I didn’t know anything about dance, until 10 years ago. And then I learned just enough to love it.

I have Michelle Mierz and Kate Hutter to thank for that.

Michelle and Kate were my students in a business-of-theatre class I taught at USC for a few years. Michelle was a business major and dancer, and Kate was a dance major and choreographer. In 2003, the third year I taught that class, they decided to team up for the assignment to create a theatre organization or production on paper. They came up with the L.A. Contemporary Dance Company — and then decided to launch it in real life. Just doing it for the grade wasn’t good enough. (For the best students, it never is.)

On Saturday night, I attended the 10th anniversary of their launch, in an event at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. (You can see a sample of their earlier work above.)

It was an incredibly rewarding and inspiring evening, with hundreds of wildly supportive people in attendance. Kate was kind enough to recognize me from the stage (as though I had anything to do with their success, apart from, well, making the classroom assignment).

Kate’s choreography was smart, evocative, mysterious, and very physical, as always. She’s obviously good at moving people around the stage in exciting ways. She’s also good at pairing movement and music. In 2004 (I think), I was directing a play called “Big Bear and the Other,” at the same Los Angeles Theatre Center where Kate and Michelle had their event the other night. The play, a dark comedy of sorts, concerned a group of previously forlorn men who had now formed a cult of bear worship; at one point, I wanted a dream fantasia where they would be swept up into cosmic connectedness. Kate whipped that up for me, teaching a group of middle-aged men how to roll and dance and look, well, beautiful and graceful while doing so, all in one night. Her work in that evening far surpassed anything I brought to that production. I remember being incredibly proud of her, grateful for my access to her, and somewhat envious of that much talent.

(An aside: my friend Tom Boyle, whom I wrote about here and here was in the cast of that production. He was effortlessly funny and filled with good ideas. My foremost talent as a director is just to get other talented people together.)

Before and after the performance on Saturday night, I got to speak with Michelle, who now lives in Seattle and works for Amazon. Michelle was the first hire at my nascent consulting company, CounterIntuity, in 2004. (The company was later re-launched as the marketing company Counterintuity, LLC, with no capital “I” in the middle.) Again, what you see here is my talent for identifying talented people: Michelle is whip-smart, something I spotted in about the first four seconds when she was my student. I was damn lucky she came to work for me; in some ways her early imprint on the company is still there. (As are some of the clients.) She was also directly responsible for landing one of our first clients, Dance Camera West, and thereby leading us into what I’ve called “The Year of Dance,” when we did no fewer than six dance projects with six different dance-related businesses: a dance company; a touring program (which we toured with a little); a dance agency; an online dance resource; a dance film festival; and a sixth one I can’t recall offhand.

All of that dance activity in one year left me with a deep appreciation for an art form I’d known nothing about. I’ve been a writer my entire life, and a bit of a musician here and there, and added stage directing (and then video directing) later on. But dance? The deep appreciation I’ve gained is due to Michelle. I thank her for that.

In the spirit of all things circling around, let me also say that the night before, Friday night, was an evening of shorts presented by that dance film festival, Dance Camera West. Dance Camera West is a “dance media festival” that screens the best in dance films from around the globe; these are astonishingly creative films. Here’s the trailer for this year’s festival.

Dance Camera West Film Festival 2015 (Trailer) from Parker Laramie on Vimeo.

This was the eleventh year in a row that my company has been associated with the festival, a connection I’m proud of. Three of us from Counterintuity, plus guests, attended the evening in a beautiful old movie palace in downtown Los Angeles — and today, one of my staff came in to my office to share just how much joy and passion those films had reawakened in him. Precisely right. For me, a person who works mostly with words, to enter a world created by the movement of the body, is to thrill to the excitement of an exotic environment.

I was Michelle and Kate’s professor. But whatever I taught them, I know I learned more.

On the one hand, I admire Brian Dettmer’s art. It’s beautiful and striking.

But on the other hand, it involves maiming books.

When I was made aware of Dettmer’s work by my friend Doug Hackney, I responded, “Destroying books? Who is this guy, ISIS?” Because that’s the way I feel about it. (And them.) Doug responded that it was a tough call for him as well.

But — because art lovers are almost assuredly book lovers too, and what book lover can delight in seeing a book get cut up? — perhaps that visceral reaction is precisely the point.

Here. Judge for yourself.

On Friday, a friend and I went to see the Arthur Miller play “The Price” downtown at the Taper. I am not by nature an Arthur Miller fan; I’d rather be burned at the stake than ever again sit through the screaming girls in “The Crucible,” and to me the dramatic problems presented in “Death of a Salesman” would be easily solved if only Willy Loman would get a job he’s better suited for. But “The Price” turned out to be a completely engaging, unexpected and well-written evaluation of the price paid for certain life decisions by two brothers fighting (or not) over what’s left behind after their father’s death. Moreover, it’s anchored by four very fine performances, especially that of 87-year-old Alan Mandell, stealing the show as a comically sly appraiser wheedling a storehouse of old furniture out of Sam Robards’ grasp in exchange for peanuts. Mandell delivers every laugh possible while bringing to life a performance that’s completely plausible and true. That he can do this at age 87 is argument itself against term limits for stage actors.

Afterward, my friend and I went for a drink and shared another sort of price: While it’s often reported how expensive it is to attend the theatre, there’s the even greater very real financial cost paid by those devoted to making theatre. The backdrop for this discussion was our own experiences (I have no doubt I’m out hundreds of thousands of dollars) as well as the ugly rumblings from Actors Equity that it may end the 99-seat plan that allows union actors to perform on LA’s small stages. Moving actors in sub-100-seat houses from token payments of $10 or $20 a performance into minimum wage won’t help them make a living; instead, it’ll shutter our small theatres and sideline thousands of actors. (But then, if you’re the union and you subsist on dues and shares of revenues, and your revenue resulting from these theatres is almost nil, why should you care?) The actors have been subsidizing small theatre, for sure — but so have been the playwrights and the directors and the board ops and everyone else involved. And God knows the producers — and I’ve been one — have spent both opportunity costs and actual hard cash on keeping small theatre alive, because it means so much to us.

Scheduling and life circumstances had cost my friend and me more than a year and a half since we’d last seen each other. I just confirmed this in my calendar. The last time we’d gone out together had been in August of 2013 to see a Woody Allen movie. Judging by the terrific time we had together on Friday night, that’s far too long. I also note that in 2011 we saw a movie called “The Debt.” I couldn’t remember anything about this movie, so I just looked it up. Now it comes back to me. It’s a thriller about old friends who shared an adventure in the past, but who question the choices they made, much as the characters in “The Price” do. And much as we all do.

I wish the Beckett estate would lift the embargo so the first (and only) season of this could be released on DVD or streaming.

Well, I guess ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here’s something I won’t be watching: Every Marvel movie stitched together into chronological order.

Which would still be shorter than something else I won’t be watching: every Peter Jackson Rings/Hobbit movie put together.

John Cleese, who’s on a book tour, recently got together with former comedy partner Eric Idle for a fun hour-long chat here in town. Here’s that chat. I know — you think you don’t want to watch it. I urge you to do so. But fair warning: If, like me, you think you’ll watch five or 10 minutes and then turn it off, you’ll be wrong. You’ll wind up watching the whole blessed thing. Because whether they’re reminiscing about the beginnings of Monty Python or dishing on their former castmates or tossing funny barbs back and forth or re-enacting hilarious sketches from the now-lost show Cleese did before Python, they’re hilarious.

This really puts everything into a new light.

Sad to learn of Sid Caesar’s passing. Well, somewhat sad. Sad in that an era is passing — if it hasn’t already left us entirely; that would be the era of gifted comedians and actors who came up through stage comedy such as vaudeville. That generation had incredible chops. Not said in that Mr. Caesar was in very poor shape in recent years, and this is probably a blessing.

I’m glad that, about 15 years ago (maybe more, at this point), I got to see him with Imogene Coca doing a “Your Show of Shows” revival live on-stage here in L.A. My wife and I were the youngest attendees by centuries. (She said to me, “We’re seeing WHO?”) Actually, as I recall, Mr. Caesar was 68 at the time, so, given that he died at 91, that was… an incredible 23 years ago. Could it be? Here’s how I know that: During one sketch, he took off his shirt and my wife exclaimed loudly, “WOW — he’s built!” All of the bodybuilding paid off, at least then. (And partly offset the drinking, I guess.) He and Ms. Coca were fantastic — endlessly funny and entertaining — and, well, I’m glad I got to see it. That turned out to be Imogene Coca’s last live performance, and now we won’t be seeing Sid Caesar anymore either.

I’m glad to say I saw Rodney Dangerfield. And I’ve seen Bob Newhart. If you have a chance to see classic comedian while they’re still here, you should do it. They’re not going to be here much longer, and the new people are funny — but they aren’t classics.

On Sunday, I awoke to find two blog-related emails. The first I addressed in the preceding post.  The second was from the star of The Whale, thanking me for my “kind words” here, which had just been forwarded to him. I told him they weren’t kind words, they were earned praise — that his portrayal was astonishing, reminding me all too well of a dear longtime friend who struggled all too mightily with morbid obesity.

After handling those emails and a lengthy breakfast consumed with reading two thick Sunday newspapers, I took my two younger children to play miniature golf.  There is something wrong with the miniature golf course these days, because one of these children finished with a better score than mine. I’m not sure how that happened, but I’m looking into it.

After that, we went to the Bat Cade in Burbank, which is a batting cage with arcade with pizza parlor — a sort of mashup of activities geared toward my internal age (about 15). Just add comic books and it’d be paradise. There’s something wrong with the air hockey table at the Bat Cade because my son beat me and my daughter also beat me. This is not how this thing is supposed to work. Luckily, the classic arcade game Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh was functioning perfectly well and I was unbeaten. We ate pizza to celebrate my victory, then took turns in the batting cage, where I successfully defended my head from 30 baseballs flung mercilessly at top speed.

Even though satiated with top-quality local pizza, we stopped at the nearby Ralphs (that’s the name of a supermarket — make your own joke) to stock up on comestibles. I spotted bottles of $15 chardonnay mysteriously priced down to $3.99 and snagged two; I will let you know if they were bottled in a Chinese lead factory. (If I never post here again, you’ll know what happened.) On a whim, I also picked up an 8-piece container of fried chicken because at this point I had no vision of cooking anything for dinner. Later, I discovered that the 8-piece container of chicken held only six pieces — there were no drumsticks. Which left me wondering:  had it not been properly filled by the people behind the deli counter, or had someone surreptitiously slid two fingers inside and stolen the drumsticks out of the case before I bought it? Either way, I figured I’d just eat it.

Later, I watched Downton Abbey, enjoying the latest episodic effort to ennoble a landed lord with grace and human dignity, when I know he’s a pirate sucking off the desperate largesse of the lower class; the show is simultaneously entertaining and deeply infuriating (the way I imagine the new video biography of Mitt Romney will prove to be). I also watched the Grammy Awards. On DVR. So that the entire nearly four-hour enterprise, stripped down to actual content, consumed only about 22 minutes. Takeaways:  How does one sing when swinging upside down from a rope? (Answer:  one doesn’t — it’s lip synching.) Also, now that I’ve gleaned that Ringo’s touring show largely involves him singing, I’m glad I’ve saved my money. As a singer, he’s a passable drummer.

I also wondered how much regret the guys from Daft Punk were living in, wearing those hot robot heads for more than four hours straight, and leaving the man in the Dudley Do-Right hat to inarticulately accept every award for them.

Finally, I went to bed and dove further into a late Philip Roth novel, Indignation,  that I had somehow missed when it came out. (I’ve been reading all of Roth’s new releases for years; same deal with Paul Auster and Julian Barnes — they publish it; I read it.)

Then, finally, sleep.

A friend alerted me to a noteworthy publishing offering next month: The Best of Hieronymus Bosch.

I want this. To add to my collection of books about Bosch’s zany art work.

Hats off to the copywriter of this launch. Samples of his or her work:

FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MEDIEVAL PAINTER HIERONYMUS BOSCH HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN A LAVISH BOOK. SEE A DEVIL ON ICE SKATES, MYSTICAL VISIONS OF RELIGIOUS ECSTASY, AND NAKED LADIES WITH BLUEBERRIES FOR HEADS.

More than 400 years before LSD was even invented, the Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch created some of history’s trippiest paintings. His scenes feature such grotesqueries as devils on ice skates; hare-headed demons; knights being eaten alive by dog-lizard hybrids; and a pig in a nun’s habit kissing a naked man.

And, probably my favorite:

He makes Salvador Dali look like Norman Rockwell.

It really says something about our culture when a guy who’s been dead for 500 years is repackaged as a “Best of.” It makes me think that the target audience for this is not that far removed from the target audience for, say, The Best of Paul McCartney & Wings.

While I have great admiration for that copywriting, I can’t help noting that this edition can’t be both comprehensive — as it claims to be — and a “best of.” These things are antithetical. “Best” refers to the upper echelon of achievement; “comprehensive” tells us that everything is included.

Let me tell you, it’s pure hell hearing every word for its actual meaning. But, as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.