Gary makes me hungry.
I had a long, fun conversation with my friend Gary the other day, Sunday actually, over the telephone, and we quickly started talking about food, as our conversations tend to do. Gary, now a famous playwright/critic, who spends most of his days on a plane, as opposed to by a plate, always wants to hear about what Nana has cooked, created, invented, resurrected from her kitchen shelves. Nana’s kind of magical that way. And she has become something of folklore in my social circles, and many of my friends eagerly await for my Sunday dinner details. (I can think of one person who...
He was called Bear because he looked like a bear.
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, education, family, food, language, life, theatre, writing
I figured something out yesterday: The closer I get to someone, the more of my name I lose. It's not the first time, I admit, that I've had this thought. I’ve often been concerned with the apparent fluid boundaries of what constitutes Identity, especially where names are involved. I got it naturally; after all, I’m no average Chris…I’m Kris…with a K. I even wrote a song about it once. It was always a delicious fantasy for me, though, in grade school, to change the spelling of my name on my homework assignments. I mean, Chris (with the “Ch”) was as foreign a person to...
That’s how we bring up all children in our family: by ear.
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, family, health, life
I like to think I'm a good uncle. Even though, I don't really know my "real" nieces and nephews. I've seen Millie, once; I've seen Auden, once; I've never meet Vinnie. So, to make up for this: I give all my grand uncle-ness to a series of young cousins, whose mothers I grew up with, as my nieces, being the baby of the adopted family I claimed with their grandmother, who I took as my--- You know what, let me scratch that. It's too confusing. My family tree, you know, is really just an assortment of random branches that were blown down during a storm, and happend to fall around...
I accidentally punched her in the face: Tacoma Tales, Part 2
I'm a big fan of water. And not just for drinking. I love to be near, on, and in it. Each year, a group of friends and I make a sojourn to the beach and do little else than sit on the sand until we crisp. All for the sake of that liquid salvation. Sometimes, it's enough to just hear those waves, you know. I wait all year for this one week (usually in May, because no one is on this particular beach in May) constantly envisioning the glare of the sun from the sugar sand, salivating for the long evenings, lounging in...
It takes a Village and Xanax: Tacoma Tales, Part 1
Things I remember about Tacoma, and its people: 1) it's not Seattle; 2) I had to fly on a plane to get to it; 3) they fully believe in a Farmer's Market - despite the fact that, in my estimation, there were probably only two or three actual farmers at the market; 4) they want everywhere you turn to be something worth looking at; 5) so, that means there's a lot of random art and sculptures everywhere; 6) Sundays are just as dead there as here, and 7) did I mention I had to fly on a plane...
I buried probably, like, a million birds as a child.
I don't know of a southern household that doesn't own a pair of binoculars or have a jar of Blue Plate mayonnaise in the refrigerator. So, this is going to be a disappointing blog, in part, because my house has neither. Ok, well maybe a thimbleful is left of the mayonnaise. Ms. Frankie, the sweetest neighbor I had while growing up, God love her, thought it was because people really liked to look at the birds, that's why they all had binoculars...and that anything other than Blue Plate was sacrilege. She had a pair, herself, but they sat on the mantle after her husband died and...
Because hands can do everything but lie.
I don't always know what to do with my hands. You might find that ironic for an actor, even more so for an educator. But, it's still the truth. It wasn't anything I ever really noticed until a few years ago. I began to realize that my Nana was fascinated by the frequency with which I used my hands to animate my conversation. She would look less at me and more at my gesturing. Over time, I became so concerned with how I might physcially be telling my story that I began to grow flustered at the dinner table. I didn't know how...
He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.
U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week. There's no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that's found some way to stick, even to this day). What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what's being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still,...
The Dollar Bill Incentive, Or, Being Good For Nothing.
I was always an "A" student. I had a memory like an elephant. I never needed a curfew, and I went to church almost more than I went home. Yet, I was terribly, awkwardly naive. A bookworm straight out of the solid core of a ripe apple, I didn't read people as well as words, not until I was much older - and oh how I wish you could shut people up the way you do a book, one flick of your wrist and back they go on the shelf. But me, no, I never questioned authority, and let me tell you that came to backfire...
"I'm not so sure that shrimps is correct."
...if you know me - and soon enough you will, I hope - you know that I'm a bit obsessed with language and pronunciation, etcetera. For instance, I flat-out refuse to drag the word comparative over four separate vowels and/or syllables depending on which part of the country you live in. Instead, I just say it shortly and sweetly, like this, comparative: emphasis on the first syllable, omitting the middle "a," and running the rest of it together under the "r" sound). It sounds more intelligent, I think. I am quite a strong advocate for doing all I can to...
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