Letting Go

As you're reading this some of your fellow Tehachapi area residents are getting ready to put on a show. Actually eight shows. That's right, it's time once again for Tehachapi Community Theatre's Playwrights Festival. Starting March 7th and going through the 16th at the BeeKay Theatre TCT will be doing world premieres of eight 10-minute plays.

A Little Help

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 I recently had a reading of my fairy tale play that I mentioned here a while back. Now when a playwright talks about having a reading that's more than folks just getting together and reading the play. Unlike most writing, a play is something that will (hopefully) be spoken by a group of people in front of another group of people. The play is something that is performed. So you have to get people to portray the characters and hopefully do it in front of an audience.

Accidental Librettist

I've only recently become familiar with what a libretto is. And that is because I have accidentally become a librettist. So despite not particularly caring for musicals (except things like Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) I find myself working on one.

Once Upon a Time

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 Lately I have been doing some research and reading on fairy tales. And not just because of TCT Jr.'s upcoming production of “The Princess and the Pea” which opens on April 19th. I've been reading fairy tales because I am trying to write one. Well kind of. I've run across a call for short plays dealing with “fractured” fairy tales.

Room and Board

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 We don't hear much about boarding houses anymore. Well, except for pets. I did a search on the Internet and besides a restaurant or two all the hits for boarding houses seemed to be for pet lodging. But in the past boarding houses were common.

Tripping Through Time

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We are all the product of our times and cultures. But our ability to read and write, both history and fiction, gives us the opportunity to look back at other times and cultures. The presuppositions we have come from our culture, but these are always in flux. There is a constant struggle between change and stasis. 

Got 10 Minutes?

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Just about everyone has a story. And you have, right now, an opportunity to tell it. The Tehachapi Community Theatre Playwright's Festival is entering it's first phase. This is the ten minute play festival that has been going on for the past three years. This year the festival is expanding to two weekends. 

Who Gets the Dawn?

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In The Lion in Winter, the king and queen contest the succession to the throne of England. (I had to give a mention to the Tehachapi Community Theatre play that will still have a few shows when you read this.) And they bounce between a shortsighted “who's ahead now” and long term historical thinking. And we too, often think in the short term. Yet when we reach a point when our problems loom large, we wonder how we could have reached this point.

In Like a Lion

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Literature has loved the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. And the people making up the English royal family. There are many stories of Robin Hood with the characters of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted in the background as villain and savior respectively. Ivanhoe too, tells of this same time. Henry II's children have had a lasting impact on stories we read and see growing up here in America. We've had movies, plays and books about Richard and the Crusades. Cartoons about Robin Hood. The name “Prince John” brings up a very definite image.

Anachronistic

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When you treat history like a science, or when you're doing a historical science (like geology), things that are out of place in time are important pieces of data. Things that are out of place in time are known as anachronisms. This would be like finding fossil cows mixed in with a herd of dinosaurs. You just never find those things together at the same time. And you'd never find disco music in the soundtrack of a movie made in the 50s.

Historical

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Things have been happening here on Earth for around four billion years. Most of the things that have happened during that time were unobserved. And for most of the things that have happened that have been observed, no one has bothered to note them down.

Resolution

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It's that time of year again. Time for New Year's Resolutions. Popular resolutions include: losing weight, saving money and managing stress. But I'm making slow progress on the first two and the last one doesn't apply to me too often. Only when one of Tehachapi Community Theatre's shows takes over my life. And that's generally short term and voluntary.

Invasive Species

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Today I met Zippy, who is a juvenile Yellow-bellied Racer. (That's a snake for those needing a translation.) Zippy was named due to his or her speed. The term “racer” in the name is a good indication of that. Zippy may have been living in my front flower bed for some time. The snail population seems to have dropped in that area.

Botany 101

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Humans have always been affected by the plants in our environment. As our ancestors moved out of the trees and down onto the ground, the plants we ate changed. Anthropologists can look at the teeth of the ancestors and determine what those people were eating by the wear patterns. And when our ancestors settled down with agriculture the plants we used changed again.

Shrews

The shrew (true shrews that is) is a small, mouse-like animal. Though they are not rodents and are more closely related to moles. We do not have a huge number of shrew species here in California (only 13). And several of these are pretty limited in range. However around the world shrews are a common small mammal. Though not seen very often. Like their relatives the moles, they have small eyes and poor vision. They make up for this by having good hearing and sense of smell. 

Wabi-Sabi

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In art there is often an attempt to make permanent an instant of beauty. I've taken pictures of wildflowers and sunsets. Painters and sculptors do the same. But not all beauty can be made permanent. Photos of sunsets seldom really capture the beauty of the sunset, because part of the beauty of the sunset is that it is transient. It changes. 

Making Faces

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I recall being told as a child that if I kept making that face, my face would freeze that way. Well, I've now seen it happen.

In the current Tehachapi Community Theatre (TCT) production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, there was a need to have bust made of one of the cast, Monica Nadon as Domina. After a little research on the Internet, what can't you learn there (of course it's sometimes wrong), I found a method to do lifecasting. Which is making a mold from a living subject to turn into a sculpture.