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Herodias: I have slipped in blood. It is an ill omen. (Yeah, to the person whose blood it was...) |
Friday, October 20, 2000 Essays, Skin, Salome I've gotta rush off to Far Rockaway really shortly, and I need to pack up my stuff first, so this'll have to be fast. And owing to the final installment of the fall holiday season -- Shemini Atzeres / Simchas Torah -- this is going to be it until Sunday night, at least. Briefly, then, the latest draft of my Fulbright essays are done, and I'll probably have to make a few more changes by the final deadline next week. In the meantime, I need to find out what my congressional district is, that being the one item on the form I don't know the answer to.
Wednesday afternoon, thanks to a combination of said Fulbright work, and my forgetting that class starts at 2 PM on Monday, but 1 PM on Wednesday, I arrived at my comedy class one hour into the hour-and-fifty-minute period. Which would have been bad enough, but it was also the day of our first exam. 'Twas an essay exam; choose three out of four. Working in my favor was the fact that I thrive in crisis situations, and am very good at writing things at the last minute, so I think I did okay, especially considering the circumstances. I wrote the three essays simultaneously, in rotation, first planning them all out, then writing the first paragraph or two of each, then the next paragraph of each, and so on, so that if I ran out of time, the essential stuff would be there for all of them; only the development would be a bit short.
In other news, I now know how to paint white-boy skin tone, having wandered around the classroom, found somebody else who'd managed it, and asked how he'd done it. Mostly white paint, it turns out, with a smidge of yellow ochre. Season to taste with teensy dabs of yellow or red. This was a good thing to know, 'cause I arrived to class quite late again (I was out mailing my GRE forms at the last minute, spending $11.25 to send 'em by Express Mail, 'cause they had to arrive in New Jersey today), found that everybody was painting a classmate this week, and I took the first easel I found and painted the person closest to it, who turned out to have very fair skin. The painting didn't turn out too badly, all things considered. Not much detail, but I kinda ran out of time.
Otherwise, I saw Salami, by Oscar Mayer. Umm, no, sorry. Typo. Actually, I saw Salome, by Oscar Wilde. Except that's not entirely accurate either. What I saw was "Oscar Wilde's Salome, Staged as Kabuki," which turns out to be an abridged version of Wilde's work, done in that Japanese performance style. It was performed in college and I saw it for my Drama class. I have what to say about it, but I don't have the time now. As I doubt I'm gonna get back to this, I'll confine myself to noting that I'd had no prior experience with Kabuki, which makes it well-nigh impossible for me to have an opinion on how well it was done... and that I'm not certain I approve of some of the script changes they made. They had to cut a lot for length, I take it -- as it stood, the play was about two hours long, with the intermission -- but they yanked out pretty much every Jewish and Christian reference, making it a bit hard to see why Iokannan (AKA John the Baptist) mattered to any of the principals in the first place. Not that I read the script until after I saw the play. And maybe that sort of thing is more acceptable in Kabuki; I don't know. Still, the actors seemed to know what they were doing, and I rather liked the Page of Herodias. I'm kinda happy the next play at Queens College is gonna be a musical, though. Oughta be fun.
Oh, by the way, I ended up revising my last entry, on the Subway Series thing, just a bit and using it for my next column in the student newspaper. Then I revised it a bit more and sent it out to Newsday. I have little hope of its acceptance for the latter, but this is the first time I've even tried to send them something in about a decade. So I figure having done so is good, even if they hate it. And now I must run, for sundown is nigh, and I have a bus to catch.
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