unexpected delays

i thought i'da posted again the day after my previous, to say how the marleys were. but i was torn and stalled for days, and now can't stand it anymore because the backlog of unwritten thoughts is driving me beserk, but my mental archivist won't let me skip ahead. the show was amazing, but my hands were tied because i couldn't say so without also saying that the crowd was shit, and i didn't feel like talking about the assholes. the truth is, that the crowd @ the marley show was unexpected, annoying, and complete with attitude that seemed the polar oppossite of the vibes the show shoulda had. i wished them all dead, even as i loved the music and tried to stay in my head with the marleys and not in the club with the assholes.
ultimately, this is why i stopped going to clubs in the usa. it's something i don't like to have to get into, but: americans don't know how to party. the amount that i used to enjoy any night @ a club was inversely proportional to how many americans were in the dance and when the odds were too far against me i stopped going altogether, and now stick with trini fetes/shows except for theatre and the occasional musical act (manu chao, june23, merriweather, fuck yes) that i consider unmissable. the marley show just made me wish i was seeing them back @ home, and i prob'ly will (seen them there before). i'm not sorry i went, but i'd pay twice the price to have been there without most of the others.
we had a good, fierce little crew, though, so we held our own, even though my instinct on entering was to not try to deal with the crowd. i was wisely convinced that we could take them, and we did, even with 2 almost-fights that thankfully stayed verbal...i think abby may have told that chick she'd bite her something off, though...
but the performances were great. my only complaint would be that they coulda done more of their own, newer stuff and interspersed less bob; but at the same time, it hard to complain about having bob's work performed live by his youths. is just that they have albums to be proud of and do for their fans and i felt like we didn't hear a lot of tunes we were looking forward to. but the band and backups were as tight as always, the flagman hold it down as always, and the marleys were the hotness. always.
some of the other shit rattling around my brain for the past week:
coincidentally, they re-running this jon stewart episode on comedy central right now, but last monday night jon stewart's daily show and the colbert report both used the same line- 1st john oliver said that the 1st republican debate showcased the usa's multiculturalism/ethnicities/something-like-that, in all shades "from eggshell to bone", then stephen colbert said the same thing, but "from eggshell to ivory"- it irked me more than i expected. i felt cheated of funny metaphor when colbert said it, preceded by that particularly frustrating deja-vu that you know is about to ruin a punchline.
speaking of which, we saw the heidi chronicles yesterday- covey was lovely in it, especially the character with moustache and high-waisted highwaters- and it was as dated (not in a bad way) as one should expect, knowing it's specifically set from the 60's to late 80's, but i was saddened to realise that the play just isn't as well-written as i'd remembered. it lacks subtlety. part of the problem is that it's written like a sitcom, so each joke/revelation is completely predictable, but it's also mostly populated by 2-dimensional characters so that having lived through the decades since the end of the piece's range makes their stereotypes too obvious from the second they enter. there was not a delicate or surprising second in the piece. it didn't help that the leading lady was so weak that her heidi appeared devoid of personality, leaving me to question how the people in her world could think so highly of her. the 2 main male characters were better drawn (and performed), which might be explained by wasserstein's point that heidi seems to others like a strong, vibrant woman, but feels more like an observer, but if that's the case, when heidi puts on her brave face the audience needs to see that it's a mask, covering some emptiness, rather than seeing a woman blithely traipse through a life that she complains verbally about being an observer in while appearing unaffected and not taking action to maintain involvement- we can't care about that woman.
when that play came out we theatre people (and the pulitzer prize people and some other awards committees, apparently) thought it was groundbreaking, and it was, but isn't timeless, the way, say, angels in america seems to be...it was disappointing to know that it just wasn't that well-written, but i'm not that subtle so if i crave subtlety from a script, that says something. the other issues i had with the show are the ones i have with every show i see @ arena stage's fichandler space- i hated the blocking and i find the scene changes lacking a sense of urgency. i know that theatre in the round is harder to block but i have no sympathy because they've had years to figure that shit out, plus, i been in 2 different plays in the round in the last 6months plus several prior and know it's not that hard to do cleanly. and they need to stop thinking that if they have scene-change-music it's cool to take their time moving set pieces and have no uniformity among asm's/stagehands.
speaking of which, i've been watching quite the lineup on reruns of alfred hitchcock presents in the last week-and-a-half; yaphet kotto was amazing, as was joaquin phoenix (playing a deaf boy who hires a hitman to kill his pops, so young that he's still credited as "leaf"), barbara hershey and martin sheen were great, jessica tandy and arsenio hall were on too, but steve mcqueen was a letdown (i expected him to be much sexier, in the way that luke perry wanted to be in 90210) and even what i think was an amusing tony danza sighting in a crowd of reporters couldn't save a shoulda-been-interesting episode from mcqueen's awfully lame performance. but alfred hitchcock's still the bomb, especially since i don't get any channel that still shows columbo reruns anymore and twilight zone (thankfully on today) and tales from the darkside are only @ sci-fi's whim.
and speaking of whims, i saw a piece on discovery or hgtv or somewhere about people building the world biggest popcorn statue. at first i was just mildly annoyed by the pointlessness of setting and/or trying to break the world record for the biggest popcorn statue, but then i saw how much corn was used (read: wasted) and my heart broke- they could've planted so much and fed so many with that corn, instead of popping it to make a fucking statue.
talk about a sign of the times...
walk good.
ps: thanks, bella.