Thanks to everyone who participated in the Fun Home The Musical contest! All 27 of you. The winners were notified today.
Has anyone seen the Salinger movie? Hol and I went tonight. It was kinda cheesy, like one of those annoying History Channel shows that beats you over the head and repeats itself constantly.
The cat was frisky when we got home.
So the musical based on my book Fun Home is about to open at The Public Theater in NYC. It will be in previews from September 30 through October 21. October 22nd is opening night, which I am sadly going to miss, but I will be at the October 19th performance just before they “freeze” the show for the official run.
The theater has given me two pairs of tickets to give away. I thought I would make a little contest, a little series of questions about my book, and if you want to play, you can email your answers in and we will pick two winners at random from the people who get them right. I say “we” but I really mean my kind girlfriend Holly who has agreed to manage this since I am a little crazed right now. Also, I know it’s kind of weirdly narcissistic and self-referential to make people answer questions about my book, but I suppose that is the blight memoirists were born for, to paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins, so I will embrace it. Here they are:
1. What is the date of my father’s death?
2. What is the name of the family hunting camp where my dad takes my brothers and me camping?
3. What was the line that my father added to my first poem, “Spring”?
4. What was the name of the bar my father tried to take me to when I was 19?
5. What is the phrase my father writes to me in a letter, echoing something Stephen Dedalus says near the beginning of James Joyce’s Ulysses?
If you know the answers, email them to Hollyraetaylor at gmail by 5pm on Friday September 27. And she will pick two winners at random. Assuming that more than two people choose to spend their time in this fashion.
If you don’t want to bother with the contest, you can get discounted tickets to the preview performances with this code: ALISON
Go here to purchase tickets. Full price is 90 bucks, but with the discount code they’re 50.
On another note, today at 4:44pm the earth’s axis is tilting neither toward nor away from the sun.
I love seeing these Sears cartop storage things. Here’s the logo…
… a cartoon snail combined with the word “X-cargo.” Meaning extra cargo space. But it’s also a pun on escargot, the French word for snail. And a snail carries its house on its back. So it’s like a bilingual pun and a visual pun all together.
I don’t know if I read about this somewhere or figured it out myself. It was a long time ago when I first noticed it.
…from my mom’s house. She has a mint condition Dykes to Watch Out For mouse pad that I’m gonna sell on eBay. It was one of the last items of merchandise I made in the mid-1990s, before I shut down my mail-order swag business.
It’s got a hard plastic surface. The black rubber backing is a little discolored but otherwise fine. The design is a take-off on Norman Rockwell’s “Chain of Gossip.”
Which I stole again over a decade later for the cover of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.
I also just came across this picture of me in what strikes me as a bizarrely butch outfit for a baby girl circa 1962. What were my parents thinking?
The musical version of Fun Home, created by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) is opening for real this October at the Public Theater in NYC. Here’s a picture of me last fall, during the workshop of the play, with Sydney Lucas, the girl who plays “Small Alison.” Hearing her sing Lisa and Jeanine’s song “Ring of Keys,” based on page 118 of the book, is worth the price of admission.
Here I am with all three Alisons, including Beth Malone (regular Alison), and Alexandra Socha (Medium Alison.)
Well, come see for yourself if you want. Tickets go on sale on August 8. Here’s a link to Fun Home on the Public Theater’s site.
One of you wrote to ask me this. I have been getting concerned emails from various blog regulars about the disappearance of recent posts and the lack of any new ones. The disappearance is due to a problem my web host has been having. The lack of new posts is just due to my being busy and not having much to report. Here’s something, though:
I just got this Oberlin College t-shirt in the mail. I think it was because I gave money to the alumni fund. But I really love it. In fact I am wearing it for the third day straight. I like the design, which is an image of one of the iconic “womb chairs” in the Oberlin College Library. But I also like the t-shirt itself. It fits perfectly. Most t-shirts don’t, they grab or pull or bag or otherwise impinge on one.
I guess I have reached some strange new phase of life, where I fret about t-shirt comfort and give money to my alma mater.
Hol and I went out for a walk after dinner. I stated that I was determined to hear a thrush. Their haunting, piercing song is a crucial rite of spring for me. I have been away from home for a while, so missed their return. I heard one at a distance the other evening, but tonight we not only heard a hermit thrush in ear-thrilling proximity, we could see it! In this video, if you go to full-screen mode, you can see the bird move from one branch to another near the middle of the frame. Thrushes are very private, secretive birds. (Not unlike my recently departed mother.) I’ve seen one before very briefly. But mostly they are invisible in the dusky forest.
Every year I drag out this bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Spring…but every year it is true.
…Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing…
And here is the almost-full May moon rising after we got home from our bird walk.
Here is a video about the moon, thrushes, and veeries, that I made 6 years ago. The meadow where I filmed the moon is now fully grown up with pine trees. The passage of time is nearly unbearable.
My mom died yesterday. Here’s her obituary.
I got to spend a lot of time with her over the past couple months, which was a tremendous gift.
I’m at my mom’s house, and have been going through some of her old files of the plays she acted in. There are programs from college and summer stock productions, old newspaper reviews, head shots…including this stunner:
…there are also cast photos, stuff like that. But then I ran across this curious document.
An envelope of lovely cream-laid stock, sealed with red sealing wax and addressed in my own handwriting to Mme. Leonora Armfeldt, a role my mother played in A Little Night Music in 1977. At first I thought it was something I’d given her as a joke. Certainly the address was a joke…”Björneborg Manor.” But then I opened it up and read the letter.
These are lines from a song that Mme. Armfeldt’s daughter Desirée sings. Then it all came back to me—this was an actual prop from the play! Mom had asked me to create an authentic looking letter that the characters could use onstage.
This has added yet another bizarre layer of complexity to a scene in chapter 6 of my memoir Are You My Mother? where I write about mom’s performance in that play.
Unfortunately, I am having to cancel some events I was scheduled to do next week, due to a family situation. On Thursday May 8, I was going to do a talk at BAM with the illustrious personal essayist Phillip Lopate. (Wow, didn’t know till I made that link that it’s some kind of dinner event! $55 with wine and tip included! Plus it’s sold out. Man.) We’re working on rescheduling this.
After the BAM event, I was planning to continue on to Boston, to do a keynote for the Women and Psychotherapy course, part of Harvard Medical School’s continuing education program. I was looking forward to meeting Janna Malamud Smith, one of the organizers. She’s a therapist and also a writer. Several years ago I blogged about her memoir about her father, Bernard Malamud.
So I’m not going to be able to do the Women and Psychotherapy event either, but I’m working on a scheme to deliver my keynote virtually–my talks are always essentially slide shows–so it might work to send a powerpoint file with a voiceover of me talking, that they can play for the audience.