Fecal cube or pizza-delivery dessert add-on?

With the help of readers, Slate’s Seth Stevenson decodes some commercials so popular I’ve even seen them. (They must run Friday nights on Sci-Fi.) The ad agencies think they’re telling us one story, but under a different microscope dessert looks like free walking hashish.

When you speak in metaphor, there is no universal translator.

While I’m on the subject of the Edwards announcement, I couldn’t help noticing two more things:

1. The campaign put up then took down then put up its site, stepping on its own announcement. If you can’t even announce right, can you really run the country?
2. The story says, “He did yard work at the home of New Orleans resident Orelia Tyler, 54, whose home was completely gutted by Hurricane Katrina and is close to being rebuilt.” What would be the difference between “completely gutted” and just plain old “gutted?” Because the latter means “guts removed,” it’s an inherently complete operation. You can’t incompletely gut something.

It’s somehow fitting that Gerald Ford died just a couple of days before John Edwards’ announcement that he’s running (again) for president. Ford was the accidental president — someone who was never elected president or vice-president, and whose lasting accomplishment was proving with a pardon that there are indeed two levels of the law: one for the president, and one for the rest of us. I used to wonder if the Republicans so outraged by Clinton’s lying under oath (as I was) ever stopped to realize that this was where the two-tiered view of presidential justice began.

Where Ford was accidental, Edwards made a fortune in litigating large settlements out of accidents. In the abstract, I’m glad that we have a system that allows for injury claims, and I view this as part of our system of checks and balances. In practice, neither this nor one term as a senator qualifies one to be president. (Especially when just two years ago one was a vice-presidential nominee and provided zero assistance to the ticket — including in one’s home state.)

While I’m on the subject, I am as enchanted as everyone else with Barack Obama’s speeches. But my view of leadership involves making hard choices in the face of adversity and often against the headwind of public opinion. If fellowship and togetherness are your panacea, what remedy do you have when not everyone in the world wants to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

I recently saw a terrific one-person show that I almost missed because I’ve grown to hate the form so much.

For writer and performer Debra Ehrhardt it was almost as difficult getting out of Jamaica 25 years ago as it was getting me to see her show, “Jamaica Farewell.” I don’t begrudge anyone their opportunity to spin self-indulgent tales of their comically tortured childhood; I just don’t want to see them anymore. (Even if — especially if — your name is John Leguizamo. Note to John: less mawkishness next time. And please don’t ever again mime a baby suckling at a breast. We get it, even if you don’t — you’re a demanding infant. Jeez. And note to Mr. “Frank Sinatra Fucked Up My Life”: No, that was you.)

So, having been annoyed so many times, my preference to seeing most one-person shows that don’t feature Dame Edna or Elaine Stritch would be to stay home. Or even to shoot heroin into my eyeball. Anything. Ehrhardt, though, was charming and persistent and I decided to accept her invitation to see the show one night in December just before leaving town. I’m glad — no, lucky — that I did.

Every once in a while you see a show that rewards your devotion to the theatre. Some months ago I asked a group of fellow playwrights how often they were glad they’d seen a show. How often had it been worth the effort involved? Responses ranged from 25% (the always upbeat and bright-eyed comedy writer Stephanie) to 10% (me) down to 5% (the would-be curmudgeon in the group who is a closet romantic — and isn’t that what every cynic is: a romantic who got burned?). The theatre is notoriously difficult to pull off. The writing has to be good, as well as the performing, it has to be pulled together and presented well by a director and designers, the theatre had better not be too hot or too cold, the right audience has to have found it because they are very definitely part of the experience, there had better not have been a bad parking or driving or box-office experience, and on and on and on.

So why do so many of us go so often? Just to get angry at ourselves for our blockheaded refusal to give up? No — because when it is superb, nothing surpasses the visceral thrill of performers and material connecting with an audience in a defined space. I love great performers of all stripes and honestly feel blessed to have worked with so many wonderful actors, and I love great provocative writing. Put the two together and you’ve got the theatre — when it works.

I haven’t seen a lot of that in one-person shows, and that’s probably because the form has become confessional, with the goal of arousing our sympathies. Mostly, I have no sympathies. Life is hard, and if you’re doing a one-person show I can unequivocally guarantee you that by comparison your life is not at all hard — in fact, it’s ridiculously easy. How easy? Unlike these people in Lagos, you aren’t grateful for the opportunity to live deep in a pit at the bottom of the world’s largest dump. Despite what you think, juggling your waiting job with acting lessons is not a great tribulation.

Everything about Ehrhardt’s show is in delightful contrast to the new proclivities of the one-person show. In relating her tale of trying desperately as a young woman to get to the U.S. and start a new life, she never asks us to feel sorry for her. Rather than drowning us in bathos, she shows us pluck and determination. Nothing will stand in her way. She’s also generous in her characterizations: Although she stars in her own life’s story, all the peripheral characters are given fair treatment and deft handling. She sketches in her mother, her father, her boss, and sundry townspeople with wit and charm. Her portrayal of her father, a drunk who has squandered every family opportunity, is remarkable in its final kindness. In an age of visualized revenge, we don’t see that sort of kindness and understanding often. (Except at the end of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” — in which our protagonist shows great empathy for her molesting uncle, in a closing that elevates the play into art.)

Somehow or other, she also manages to meld comedy with high-wire tension in this 90-minute show — as when she is threading her way through the strange terrain of darkened backwaters with a million dollars in cash in a briefcase and men with machetes or would-be rapists stalking her. The writing, and her performance of it, is riveting. I promise you that I’ll never forget some of it.

There are two upcoming performances of “Jamaica, Farewell” at the Whitefire Theatre in L.A., on January 7th and February 4th. I strongly, strongly recommend the show. It hasn’t had an extended run yet, but it deserves one, and it deserves to tour.

…about 30 years too late. (Putting them in the John Kerry School of Snappy Response class of 2006.)

Here’s the story from Publishers Weekly:

Archie & Gang Get A Makeover

The residents of Riverdale will be get a makeover in an upcoming issue of the Betty and Veronica Digest. Artist Steven Butler, who has worked on Marvel’s Spiderman, will give Archie Andrews and the rest of the Riverdale crew a new, more naturalistic contemporary comic book art style in a new story coming in May 2007. The story, “Bad Boy Trouble,” will be written by Melanie Morgan and debut in Betty and Veronica Double Digest # 151. The story will experiment with a longer format. It will be a four-part story and each part will be 25 pages. If the story meets fan approval, look for the mini-series to be collected into a single volume graphic novel. Archie Comics public relations manager Rick Offenberger said the makeover is strictly an experiment to try an attract older readers and the art style will not be used on any other Archie series. He noted that the manga redesign of Archie Comics’s Sabrina series has been “extremely sucessful.” Offenberger said, “This is a real change for us. If it works we’ll collect it into a book. If the fans hate it; we’ll never do it again.”

By the way, here’s the new Reggie:

And this is the new Jughead:

Two-and-a-half years too late, John Kerry has a comeback: Maybe flip-flopping isn’t a bad thing.

(Regarding Mr. Kerry himself, I don’t foresee a comeback. More of a stayaway.)

In recognition of the holiday and as an admirer of Paul Auster’s work, I thought I’d share his modern Christmas fable (filmed as part of the terrific film “Smoke”), Augie Wren’s Christmas Story. And luckily, here’s a site where someone spent the time to type it for you: Augie Wren’s Christmas Story.

In the film, Augie (Harvel Keitel) relates the story to a fictionalized Auster played by William Hurt. The scene plays out much as this short story does, with the added touch that, as Augie tells the story, the camera pulls in closer and closer toward his mouth and finally his slight smile, raising doubt about the story’s veracity. Part of the point: Whether it’s truth or fiction doesn’t matter — in fact, it’s all fiction, and, as usual with Auster, it’s metafiction (fiction about fiction). As a fable, it’s an evocative and unforgettable story about the sometimes incredible generosity of the human spirit. And that’s what every Christmas story should be about.

Christopher Durang be damned, this is a great Christmas story. (And so, in a way, is his dada Christmas, in which he and his mother reinvent the holiday with abandon.) This is from Mark Evanier’s blog, in which he relates (almost) meeting Mel Torme and instigating a very personal rendition of “The Christmas Song.” Here’s the link.

Christopher Durang on the true meaning(s) of the holidays. For him.

Merry Christmas. May the fat man be good to you too.