Do I wake or sleep?

A beautiful baby girl! Seems like a tiny little thing, 6 lbs. and 14 oz. (is that small?). Name to follow.

Eeeeeeehhhhh!

First off, exciting news--Columbia wants to use me as an exam proctor!  Yay for more money!  They want me to start as soon as possible, so next week it is.

So the other night Kelly had her fundraiser for Ten Reasons I Can't Go Home with You.  Last week she'd mentioned something about having people auctioned off her dates--I think I just assumed this would be like a group of us so I agreed to do it.  Kelly was having second thoughts about it at one point, so I said "hey, we could body shots instead"--and I chose my outfit accordingly.  My yellow sleeveless Ralph Lauren polo top, white pedal pushers, yellow espadrilles, and my yellow polka-dot Betsy Johnson cropped sweater.  The sweater was to look demure if there was a date auction, the sleeveless polo top was for the body shots.  Last night when Kelly called us up, I realize it was just Ben Holmes and me--as I stood up there, I was thinking "hmm, this...could be bad" but then I figured che posse fare?  Ben went for $16 and I was just praying I could at least meet that.  Well, Kelly has some chivalrous friends--she started the bidding at $10 and it was sort of piddling along until one guy shouted out what Kelly heard as "fifteen"--but it was actually fifty, if you can believe it.  And then another guy topped him with $54.  It was just like the box lunch auction in Oklahoma!  I was thrilled and afterward I talked to both these guys for a while, and also gave them postcards for Thyme.  Kelly had made an amazing amount of baked goods for the shindig, that I thought were reserved as raffle prized.  No, she told me--the baked-good raffle prize was a custom-made thing (if you won, she would make you whatever you wanted), the stuff on display was for all of us.  My jaw dropped open--the room was STUFFED with yumminess, including this cracktastic peanut-butter brownies.  I could not stay away from them!  As I told Billy Mitchell, "as we used to say on my cruise ship contract, these are so good--I want to fuck them."  (On the ship, you develop a weird relationship with food, since it's so proscribed.  Limited eating before shows, no food available after shows, no food in cabins, etc.)  There was a lot of stuff left over, and I was allowed to cart away as much as I liked [/gloat].  *AND* Kelly said I didn't have to win a raffle for her to make me something, she would do it anyway (after July!).  Kelly, I've been thinking this over and what I would like are these yummy-ass Irish car bomb cupcakes (minus the John Deere hats, of course!).  So yeah, yesterday I nommed quite a bit on Kelly's amazing baked goods.

I also got to chat with Jason Wynn, whose cabaret I've seen before and who I find terribly talented.  He has something to do with Kelly's show, not sure what, but he is a terrific composer.  Chris cariker walked in but I didn't get a chance to say hey to him.

I saw Moose Hall's Comedy of Errors last night--very, very well-done, I was impressed.  Jodie Pfau, Holla Holla's Juliet, was Luciana and of course did a fantastic job.

Damn, Demetrius BRUNG IT  tonight.  I was a little worried for him last week but he was bleepin' hilarious tonight.  Kelly is hilarious as well; it's difficult to keep a straight face when she's on stage.  Her crying scene as the witch, and toward the end when she's "interrogating" Bottom--really, really funny.  Kelly really is a natural comic actor.  Pretty much everyone did well tonight.  I went out into the hallway between my scenes and worked on stuff--I was attracting a certain amount of attention, between my skimpy top, shinyhuge leather pants, the lil' devil horns Duncan got for me, and my hair.  This one older guy who was there for an audition was sort of lingering in the hallway and told me "good luck!"

...and dust behind the door go sweep.

So final dress for Thyme is tomorrow. We had it at the theater, which is down in Noho, right near where Kevin (Lori's BF) used to live, so I know the 'hood a little bit. Tech was a little tense, as these things always are--actors are used to DOING and tech rehearsals are just always difficult because we stand around so much. (And we've been rehearsing in some small rooms, which makes me very claustrophobic--I have to stand at the window so I don't snap at someone.)  Most (if not all) of us are 100% on lines yet, although I'm pretty close. Poor Demetrius (who's a replacement for Luke) had a bad time of it yesterday but I like what he's doing with the character. For the most part, the costumes look FANTASTIC--Titania and Pumpkinseed look gorgeous, Oberon looks great and the lovers are all awesome. I'm a little mortified at these pants:



They make me look huge--the pants are too big and they're shiny and it just seems to suck like. I don't know what it looks like in real life as opposed to a picture, but I hope it's better. I'm supposed to be a fast-moving fairy, who makes a girdle 'round about the earth, not lumpy! Although this picture makes me giggle:



I'm all Creature of the Night....aaaaand I'm wearing pink pearl earrings.

The music is unbelievably perfect--it adds this magical, haunting, fey dimension that I LOVE. The music really completes the show, especially with the viola. Love, love, love it.

Can't wait to get this on its feet.

I Netflixed Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls; MAN.  It's not manipulative and there's not a strong POV in it; the camera just tells the stories.  There are extensive interviews, mainly with the remaining family members, but with other commentators as well, including Walter Cronkite and Bill Cosby.  And George Wallace.  Wallace is an interesting character, one of those byzantinely complicated Southerners regarding race relations.  Like Lyndon Johnson.  Johnson, in his personal life, was racist, called his chauffeur "boy" and expressed other racist sentiments.  But politically this man pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964--at the cost of his own party's hegemony.  (No one knows for sure whether Johnson said "we have lost the South for a generation" (after Reconstruction, the South was all-Democratic)--but you know a politician as savvy as Johnson recognized that reality.)  He was able to transcend his own personal racism and be the rarest of leaders, someone who appeals to the better side of people.  Sometimes, in fatalistic mood, I think Kennedy had to die in order to make Civil Rights happen. If he'd lived the administration wouldn't have had that emotional leverage, that nation united in grief, to push it through.

At any rate Wallace was another one of those torturously complicated racist Southerners.  (It's frequently like that down there--Southern racism is very different from Northern racism because even back then, blacks interacted much more with whites than they did up North.)  Wallace was THE arch-symbol of segregation--in his inaugural address as Governor of Alabama, he famously declared "segregation now, segregation tomorruh, and segregation forevuh!"  And yet later in his life, during his last term as Governor, he renounced his racist beliefs, apologized o civil rights leaders and acted on that--appointed blacks in record numbers.  Lee's documentary seems not to take that change of views seriously--it has an odd couple of interview snippets with Wallace where it uses subtitles for his speech (I dunno, I understood fine what he was saying, although he did have a strong accent--I guess I see that as a tactic to undermine what he was saying) and in general films the Wallace segments differently (no closeups, for one thing).  But I can understand why someone might not accept Wallace's conversion; he acted pretty badly in the '60s.  He had a lot to answer for.

Anyway, the documentary is very strong, just breaks your heart.  One of those pieces that just makes you hate people, sad to say.  Birmingham was some kind of dark place on the planet then--the background on the city, "Bombingham," is interesting because I have a lot of family there, my grandfather was from Birmingham.  A very dark place in the '60s that attracted a lot of dark, angry energy. 



I love this graphic for the DVD.  Although that's some awfully Catholic iconography for a Baptist church!

At one point in the documentary, two of the girls' sisters were talking about the last time they'd seen their sisters, or spoken to them, and the music was playing this one sustained string note.  Tension.  As if--their fate was nigh.  When we look back at events, especially those that are iconic, important turning points like this, we tend to accept them as already having happened, a fait accompli.  Fate.  We know it's already happened, we know the ending of the story and it's hard to watch the narrative without that foreknowledge.  Was this their fate?  Was Ate looking over the 16th Street Baptist Church, was it meant to happen?  Or was it a series of choices made by the racist filth who planted the bomb, and the leadership of the city and the South (like Wallace and Bull Connor--God, what an uptight, angry, hateful creature he was) who, deliberately or not, encouraged this kind of action, in conjunction with the random choices made by the girls and their family, and the church, that all aligned to place these girls in that basement at 10:22 that morning?

And the choir kept singing of freedom...

Why were the accents so off in the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd? Mrs. Lovett is consistently Cockney but the Beggar Woman goes back and forth between Cockney and not (alms, alms...), although I think she's fairly consistently Cockney in her spoken lines--and Sweeney himself has an American accent! And Anthony's accent seems awfully posh for a common sailor. Confusing...

So we had our history final Tuesday.

The exam was the same format as the midterm, only with two essays to write instead of one. We had four questions from which to choose:

( The Exam Questions )

I was part of a study group and the guy who'd organized it randomly assigned us different essays--just for the purpose of studying, we certainly weren't bound to this. I was assigned questions 3 & 4. I banged out three--I actually came up with seven different factors, just to give the other students many reasons to consider--and posted it to our Google docs group. (We also had fifteen identifications--terms we were going to have to define/identify for the exam--that I uploaded.) I was rather proud of one of those reasons--I said that one factor was Christianity's sacred texts, which we hadn't actually discussed at all in class, but when I was composing the outline, it occurred to me that not every religion has sacred texts. Certainly paganism didn't. I did a little research on other Mediterranean basin religions in Antiquity and found out there were only 3-4 other religions that had sacred texts, and none of them were explicitly evangelical. I whipped off an email to my professor:

I've been working on that essay question number 3 and came up with an interesting idea that I don't think we covered in class. I think the fact that Christianity has sacred texts is another factor in its success--it's much easier to propagate and reinforce information (the Word) when you can write it down and pass it along. The other Mediterranean basin religions with sacred texts (as far as I can find out) were ones that were not explicitly evangelistic, like Judaism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. I think it's the intersection of Christianity's evangelism and their sacred texts that helped them explode eventually.

Am I completely off-track here? I realize that many of Christianity's early adherents might not have been able to read (hence reducing the effectiveness of the gospel as a tool for evangelization), and it wasn't until it had been firmly established as the state religion that they established the biblical canon and started translating the Bible into other religions. But surely before that time, during the early church, evangelists used the sacred writings as part of their outreach--did Paul preach the written gospel or did he improvise?

He responded:

Dear Clara,

your idea is absolutely not off-track. There are several studies arguing about the decisive role played by the written word, and hence interpretation, that is theology, in the rise of Christianity. Paul: remember that Paul wrote his letters before the evangelists wrote the Gospels. The Gospels are later and take into account Paul's letters. Moreover, Paul wasn't an apostle and never met Christ in person. Thus, Paul's letters are based on an oral tradition and the Gospel on orality and Paul's letters.

Eeeh! So I worked that into my argument.

Then I studied the last question. I wrote a quick outline for it but as I was composing the outline, I realized that question would be a little difficult to answer, by memory, with sources (remember, the difficult thing--the REALLY difficult thing--about this format is that we have to not only write an essay, we have to cite original sources--from memory). With this kind of format, linear is better for me, it's much easier to remember a linear argument than a convoluted, circular one. And no matter how you choose to answer no. 4, all those factors influenced each other. Example, one economic factor was the debasement of the currency--but this wasn't an isolated phenomenon, it influenced--strongly--how the legions acted...which then influenced the imperial succession. The 3rd century was basically a precursor to the Fall of Rome in the 5th century and like any event where things are falling apart, they all feed into each other and social entropy takes over and...

Basically the 3rd century was a hot mess, yo.

So I decided I would rather concentrate on no. 2 and emailed our study group leader, who was fine with that. This was a more complicated question than no. 3 (albeit still linear) so my outline was longer. It boiled down to:

( Long Boring Outline on How the Roman Empire Held Together )

I committed this to memory (as well as my other outline) and basically spent two days muttering under my breath every chance I got. Got to the final on Tuesday was pacing around, still muttering--my TA saw me and made a "you're going to be FINE" gesture and mouthed that. We had nearly three hours to do the exam but the other TA said it shouldn't take nearly that long. I clocked out at about 3:30 (2.5 hours) after 3 blue books and one aching hand. I did this exaggerated walk up to drop off my blue books and one of the TAs said "we were taking bets on how many you would fill up." I gave him a long-suffering look and gimped off to treat myself to some Pinkberry. GOD, that stuff is good!

Have to register for next semester now!

(originally dated April 27)

Yay! I finished it almost a week early--not because I'm such a goody-goody (as IF, in college I took great pride in writing papers the night before that got A's :) but because the professor suggested we do so and with a class this big, if I hand it in with everyone else, I won't know my grade until JULY. (Which might be appropriate, since Gaius WAS born in the month named after him. )

However, graceful speech was but one literary weapon Caesar deployed in his calculated campaign for domination—he was as fluent a writer as a speaker and his two Commentarii, with their combination of elegance and brevity, are still held up as models of military composition. In these Caesar eschews the more flowery language of the funeral or the Senate hall, and instead writes in a much more appropriately martial tone—businesslike, brief, unemotional. And yet for all that, the Commentarii served as effective tools of propaganda, intended to justify his expensive campaigns and subtly position himself as a leader to the people. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” (Book I) begins his Commentarii de Bello Gallico and with this engaging opening Caesar invites the audience—his peers in the Senate and the Roman populace—to follow him as he plunders Gaul and conquers the Celtic and Germanic barbarian tribes…all for the greater glory of Rome, of course. Throughout the Commentarii, and notwithstanding Caesar’s use of the third person narrative, he is selling himself in a very personal way to the reader, sprinkling his text with anecdotes of Caesar’s mercy, charm and most important, his military invincibility. Caesar was well-aware that the infantry was the heart and soul of Roman glory. Latin’s straightforward construction, with its structural terseness and lack of articles, lends itself very well to the purposeful efficiency of the Comentarii—-Caesar’s ending to the Commentarii de Bello Civili is a simple “Haec initia belli Alexandrini fuerunt.” (Book III) Caesar’s writing style in these two works highlights another verbal characteristic—-his instinctive grasp of the impact of conciseness. Caesar’s epigrams are famous in every language, the most well-known being, when asked about his Pontic campaign, his laconic response “Veni, vidi, vici.” (Suetonius, 37) Plutarch tells us of another example; upon being warned by one of his captains that the Senate would not extend Caesar’s term in Gaul, Caesar “clapped his hand on the hilt of his sword and said, ‘But this shall.’” (28) As any soldier knows, brevity is the soul not just of wit, but of might.

Sometimes I think my professor is a little taken aback at my interest in military matters--the wars themselves are not that interesting, but military technique and strategy is because they never change. What worked thousands of years ago can work now, because all armies are composed of infantry (soldiers who march), cavalry (mounted soldiers), artillery (launched missiles), etc. and they still study brilliant battle tactics today, like Hannibal's double-envelopment (pincer) attack at the Battle of Cannhae. In fact I believe I remember that Stormin' Norman used the pincer plan in Desert Storm but the Wikipedia article doesn't indicate that, so I could be wrong. And Joshua Chamberlain, a Union commander at Gettysburg, used another classical battle tactic at Little Round Top (I think it was from the Spartans)--he was a classic professor at Bowdoin so of course he knew it! I just love that something someone did thousands of years ago still works, still fits, still is applicable and relevant. History never changes because people never change.

Rest in peace, Allison, Sandy, Jeffrey and  Bill.

And for those of you Guardsmen who turned and fired on unarmed students, some of whom were merely walking to class--you have to live the rest of your life with what you've done.  I want you to see all the news stories about today, the 40th anniversary of Kent State, and remember the lives you ended, and those you changed forever.

In the aftermath of the shootings, campuses all over the country shut down and students were sent home.  Many of these students were told by their parents that "they deserved it" and "they should've killed them all."  One girl asked her mother "I had a class that day--what if I'd been shot walking to class?"  Her mother paused and said "you would've deserved it."*  Her own mother. 

This is what happens when political discourse is poisoned to this extent, when vitriol has seeped into people's identities--they are so invested in the fight, the aggression, they lose sight of fundamental issues like a student's right to protest, and to walk to their classes without being fired on and we're all human beings together.  I cannot get past that someone was so, so very invested in their hateful political stances, they just cannot bear to admit there might be a chink in their hateful, angry political philosophy,  that they actually say things like "you should've been killed too."  If your politics cause you to forget your own humanity and say dreadful things like that, you need to rethink your politics.

My grandmother and mother got in an argument about it--Mom said "Mother, not only were they allowed to be there, those who were walking to class were required to be exactly where they were!"  She finally got my grandmother to back down.

*From James Michener's Kent State: What Happened and Why.