics to a favorite song of mine.

My antidepressant
Hope-giving Holy Mud.
If I only, if I
I
Only drink enough!
I can see clear my escape,
I can see into another
Into another state.

From Coffee Girl by MK Ultra (you should totally check them out, along with John Vanderslice)