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Willie “Big Eyes” Smith
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Bank robbery foiled when teller can’t read stickup note
A British man allegedly botched a
bank robbery because of a handwritten stickup note that was so sloppy the
teller couldn’t read it.
That would-be robbery was part of
a short-lived spree in East Sussex by 67-year-old Alan Slattery that included a
second failed stickup and one successful theft of $3,300, Sussex Police said in
a news release Wednesday.
The retiree tried to rob the
Nationwide Building Society on the morning of March 18 by slipping a note to
the teller – but he hightailed it out of there with no cash when the teller
couldn’t make out the writing, the release said.
Only after he was gone did staff
make out that the note said "your screen won’t stop what I’ve got just
hand over the 10s and 20s think about the customer’s (sic)."
The goofy crime was reminiscent
of a scene from the 1969 comedy film "Take the Money and Run," which
shows a bank robbery that goes wrong when the would-be robber argues with
tellers, a vice president and others about whether his stickup note says
"gun" or "gub."
But Slattery kept at it after his
first stickup went south, and on March 26 he slipped a note to a teller at
Nationwide Building Society who was able to read it – and turned over about
$3,300 cash, police stated.
Surveillance footage showed
Slattery boarding a bus afterward, and he was identified through the bus
company by the photo on his pass, according to police.
Slattery struck out one last time
before police charged him, though – this time at a NatWest bank on April 1, the
release said. He once again used a note, but this time the teller pushed back
and scared off Slattery who left the bank without taking anything, according to
police.
Police arrested Slattery walking
near his home later for robbery and attempted robbery, police stated. In his
house, they found "sticky labels" that matched one of his stickup
notes, the statement said.
"These incidents caused fear
and distress to both the employees working in the banks and to the wider
public," Detective Constable Jay Fair said in a statement.
"I’d like to thank all the
victims and witnesses who supported our investigation, and I’m pleased to see
the severity of the offenses reflected in the sentence handed out by the
court."
Callow
Callow means “lacking adult sophistication.” Often used to describe a young person who does not have much experience and does not know how to behave like an adult. Callow comes from calu, a word that meant "bald" in Middle English and Old English. By the 17th century, callow had come to mean "without feathers" and was applied to young birds not yet ready for flight. The term was also used for those who hadn't yet spread their wings in a figurative sense.
A remarakable story
This is a remarkable story. In
2017, a homeless man named Joshua Spriestersbach was standing in a long line
outside a Honolulu shelter. It was a miserably hot day, and Spriestersbach
hadn’t eaten in several days. Suddenly he fainted. The police were called, and
after they had roused him awake, Spriestersbach assumed he was being arrested
for sleeping on the sidewalk where he had passed out.
Spriestersbach, left and Castleberry, right
What happened next is odd. One of the cops who knew another homeless man named Thomas Castleberry mistook Spriestersbach for Castleberry and arrested him on an outstanding warrant for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.Spriestersbach and Castleberry
had never met, nor did Spriestersbach ever claim to be Castleberry, although
the arresting police officers lied and said he did. The chances that recently revived from the
sidewalk Spriestersbach could have come
up with an alias like Thomas Castleberry are remarkable.
That was the start of a two-year
nightmare. Spriestersbach was locked up in a state mental hospital and forced
to take psychiatric drugs and the more that Spriestersbach insisted he wasn’t
Castleberry, the more he was determined to be delusional and psychotic by the
hospital staff who kept him heavily medicated.
Finally, a young psychiatrist
listened to Spriestersbach and determined he might be telling the truth. The
psychiatrist called the police and had them come to the hospital and take
Spriestersbach fingerprints and photograph and compare to their files. Sure
enough, they were holding the wrong man. The real Castleberry was in prison in
Alaska.
The hospital ad the police held
an emergency meeting and decided to secretly release Spriestersbach, who had a
series of mental health issues. He was returned to the streets without an
explanation, cash, or a place to stay.
A homeless shelter contacted his
family, who took Spriestersbach to live with his sister on a ten-acre property
in Vermont, which, Spriestersbach, understandably, refuses to leave.
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Randy's Dandy Coaster Castle by Alexander Perez
A dark comedy about a run-down amusement park in the Florida panhandle and the people who run the place.
It touches on a plethora of topics but mainly the psychological toll of the low wage labor market, employer/employee power dynamics, as well as the differing sociopolitical perspectives between first wave Cuban immigrants and the generation that came after them.
The play runs August 19 - 21 @ 7:30 pm; August 22 @ 1:00 & 7:00 pm; August 25-28 @ 7:30pm; August 29 @ 1:00 & 7:00 pm
IRT Theater, 154 Christopher St, New York City.
More:
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
FutureFest 2022
Entry must be an original work (NO musicals or plays for children) that has not been published or produced where admission was charged prior to FutureFest 2022. Staged readings/workshop productions are not necessarily disqualifying factors.
Should your script be selected and produced as one of the six finalists, you must be available to attend, in person, the weekend festival (July 15-17, 2022) in Dayton, Ohio and participate in all events. Finalists must acknowledge the Dayton Playhouse when script is published. The winning playwright awards the Dayton Playhouse the option to produce the winning play as part of its main stage season royalty free.
AWARDS
A $1000 honorarium will be awarded to the winning playwright; runners-up each receive $100.
The Dayton Playhouse provides the six finalists travel (within the continental U.S.) to Dayton and housing for FutureFest weekend.
***
Players Workshop seeks plays for its Ninth Annual International 10-Minute Play Festival, Diez Minutos. This fully-staged festival will be in English and will take place in March of 2022 in the international arts center of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — a World Heritage Site brimming with charm, history, and culture. San Miguel was recently voted Conde Nast Traveler Magazine "Best City in the World.” In 2017, readers of Travel – Leisure Magazine voted it the #1 city in the world to visit.
***
Fantasy Theatre Factory in Miami, Florida, understands that black female playwrights are underserved when it comes to the production of their work. We are holding a call for black female playwrights from the United States to submit monologues and short plays that reflect their personal experience, their dreams, joys and hopes.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BOOKS -> PLAYS ***
There are a lot of famous movies that were made from plays, but there are a lot of amazing plays that have been based on books. These days, everything seems to be based (even loosely) on something else. But this isn't always a bad thing. Many books lend themselves well to the stage, as evidence by the plays on this list. What are the best plays based on books?
The plays on this list span genres and production styles. They include dramas, comedies, and romances. Did you know that some of the most famous plays in history were based on novels, autobiographies, or other books? It’s no wonder they're on this list since they’re based on stories we all know and love – stories that have actually made a significant impact on the literary world as well as the world of the stage.
The plays listed here have been ranked by the community as the best. This list features the best plays based on books including, Les Miserables, Ben Hur, A Christmas Carol, Young Frankenstein, Kite Runner, Albert Speer, and War Horse. Vote up the best plays based on books below and see where the plays you think are the best rank!
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***
Before heading out to talk to Mike Poulton about adapting Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the stage, I pop the two books on the scales. The hardback copies of Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prizewinning novels weigh in at around a kilogram each: not just a workout for the mind, then. These are epic texts. “The audiobook of Wolf Hall is 24 hours,” Poulton wryly observes.
No wonder Poulton hesitated when first asked whether they could be adapted. “Probably not,” was his initial response. But Thomas Cromwell, the central character in the two novels, is nothing if not persuasive. Mantel herself has observed that “from the moment I started writing Wolf Hall, the characters were fighting to be off the page”. And so, three years and nine drafts after that initial inquiry, Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn et al are to tread the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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***
200 years of Jane Austen: six times Austen's works were adapted for the stage
(July 18, 2017) marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, but her novels live on. The BBC's Big Read, which polled the nation on their favourite novels, had Pride and Prejudice as the UK's second favourite book after JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings at number one and Emma features at number nine in the Guardian's top 100 books of all time. So it comes as no surprise that theatres are keen to adapt Austen's work for the stage. Here's our list of some of the best ones in recent years.
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"We express who we are not just by telling stories but by re-telling the stories of others, emphasizing different details, putting our own spin on things," says writer/director Aaron Posner. "The re-telling of stories is a basic human need."
But one particular way of re-telling stories, turning literature into theater, is especially tricky. In some ways, classic and popular novels provide ideal source material for plays — familiar titles, characters and settings, thoroughly developed stories, proven appeal. But the two forms work by different rules and reach us in different ways. The love a reader has for a book quickly can turn bitter if the stage version doesn't fit the version in her imagination.
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***
Theatre has been adapting books since time immemorial. Many famous plays, whether musicals, dramas, or comedies, are based on books. Successful theatrical adaptations convey the essence of the story, even if the script differs slightly from the book. Going by both, the number of first-time productions and revivals we see every year, adapting plays from popular books seems to be a recipe for success.
This is a list of 10 famous plays that you may not know were adapted from books
Cabaret
This ever-green musical is based on the novel, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. The original 1996 Broadway Musical won 8 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
The book is written as a series of six connected short stories and novellas. While the book tells the story from Isherwood’s perspective, in the play a character by the name of Cliff Bradshaw replaces him. The story, set in 1930s Berlin, describes a group of people whom the narrator meets during the rise of the Nazis. Nazism is an important theme of the play and the book, as all the characters, in one way or another, are affected by it.
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***
How many of Shakespeare’s plays can we say are wholly original to him and not based on a pre-existing work?
Two, I think. In the first case, we haven’t found a source for the main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, Pyramus and Thisbe derive from Ovid; you can find precedents for certain scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And he’d done lovers crossed before—say, in Venus and Adonis or Two Gentlemen of Verona. But we haven’t found a source for Midsummer’s mixing of the love plot, the fairy plot, and the rude mechanicals plot. That seems totally original.
The other one is The Tempest. While there are narratives of loss in romance and of shipwreck everywhere from the Greek romances through to the Roman and the Italian, we haven’t found any one book that we can run through and tabulate where Shakespeare wanted this, didn’t want that, and contradicted this—like we can with Julius Caesar and Plutarch’s Lives, for instance. These two plays are wholly original.
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***
All the World’s a Stage, But Only Some Novels Become Plays
We purchased Broadway tickets a few days ago to see a December performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, which led me to think about novels that have become plays or musicals.
Plenty of novels inspire movie adaptations, but fewer such books are turned into plays — with one reason being that there are of course more major films made than major plays staged. Also, certain elements are needed for a novel-to-play transition to have a chance to work: It helps if the novels are well-known, well-written, filled with great dialogue, dramatic, plot-oriented, and graced with memorable protagonists; and it also helps if theatrical productions feature high-profile actresses and actors. Some luck doesn’t hurt, either.
The acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird production, which will reopen this fall along with various other Broadway plays after the long COVID shutdown, first featured movie notable Jeff Daniels as attorney Atticus Finch. Daniels will return to that role when the play resumes October 5, and is scheduled to stay until January 2. Harper Lee’s iconic novel had previously been performed as a play for several decades in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama — an example of how a number of fiction books have inspired local or regional theater productions.
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