Giada - Inaugural Issue FREE

Hey everyone! So part of why I haven't been around as much these days is that I've been working on some other projects that are similar, but far more lucrative and have way more readers. (Props to you, core group of awesome ones, though.)

And one of those things launches TODAY! The inaugural issue of Giada, a digital weekly is available for FREE for your ipad in the itunes store. It's coming soon to other digital platforms. But for now, if you have an ipad, please give it a try. 

There's tons of amazingly delicious Giada recipes, music playlists, style and beauty tips, and tons and tons of travel stories so you too can live the good life. I've tasted these recipes, I've seen these tips in action, and I can tell you... WORTH YOUR TIME.

I want to be Giada when I grow up and this emag will make you want to as well. Super thanks to everyone involved for the opportunity to be a part of this. (Especially you, Ashley Reed!) 

Launching things, being there when it all starts is my most favorite part of life and especially of any sort of artistic/professional experience. With all your help, this can be the start of something really fun and special. We'll keep working hard; you keep reading. 

When I Look Back On Those Neon Nights - Miss Atomic Bomb

Almost every song ever written by The Killers carries a kind of inescapable Vegas about it. They aren't just from here-- they radiate the ambience of here. A perpetual nostalgia. They also seem to understand the significance of their origin. They lean into it. Sam's Town. And this latest effort, our state motto: Battle Born. I wonder if that Vegas palate they paint with is detectable to anyone not from here. Once, in the radio station here, I told Kade that "When You  Were Young" was what growing up in Vegas sounded like. He thought about for a minute, and then agreed. 

"Miss Atomic Bomb" sees that feeling and then raises it with so much local specificity and ambience, it puts a squeeze on my heart a bit. My hometown band still has the same sound they've always had (there's a guitar homage to "Mr. Brightside" on "Miss Atomic Bomb," as if Mister & Miss were a couple) but I do think they've grown. Brandon Flowers has never sounded better. And this is one of the most beautifully shot performance videos I've ever seen. 

Time Traveling - Hollywood Tower

Radio people have always been my people. Makes me think of a time before television. Before I moved to NYC, I used to spend hours in the studio laughing maniacally with DJs from Mix 94.1, most especially, my darling Kade. We talked about Buddhism and life and had funny alter egos I'm sure no one found as funny as we did. I'm so happy to be reunited with him here in Los Angeles. His radio station, 98.7, permanently occupies the rooftop penthouse at the Hollywood Tower, and last night, we partook of its splendor for some Saint Motel and The Walking Dead. All of that was fun (minus the blase LA crowd-- whatelseisnew?) but I was mostly just happy to be surrounded by art decor on all sides. 

Hollywood Tower was built in 1929 with an eye towards entertainment type inhabitants. Or, as the plaque on the door says, "Sophisticated Living for film luminaries during the Golden Era of Hollywood." The bathrooms, the elevators alone... le sigh. I'd live there, that's for sure. 

One day, I want to make a coffee table book consisting of nothing other than dreamy photos of me draped with the ennui of the aristocracy on fabulous couches all over the world. You'd be amazed at how many I already have....

Happy 100th Birthday, Rice University!

Today, I am wishing a wonderful Centennial Celebration to my beloved alma mater, Rice University. We are a small, strange, and lovely place. I hope we will always fight to keep it that way. We are a small, strange, and lovely group of people; filled with wild, brilliant, silly thoughts. 

I had a hard and lesson-filled four years there.  I remember the joy of winning the world series, jumping in Gillis's pool (no longer the president's house. They've filled the pool in now) and the more than one occasion I sat locked in my car out in the parking lot, staring up at the stadium and crying. They were an intense four years. Sometimes it just felt good to cry it out. In many ways, I think I made the absolute most of them. In other ways, I wish I'd worked a lot harder. 

But out of all my decisions, in my whole life, no decision (or the lead up to it) has had more impact on my life than choosing Rice. It is the fulcrum on which the everything else pivots: my career, my friends, the way I interact with the people I keep in my life. 

I haven't always agreed with the direction our current president has taken the school, but I insist that there exists an inherent Rice-ness at the soul of those swampy acres that no ambitious professional academic administrator could squash. Try all you like, but I think you'll never make Rice like Duke or Columbia or Harvard. And I'm glad for that fact. I always think of the West Wing: Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. 

Let Rice Be Rice. 

I wish I could be there to celebrate homecoming with everyone, but I am sending all my love and thanks to a place I love so dearly. Happy Birthday, Rice. Gurrrrl, you look good for 100. Go Owls. 

Americana, Man

One week ago, my dad and his surrogate (my surrogate) family, in addition to some culture-shocked Scots, were rocking out to Steamboat Springs at the Myrtle Beach Depot. There was free New South Beer (Red Ale = delicious) and Red Velvet cake and brisket and pretty much everything amazing. 

Dad rocked out in all ways, as usual, but most especially, Statesboro Blues. And I got a little teary, as I always do, when they played Music Man in honor of Jeff. His son Hunter is practically a man now, and I hope a few more of these concerts and we'll have that college fund of his taken care of. 

My family's never quite been the same since my Grandfather died. It's hard to know what to rally around. But these gatherings somehow always clear up the confusion for me. I am enormously grateful for them. And for all the effort of so many people to make it happen. 

I'm not sure that my Scottish friends really appreciated what was going on. Perhaps its kind of an inside joke. But for some just off the boat Scots (And one who's reluctantly heading back) I can guarantee they witnessed some some m-f-in' Americana, Man. 

My Grandmother is Maggie Smith

While we only have a few days left to wait until the premiere of Downton Abbey's Season 3, I feel the urgent need to tell you something: My Grandmother is Maggie Smith. She's Maggie Smith in The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood (A movie I'm still surprised Maggie Smith was in, but moving on...) because, obviously, my grandmother has a Southern accent. 

She looks like her, (startlingly so, actually) she acts like her, and she's just as funny. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with her in the hospital this week, and even though the Perry, Georgia Hospital is not my ideal scene setting for hanging with the GrandMary, it did allow for some of her most Maggie Smith-ness to flourish. She had quips and one-liners about the food, the annoying man who always came to do her breathing machine after she'd taken her ambien, who was common, her continued annoyance at people's incorrect use of grammar, and of course, how she missed the gossip of being amongst her friends. 

I will admit that my relationship with my Grandmother has never been quite the same since my Grandfather died. We used to have a kind of deep understanding, some kind of unspoken fun wavelength we were both on at the intersection of historic homes, love of novels, and UNO. There's so much I'm desperate to make her understand about my life, the way she used to so effortlessly when I was a little girl. But instead, we meet at a new intersection: Queen Elizabeth. She wanted to know all about the Jubilee. Which reminded me all the more of Maggie. And I was happy to tell her all about it. 

Even though I'll be missing my Grandmother, I'll be riding high from my time with her happy to have Maggie back on telly, reminding me of my fab family matriarch. 

Happy Labor Day!

Even though it's a holiday, I'm working. Now that Nicholas & Alexandra is done, (did I mention that? Finished! For now.) it's time to crack into finishing those grant applications Steven and I are applying for and get my pilot in shape to take to LA at the end of the month. 

I have a lot of feelings about unions, but I feel like it's important to never lose sight of the purpose  of unions-- what we have that we once didn't have because of the Labor movement-- and to remember that who needs the protection of unions may always be changing. I'm working today by choice. So, thanks, Labor movement, for weekends, 8 hour work days, (at least in theory) child labor laws and sick pay. 

Battleborn, Or Be My Friend, Claire Vaye Watkins

Comparison is the thief of Joy. It's a lesson I've always had to learn the hard way. I'm hard on myself. Always. So I stack myself up against others all the time. I transfer my own judgement of myself onto my dealings with my family-- and make them the people who are disappointed in me, when really I am the one. It's me. I'm comparing me to others. Not them. 

In college, my friend Parisa had this great rule we always tried to follow whenever that feeling crept up on us about other women. Whenever you feel tempted to feel jealous or envious of another girl, you should immediately become their friend. Nothing will kill that jealousy faster than becoming friends. It really works and I've done it a lot. Some of my best friends came from The Parisa Method. 

It's also the inspiration for the series I do on this blog: "Be My Friend, So & So." I've talked about Liz Merriwether, Liz Gilbert, Allie Brosch and others.  So here's a new one in honor of Nevada writer, Claire Vaye Watkins' new collection of short stories, Battleborn. 

If you know your state mottoes, you'll see right away that these are short stories about our shared (ambivalently felt, in my case; less so, in hers) home state of Nevada. Drifters, wanderers, that washed-out old photo feeling that comes from the place... that's Battleborn. I'm only one story in, but that was pretty much enough. I'm sold. 

She has lots of interesting things to say about writing and the Battleborn State (NV was admitted to Union in 1863 during the height of the Civil War, thus the moniker) on this Granta podcast. The sound is rather low, so crank up that volume.

One of the things I like best about Claire is the free writers workshop she's put together for rural Nevada teens, The Mohave School. It took me a long time to own where I'm from (or at least accept it and love it as one of the places I'm from) but now that I've arrived in that mental state, I'd love to get involved in her endeavors there. The thing I could always say is that there are far more stories in Nevada than anyone would think at first guess. FOR EXAMPLE, in Claire's case, this little teeny tiny bio detail. My most extensive experience with Charles Manson was playing Squeaky Fromme in Assassins where I sang a love duet to him (while John Hinckley Jr. sang to Jodie Foster.)

Perhaps because that song is called "Unworthy of Your Love," that detail feels simultaneously like a joke and also massively significant. I suppose, I think it's interesting to look at the parallels and the diversions between any two people. Like me, Claire was born in California and thereafter moved to Nevada (Pahrump in her case.) Like me, she had an alcoholic mother (she describes her mother as "this incredible dynamo; a great bullshitter.") My father is the opposite of Charlie Manson's right hand man. Unlike me, she stayed in Nevada and went to UNR. We both did postgrad writing programs in places you might not expect.  

Bringing this back home to the beginning of this post, and in my continued effort to get really seriously real with myself and you on this blog,  I suppose I want to say this. (In addition to "Be My Friend, Claire Vaye Watkins.)

I want to say that Claire is two years younger than me and has been published in all manner of places I envy. The Paris Review. Granta. She gets compared to Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx and Joan Didion. My teeth hurt, I am so envious. But here's my confession: I don't even send my stories out anymore. I have been propped up and pared down so many times now, I don't know what to think. I don't send any fiction out into the world, save on this blog. I both know and don't know why that is at the moment. I have been hoarding. I have been waiting for people to ask. And when people finally ask-- and mean it; not just as a courtesy-- it feels like my heart is going to explode. I cry on the spot. 

I am trying to work through this unworthiness I feel-- with my family and with myself. And in the odd manner in which I choose and sometimes choose not to share my work with others. 

All photos from the author's (really beautiful) website

Monday Music - Summer Mixes from my Brother

London's weather is nothing short of a miracle at the moment. For that, I send up a hallelujah. When the sun comes out, I simply must have a buffet of music to celebrate it. Luckily, this summer is full of great music. I'm not just talking about Milo Greene, Frank Ocean and Passion Pit, etc etc etc... I could really just go on and on... I'm also talking about the mixes my bro has been posting on his soundcloud page. 


It's wild and heartwarming to discover how respected my brother is in his industry. I'm feeling pretty proud. And I am counting down the days until I get to see him in action. The last time I saw him, he looked like this. Although, I think it's safe to say we both still look scarily similar to how we looked when we were ten, his real life face twenty years later is gonna look pretty good to me. In the meantime, I'll enjoy his skills via the internet and share them with you. I hope wherever you are, you're feeling that Summer feeling-- that it's sunny and filled with music. 

Perfectly Aligned

One of the most effective literary devices is the employment of twins. Doubles. Twelfth Night. I Know This Much Is True.  If you read any of my writing, you'll find an overwhelming presence of doubles, sidekicks and twins. I've always been drawn towards twins. A match to yourself. A set of aligned humans. My mom was a twin. I'm sort of genetically in line to have them myself. And, for a very formative time during my childhood, I had a kind of twin myself. 


This confuses people. Technically, my parents had no other biological children with any of their many previous or subsequent partners. But both of them accumulated some step children along the way. Sometimes these people wanted me, sometimes these people did not. I've got stories for days about these people who were and then suddenly were not my family. But there is only one that ever took a punch for me. That I had a kind of strange psychic connection to-- probably because I don't really remember any part of my life before he had come into it. 


From the time I was about four until ten, I was raised alongside a brother who I can pretty much only describe as my step-twin. My mom was sort of insistent about raising us that way. She was always trying a little too hard with it. Probably because of the contentious way she and Dax's dad had gotten together. That's his name: Dax. 


She made us do everything together. Sometimes we resented it, but mostly, it was okay because we had started out as neighbors and friends anyhow. We were born only about a month apart, looked alike, and while our personalities were sort of yin and yang, we'd lock ourselves in tiny spaces and cackle with laughter for hours. We ran wild together. We terrorized the many many neighborhoods we occupied all over Northern California. We hid from my mom together. We used to ride in the trunk of my mom's car... I think by choice. WHAT?


Sometimes, you guys, when I recount, even to myself, the reality of the details of my childhood, I myself do not even believe it. I do not know how I made it out. I do not know what kind of planet I lived on then. Except that for most of the worst of it, (and the best, too) there was this boy who fought with me and for me and hugged me and stuck up for me and intentionally took my mom's focus and anger away from me and onto himself. For many years, he both literally and figuratively stepped in front of flying fists aimed at me. And when the soft part of the back of my head got slammed into the corner of the coffee table, he was there too, trying to help me. There is no way for me to repay him for this. 


He got out sooner than I did. And when he was gone, suddenly, I had the courage to leave too. 


The family I always talk about seeking-- it starts with him. And for twenty years, I've had no way of contacting him. I searched and searched for years, on every social media and google resource available to me short of hiring a private investigator. A part of me wondered if he would even want to hear from me. Perhaps, it would open something he didn't care to revisit. But then finally, recently, he appeared. 


Just having pinpointed him. Knowing he is there. And where there is. To know he is doing well.  To hear myself addressed as sister. And receive the pledge of a brother. "Whatever you need, sis." It's brought a lot of things to the surface. 


I know that the bulk of the raw material of my life and life's-work was created during those years. That is the clay I am shaping and reshaping-- standing back to look  at, evaluate-- going back in to work at again. You get your hands dirty every time. It is the work I will never stop doing. It is the crux of the balance between the heavy that I came from and the lightness I am always trying to laugh my way towards. To make the heavy go light. That's really something. 


It gets easier. It gets harder. It gets more worth it. The really serious heavy lifting we all do to come to terms with the trauma we experience-- it is made worth it by knowing we did not go through it alone, that we helped each other by taking turns carrying the heavy, and that somewhere out there, if you just keep googling, you will find that twin again. 

The Presence of Grace - Flannery O'Connor

Every now and then something so amazing comes along that it just makes your week. (Month! Year!) There are only two known recordings on Flannery O'Connor's voice. This is one of them. (Here is the other, btw, of her reading from her essay, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.") It's so perfect and complete, I can scaresely believe it's true. For 37 minutes, she reads the entirety of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." 


Living in the UK, I don't often get to hear the kind of Southern voice I love so much; the kind that scarcely makes it into any dramatic interpretations or impressions of Southern accents, but is what I hear in my mind when I think of my family and my childhood summers in Georgia. I was always very proud that Flannery O'Connor was from Georgia. And proud to be from there myself because that was where she was from. I don't care what anyone else might say while trying to be modern or clever, women writers with Georgia roots are where it's at, people. 

My Vintage London

Let's just say I've spent quite a bit of time on this website examining its fascinating photos. Trafalgar Square in the 50's? Yes, please! I'm especially intrigued by the World War II photos. With the exception of Pearl Harbor, we never saw that war come into our cities like Europe did. I can't imagine taking shelter on the tube tracks or a massive zeppelin above the Thames. And even though there have been tons of movies illustrating these events, nothing is quite like seeing the man on the street's view of the real thing. Also, Bonus website! We're having a heat wave here in London, so here's a throw back to another heat wave-- of the 1920's.

"Release Me" into wonderwild - New Nic & Alix

Of all the songs we had on deck (and of all the songs we PREMIERED!) at Lincoln Center, I was perhaps most excited to let this one out of the bag. I'm super proud out it. Perhaps because it did not come easy. I'm normally a fast writer. I edit for a long time, but the primary chunk, the main idea-- the heart and soul of what the song's lyrics are going to be-- pretty much all happen in about fifteen minutes. That sort of makes me feel like a brat just saying it, but it's mostly a "don't force it" kind of situation.


Anyhow. This was not one of those fifteen minutes get in/get out kind of things. We knew we wanted a song about a certain feeling of change that Alix feels when she's brought to the brink. Years of stress and hiding her son's illness and just in-your-bones fear that she'd lose the son and heir she waited ten years for. The political scene is precarious and relies heavily on her son being perceived as the future of Russia. 


Also, she's a bit of a religious zealot. Highly interested in mystics, etc, but I mean, cut her some slack. I'd probably be pretty desperate to put my faith in anything I thought would work if I had a sick kid too. 


When the song begins, she's been told it's basically the end for Alexei and only a matter of time before he's gone. She's essentially begging for grace. And then, mid way through the song, she receives a telegram from a mystic who would change the course of her family's lives. The telegram was simple: just to leave the boy alone; to not fuss over him too much. And sure enough, his health improved and from that moment on, Grigori Rasputin was adopted into the Romanov family with catastrophic results. 


We wanted to simulate the feeling of a telegraph and morse code signals, so listen for that. And Steven and I kept circling around what the central 'idea' of the song should be. I kept saying, nope, nope, not quite right; a little too general. And finally, I had it and went away to birth this one. A difficult labor. But happy with the results. I felt a bit like the emotions expressed in the lyrics themselves by the time I was done. 


I wish I'd filmed the sound check which was pretty much flawless. This is marathon, labor of love five minute anthem to sing. And we're still streamlining scansion and tempos. Also, it's a good lesson to not have favorites in your own lyrics. Lyrics will always be flubbed for the rest of time and eternity. And chances are, if you have favorites, it'll be those. "So many prayers unanswered, bargains made and nights unslept, your words fold the space between promises broken and kept" will turn into a repeat of the last line. And no one will know but you. 


The best thing about Autumn is that I cease to care about what I wrote and only feel the emotion of her performance. Which is... the point, actually. Which she has always, always been a master of. Every time. I look forward to much much more of this song and Autumn. And this show and Autumn. Just...one of the most beautiful people all around, of all time. 


Like Nic & Alix on facebook here. Photos by Daniel Robinson

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Scotland might be celebrating the birth of Robert Burns today, and even though a huge proportion of all my favorite people were born today, January 25 is always the day to celebrate my amazing dad. Perhaps I beat this drum too loudly and too often, but I'd rather over-make the point than under-make that nothing I do or have ever done would be possible without my dad's unfailing support. He gives wisdom and humor to everyone around him. He will make you smile whether you want to or not. 


One of him is like five parents. I'll even share him with you, dear readers. If you have a tough question, let me know and we'll get him involved. I mean, here is his response from when I wished him a happy birthday late last night when it was already his birthday in Scotland, but not Las Vegas:

The wisdom of a Buddha can only be understood by another Buddha! It takes one to know one! I love you, too! What are you doing up this late?

Many happy returns, Dad. You are the best!

The Story of Musicals (from the British perspective)

After a lot of days in both the East Lothian and Perthshire countryside, I came back to a rainy ugly Edinburgh and some good old fashioned comfort food: musicals. It took my favorite bird-lover to alert me to the new series on BBC on the story of how (and, listen, I'm gonna put this in quotes and explain why in a minute) "British musicals reclaimed the genre." Or maybe just reclaimed the West End. Either way. 


Even with the topicality (both Jesus Christ Superstar & Evita [a production I'm salivating to see] will return to Broadway this season) I must say, there's a lot of well-tread and re-hashed territory-- at least in the first episode. Stuff about Lionel Bart turning into an ego-maniacal drug addict filing for bankruptcy, how Oklahoma invented the musical as we know it today, etc etc. But I did enjoy the extended interviews with Elaine Paige, Tim Rice and especially James Rado on his influences (one of which was the British Oh! What a Lovely War) and Hal Prince being his usual badass self. 


At the end of the day, I still think the genre belongs to us. I do think it most likely took our Hal Prince to make Evita the success it is. To bridge the gap between what a story could be and what Tim Rice always seems to leave out in my opinion. 


Or maybe its something to do with the innate enthusiasm of a musical. That's why it will always belong to America. Nothing excited me more than when they'd cut to West Side Story, etc etc. And that's not because I'd ever actually thought about the thing I love most as a turf war between my two homes. Objectively, as a musical lover, there's nothing British that can beat anything on the long list of my favorites. 


But it's useful to think about, especially working on Nicholas & Alexandra-- the most Britishly influenced (read: pop opera) of Steven and my stuff. And one thing Steven and I have always been on board with Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber about is the concept album. I believe in the concept album. More to come on that later... 


Pictures and adventures from the country tomorrow. While it was nice to have a bit of fun, the documentary reminded me that what I really am is a workaholic....so back to it. 

Christmas Eve Eve Links

Being around all my friends' adorable kids is pretty much the best Christmas time present I could imagine. (And thanks to my new lens-- it's so pretty!-- I can photograph the living daylights out of them without needing actual daylight!) The side bonus is that I also see these kids' parents & the rest of the folks I've been pal-ing around with for the past 20 ish years. It's a brilliant, warm feeling to be around the people you never have to explain anything to. It's my favorite part of the holidays. Class of 2000 annual Christmas reunion, Commence. 


But if you're bored, waiting for your own holiday reunion to commence (so much down time around the holidays. Sigh.) here are some links for you. 


- The really overwhelmingly nice article about Steven & I in Rice Magazine. We're page 47-48.
- World's Weirdest Hotels
- a thought-provoking article about ideas of modesty
- last minute Christmas List update: subscription to Upper Case Magazine
- this Art Heist thing is pretty sweet. I love stuff like this.
- I'm into clever ideas
- Beautiful photos, travelling on the Orient Express

Here's to you, Vegas, Forever in the 90s

Here's a little confession: whenever I'm homesick (or, for that matter, can't sleep... so let's just say, this is a common occurrence) I watch CSI. A part of me feels a little silly for doing it, knowing that, except for the occasional obligatory shot of Nick Stokes on the Strip, it isn't filmed here. 


But they get almost all of the details right. From the street names & intersections, to which neighborhoods are bad and which are posh... they even use local newscasters when they show news clips. (Most often Paula Francis.) This is mostly due to creator (and my teenage speech & debate patron) Anthony Zuiker. 


And it's that texture, even more so than my belief that Nick Stokes is the perfect man (I love when he flips that shovel in the opening sequence. Bam!), or the increasingly preposterous (and/or recycled! They rely on 10-12 years of distance for you not to remember certain actors coming back [such as the actor who plays Henry, who originally played the baddie in a zoo animal smuggling case that got a man killed. He couldn't be Henry! He got sent prison.]) plot ideas (like the whole Strangers on a Train idea. They've done that one three times now). Even more than my loose personal connection, which somehow feels less than loose. 


Everything about Vegas, even CSI, loops back around to the 90s. The show didn't start until 2000, the year I graduated and left Las Vegas, but everything about it feels fixed in the 90s, just like Vegas. It's willingness to strip, repurpose and reassemble pieces-- actors, plot lines, you name it. 


I can't stress the truth of this to you enough. And can you blame Vegas? (The dream of the 90 is alive in more places than just Portland!) The 90s were a golden decade. The 90s were good to Vegas. Good to America, in fact. It started with the Mirage in '89, and then the Excalibur and the Rio in '90, the Las Vegas Bowl in '92. In '93 we sold and imploded the Dunes to make way for the Bellagio and built the one billion dollar MGM Grand. (In the spot of the old Marina Hotel. That wing still smells like fish to me.)


'94 - Luxor opens with a light beam you "can see from space."
'95 - Fremont Street Experience built, Hard Rock Hotel opens, Landmark imploded. 
'96 - Stratosphere opens. The iconic Sands is closed and imploded on November 26
'98 - Aladdin imploded, rebuilt. Bellagio opens featuring Las Vegas's first fine art museum


We've never been as good as we were then. But we keep trying. And I'm certainly not the only fan of nostalgia around here. The radio stations still have the same DJs. Mark & Mercedes are still playing almost exclusively 90s music. Paula Francis is still rocking the news on Channel 8.  It's comforting.


It took me a long time-- nearly 20 years-- to come to appreciate, or even understand, this weird and sort of wonderful place where I spent my formative years. While the 90s weren't an especially "good" decade for me, those years are echoing and reverberating back through everything I've done since. A part of me has always tried to deny to myself that this is where I came from-- it's not intellectual or cerebral, Vegas doesn't appreciate art or culture, etc etc etc, I have waxed on to myself, as I toured the world, and tried on different versions of myself for size. And oddly, moving abroad has actually enabled me to be here more often and more fully than I have ever before. 


Vegas is always destroying and regenerating-- we have no sentiment. We rip it down. Anything that isn't working anymore-- it comes down in artful implosions. But a part of it is fixed resolutely somewhere in the 90s. And I'm glad of it. It makes sure I can't let myself off the hook. Any temptation I might have to forget the fluke of my identity is evaporated driving down the many many freeways to the tune of one of those 90s jams. They can start calling Barbary Coast "Bill's" but Drais is still there and so is Battista's Hole in the Wall with world's oldest living accordion player. And Green Valley Parkway is a bit bleaker than it was in my day-- we're no longer dying the grass green-- but drive down Windmill & turn on Glacier, and my old house is still there, along with the Willow tree my dad and I planted in the front yard in 1994. It's taken over the whole yard. You'd hardly know you were in the desert. 

Queen of the Mist

When I was in college, I rustled up the email address of my favorite musical theatre writer, Michael John LaChiusa. We became pen-pals of a sort. At the time, it was the most encouraging thing that had ever happened to me.  I had directed a production of Hello Again (still one of my favorite shows, and sort of a life-changing experience for me) and I was kind of in awe of everything about MJLaC's style. That way he steers from storytelling and comedy into something really heartbreaking, or desperate-- taking you somewhere totally unexpected-- that place has been my aim from the first day I started writing songs. Mistress of the Senator, Tom, Little Fish, Coffee, oh, Coffee. 


And now, he has a new show with Transport Group, starring the amazing Mary Testa, Queen of the Mist. Me and Steven's superpal and eternal VOTE! stagemanager extraordinaire, Theresa, has been working on the show. Needless to say, I'm pretty jealous. I'd kill just to seeeee the show, let alone be working on the production-- telling the tale of Annie Edson Taylor, who in 1901, at the age of 63 went over the Niagara Falls in a barrel. And lived. Best of luck to the production, which kicks off this month. 

Houston Bound

Back to Houston for the first time in over five years. Other than friends and, ya know, seeing VOTE! all I can really think about Houston is food. I just want to eat at all my old favorite restaurants. I think it's going to be a big weekend for Mexican and Thai Food and Barbecue. Oh my god, I gotta stop thinking about Ninfa's and Nit Noi and Kolaches and Demeris and oh wow, I gotta go to sleep. While I fly, enjoy this vid of the baby birdies on ABC in Houston! 


UK'ers, hope they don't block this! Also, UK'ers, anyone wanna tell me if the new VOTE! cast album is actually available for purchase on UK itunes?


Also, talked to the one and only real live Ms Fowler via email today. An inspiration as always. Thanking Green Valley High School and Rice this week for my education.  

Magical. Or Disgusting. Few things in the world spark such a difference of opinion. Maybe marriage.

 One of the many reasons it pays to make friends on the subway is that when your camera-- with all your photos from the bullfight you attended (alone!) for research on your amazing matador dance musical-- when that camera is stolen (along with your whole purse) from a Baixa coffee shop patio, these friends you made on the subway, who attended the very same corrida at Plaza de Toros Las Ventas Madrid on June 19, 2011 will graciously email you all of theirs.


And I needed them. Because what is available for seeing in all the glamourous photos on ESPN stories, and the youtube clips, are primarily concerned with images like the ones above. (Though, I'll get to him in a minute.) But when I walked into the plaza and to my front row Sol seat and my hot as hell rock slab to sit on (1. The cheap cheap seats were sold out 2. I live in Scotland-- I figured, bring it on, sun. Just bring it on.) I was thinking: who gives a shit about the matadors. I've watched them countless times on TV. I've read every book on corridas ever written. I know their deal. 


I want to know about the other guys. I wanted to look at their faces: the peones as they scurry behind burladeros to protect themselves, the guys with their trumpets up in the bandstand, the novilleros, the ticket takers...all those guys. What happens when they go home?I wanted to know who those little guys are. So I did a lot of watching them.


At least, in the beginning, that's what I did. I will tell you that the first 45 minutes in that plaza (I was early) were some of the most uncomfortable of my life. After the disapproval of nearly all my friends, I was: sitting on hot rock slab, my water bottle was already gone, (so... was my cerveza) I didn't know anyone, the people who were around me were super obnoxious bro-dog /embracing-their-machismo American men (barf), the sun was blazing in my eyes, and even before Paseillo, before anyone rode out on horses, and before the first very sad-eyed, very gentle bull came out, I was....depressed. 

I was depressed because on every level and from every angle, especially a modern corrida asks you to contemplate death. Of course. The bull's death, the matador's death (if not today, then sometime), your own death, and the death of the very thing you are watching. I looked around at a nearly empty stadium and felt a dull sadness that didn't seem to belong to me. 


So during the middle of the first bull, I felt sick. I wanted to leave. This was the height of male machismo folly! You think you're tough? Taking ten guys, swords and spears, to kill one bull? It seemed more pathetic than anything else. There was nothing technically wrong with the way the first guy was in the ring... except that killing a sweet looking bull seemed not only NOT beautiful, but that somehow he managed to make the thing boring. 


The only thing moving, the only thing beautiful was the bull. And as they hitched the dead toro to a cart and dragged him out of the stadium, I started to think about what that would mean for my show. My show, in which you never see a bull (because...just no). In which the bull is replaced by music and by the idea of these three women in his life, who turn the tables on my matador, Nico "Aries" Brio. I thought back to the quote that opens my show: 

“It may seem foolish to speak of almost killing an animal such as a fighting bull with a cape. Ofcourse you could not, but…you could lame the animal and, by abusing its bravery, force it to charge uselessly, again and again. It is the effort made [by the bull] that kills it.”
–Ernest Hemingway

David Mora

 And then, something magical happened. A truly cantankerous bull came barreling out of the Gate of Fear to meet David Mora (that guy above) and all of a sudden, there was a corrida. Not only that, there was my Aries Brio, and there was my show. Something about this David Mora... Just middle of the ticket, but serious, graceful, daring, an entertainer, dimples, ego you were happy to accept. All of it. He made that shit look good. And everyone bought it. Including me. 

They gave him the ear of that first bull and he did a little lap around the plaza, tossing the ear, his hat, whatever he had at people in the audience and they'd toss it back to him. The dimples, the way he touched his hair, I swooned a little. I thought, "That is my guy."Sex.eeee.

You see, I'm a pretty feminine writer. I always know who the women in the story are, and often, I access the men by way of the women. So I've largely been writing around him and waiting for some tangible detail to lock him into focus. Thank you, David Mora, for making me get it. And for making me feel that amazing mix of conflicting emotions that are the exact elixir I want people to feel when they one day sit in a theatre and watch Tercio de Muerte. How the onstage seating will slowly trickle off stage. How when they come back from intermission, half as many people will still be there. I want them to feel depressed. And sick. And bored (just a little...or maybe frustrated) and elated, and hysterical and turned on, and ashamed that they're turned on, and superstitious and worried and connected to something primal, and confused about why they feel connected to it. 

I don't think there are any lit terms in English that are as good as the terms in other languages. Nothing as good as mono no aware. Definitely nothing as good as duende. But I felt all that. Which is to say, if you let it, the corrida is a dramatic universe so rich in texture, that it is capable of activating in you-- and causing you to questions the origins of-- almost every emotion you have. The collision that results is why you go. 

**Please, please read wonderful Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy's book On Bullfighting. One of the most vulnerable, honest and compelling reads ever. Also, Death in the Afternoon remains, for all its Hemingway-ness marvelous. Read these. For video of what I saw, check out here. Google chrome will translate these pages for you.