The first tortilla on Valencia

Alison Abramson (yes, the Alison from The Price is Right) has made the first Tortilla Espanola ever to be made in our Valencia (St) apartment! This picture is not the actual tortilla we will soon be eating while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in Dolores Park, but it is a fair representation.

Tortilla Espanola earned the prestigious "Todos Los Dias" distinction from Mark during our recent trip to Europe (Check out this film for a similar trip to Spain). It is essentially a thirteen inch diameter by one and a half inch thick omlette filled with potatoes and onions. As if that wasn't carb enough, the best way to eat it is inside a baguette. Mmm. For some reason, the tortilla will cost you about 7 bucks for a slice at local tapas joints even though the ingredients are, as mentioned, potatoes onions and eggs. The whole circular kabudle would only set you back about 5 or 6 bucks in Spain, not including the plane ticket to fly and eat it. Plus, you get no baguette to eat it in around here. Sad, really.

In other news, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival has kicked off in town. I hit the first reading last night and am planning on catching almost all of the plays if I can. If you are a new play reading fanatic, come check it out. Some good shit to be seen for sure.

Or, my play is now selling tickets through August 20th! Woo! Any it may go longer than that. Nutty fabulous! info and tix here of course

Exciting new fact

I have just learned the closest living relative of the Hippo is the Whale! Crazy, huh? Manatees and Elephants are also closely related.

I'm reading The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, a backwards journey to the beginning of life on the planet, which stops each time a major group joins the evolutionary trail that we are journeying back on. During the journey, continents are moving, extinctions come and go, the earth gets hot and cold, and millions of generations cause incredible varities of changes. The planet is in a constant state of flux and change, slow and abrupt.

Also, I ate a bit for Mark's morning bun from Tartine earlier today. One of the best morning buns ever. God bless Tartine.

slowly trying to wrench this blog away from self promotional aims

and keep it true to what it should be: a great procrastination device for me and you, all you people who read this. Who are you people? It's way too frikking hot to do anything intelligent right now anyway. I have decided my intelligence will be used at about 7:30 tonight.

So let's see what else has been going in my life besides the 'ol blah blah blah:

• My most recent iTunes impulse buy is Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser. I think I like it. It's got that repetition and melancholy that suits it for meaningful walks around the city with iPod buds in ears while thinking about how bleak yet beautiful everything is.
• I now have two checking accounts because the bitches at Washington Mutual decided to make a better one and then to NOT automatically give their old customers the benefits, like not charging two bucks everytime you use another ATM. I have decided to use the new one as my "monthly spending" account. As opposed to the other which will now be my "Bills and Loans" account. I think it's going to get confusing. BUT, I have earned 3 CENTS!
  


• There was an ad on the TV last night which announced with great intensity that we could now buy the great album from the (insert deep and flanged truck voice) STEVE MILLER BAND! You know, the album that came out when I was 2?
  


• I'm reading a book on the history of life on the planet called The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. It's research for a new play, plus I loves the biology. Anyway, the book travels back in time, and I just hit the moment that ended the dinosaurs reign on earth, most likely due to a comet hitting the earth near the Yucatan. He points out how even just the sound the impact would have made would possibly have rendered much of the life that survived completely deaf. Good times! It also should be noted that the time the dinosaurs went extinct wasn't even the most severe extinction on the planet, the one that rendered 95% of all species extinct. Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't be listening to Thom Yorke while blogging.
• I have currently subscribed to Craigslist Job Postings so I get certain ones individually in my email. The "experience requirements" tend to be so overwhelming they send me into a funk. How does one exactly become "experienced with such standardized admissions tests as the SAT I, SAT II, SSAT, GMAT, GRE, ISEE, STAR, Stanford-9, etc."?
• I have not yet found a convenient time to see An Inconvenient Truth. BWHAHAAAHAHAHAHAHA
• I am looking for a workspace. And a part time job. Any leads are appreciateds.
• I usually buy gum when i want to get cash back at Walgreens. And I am going to the Kelly Clarkson concert.
  

My first SF Chronicle Review

Here it is!.

It can only go downhill from there.

The show has been extended till August 6! And some new actors are joining the team.

This weekend's shows feature Fontana Butterfield leaping into the role of Wendy. It's also the last four shows for John Kovacevich in his brilliant Tom (well for now, at least ;-)). That's only four more guaranteed chances to see his you know what! Liam Vincent can be seen as Tom the following two weekends, and Alexis Lezin will be back as Wendy. The family is growing!

I popped a bottle of Korbel with the original fab-4 after last Sunday's show to toast the crazy journey. It's been a real treat to work with everyone.

The good feelings help contrast the general self loathing, frustration, and head slamming pain that comes with writing a rough draft of a new play, which I am in the midst of. So weird to be at the beginning and the end of a process at the same time, and good lord they seem so far away from each other.

Ashland roundup

My mom and I returned on Thursday from a brief sojourn to Ashland, Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a place where my theater world has been severely rocked in the past. A particular memory is seeing, at age 14, Pirandello's Enrico IV starring the late Rex Rabold which blew the poop out of me. It was so amazing and riveting even compared to the near death river rafting experience I had added to my life history only a couple days before. I had the same thumping in my heart after both experiences.

This year, the amazing dinners and company at the house we were staying at were vastly more interesting than the plays we saw. Not to say the plays we saw were bad (Bus Stop, Intimate Apparel, and Two Gentlemen of Verona). In fact the acting, direction, and writing was good in all of them (good writing with the exception, perhaps, of Two Gentlemen of Verona). But the productions were just kind of there. Flat. Unurgent. Intimate Apparel featured my favorite script and some great performances, probably my favorite of the trio and employed some nice use of hydraulics. I really loved the language and beauty of the story. Even so, it, all of em were no poop-blowing theater experiences. Nothing felt very passionate, went for the gut. I'm partial to gut-going theater and this was just a little quiet, automatic, lacking in any sense of vip for my taste. It all felt very, very, um, professional. My ho hummness may be due to the atmosphere of Ashland, which is somewhere between ACT and Disneyland. It also may be due to some bad crampy stomach issues the first day we saw plays. What's up with my stomach? That's another blog post.

The dinners featured fresh borsht and sauteed beet greens too, buffalo, lamb, sausage, multiple elaborate salads, and a new champagne cocktail that my mom really enjoyed. Stories circulated about being in the army with Richard Schechner, how Spalding Gray wrote his first-ever monologue based on one of the houseguests, Mexican drug cartels in Oregon, Being shot at while drilling a well, Illicit meeting in the 60s and 70s outside City Lights Bookstore, journeys from Germany to the south in '64, and the growing industry of decorative boulders. Not to mention there was some interesting dynamics and gentle tension occasionally politely currenting through the table.

All this to say that my trip to Ashland with my mom was mostly enjoyable because, it was a trip to Ashland with my mom. Our almost theme park style theater experiences, the whole reason for going, only seemed to be second fiddle to the wonderful company, beautiful scenery, and various meats grilling on the mesquite.

still working on my ashland roundup, but in the meantime

a capsule review came out in the chronicle!

Look!

extended!

Hunter Gatherers has been extended! Shows are now running through July 23, so tell all your peeps, or see it again for the very first time. The last weekend features one new cast member for four performances. Crazy!

foot odor

It's coming back. A little bit. I'm not sure why foot odor is seasonal, but it seems to be with me. Summer seems to me an especially moist time for my feet. I'm hoping to combat with extra soaping.

And for those of you who are looking at my blog after receiving a job application, Welcome!