Rumors

Congrats to Los Altos High School Drama Department for putting on the Neil Simon show Rumors.  It is so nice to see some lesser-known Simon.  I say yuck to constant productions of The Odd Couple (in either gender, and yes, I remember directing it once upon a time) and Barefoot in the Park.  Give me Rumors any day.  My dear friend Julie's younger brother Scott was the lead.  He's a talented young man.  We all like him... he even comes to Christmas and other holidays.  Scott Evangelista... some day, he shall be famous.

After the show, my friend Jaime and her boyfriend John and I went to a bar for happy hour (okay, it was Applebees in Walnut, but for some reason I don't like to admit to this.)  It was very nice.  So nice to go somewhere with 2 other people instead of 6,000, like so often can happen.  You can actaully have a conversation when the numbers are down like that.  I love my friend Jaime like no one else.  She is a constant support and understanding ear. 

We had a waitress name Lisa.  She was cool.

I wanted to share something from Tony Kushner's adaptation of Corneille's The Illusion.  This may be one of the most beautiful things ever said in a play...

Pridamant: The theatre—all that effort devoted to building a make-believe world out of angel hair and fancy talk, no more substantial than a soap bubble.  You are moved at the sight of a foul murder—then the murderer and the murdered are holding hanfs, taking bows together.  A black-magic reconciliation.  It's sinister.

Alcandre: Oh not so sinister.  What in this world is not evanescent?  What in this world is real and not seeming?  Love, which seems the realest thing, is really nothing at all; a simple gray rock is a thousand times more tangible than love is; and the earth is such a rock, and love only a breeze that dreams over its surface, weightless and traceless.  And yet love's more mineral, more dense, more veined with gold and corrupted with lead, more bitter and more weighty than the earth's profoundest matter.  Love is a sea of desire stretched between shores—only the shores are real, but how much more compelling is the sea.  Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.  A dream which makes the world seem... an illusion.  The art of illusion is the art of love, and the art of love is the blood-red heart of the world.  At times I think there's nothing else.