Buyer and Cellar at Portland Center Stage

It's interesting, the things people choose when creating fantasy worlds in their basements. I mean people who have the money to create fantasy worlds in their basements. I mean Barbra Streisand.

I mean, if I had the money, I'd go for Rome circa 125 CE. Or Egypt circa 1345 BCE. Or, OH, OH - I'd make it the inside of a spaceship as seen through the eyes of the early twentieth century with thousands of blinking lights and one of those—

But anyway, I think the last thing I'd make is a shopping mall.

Still. The very true fact that Barbra Streisand has a life-sized replica of a mall in her basement makes for great theater. Buyer and Cellar, which we saw Friday night at Portland Center Stage, is the story of an out of work actor, not long from being summarily fired from his latest gig playing a character at... Disneyland, who receives the very strange offer of performing as the singular on-hand shopkeep of all the shops in Barbra Streisand's basement. He dusts her many collections displayed in the shops, serves frozen yogurt, even performs sales exchanges (complete with haggling) with the star over her own merchandise.

This show is totally weird, wildly inventive, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Full disclosure, Stephen and I are big Streisand fans. Stephen is hugely so (pre-1980s Barbra, specifically). As we sat in the theater before the play started, Streisand music piped in around us, he said, "If they'd play this louder, I could sing along, and if I sang along, I bet everyone would sing along."

I'd been worried Buyer and Cellar would be a musical. I can be quite a stickler where musicals are concerned, and I wasn't sure I could condone a guy giving us his life's story while crooning covers of "Evergreen" and "Papa, Can You Hear Me." But it isn't that at all. It's a charming and hilarious one-man show about ambition and the ways we create fantasies of our lives - with a sweet love story to boot.

The writing is fantastic, but what it takes to pull off this show is a really great actor. He has to stay "on" for a seventy-miles-an-hour one-hundred-minute ride with no intermission, playing four different parts (including narrator Alex, and of course Streisand, herself) (oh, and a quick cameo by Oprah, so five), has to play those parts with energy and subtlety, has to charm the pants off the audience and make them laugh for most of those one hundred minutes—and Nick Cearley did all that.

I can see this role being irritating if performed by a less experienced actor, but Cearley has beautiful timing and perfect nerdy lovability (I remember him as a great Seymour in PCS's production of Little Shop of Horrors a couple years back.). He has lots of energy but it's not over the top. As he spins his outrageous story, his face, and at times his whole body, comment on its ridiculousness with wonderful little asides. There's a great sequence where he dances while he tells his story, and every move is the elegant and perfect pairing for the words he speaks and the mood he wants to create. In dialogue, he's able to switch back and forth between characters beautifully. Conversations between Alex and his spirited boyfriend Barry in particular are absolutely seamless.

The framework for this play is a book Streisand wrote called My Passion for Design, all about the design of her home, the design and decorating of all the rooms, her gardens, her many collections. I was struck, watching the play, by the way design can mean more than just creating the look and feel of an object or a space. And by the way so many of us work so hard to design our own selves.

I was thinking, too, about the title Buyer and Cellar. How important is the idea of buying and selling to the big picture of the play? Did the author focus on this in the show's title solely for the pun on the word cellar? Or is it more? Interestingly, though the story is told from the point of view of Alex, he's not the buyer, he's the shopkeep, the seller. Barbra, haggling over price on an antique doll that's technically already hers, is the buyer. And the weird thing for me in the title is that this means Alex doesn't get mentioned at all. It's buyer (Barbra) and cellar (also implying Barbra). Or is he the buyer, too? What is he buying, with his time and his effort? A brush with celebrity? A brush with fantasy? A brush with the existential truth that we all, as humans—

Oh, sorry. I nerded out a little just now. But then again, why not? Buyer and Cellar celebrates the best of nerdiness, along with being deceptively smart, giving you lots of think about after you're done laughing your head off and go home to your apartment or your house with its very, very regular basement.

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Buyer and Cellar is playing now through March 3rd in the lovely Ellyn Bye Studio (Hey, that's below ground, too! That's like having a theater in your theater's basement!) at Portland Center Stage. More information is here.

Photos by Patrick Weishampel/blankeye.tv courtesy of Portland Center Stage at The Armory.

Publicity poster art by Mikey Mann

random moments from my bus ride

A woman sits down next to me. She smells good. That's a weird thing to say, but more often than not, the smells on the bus are not good, so this makes me very happy. I think it’s the coffee she’s sipping. Something warm and sweet.

It's dark out. I read Amy Hempel. Every time the bus stops, the lights are white, and when it starts up driving again, they settle into a deep mauve on my pages.

I make a little wish that the woman with the coffee that smells good stays sitting next to me as long as possible. I wonder if people ever make friends on buses, like just start talking and the next thing you know, they’re friends forever. I don’t know what people would say to start conversations on buses. You can’t just say to another woman, “I’m glad you smell good.” 

The sun starts to come up. We drive over the bridge and everything is a shade of stonewashed denim.

When the bus empties out more, she moves across the aisle to the other side. I'm a little sad to lose the warm, sweet scent, but I'm sure she's happy to have the chance to sit by herself. Almost immediately, a man entering the bus goes and sits next to her.

A conversation behind me between a boy and probably his mother, boy first:

“Look at that sculpture of pigs!”

“I see!”

“Look at the baby one.”

“I was just noticing that.”

“They call a baby pig a piglet. That’s how they got the idea of Winnie-the-Pooh. They thought of a baby pig and made up Piglet.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They started with an idea. Next they started by drawing. They made a lot of drawings. And then they made it into a movie. And next they promoted it. So people would want to go see it. And now we have that movie! Pigs sometimes give people ideas.”

           

“That’s true.”

“Not always, but sometimes they give people ideas.”

Another woman sits down next to me. Luckily, she doesn't smell bad either. Whatever it is reminds me of Irish Spring soap.

As we get close to my work, I start to look for any of the few coworkers who sometimes take this bus. The only one I really know is on vacation. There’s a woman who rides with a man who may be her husband, and he always walks with her to the door of our work and then turns around and leaves and I think he gets back on the bus going the other way. Today, I see him come from the back of the bus, by himself. As he steps down the aisle, I notice the woman sitting up in the very front of the bus, on one of those sideways benches. They don’t say anything to each other. She stands and joins him to wait for the bus to stop.

They get out in front and I get out in back. I forget to thank the bus driver and then when I come up to the open front door I think maybe I’ll shout thank you through it, but I chicken out.

In the gravel of the sidewalk just about at the intersection, a railroad crossing sign is lying face-up. Undoubtedly the sign is two-sided, so it's also lying face-down.

As I cross the street, a novelty car or boat horn plays the first twelve notes of the song "Dixie." The horn says, Oh, I wish I were in the land of cotton.

Sense and Sensibility at Portland Center Stage

I'd just had a medical test and was awaiting results, expected Thursday. I also had theater tickets for Friday. I thought, if it's bad news, will I go to the theater? Will I throw a little carpe diem on my disappointment, force a little eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die? I thought, no, I'd probably rather stay home and cry.

Oh my god, I am so glad I don't have cancer because Portland Center Stage's Sense and Sensibility is

the most delightful thing I've seen in a very long time.

I feel a little at a loss, writing about this, because to give you a sense (oops, no pun intended) of why you need to go see this play right now, I'd need to spill some details that were just so lovely to be surprised by. Let me say that it's an evening of beautiful stage magic. Brilliant stage magic. You know that thing where the characters are sitting on chairs and miming being in a car and they sway their bodies to show the car careening here and there? It was that stuff but perfected to the fourth power and used so cleverly that I laughed with delight all the way through (a couple times loudly enough to embarrass myself) at how smart it all was.

Alright, just to give you a sense (oh, lord, I did it again): Chairs with people sitting in them are skated around on stage so that it's like you're watching a film and the camera is moving. Disconnected pieces of scenery are moved and rearranged to form different settings. At one point - but, no, no, I'm not going to say more. The details are so masterful that you just have to experience it in person.

Whose idea was all that stage magic? Was it Kate Hamill, who adapted Jane Austen's classic novel? Was it Eric Tucker, who directed? Who was responsible for the intricate coordination of all that magic, a coordination that was so perfectly executed it seemed like a dance? Certainly credit has to also go to lighting director Sarah Hughey, who further refined the magic, particularly in a couple dreamy sequences that, for me, were dramatic high points of the show.

And the cast did a beautiful job, playing their (often multifold) characters and being moving (often careening) parts in the execution of that stage magic. Stars Danea C. Osseni and Quinlan Fitzgerald were great as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, two sisters navigating love and representing sense and sensibility respectively. I also particularly liked Lisa Birnbaum as their mother, Mrs. Dashwood. Longtime Portland favorite Darius Pierce was great in a handful of turns including a fabulously deadpan... horse.

And a big standout for me was Lauren Modica as the gossipy wishful matchmaker Mrs. Jennings, who had crack comic timing and brought down the house with one particular outrageous and funny monologue.

With this great cast and the smart, funny but reverent adaptation of Jane Austin's novel and the whirlwind of stage magic that did exactly what stage magic should do (including retreating when things got serious), and which beautifully underscored the artifice of civil society that Austin was so adept at putting on the page, Portland Center Stage's Sense and Sensibility was, for me, exactly the perfect thing to celebrate getting good news.

But if you got bad news? Seriously. Go see it anyway.

Spoiler/not spoiler: my very favorite moment, which you'll get if you go see this show, is the moment with the teacup.

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Sense and Sensibility is playing now through February 10th at the Portland Center Stage Armory Theater. More information is here.

Photos by Patrick Weishampel/blankeye.tv courtesy of Portland Center Stage at The Armory.

an incomplete list of the ways he made me feel better during the three days between the second (and way ouchier) mammogram and the biopsy

He suggested we watch a movie and I eat a whole pizza.

He insisted he go with me for the biopsy even though I'd made the appointment for eight in the morning and he's not a morning person.

He said I get to pick all the movies we watched that weekend even if I wanted to watch cheesy Eighties adventure films.

He told me he knew it would be okay.

He said, "If it makes you feel better, I loved you back when you didn't have any boobs at all."

He put pizza on the shopping list and circled it like it was really, really important.

[If you know me, you know pizza is really, really important.]

On the night before, he rubbed my head and ran his fingers through my hair until I fell asleep.

He went to the store and came back with three pizzas.

a moment in the day: bip

It's the night before the bipsy.

That's a typo. It's a biopsy.

Bipsy makes it feel so, so, so, so much funner.

It's the night before the biopsy, and I'm sitting at the computer working on some graphic design stuff.

I've been trying to make drops of water out of nothing. Out of pixels and vectors or whatever magical things make pictures on computers where there were no pictures before. I have all these layers on top of each other and they come together to form what looks like a drop of water. Kind of. A drop of water in extreme. A drop of water in relief. A drop of water that is just a little bit too much a drop of water, and therefore not enough a drop of water at all.

The issue's not the over-bright blue color. That's on purpose for the background I'm going to set it against. It's just that it's not finished yet. I start mulling next steps. Maybe I need to take it into Photoshop and put a bit of a blur on it in selective spots.

Maybe I need to lay a thin, transparent layer of blue on top. Or start washing in a color counterpoint, a dab of yellow or a bit of purple.

Maybe I need to do a little erasing to the pointy top of that drop of water that's just a little bit too much a drop of water.

And then I remember. It's the night before the bipsy, the so, so, so much funner bipsy, and I haven't been thinking about it for five full minutes.

And you know what's weird? There's part of me that feels uncomfortable about that. Like I should be thinking about it. Like, oh no!, I forgot to think about the very important thing!

That's what this day is like. That's what a lot of my life has been like, if I'm honest. I'm either worried or I'm worried about not having been worried about the very important thing. But what is actually a very important thing is that for five full minutes I've been thinking about a drop of water and nothing else at all.

Book cover: This Particular Happiness

Creating the book cover for the next Forest Avenue Press title, Jackie Shannon Hollis' This Particular Happiness, came with a very particular challenge. From the publisher description:

As a farm girl in eastern Oregon, feeding bottles to bummer lambs and babysitting her little sister, Jackie Shannon Hollis expected to become a mother someday. After a series of failed relationships, she met Bill, the man she wanted to spend her life with. But he was a man who never wanted children. Saying I do meant saying I don’t to a rite of passage her body had prepared her for since puberty.

A memoir about not having children... I've made lots of book covers that focus on the central something in the book. But, how do you create imagery about the lack of something?

What I did first was procrastinate. A lot. And that's fitting, right? That's me performing the lack of something, i.e., working.

OK, I wasn't procrastinating so much as beating my brains out, trying to come up with a way to put this theme visually on the page. I kept thinking about this scene in the 1938 film Marie Antoinette with Norma Shearer where, to taunt Marie Antoinette for not yet having given the Dauphin Louis-Auguste an heir, Madame du Barry sends her a tiny empty cradle for an anniversary present.

There you go. A book cover showing an empty cradle.

Ugh.

In the end, the inspiration for the concept came from publisher Laura Stanfill, who sent me an email asking if I might create a promo piece for the book that included an image of Jackie with some words of identity arranged around it:

DAUGHTER
LOVER
WIFE
FRIEND
SURVIVOR
AUNT
NEIGHBOR
MOTHER

That list got me thinking. I emailed back:

There's something that feels very dynamic to me about your list of things she is, with the word "mother" crossed out. It makes me wonder if that's the seed for the cover, itself. Like if those words were over a photograph, maybe not even as thought bubbles but as, like, overlapping words in some way.

Then Laura to me:

Or another concept like that—a flower (she gardens), and the petals could include the words, and that is very much about womanhood and growing into your own beauty. Ooh, I kind of like that. What other vessels could hold happiness? Hold the title?

Me to Laura:

Would it be too on the nose if we explored the flower thing and the mother petal were falling off?

Me to Laura:

Because I can see something really stylized where the words aren’t just in the petals but form the petals. And maybe the title words form a pot or something.

And then I was off and running.

I made SO many versions of this concept. Versions with the flowerpot, without the flowerpot, with various stems and vines, minute changes in the flower and its petals and the words that made up the petals. Often something would be visually appealing to me but wouldn't quite convey enough of what I was trying to say.

An early work-in-progress version of the flowerpot idea, as I was trying my darndest to fit the words into the shape of the pot. Definitely too jaunty. There's joy but there's also a lot of heartbreak in this book.

Experimenting with blurred flower backgrounds with the white lines overlaid. I wasn't worried, yet, about trying to find a font that would go well with the flower lettering - just looking at the shape of space on the page.

Laura and Jackie really wanted "professional" incorporated into our list of words, and I just couldn't squish it into a petal because of the length of the word. Here I tried making it a leaf. Something to frame Jackie's name with. I knew I'd need another new word for the other side, but for starters I just flipped "professional" backward. The layout was pretty but it distracted from the falling "mother."

Adding the "professional" leaf on the stem of the flower didn't work because it, too, distracted from the falling "mother."

In fact, plenty distracted from the falling "mother," including the blurred background. Cover work can be a delicate balance. Sometimes a design element that is a plus in one way (like the moodiness of the background of the sample below) can be a minus in another (too busy against the detail of the flower).

There were versions with swirly vines all around. At this point the lettering for the title was starting to get there, although those Rs look as though they found their way into grandma's liquor cabinet..

I worked and worked to get that flowerpot thing to work. No matter how much I simplified, it was always just too complicated for comfort.

I finally got it through my head that in order for the concept to work, the whole thing needed to be simple and "mother" needed lots of space around it.

"Mother" had to be the star of the show, and all the bells and whistles I was adding were taking away from what we were trying to communicate to the potential reader.

Another change that happened at this point was the rounding-off of the flower petals because it was suggested to Laura and Jackie that pointy petals might looks like a marijuana leaf, and that's a very different particular happiness.

I was pretty happy with this sample, because the layout was really pretty to me. But Laura pointed out that the swirly... let's just call it greenery was still too distracting. And she was losing sight of the fact that the petal was falling from the flower because of the place where I connected the stem.

Come on, what was my problem? Why did I keep complicating things?

So I knuckled down, simplified the greenery, moved the stem, and we finally, finally had our cover. 

And a lovely blurb from Cheryl Strayed to boot!

This Particular Happiness comes out October 1st of 2019. More information can be found on the Forest Avenue Press website here.

And in the meantime, here's a little taste of the book:

But my body also called out for other possibilities that I didn’t pursue: to run a marathon, to climb the face of a cliff, to go beyond my limits. My longings always called out for more, more, more than what I had. 

And I kept opening the same wound over and over thinking a child would be the salve. I wanted Mom’s approval. I wanted the approval of the women in the mothering club. I didn’t like to be left out. I didn’t want to be pitied. Or judged. 

Maybe this thing I called wanting a child was a distraction from a bigger need: to understand why I was here, why I alive. My need to justify myself. 

Would a child justify me? 

Would it make me happy? 

Wasn’t I already happy?

a moment in the day: needles

Stephen is sweeping pine needles from the space that used to be our Christmas tree.

Earlier today, I took down all the ornaments and put them away, wrapped the dead lights in loops, palm to elbow, and stowed them in the trunk where they'll wait for next year.

I picked up the Christmas waldteufel and gave it a spin for good luck for Stephen's healing.

As I worked, he'd been at Urgent Care, getting the four stitches removed from his lip from the very scary New Year's Eve two-in-the-morning fall from our bed.

He's been ailing so he hasn't been happy, so I haven't been happy. I don't like beginning a year in an unsettled place.

We've been to medical offices four times in the last six days. The ER on the morning of the 31st, then Urgent Care later that day, then Urgent Care again on the 4th when it looked like things were infected, and then today Stephen went back to have his stitches out, and as a bonus, in the middle of things, I got to get a mammogram. I'm not great at math, but that's a pretty darn obnoxious doctor-to-day average.

Scritch, scritch, Stephen sweeping pine needles. I take Nicholas out in the backyard for a walk. It's dark and he runs off across the yard, to lift his leg on the shadows of dormant day lilies.

Usually when I take down the Christmas tree, I try to make a little event out of it. Some music, some movie picked out for us to watch afterward, maybe fun food. To pretend it isn't sad to put Christmas to bed for another season. This year it seemed kind of fitting to put it to bed without any supper.

Stephen told me the removal of the stitches hurt a little. I feel bad that I didn't expect that somehow. For a pessimist, I tend to be weirdly optimistic sometimes, like, okay, this time he's just going to get his stitches removed, no problem. I feel bad that I didn't go along.

Nicholas pees on the spindly, leafless dogwood tree in the very corner of the yard. Over the fence, the neighbor's house is all dark except for one window, dead center up top, full of light. There's something furry in the window. And a man moving around. The something furry is maybe a cat, but no, it's way too big to be a cat, but it's right in the window, where cats like to be. I squint because sometimes I think if I squint, magical binoculars will appear in front of my eyes.

The man moves left, then right, then left in the window. The something furry breaks and dissolves in the movement if the man in the window.

And then I realize. The man is taking down his Christmas tree too.