Umm... yeah.

[BTW, it occurs to me that since this is International Blog Against Racism Week, it may look like this blog post is a reaction to something specific I've read. That's not the case. This is something that I've been stewing on for a while, not a reaction to anything or anyone specifically. If you think this is about you, really, it's not. Please don't take it that way.]

I grew up primarily in settings where pretty much everyone around me was white. On my first day of school, I walked into class to be met by predominantly white faces. This is an experience I share with many people in the United States. I don't know if it's a majority, or even a plurality of people. Certainly, the experience is common enough that few would flag this as unusual enough to be worth mentioning.

Unlike most of them though, I walked into that class permanently darker than everyone else by at least a few shades, and with no knowledge of English. On one hand, I clearly share the experience with lots of people of walking into a class and seeing primarily the light end of the sepia rainbow. On the other hand, I clearly don't. I'm not saying that my experience was harder or easier than anyone else's. It, though, was clearly a different experience, not one shared by most of the students who walked into the same room and saw the same students.

People constantly tell me that everyone experiences prejudice, that everyone suffers. Sometimes, they will regale me with the story of that time when they experienced prejudice. I totally get why they do that. It is an attempt to empathize. It is an attempt to include. It is an attempt to comfort. It's also extremely annoying and it's taken me a long time to work out why.

Whether it's the intended effect or not, it feels like an attempt to normalize my own experiences. It's an attempt to say that my experiences are just like everyone else's, as if the isolation of being the only Chinese person in the building is no different than the isolation from having worn the wrong brand of jeans to school. I'm not claiming that I'm a special snowflake, but I also don't want anyone to treat my encounters with thoughtless, institutionalized racism as normal. Actually, I suspect they are, but I don't want that fact shoved in my face. A thoughtless comment that inadvertently slams my entire culture is not the same experience as a thoughtless comment that inadvertently slams some embarrassing bit of my personal behavior. (I've experienced both. I should know.)

Like I said, I'm not a special snowflake. Obviously, I share experiences, especially of racial discrimination, with lots of people. Of course, as a member of a Model Minority, I miss out on some of the worst of it. (For example, I haven't been physically attacked for being Chinese since high school.) The people from whom "everyone experiences prejudice" would not feel normalizing, though, are invariably never the people who say it.

This is a tricky thing to express because shared experiences are the basis of a community. By saying, "Well, no. Actually, I don't share these experiences with you" I seem to be explicitly divorcing myself. This, of course, isn't exactly the way to integrate into a community composed of a beautiful sepia rainbow of people.

Maybe all I'm saying is that we can be inclusive without implying that all our experiences are equivalent. We can understand each other without implying that we have had the same experience. e.g., I suspect being the only Chinese person in the room is a ultimately a very different experience than being the only woman in the room. In that case, perhaps there are similarities that lead to better mutual understanding, but I still doubt they're equivalent.

The point is, though, that we don't need that equivalence. We can seek to understand each other without telling each other beforehand that we already do (unless, of course, we actually have had equivalent experiences). The all too human urge to homogenize is how we got here in the first place.

It's an incredible thigh workout. You're constantly squatting to pick up dropped bean bags. Ok, I did 5 hours of rather physical improv on Saturday. I don't think doing free squats in 10+ minute increments all day Sunday helped though.

I was planning on doing some bouldering this week. Maybe next week instead...

One of the reasons why I bought the iPhone when I did was so that I could use Readercon to test it. When I got the Newton, Readercon showed me that yes, I could write and edit text with the Newton. No, I'm not going to carry it around with me all the time because it's too cumbersome for that. No, it's too out of date to be truly handy. I wanted to subject any portable computing device I use to the same test. (Also, I'd been out of my cellphone contract for over a year and upgrading to a new cellphone wasn't an intrinsically bad idea.)

iPhone both succeeded wildly in ways that I didn't anticipate and failed in ways that I expected. I'd so over-thought this purchase that the ways it failed didn't surprise me. On the other hand, it's a given that any device I buy, if it was worth buying, will be useful in ways I didn't expect.

The good news is that I enjoy writing and editing text with it. No, it's not as fast as with a real keyboard, but it's faster than not having any device at all. Readercon offers its program and schedule grid as PDFs. I loaded them into the PDF reader and I had access to both without having to carry a large sheaf of paper around. I hadn't planned on making use of the 3G network, but it was nice having access to email, the web, and Twitter while I was there. (Yes, I was reading the #readercon tag while I was at Readercon.) It makes a serviceable field recorder, although I ended up not recording anything. All in all, it does everything I expected it to do and then some.

It failed in the ways I'd expected. Finding a text editor with decent syncing facilities was tough. I ended using the native Notes app (which syncs with Mail.app on the Mac) and simply cutting and pasting to and from the files I actually edit on my Mac. Also, after the workshop and stealthmuffin's comments, I really wanted to work on the workshopped story. However, I couldn't. I hadn't synced it over to my iPhone. The story actually sat on a USB thumb drive in my pocket, but I had no convenient way to get that into the iPhone. (This is one place where a handheld computer that has a USB port and admits to the existence of file systems would have been a real win.)

Also, the iPhone Mail app (unlike Mail.app on the Mac) does not do client side spam filtering. I could run everything through Gmail. However, as wonderful as Google's services are, I like the idea of not being dependent on Google for absolutely everything. I can move off the free tier of my primary (non-Gmail) mail service to get better server side spam filtering. At $5/yr, it's worth considering.

On the whole though, it's passed the Readercon trial with flying colors. I did everything I wanted to do with it. The compromises I made were all ones I'd expected and with one possible exception, ones I was willing to make. (The exception: I version control my fiction with darcs. Ideally, my pocketable mobile device holds a darcs repository for easy syncing of changes back and forth. In reality, this is so unlikely to happen with iPhone.)

I'd worried about battery life. However, not only did I not run out of battery, I don't think I ever got the battery under 70% capacity. (I kept it on airplane mode most of the time on Saturday and Sunday, but I don't think I needed to. e.g., I didn't on Friday because I hadn't thought of it.) This may just mean that I don't use it very much. e.g., I was not live tweeting Readercon. I don't normally take too many notes.

Actually, the one time I took notes, it was the panel on the state of the short story. In that case, the story recommendations came so quickly, that I scribbled everything into the Moleskine notebook that my iPhone is supposed to replace. (It was in the jacket I brought with me because the Burlington Marriott was freezing cold.) If I'd thought about it, I would have simply recorded the audio. That would have been easier and more accurate.

I'd been looking for a pocketable mobile device to replace my Moleskine notebook. My iPhone has really done a good job of doing that, so far. If it can survive the Readercon trial, it's likely to survive anything else I'm likely to throw at it.

(Having said that, I may still get another pocketable computing device. Syncing data back and forth really is an issue for me. Also, having given into the shiny to buy an iPhone, I may give in again...)

Just a few observations:

1. One of the other writers in (this coming) Sunday's writing workshop yesterday came directly up to me and said, "You're in Sunday's writing workshop." He was quite confident of this. He actually (unintentionally, I'm sure) surprised the hell out of me as I was scrolling through the Readercon program to see what I wanted to do for the rest of the day. But, of course, he was right.

Now, it's possible that he managed to read my name tag from across the room. (Hey, it's a SF convention. Someone must have telescopic, X-ray, light wave bending vision.) It's possible that I'm the only Chinese male at the con, or at least the only one he saw all day. (Ted Chiang isn't at Readercon this year. Where's Tony Pi when you need him?) It's also possible that there's some entirely different explanation which didn't occur to me at the time. I didn't ask.

2. At the obligatory race panel, K Tempest Bradford made the point that Nisi Shawl's work wasn't aimed at the mainstream audience. i.e., the white and male audience. She continued that the mainstream audience wasn't accustomed to reading works not aimed at them. That might explain why it's taken her work a while to become accepted.

One (white, male) audience member reflected this back to her as Nisi Shawl writing works that white readers don't want to read, then asked if this was counterproductive to producing diversity in genre (as opposed to creating segregated genre). K Tempest Bradford handled the question beautifully by re-iterating her point, and Eileen Gunn supported her by saying Nisi wasn't writing for black people, she was writing for all people.

What I find interesting is that a member of the mainstream heard "not aimed at the mainstream audience" as "something I don't want to read." I'm not exactly surprised. (We all like it when we see ourselves on the page.) But if female fans, fans of color, fans of alternate sexuality find value in works not aimed at them, surely it can work the other way around?

3. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Readercon. I just realized it as I was getting something to eat for dinner yesterday. Most of my work deals with race issues or sexuality issues in one way or another. For my 2009 Clarion application though, I managed to pick the two stories that didn't. (No, not just "two stories", but "the two stories".) Of course I'm not saying that everything I write must deal with race or sexuality, or that I'm incapable of writing well outside those areas. It's an interesting coincidence though.

This is coming as quite the late realization considering I applied in January and was rejected at the end of March. Whether they actually were my best work at the time or not, I could have picked more representative stories.

One of those stories, I totally don't regret sending to Clarion. I think that absolutely was my best work to date. I also think I'm writing better now.

The virtual keyboard is much better than it has any right to be. Right now, I'm still manually correcting my text rather than letting the auto-correction do its job. I also forget that it doesn't register a hit until after you release. i.e., if I hit the wrong key, I can slide to the correct key and all is ok. The most damning things I can come up with right now are that in portrait mode, the keyboard does not feel centered to me and that there is only one shift key. (I naturally use the same thumb as the hand I would have touchtyped with.)

My biggest annoyance right now is getting data on and off the thing. Apple clearly did not learn its lesson very well with the Newton. None of the text editors I looked at do what I want in this respect. (Why am I blaming Apple? If they'd admit to a filesystem on the thing, I think it would be much easier. The Newton, BTW, really didn't have a filesystem.)

I don't want something that syncs to the "cloud". I just want something that lets me move text files to and from my computer. TextGuru apparent comes with an FTP server, but the web accounts are that I can't use it to get files off the iPhone. WriteRoom allows you to edit files on your computer only via a web browser. WritePad might actually so what I want. It also does handwriting recognition. However, it's crash prone so I'm not considering it for now.

Documents To Go and QuickOffice both appear to offer saner syncing options. I want to edit text though, not Word files. (QuickOffice supports creating text files. It still seems like overkill. Documents To Go actually does not support creating text files although it lets you edit them. Neither supports RTF which would be the only reason I have for now to get an office suite for my cellphone. OTOH, QuickText is on sale right now. If I never need the rest of the office suite, it might not be a bad idea.)

For now, I may just use Notes. It syncs to, of all programs, mail.app. This means lots of copying and pasting like I would have to do with WriteRoom. The latter doesn't appear to support cut and paste (yet?) and their talk of an eventual syncing solution relies on the "cloud". These two things make me less than eager to buy it.
(Oh yeah, I also looked at NotePad, but their syncing app for OS X didn't fill me with confidence. It has an empty drop down menu whose name is " ".)

I've been playing with the iPhone all weekend. Ok, it's more like "if I make it to this plot point, I get to try out this iPhone feature." I'm not proud. The upshot is I have most of a story fixed and I've played with the iPhone.

Anyway, the startling discovery of the weekend is that AT&T's 3G network is at least twice as fast and much more consistent than my home wireless network. I have, therefore, decided to replace my 10+ year old wireless router with something newer. It should show up in a week or so. (Ultimately, I don't need this that quickly.)

No, I'm not doing this just for the iPhone. The home wireless network is actually extremely useful when I work from home. I just didn't realize that it wasn't working right until I starting playing with the iPhone. i.e., performance isn't supposed to go down when you switch from 3G to WiFi. Maybe this just points out how little bandwidth I expected from my wireless connection. (On the plus side, if I can get the wireless bandwidth something near typical, the whole work from home scenario will improve drastically.)

At first, I worried it might be my iPhone. However, my laptop experienced similarly awful throughput. (I'd never occurred me to do any bandwidth testing until now.) Also, my iPhone behaved fine in another WiFi network. (iPhone customers get free AT&T WiFi at various bookstores and coffee shops. I felt guilty though, so I bought a caffeinated beverage.)

On top of the (purely elective) cost of the wireless router, there is also the (purely elective) cost of the apps I'd like to get. Obviously, I'm not buying them all at once. That'd be insane. (Fortunately, some of the ones I want are free.) However, this is like when I first bought the condo and spent every weekend for at least several months going to home repair warehouse stores. It's not just the initial purchase. There are all these ancillary costs on top of what you already know about.

Granted, most of it is optional, and not important in the grand scheme of things. e.g., as much as I want to turn my iPhone into a loop sequencer, I don't need to do it right this moment. A VNC viewer, OTOH, may be immediately useful for work among other things. Of course, EverNote and some sort of text editor...)

I'm seeing this quote from Apple about unsupported third-party digital media players touted as some sort of "warning shot":

Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store. Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

Obviously, I don't know what Apple's intentions are. This may, in fact, be a veiled threat. It also makes perfect sense taken at face value.

As the codebase changes, features that you do not explicitly test for will eventually stop working. For whatever reason, the pundits that I've read who've called the above quote a "warning shot" have missed out on that fact of software (and hardware, for that matter) development. This is why companies do lots and lots of regression testing before release. They need to catch any backsliding before the public gets a hold of the product. Unless the third-party device has emulated an iPod perfectly, it may fail to sync with a future version of iTunes not because Apple has explicitly prevent it, but because Apple has made no effort to continue to allow it.

Calls for Apple to "let it be" make no sense. Obviously, what they mean is "well, if it syncs with iTunes now, it should just continue to be able to sync with iTunes." What they apparently don't realize is that takes active effort on Apple part for it to just continue to sync with iTunes. Functionality does not come for free. There's always a cost. Even if they don't ever have to make changes to the codebase for third party devices to continue to sync with iTunes, the Quality Assurance team will have to do lots of testing they otherwise wouldn't have to do to determine this.

What Apple has said makes perfect sense from a computer engineering point of view. Translated into English, they're saying: "We don't test for third-party syncing, so if that breaks in a future version of iTunes, we will not know before release. We don't support third-party syncing, so if it breaks, we won't fix it." They're doing the right thing by telling iTunes users this.

Like I said, yes, this can sound like a veiled threat. (e.g. "Gee, you have a nice car. It'd be a shame if someone were to smash in its windshield.") However, given how software development works, it's not unlikely that future versions of iTunes will fail to sync with third party devices out of benign neglect. It takes active effort to retain functionality as the codebase changes. If you haven't tested it recently, it doesn't work.

"Let it be" is not "keep it working." "Let it be" is "let it eventually fail."

BTW, this isn't to say that Apple won't intentionally prevent third-party syncing. This is to say that if third-party syncing fails in a future version of iTunes, Apple may in fact be the last to know about it. (I.e., it fails because Apple doesn't regress for it not because Apple explicitly prevented it.) Of course, there will also be lots of people upset at Apple for not supporting what Apple has been extremely clear about not supporting anyway.

As an aside, Apple may still be making changes to their syncing code. The most recent version of iTunes must sync my iPod classic an order of magnitude faster (no exaggeration!) than the previous version. I used to have to plan to sync ahead so that it'd be done when I needed it. Now, it only takes about a minute.

My Harold 3 grad show was last night. Honestly, it might have been the first time every has come to class. In any case, we performed a Deconstruction. Based on an opening suggestion, two players sustain a lengthy scene that the group uses as inspiration for about half an hour's worth of improvisation. (i.e., we deconstruct the opening scene. Hey, at least it makes more sense than "Harold" as the name of a long form improv structure.)

I think it worked out pretty well, on the whole. (We'll get notes soon.) As near as I can tell, we generated so much material, we blew past our half hour target with stuff left unexplored. Also, there were so many of us that the whole thing was a decidedly low pressure affair. No matter how serious a mess you got yourself into, someone would know how to rescue you. (Also, most of the class perform Harolds regularly as part of Harold Night anyway.)

Right now, I'm kind of at a weird place with respect to improv. I'd like to keep doing long-form improvisation. I'm always a little disappointed after a show because I didn't want it to end. The only way I can see to continue though is to get onto one of the Harold teams at the theatre I've been taking classes at. On one hand, this is kind of a high bar. On the other hand, I may actually be one of the better qualified people in town who isn't already doing long form regularly. (This is not a long form town, at least not yet.)

The theater's annual auditions are coming up. (I think they may conflict with ReaderCon, actually. Thanks to Gmail, I know that last year's auditions were around now.) The next step then is to audition again. I actually auditioned last year, but mostly for the experience of auditioning. That audition was actually the first time I'd done any improv in front of an audience. I'm mostly over the deer in headlights thing now, I hope. This time, I'd be thrilled if they call me back, but I'd like to get cast in something. Ideally, I'd get cast into a Harold team, but I don't know if they're even looking right now. If I get cast in something, then I'm at least I'm around the theater and I'll know if an opportunity comes up. Oh well, I'll see how it goes...

On other fronts, I have the purely first world problem of wanting an electronic version of my Moleskine notebook. Once again, I'm thinking about iPhone. I've been off my cellphone contract for years now. With this latest rev, Apple has added the remaining functionality I care about and has started to add functionality that I don't care about. (Sadly, all I was looking for was cut/copy/paste so that I can edit text. They added 802.1x, VPN and Chinese handwriting recognition last time around.)

Future models will undoubted be more computationally powerful, have a larger set of radios, have longer battery life and have more storage capacity. For the next few years, certainly while I'd be on contract, I don't think I'd care. e.g., even if Apple comes out with an iPhone 4G in 2010, given that AT&T won't have finished upgrading their 3G infrastructure until 2011, whatever cellphone I buy today is likely to be useful for a long time. I mean, analog service finally shut down last year.

Of course, this is just begging Apple to do what they do: introduce a feature that I didn't know I'd wanted until after they'd introduced it. It'll undoubtedly happen, but I think the current set of features will last me certainly for the length of the contract, if not longer. My Mac was the fastest desktop Apple made when I bought it. It'll be 5 years old in November though and the only reason I'm thinking about replacing it within the next year or two is because Snow Leopard won't run on it.

(For a person easily distracted by the shiny, I'm oddly puzzled by the people who absolutely have to have the newest model of anything. Right now, I'm not understanding the people who simultaneously claim that they're not getting an iPhone 3GS because they think it's more or less an iPhone 3G and get all pissed off because AT&T won't give them the subsidized price for iPhone 3GS. If they're not going to buy it anyway, why do they care?)

Of course, the problem is that I'm buying something on the promise that it will be able to do something. That makes me uneasy. (Also, I'm stuck on the image of pulling something out of my pocket, scribbling on it, then putting it away. I really do like handwriting recognition. However, there are pretty much no options for that on the market. The handheld PCs that run Windows are probably the closest things. I may end up with one of them too...)

On the other hand, if it doesn't work out, it's still a good cellphone and I'd still use it for other stuff. (Of course, I'll also have increased my cellphone bill in the process.) Right now, I'm trying to catalog what some of that other stuff might be. Chances are, I'd think of more with iPhone in hand, but I want to make sure that it doesn't just turn into a glorified ebook reader.

(I'm not actually in a rush. However, the next opportunity to figure out whether a handheld, pocketable device will serve is about a month away: ReaderCon. It was there two years ago that I discovered that the Newton does exactly what I want it to do. Yes, it's ancient technology, only unencrypted 802.11b for example. You don't really want to get on the internet with it anyway. Its software obviously doesn't support any modern standards. This makes web and email challenging to say the least. However, the Newton has a superb text entry and text editing experience. I can totally write and edit vast amounts of text with the thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in my pocket and is a pain to carry out so I never do. I've been searching for a pocketable Newton ever since. Unfortunately, this is not something that anyone else wants.)

Part of me is seriously tempted to buy an iPhone, use it through ReaderCon then return it. (From the time I get the phone to the end of ReaderCon is less than 30 days.) If it works out for me, I'd buy it again but also transfer my phone number. The net difference in cost is I pay start up fees twice and I go through the hassle twice. and buying an iPhone when it first comes out is just asking for hassle. (I do note that this time around, Apple is selling it from their website and they will ship it to you. I assume it comes activated or becomes activated when iTunes detects it. I don't know how that plays with phone number portability.)

Of course, the right perspective on this is that none of this is a huge deal. Nothing rides on me getting into an improv group or not. If the iPhone text entry and text editing experience isn't what I'd like, chances are, I can deal with it. Even if I subsequently save up and get something that's pocketable but deals better with large amounts of text, it's still a cellphone, and a pocket computing platform. I'll find uses for it. (The hypothetical other pocketable device might supplant some of what I'd use it for though.)

Hmm... I still have one work related question that I need to sort out. If the answer is what I think it is though, then I think I've just made up my mind about iPhone. (At the end of the day, it really is shiny, especially in comparison to my current cellphone.)

I went to down to NYC yesterday to see Next to Normal and Hair. The trip was thankfully uneventful. I did realize that I could go to the bus station later than I have been and still get to NYC in plenty of time. (The bus trip back was eerily on time though. Usually, we arrive early. This would have been a good thing had I managed to stay asleep during the entire trip back. *sigh*)

Anyway, I finished Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss on the trip down to NYC. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I set my expectations properly. For some reason, I thought this was a genre novel. It's not. I read a big chunk of it with the wrong reading protocols. D'oh. I suspect most people will not spend the first 100 pages or so straining to speculative content. Also, the cover blurb says that it's a thriller. Well, maybe in the final few chapters. Otherwise, it's not paced like a thriller. I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't gone in thinking the novel was a genre thriller. (And, when I disabused myself of the notion, it went more quickly.)

The writing is stunning. I'm in awe of how information dense her prose can be with it ever feeling that way. She conveys a bohemian punk scene and its (inevitable) aftermath without being all cliched about it. It takes a long time for all the threads to come together, but that might be my own impatience than anything else.

(Fortunately, I'd anticipated finishing Generation Loss. I also brought Norse Code with me and read that for the rest of the day. I have about 70 pages left. I'll blog about that when I finish.)

I saw Next to Normal in the afternoon. It's critically praised, nominated for 11 Tony Awards, and next to impossible to talk about without spoiling crucial plot points which really oughtn't be spoiled. I'll see what I can do...

What they've advertised is that it's about a woman who struggles with bipolar disorder. The musical explores the affect her illness has on her family.

Next to Normal has a few strikes against it for me, one of which is really not its fault. I saw it with an audience clearly primed to luv luv luv with all of its uncritical, "I"m so impressed that the musical is so daring" heart. That just makes me grumpy.

Unfortunately, they engage in a couple tropes that also make me grumpy:

The daughter starts off as the highly controlled "good girl." So, clearly she plays Mozart and can't possibly fathom jazz. The obviously soon-to-be boyfriend is the "wild and chaotic" and so he plays jazz and can't understand Mozart at all. Do people like this actually exist? Actually, her entire plot line made me grumpy. It was predictable, didn't follow through in terms of consequences, and practically divorced from the main plot. (Actually, the main plot made me grumpy too, but in ways I can't explain without spoiling.)

We get the big "I'm not going to take my meds because the horrible debilitating symptoms of bipolar disorder is ever so much better than the unnaturally even keel of being on meds" number. I'm not saying that being on an unnaturally even keel is a good thing. It does lend an accidentally "But didn't you ask for this?" vibe when she later sings about the horribly debilitating symptoms she suffers because she's not on her meds.

Needless to say, I was not disposed to liking this musical. It's too bad because much of the music is terrific. (Why save the best stuff for the exit music though?) Half the songs are really wonderful. Whenever they focus on emotions and relationship, the songs are everything anyone could ask for. It is impossible not to feel what the characters are feeling listening to them. Whenever they try to advance the plot... well, it would been easier if it had a plot that made overarching sense in the first place. (It's ok beat by beat. As a whole though, it doesn't cohere for me. It's as if everyone in the story makes decisions be based on their current state with no history or self to draw upon. There was no arc. The problem is that only one character is mentally ill.)

I'm definitely buying the cast album. There are a few songs I want to hear again, and the rest, I suspect, may grow on me with repeated hearings.

On balance though, i suspect I would have liked it more if it weren't this year's "innovative, adventurous" musical. I do think that it's the best new musical I've seen this season and I've seen three of the four Best Musical Tony nominees. (Billy Elliot is the exception.) It really is more ambitious. It really does attempt to (and to a good degree succeed in) telling a complex story of how a family evolves. The "oh, it's so daring" vibe really grated on me. Maybe in forty years, it'll get the production that pulls everything together in a highly satisfying way.

This is an oddly good segue into Hair, which I saw Saturday night. (After all, it was the "innovative, adventurous" musical for 1969.)  Unfortunately, this production also did the "hey, aren't we daring?" thing for a while. It grew out of it though and focussed on the emotion arc in ways that Next to Normal should have, but did not.

Directing Hair forty years later is problematic in that what was audacious and daring isn't so any more, due to repetition if nothing else. This turns out to be a terrific production because it recognizes that modern day audiences simply aren't going to react the same way audiences did 40 years ago and plays scenes accordingly. This production has done the most effective staging of the final scene I've seen so far. Also, this is the first production I've seen where the object of Berger's love is not Sheila, but obviously Claude. (It really works much better that way. It's one of those shifts in interpretation where after you've seen it, you wonder why no one has done it before.)

The show's book is at best incoherent. Everyone gets serious bonus points for creating understandable characters and showing how the events of the musical have changed them. Plus, they invite the audience on stage at the end.

My biggest gripe is with the audience. (So not the production's fault, I know.)

One, to the lovely couple sitting to my right, even if you happen to know one of the swings in the show and she happens to be performing tonight, this does not give you permission to discuss this and point her out to each other during the show. I'm sure you're wonderful human beings who wouldn't think twice before donating your entire life savings to the starving in Africa while throwing yourselves in front the train so that a gentle flower maiden's life might be saved. It's still annoying when you talk through the musical.

Two, to the lovely woman sitting to my left, I did not pay an exorbitant sum to hear you sing the score. (Amusingly, you only sang along in the obscure bits. If this was some way of showing off your musical theater geek creds, consider me miffed.) Yes, you're merely expressing your exuberant joy and I'm a nasty, horrible person for wishing that you wouldn't in that way. Your expression of exuberant joy though is screwing with mine though. Seeing as mine did not screw with anyone's, I find this highly unfair.

Three, to the entire audience, do you guys not listen to the lyrics or pay attention to the subtext? For example, too often, "Let the Sunshine In" is done as this big exuberant joyful crowd pleaser. It's the finale after all. The problem is that it makes more sense as an exhortation, a desperate plea for peace, joy, love, freedom and harmony. This production gets serious Artistic Integrity Points for doing the latter. They messed with the song routine a bit, but it's powerful and effective. The audience behaved as if they were doing the big, exuberant joyful crowd pleaser. If you wanted an evening of merely highly entertaining feel good fluff set to rock music, go see Rock of Ages. *sigh*

 I thought about going to Harold Night on Friday. I decided to really need to sleep instead. I ended writing The Story I'm Currently Working On. (Some stories are total gifts that write themselves. This one is like extracting a tooth with a carp and a banjo, then realizing you were supposed to fill in a cavity on the other side of the patient's mouth.) Not nearly enough sleep happened.

Saturday was two improv workshops essentially back to back. (They were scheduled four hours apart, but each workshop was three hours long.) I learned a lot. However, as always, the issue is execution. Towards the end of Harold class today, the instructor issued me a challenge. (As it turns out, I never got a chance to do another scene so the challenge remains unfulfilled, but I know it's something I need to work on.) He was having problems finding a way to put it so I said it for him. He wants me to play a calm character. That wasn't exactly it, but it freed up his internal log jam. He revised what I said to "deliberate." The character doesn't need to be calm, but I tend to get all flaily and hyper-excitable. I  should play more grounded, focussed characters.

Sadly, I've gotten this note before. He praised my energy and enthusiasm. I really do need to focus it better. (This applies to so many other areas of my life. I'm flaily and hyper-excitable in real life to the point where people ask me if I'm on Ritalin. That always struck me as an odd thing to ask. If I were on Ritalin, I don't think I'd be so flaily and hyper-excitable.)

The amusing thing is that I spent most of 6 hours on Saturday playing focussed, grounded characters. I can do this. Just not when I'm nervous as all hell and scared out of my wits. That pretty much describes my state whenever I'm in Harold class though.  Oh well. It's always good to know what I need to work on.

Oh yeah, someone finally asked if we have a graduation show. Of course we have a graduation show. Scheduling will be tricky since members of all four Harold teams resident at the theater are in the class (plus the three of us who are unaligned). Pretty much no matter what you do, someone will be working for the full hour. Since what the instructor wants us to do for the grad show is A Long Form Structure That Is Not A Harold, someone suggested that we do a Harold too. That way, we all have to work for a whole hour. I'm not thrilled, but it would be the fairest thing to do. (Of course, there are two other student shows to schedule also.)

After Harold class, i went to see <em>Every Little Step</em>. It's a documentary about the casting of the recent Broadway revival of <em>A Chorus Line</em>. Yes, it's a movie about  about people auditioning for a musical about people auditioning for a musical. Perhaps not coincidentally, the end result is very much like Michael Bennett's (obviously unused) conception of what a movie version of <em>A Chorus Line</em> ought to be like.

I saw the production the movie documents. Knowing who they eventually cast doesn't ruin it at all. Neither does knowing what happens in <em>A Chorus Line</em>. It's a terrific movie. I think anyone who likes musicals would enjoy it.

(There was, however, this odd parallel. I spent the first half of the day learning how to put it all out on the line. Then I went to see a movie about people putting it all out on the line and why doing that is totally worth it.)