I am in New York City!

Wooooooooo! Spring Break!(lifts up shirt)

I've been looking forward to this like a kid looking forward to a christmas present that happens to hold 5 boroughs, 12 million people, his friends, and endless adventure.

I just got in last night and already I'm having fun. I'll keep y'all posted on what's what in the next week. For now, the city beckons!

they are living the revolution!

Mental illness is often a secret kept in the family, a source of self-recrimination, shame, and a sense of isolation for those afflicted. The stigma that surrounds issues of mental health is being actively challenged by the Fisher Players, a troupe of adults from southwest detroit. Their new play opened this past weekend, and I encourage you - if you're anywhere near detroit - to go and see the play this coming weekend. It is their best work yet, and I could not be more proud of them. Their history is full of stories about audiences moved to offer tearful "thank you's" to the Players for helping them either to understand or to talk about the mental illness that affects their lives or their families.

I am also happy to announce that the Fisher Players' successes have not gone unnoticed; inspired by their work, a new group has formed in Bowling Green, Ohio, to perform the first play written by the Fisher Players. When that first production is done, they will begin creating original pieces in the model of Players. I know this, because I attended a discussion between the two groups this Sunday past after a matinee show.

I also recently learned that the Fisher Players' impact on stigma has been researched by clinical psychologists, and the work causes a measurable decrease in stigma in an audience both immediately following a production and that decrease is sustained for at least 30 days following.

To have been the Fisher Players' founding director and to be able to work with them again today is one of the things I am most proud of in my life. If you get the chance, see the new show! Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m., 2730 Bagley. (313) 967-0999 for reservations and directions.

The unbearable cuteness of these beings

My dear Mango Pancakes's recent post finally made me own up to something kinda shameful: I really love pictures of cute animals. Helping my day out with pictures such as these seems to match a growing trend on the internet. It started with PandaCam and our pal Butterstick (this morning he was sleeping in a tree!), and then went on to cuteoverload.com - this year nominated for a Bloggie as "best new blog" - and then babyanimalz.com, and now, imreallysad.com.



It's not like the internet is new, or anything, so why now, at this crucial moment in our nation's history do we find this sudden up....awww, that bunny's stealing a cookie! Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right. Anyways, with news items like the Abu Gharib and Gitmo prison torture scandals, Abramoffgate, the Palestinian elections, and so forth, I'm putting this theory out there: the...oh, look, they're sitting in kiddie swings! Wait, huh? What? Maybe I need to retract my former post. Maybe the time is right for human-animal hybrids. I'd have a much harder time feeling bad about our president if he was cute, fuzzy, and, I don't know, dressed like a bumblebee or something.

St. Valenstupidtine's Day

On a much less heavy topic than my last post, Valentine's day is a crock. Regardless of whether or not you have someone special in your life, recognize that it's a day defined by marketers for the purposes of earning cash, and that's that.

The only appropriate response is total absurdity, this time brought to my attention courtesy of Kristy Messer.

This video is really, really great and oddly heart-warming. Make sure your sound is on, and enjoy.

If I wrote you

There was a suicide on campus recently. The name rang a bell, but I couldn't quite recall where I had heard it before. Then, as I was talking to some younger friends of mine, they mentioned that the person involved had done theatre, and asked if I knew him. I told them the name had rung a bell, and they showed me his picture of the front of the Daily.

I have been involved - in some way or another - in over a hundred plays, easily; most at college, but some in Detroit in high school and at Matrix, a few class productions in New York. And in my experience, when I'm involved in a play, the cast becomes my world for the eight or however many weeks we're rehearsing. They are the people I see most frequently during that time, they are the ones with whom I build up inside jokes and a sense of support and being a part of something. The lion's share of my romantic entanglements have been with females from the cast of a play I was working on at the time. The play becomes the defining component of my life.

And then the play is over. And I would move onto the next one. And a new cast. Sometimes there were people from previous shows I'd been in, but oftentimes not. New friends, new feelings, new inside jokes, new cast drama, and then, later, another new play.

The picture on the front of the Daily was of one of the actors from the very first piece of theatre I did at U of M - a scene with just a few kids. I vividly recall the fun and sense of belonging I got from that scene - but I had forgotten this man's name. I found myself thinking about how, for a few weeks, he was one of the people I saw regularly, had fun inside jokes with. He was a big part of my learning to feel comfortable with theatre at UM. I would hear about his day and he would joke with me about mine. And now, it had been eight years since I had given him a second thought, and something, some sequence of events in his life - with which I was now wholly unfamiliar - had led him to take his own life.

Seeing that picture in the Daily made me think of all the other people - dozens, probably - with whom I have had that same brief life of temporary coinvolvement. I knew about your life, and you were mine. The first and last shows I directed in college each had a cast of forty people, and for the life of me I can't recall everyone's name, let alone what happened to them afterward. I'm not saying that I could have kept up all those relationships, or that I could have done anything to prevent this man's suicide, or that I want to make sure everyone else is okay. That's all beyond my capabilities.

But it makes me wonder - where are you all? What ever became of you? Are you okay? I wanted happiness for you then, and I still do now. Do you recall our jokes, our drama, our hours of fun? What if I don't? Even as I write this all I have are mental snapshots with unclear details and emotional weight. Does it undermine the sincerity of my feelings in those hours if I haven't paid them conscious attention since? I hope not. I still consider my theatre experiences to be some of my most formative, especially those casts of forty. I hope you are okay.

I've been staring at this post for about five minutes trying to think up some sort of conclusion, but I've got nothing. It's late.

Back on the big screen -or- radio free fungus

The gentleman in this photo is wearing a "Langhorne Slim" T-shirt and I am in his new movie. His name is Mikey Berringer, and he's one of those good people you can't go wrong by knowing. We had a great time filming the short movie on Saturday, and I'm excited to see the final product.

Saturday night saw the creation of a very different creative work. Naomi and I headed to Detroit to watch the live recording of the Radio Playwrights' new work "Spore Wars," produced in conjunction with the library for the blind and physically handicapped. The play was an old-fashioned radio sci-fi drama about a "Humongous fungus" that rises up to reclaim the earth for mother Nature. It was supremely goofy and a really fun experience.

It's been tough - and really, how many more times can I beat this dead horse? - because I know so few people in Ann Arbor of similar age/interests to my own. I feel like between boredom and university bureacracy I am wasting a great deal of time and life, and I'd prefer not to feel that I am watching the world pass me by. So these two events were great, and I hope there are more of the sort to come.

Understanding the State of the Union, with your host, Dr. Von Badgerface

Okay, okay, okay. It's been about four hours since the address, and this is still getting my goat. Or man-goat, as the case may be. I understand that with all-time low approval ratings, Bush wants to appeal for bi-partisanship and can only speak in very vague and agreeable terms. America=good, evil=bad, and so on. Everybody claps, hooray. But in a speech that was so predicatable, one specific detail caught me entirely off-guard. From the transcript: "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids..."

Whoa, wait a sec, lil' shrub. We can do that? We have the technology? Forget the fact that he breezed over the faulty basis for leading us into a terrible situation in the middle east, forget the lack of apology for an inept response in New Orleans - clearly, the creation of human-animal hybrids is of enough concern to merit mention in the State of the Union address.

I'm honestly torn between being angry at him for including this, rather than other details, and being really excited that this could actually be going on. Prehensile tail, retractable claws and venom-spraying fangs here I come!

P.S. the above image constitutes an egregious use of Photoshop.

EDIT: Okay, I love the internet:
Posts that contain the phrase "human-animal hybrid" from Jan. 25-Jan. 30? Zero.
Posts that contain the phrase "human-animal hybrid" from Jan. 31 and after? 796 and counting.

And there's a T-shirt to match!