I know:  Like me, you’ve been thinking for years just how useful it would be to have a handy wall chart showing how various super powers and characters are related, something akin to a periodic chart of the elements for comics, or the system Darwin et al used so well in cataloging and referencing the biological kingdom. You’re in luck. Here it is, and you can order a copy for your ongoing reference. I know I will.

An aside:  In browsing it online, I couldn’t help noting  the relative dearth of performance-arts-based super characters — just Mysterio, Chameleon, and Puppet Master — and all of those are villains, and they’re all lame. (It comes as no surprise that two of them are Spider-Man villains.) With so few performing-arts characters, there’s definitely a market opening for a guy like me. Mentally, I’m already outfitting the hidden  costume and gadget shop.

(Thanks to Doug Hackney for letting me know about this.)

On Thursday night, a friend and I caught Big Audio Dynamite at the Roxy, prior to their performance at Coachella. The Roxy is an ideal music venue: a small dark club stuffed with people drinking beer. Someone very helpfully recorded and uploaded this video of the band playing their #1 hit from back in the day, “Rush.” I will never get to see the Clash (Joe Strummer died 10 years ago), but I did get to see Mick Jones’ other band. And they were great.

I was in Las Vegas for a few days, staying at the brand-spanking-new Cosmopolitan hotel. Here’s a photo of me hard at work in the Queue Bar on the casino floor. Do not be fooled by the photo — I promise you, I am plotting our future with my business partner, and the the drinks and the cigar and the video gambling are brainstorming devices. I highly recommend this bar, by the way, because we hit it every day we were there, and one way or another, they found ways to not charge us for the $14 drinks. And Las Vegas is one of the few remaining civilized places where one can get a drink because, again, please note:  cigar. Most other places one is asked to huddle outdoors like a night watchman. We so thoroughly enjoyed ourselves the afternoon that this photo was taken that we blew off dinner for more drinks, almost missed our plane, and over-tipped the town car driver.

Two nights before we actually did get something to eat, but given that we’d already been to a catered business reception (and there were three more the following night), we didn’t quite sit down for a dinner meal. What we really wanted were oysters. So we dropped into Sage at the Atria, the other, conjoined, new casino in Las Vegas.  Here’s what I had:

A rabbit amouse bouche. (My partner asked, “What are the little crunchy parts?” I said: “The bones.”

Oysters with red peppers in tequila with garlic.

Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, from England.

Panna cotta with mixed berries, strawberry champagne soup and black pepper meringues.

Caramel chocolate soup.

I anticipate that the jaded among you might look at these photos and say, for instance, “That just looks like hot chocolate.”  But no, it is caramel chocolate soup. It’s soup. And those aren’t just berries in a bowl with a shortcake substitute. No. That is a panna cotta with mixed berries, strawberry champagne soup and black pepper meringues. If you note nothing else, note the soup. My dining companion thought some of these admixtures, such as the tequila with the oysters, exotic. But really, no more exotic than some of what I grew up eating:  turtles, rattlesnakes, and eels. (And some of it in the form of soup.)

While in Las Vegas, I was also invited to take a tour of Zappos. I’ve never ordered from Zappos, but you may have. Many people do, because they average $12,000,000 to $16,000,000 in sales every day. Here’s what the nerve center of Zappas looks like (and before you look, I pledge to you, these are actual photos of the interior of a multi-billion-dollar operation).

I know. It looks like what’s left over after a three-day neighborhood rummage sale. Zappos’ culture insists on relentless hilarity. Fun, fun, fun is the order of the day, but the relentless “fun” to me seemed like hive mentality:  “You WILL sing/honk/dance when you hear the bell/whistle/horn.” I was there for about an hour and it was like trying to think straight while you’re in a pinball machine. See the woman in the lower right? See how her attitude seems to scream out, “I’m trying to focus here”? I kept thinking, “If I worked here, I’d have to leave the building to get anything done.” Hey — it must be working great for them. But sometimes some of us need four walls and a door we can close.

Finally, I wanted to mention that I got to see another Cirque du Soleil show while I was there:  “O.” While I wished there were more story — or, even, any story, one that explained the various costumes and characters I was getting teased with, without my having to buy the program to learn what that story was — the feats of acrobatics, strength and diving were awe-inspiring. The tickets were $185 each, a price I might have been willing to entertain except we’re getting ready to make a very very large purchase. But then someone at one of the receptions offered us a ticket (he had two and needed only one), and then someone at the Bellagio will-call had an extra he was selling for only $140, so we saw the show for just $70 each and, as luck would have it, both of our seats were in the same row and close together — and those seats were fifth row center. Pretty amazing seats for a pretty spectacular show, one where three people dive simultaneously from a three-story height into what had just a minute before been a sealed floor and is now a pool of water you didn’t realize was deep enough to catch them. Well worth seeing.

Forget U2  and whatever they’re on about. Here’s an anthem that I personally know some of you would like to learn and sing, courtesy of my friends The Ultramods.

A true shocker in the world of comic books:  Steve Rogers is returning as Captain America. And — coincidentally — just before the “Captain America” movie comes out, too. Never saw that coming.

Here’s a brief commercial for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, coming to USC the last weekend of this month. (I will be in Sacramento and unable to attend.)

Watching this spot, it isn’t hard to understand why some people will never grant that LA is a literary town. Because here are the authors promoted in the video: Ted Danson, Rainn Wilson and Patti Smith. I guess Snookie is doing a reading at Harvard that day.

You know that saying “There’s nothing playing that I want to see?” That’s pretty much how I feel about the new releases out right now, and judging by reports of box-office woes, I’m not the only one. Luckily, there’s always something screening around town that isn’t part of the mainstream.

Tomorrow night over at UCLA, the Bill Frisell Trio will be performing live original accompaniment to a trio of Buster Keaton films, the full-length “Go West” and the shorts “The High Sign” and “One Week.” (I’ve seen all three of these, naturally, but they warrant repeated and repeated — and repeated — viewings. And new live music will provide a different context.) The evening also includes the trio accompanying a screening of something or other by comic-book artist Jim Woodring (looking forward to that) and something that almost sounds like an April Fool’s Day Joke:  “a documentary made entirely of visuals of decomposing film.” And there’s some sort of reception sponsored by Los Angeles Magazine in conjunction with a vodka company and a tequila company, so I’m sure my friend and I will be checking that out too.

Over at Cinefamily — which many of us still think of as the Silent Movie Theatre — this weekend is devoted to the documentaries of Werner Herzog, with April 8th as a bonus night of sorts.  I was going to say that all of Herzog’s films are interesting, but I know that in almost all usages, especially in Los Angeles, “interesting” is code for “not interesting.” As in:  “What did you think of my screenplay?” “It was really interesting!”  Or:  “Hey, thanks for coming tonight to the show! What’d you think?”  “It was really interesting! You were great!” With “great” in this case meaning “not great.” So rather than call Herzog’s documentaries “interesting,” which I assure you they all are, and in the non-ironic meaning of the word, I’ll instead say “thrilling.” As a documentarian, Herzog isn’t interested in facts; if I were looking for someone to blow the lid on, say, corporate malfeasance, a Herzog film isn’t the place I would go. What Herzog is interested in is Herzog; we expect documentaries to carry a point of view, but most Herzog documentaries carry Herzog as well — as narrator and, often, as a guide who steps into the frame as well. Which results in films that give us a taste of what it must be like to be Werner Herzog:  someone who sees nature as a threat and man’s difficulties as irreconcilable, someone with an almost comically doomy perspective who leaches sharply observed humor from the bleakest situations. Only Herzog, when film the mysteries of the north pole or the deepest underwater, would find a man whose fingers are all the same length, or a penguin that resolutely marches off into the cold to die alone. Only Herzog has the wit to film firefighters putting out the raging oil-well conflagration started by Saddam Hussein from the perspective of an extraterrestrial visitor trying to understand the situation, thereby revealing the inexplicable madness at our core. As with the Keaton event above, I’ve seen most of these Herzog documentaries — and I believe I have most of them in the box set I own — and unfortunately I’m completely booked this weekend. But I weren’t, this is a festival I would be attending. From what I hear, it beats seeing “Sucker Punch.”

Last night I attended the annual Burbank Chamber of Commerce gala, this one celebrating the City of Burbank’s centennial. One of the interesting things about living in Burbank is finding yourself in the same room as people you grew up watching on television. Case in point:  Two of the celebrity guests were Jo Anne Worley and Debbie Reynolds.

Now, if you’re involved in theatre in Los Angeles, you’ll run into Jo Anne Worley at least a few times, and you’ll know when she’s there. As her Wikipedia page notes, even as a girl she worried she was too loud. I saw a musical “Lord of the Rings” spoof a year or two ago here in town and part-way through it, as everyone laughed along, I realized, “Jo Anne Worley must be here.” And she was. I grew up watching her on “Laugh In.” I was too young to enjoy the show — back in the days of three channels plus whatever UHF qualified as, I remember wishing it would end so something else would come on — and now the show is too dated to enjoy in reruns or specials, so this is one zeitgeist I missed. But the “Laugh In” performers were clearly wonderful, including Jo Anne Worley, who last night unabashedly sang comic two songs (one of which my wife kept singing later — which had me wondering again when it would end and something else would come on).

I grew up knowing who Debbie Reynolds  was, but I can’t tell you why, except that my mother always spoke fondly of her. Pressed by my wife to name one of Ms. Reynolds credits, just one, I came up dry. Ms. Reynolds is clearly very smart, and aware of this situation, because she introduced herself as “Debbie Reynolds — Princess Leia’s mom.” Showing off her fine figure at age 78, she also had the line of the night:  “I would have shown you my tits, but my legs are better.” (I’ll take it on faith.) Debbie Reynolds was a 16-year-old student at John Burroughs High School, my son’s alma mater, when she was crowned Miss Burbank. Burbank has been good to many notable people. I think the most famous person to come from my birthplace, Mullica Township, was the Jersey Devil, and I hear that Port Republic is trying to claim him. She was a very good sport about her age, apologizing if her voice was raw (it wasn’t) because she’d been giving so many interviews on the occasion of Elizabeth Taylor’s death. (“They’re calling me,” she said, “because I’m the only one left.” She also made a couple of good jokes about Liz Taylor stealing her husband — the gist being that she could have him.)

Some years ago, my wife and I went to see Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca because I wanted to “while we still can.” (And, indeed, that turned out to be Imogene Coca’s last performance — and she was wonderful.) Valorie had no idea who they were. A friend and I got to see Charles Nelson Reilly’s amazing one-man show, which ran four hours (I’m not exaggerating) and which I wish was still going on, and that turned out to be not long before he died. I didn’t set out to see Debbie Reynolds in particular, but she and Jo Anne Worley both were fun and bawdy, and made for a great evening, and now I’ve got another memory of seeing great performers live and in the flesh.

As I’ve written here before, digital technology and the internet allow me to do pretty much everything I wanted to do when I was kid but couldn’t because I didn’t have access to people or tools, and couldn’t afford it. But now I’ve got potentially full access — everyone does — through the internet. It’s allowed me to make some very interesting connections — to the founder of Cosmic Encounter (a game I bought at a science fiction convention when I was 14, and which the next generation of Wochners now plays as well), who once commented on this blog; to writers like Christopher Priest and Mike Daisey (who’ve also commented here); and to people whose work I admire and follow, like David Thomas of Pere Ubu. My latest interesting connection:  I just got an email from a PhD candidate in Egypt who is doing her dissertation on American drama;  she found my website and blog and wanted to know my thoughts about playwriting. I’ve made theatre friends in England and Iceland and Turkey and even New Jersey through the internet. It’s a thrill to add Egypt.