The Hollywood Fringe Festival is producing correspondents’ videos of various shows around town. The second interview in this particular roundup — about one minute in — features me talking about Moving Arts’ show, “ASAP Fables,” along with some of our Asaps (or guides; a further play on “Aesop”). (It also features two of my children in the background: the big one with the black armless t-shirt, and the small one with the close-cropped hair.) Unfortunately, in a turn of events I didn’t notice during the interview, the correspondent seems to think that the name of our theatre company is “ASAP Fables.” It’s not — it’s Moving Arts. I was sure I mentioned Moving Arts in here somewhere, but it’s not in the edit. Drat. I should also note that although I’m not the best judge of what my voice sounds like, it’s been pretty blown out the past week, what with a cough I haven’t been able to shake for three weeks. Add onto that a couple of hours of running around shrieking and cawing and this is what you get.)
By the way, we do fun stuff like this show all the time. Just in the past year, we did “The Car Plays,” a really fine one-act festival, an interactive family-friendly show called “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum (another in a series of plays I’ve written but never seen), the world premiere of “Song of Extinction” at [Inside] the Ford Amphitheatre, the world premiere of “Blood & Thunder” at our original space, and now this show. We’re already talking about doing a haunted house this October. Here’s the link to sign up and keep abreast of these and other fun developments.
I just got in from “ASAP Fables,” Moving Arts’ entry in the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival. In our show, randomly assembled teams of Moving Artists created 8-minute fables built around a witches’ brew of strange ingredients
a randomly chosen animal
a randomly assigned location within Hollywood United Methodist Church
a moral to the story
and an impossible assignment.
In our case, we were given:
a crow
the chapel
the moral “Nobody cares that you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy”
and the assignment to “Fill the sky with your beauty.”
And, you had to work in the quote “Be who you are, and say what you feel” (from Doctor Seuss). And you couldn’t spend more than ten bucks on your show. How much did we spend on our particular impromptu play, “Reach for the Sky?” Ten bucks. Glad the budget wasn’t nine, because we would’ve had a problem.
More about how we accomplished this, and about the overall event, tomorrow. This morning I taught my workshop, ran an errand, then got over to the church to figure out some last-minute logistics on our show with my three scene partners, then performed the show seven times. As a miserable crow, this meant lots of running around and cawing on my part. After that, it’s now time for drinks. So tomorrow I’ll let you know what we did.
But here’s my favorite audience line of the evening. One of the people who came to see the show was an older gentleman who’s been following us around almost since our inception 18 years ago. I saw him in the first group that came in and later in the courtyard he was waiting to talk to me.
“Hi, Walter,” I said.
He looked at me and said, “Lee. I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Yeah. It’s a lot of makeup.”
“No,” he replied. “I think since last time I saw you you’ve put on weight.”
Stan Lee on last night’s Craig Ferguson show. It’s nine minutes long, but well worth watching all of it. Stan is loose and funny and vainglorious and quick-witted — all of which must have been central to his success, and which almost must have driven his collaborators (I’m sorry, co-creators), to drink.
Last week I had my new suit fitted by a tailor. I don’t think she did a good job: the legs now ride too high and the waist is too expansive. But listening to this call in which President Johnson specifies precisely how he’d like his new pants to fit made me think that perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough. LBJ was someone who always knew exactly what he wanted, including extra room from the bunghole to the brass tacks.
Now if they could help us understand how an unemployed unknown who lives with his father came up with $10,440 — let alone winning the Democratic Senate primary — they’d really be providing a public service.
Here’s what it’s like to be one of the locals caught in the oil situation, where people are wrestling with their options: help in the clean up (but risk your health and sign away your rights), or sit it out and starve because the fishing industry is wiped out. Horrible options.
I also enjoy the PR show the lead local claims BP is putting on for the President every time he flies over, and the company’s inability to answer basic scientific questions about the aftereffects of the spill.
The end of this video, which is co-produced by Edward James Olmos, tells us to “visit the Gulf” rather than forget the people there, because they “need our help.” True. But I’m unclear how visiting them is going to help. And I can’t resist noting the awful irony that visiting them would mean consuming more petroleum — and it’s our consumption, ultimately, that led to the spill.
My theatre company, Moving Arts, is playing along with the Hollywood Fringe Festival this week. Our offering is called “A.S.A.P. Fables,” in which randomly formed teams of performers and writers concoct new fables drawn from audience-suggested fables.
Here’s the Moving Arts website for more information. If you’d like to come out and play, we’d love to have you. (The team meeting is this Thursday night.) If you’d just like to come watch, please come do that on Saturday at 5. We’ll be performing five of these fun little plays at different locations all around the historic Hollywood United Methodist Church.
In the meantime, here’s a fable you think you know, but don’t.
Meg Whitman just won the Republican primary for governor of California. She spent more than $71 million of her own money on the campaign, and more than $88 million overall. Or about $194 for every vote she got.
Had she taken a stack of twenties down to skid row, I’m sure she could have done even better.
Want to guess what the statewide turnout was today in California’s primary election? 9.8%. In Los Angeles County, it was 5.5%. If someone you think “doesn’t represent the mainstream” gets in, you’ll know why.
