Here are five great pieces of advice for your people.


Let it go…..its difficult to do, at least it is for me….but let it go, yesterday is gone. You can’t go back and change it, so let it go.

 Time heals everything. I’m old now and I know this to be very true. So give it time. You’ll get there, but give it time.

 The ONLY person you should try better than is the person you were yesterday.

 Stay calm…another one that’s difficult for my Celtic soul to deal with….but stay calm, no matter what it is, stay calm.

 Your happiness is on you. You’re in charge of that, no one or no thing rules over your happiness.

 Smile, I assure you, the result you get in return will amaze you.



I dig this, thought you would too.....


 

Turn a blind eye


 

Your numbers up.


 

Agatha Christie's mystery

Agatha Christie with her first husband, Archie Christie. Following the breakdown of their marriage, Christie mysteriously disappeared for 11 days, which became a national news story.

 

Billy Holiday


Billie Holiday from a 1944 performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, where she shared the stage with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

 




Music


 

Scion

  

Scion comes from Anglo-French cioun, meaning "offspring" or "new growth of a plant." When it first sprouted in English, it referred to a plant's shoot; the word was then applied to portions of a plant that have been grafted. The figurative meaning, "descendant," blossomed later, with particular reference to those who were descendants of notable families.




Cavalier means "having or showing no concern for important or serious matters."

  

The adjective cavalier comes from a noun referring to a gentleman or knight who is trained in arms and horsemanship. The noun traces back to Latin caballārius, meaning "horseback rider" or "groom." It is also used for "a swaggering fellow," and English Puritans used it disdainfully to their adversaries, the swashbuckling royalist followers of Charles I, who sported longish hair and swords. Their use undoubtedly contributed to the adjective's reference to a rather unbecoming quality.



Minor White


 Minor White in his Jackson Street studio loft in San Francisco, Unknown Photographer, c. 1951.

 

Minor Martin White (July 9, 1908 – June 24, 1976) was a photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator who combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies.

 White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people, and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.

 He helped start, and for many years was editor of, the photography magazine Aperture.

White was greatly influenced by Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence," which White interpreted as allowing photographs to represent more than their subject matter. He wrote "when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A 'spontaneous symbol' is one which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)"

 In his later life he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became abstract forms. He intended these to be interpreted by the viewer as something more than what they actually present. According to White, "When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he is telling us in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor of that feeling.'...What really happened is that he recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself."

While rocks were photographed, the subject of the sequence is not rocks; while symbols seem to appear, they are barely pointers to significance. The meaning appears in the mood they raise in the beholder; and the flow of the sequence eddies in the river of his associations as he passes from picture to picture. The rocks are only the objects upon which the significance is spread like sheets on the ground to dry.

In the mid-1940s White began to articulate a philosophy about the importance of how his photographs are presented to the viewer. He was influenced initially by Stieglitz, who in his teaching emphasized that photographs shown in a structured content may support each other and may create a total statement that is more complex and meaningful that the individual images by themselves. When White began working as a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 he became friends with Nancy Newhall, who was organizing a retrospective of Edward Weston's photographs for the museum. Newhall had a gift for creating highly distinct groupings of images, and White said later that her installation of the Weston exhibit was a

Two iterations of Power Spot (1970). White flipped the negative vertically between the first and the second version.

Later, as he became more interested in anthropology and myth, he began to experiment with how individual images influenced a viewer by how they were presented. In a work he called Totemic Sequence, composed of 10 photographs, he included the same image as both the opening and the closing picture. The last picture is the first picture turned upside down. White felt that this change illustrated the simultaneous reality and unreality in a photograph. The title he gave to the first image was "Power Spot."

 







 

Lower East Side, NYC, Photo by Andreas Feininger, 1940.j


 

Keep going...


 

Here's words and explanantion for ya...

 

Intransigent comes from Spanish intransigente, meaning "uncompromising." Its root is transigir ("to compromise"), which is related to Latin transigere ("to come to an agreement"). The French have a similar verb, transiger, which also means "to compromise." Transigent as an opposite of intransigent has yet to become recognized as an acceptable word in the English language.



 Pilcrow: Apparently an alteration of the word paragraph, with r changing into l and remodeled along the more familiar words pill and crow. Earliest documented use: 1440.

In the beginning, a piece of writing was one big amorphous chunk of text: no punctuation, no upper/lowercase, no spaces. Writing real estate was expensive, whether tablets, skins, or papyrus. With time punctuation marks entered the language. A pilcrow signified a change in topic, even though the text still flowed without any visual breaks.

Eventually, actual paragraph breaks were employed and the pilcrow sat at the beginning of the paragraph, often embellished in red color. When printing came along, the hand embellishment of the pilcrow disappeared though the space marked for it remained at the beginning of the paragraph as an indent.

The pilcrow took a well-earned retirement and is no longer used.



 Originally, mettle was simply a variant spelling of the word metal (which dates to at least the 13th century), and it was used in all of the same senses as its metallic relative. Over time, however, mettle came to be used mainly in figurative senses referring to the quality of someone's character. It eventually became a distinct English word in its own right, losing its literal sense altogether. Metal remained a term primarily used for those hard, shiny substances such as steel or iron, but it also acquired a figurative use. Today, both words can mean "vigor and strength of spirit or temperament," but only metal is used of metallic substances.


Joe Arridy: Another reason to get rid of the death penalty.

 



Joe Arridy: Another reason to get rid of the death penalty.

Joe Arridy was born in 1915 in Pueblo, Colorado, to illiterate Syrian parents who did not speak English. Arridy was slow to develop, and when he did speak, he couldn’t speak in complete sentences. The idiot local elementary school principal told his parents to keep him at home. The child was eventually placed, at the age of 10, into the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he lived on and off until becoming a young adult. Both in his neighborhood and at the school, he was often mistreated and beaten by his peers. He left the school and hopped on freight railcars to leave the city, ending up at the age of 21 in the railyards of Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1936.

On August 26, 1936, Arridy was arrested for vagrancy after being caught wandering around the railyards. At the time, the county sheriff, George Carroll, was searching for suspects in what was called the Drain murder case in Pueblo Colorado, where Joe Arridy had suddenly leaped on a train.

The Drain attack was a horrific crime. On August 14, 1936, two girls of the Drain family were attacked while sleeping at home in Pueblo. Both 15-year-old Dorothy and her 12-year-old sister Barbara Drain were bludgeoned with what was believed to be a hatchet. Dorothy was also raped; she died from the hatchet attack, while Barbara survived but barely.

When Joe Arridy told a cop that he had left from Pueblo the day after the Drain attack, he was pulled out of his cell for extensive questioning about the rape/murder.   Sheriff Carroll said that Arridy immediately confessed to the crime. Yet, when Carroll contacted the Pueblo police chief Arthur Grady about Arridy, he learned that they had already arrested a man considered the prime suspect: Frank Aguilar, a laborer from Mexico. Aguilar had worked for the father of the Drain girls and been fired shortly before the attack. An ax head was recovered from Aguilar's home.

 But Sheriff Carroll claimed that Arridy told him several times he had "been with a man named Frank" at the crime scene.(That statement appears to be false, in other words, a lie by Carroll, but at this point, it can’t be proven.)

However, Aguilar….who barely spoke English…. later confessed to the crime and told police he had never seen or met Arridy, whose first language was Syrian.  Furthermore, there was no physical evidence against him. Barbara Drain had testified that Aguilar had been present at the attack, but not Arridy. She could identify Aguilar because he had worked for her father. Regardless, Arridy was transported to Pueblo and confessed again. But it’s important to know that studies since that time have shown that persons of limited mental capacity are more vulnerable to coercion during interrogation and have a higher frequency of making false confessions.

When the case was finally taken to trial, Arridy's lawyer pled insanity to spare his client's life. Arridy was ruled to be sane, while acknowledged by three state psychiatrists to be so mentally limited as to be classified as an "imbecile", a medical term at the time. They said he had an IQ of 46, and the mind of a six-year-old and that he was "incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and therefore, would be unable to perform any action with a criminal intent".

It didn’t matter. Joe Arridy was convicted based on his false confession. Aguilar was also convicted of the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1937 and went to his death, denying Arridy was involved in the case.

Joe Arridy was sentenced to death as well. Attorney Gail L. Ireland, later the Colorado Attorney General, took on Arridy’s case as defense counsel, Pro Bono, after his conviction and sentencing.

While Ireland won delays of Arridy's execution, he was unable to get his conviction overturned or commutation of his sentence. Ireland also petitioned the Supreme Court of Colorado, writing, "Believe me when I say that if he is gassed, it will take a long time for the state of Colorado to live down the disgrace". The Court denied the petition by a single vote.

While held on death row during the appeals process, Arridy played with a toy train, given to him by prison warden Roy Best. The warden said that Arridy was "the happiest prisoner on death row".  And that he was liked and treated well by both the prisoners and guards alike.

Although Ireland gained nine stays of his execution, Arridy was finally ordered to be executed in late 1939.

He ordered ice cream for his last meal.

Warden Best said, "He probably didn't even know he was about to die, all he did was happily sit and play with a toy train I had given him" and that when Best questioned Joe about his impending execution, he showed "blank bewilderment".

When Best told him that he was about to die in the gas chamber, Joe replied to him with a broad smile "No, no, Joe won't die." Inside the chamber, he became nervous and Best held his hand and reassured him.

Not one member of Joe’s family came to witness the execution.

Almost 70 years after Joe Arridy’s execution, a group, called Friends of Joe Arridy, came to the attention of Attorney David A. Martinez, who prepared a 400-page petition for a pardon from Governor Bill Ritter. Terri Bradt, the granddaughter of Attorney Gail L. Ireland, also became involved in the pardon issue.

In 2011 Joe Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon by Governor Bill Ritter. In June 2007, there was a dedication of a tombstone commissioned by the supporters to grant Joe a full pardon,  for his grave at a Cemetery near the state prison. (Prisoner are buried without markers)

Joe Arridy's death, the US Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to convicted persons who are mentally disabled.

The Hobo's poet

 

A Sailor's Life

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to brag —

An oilskin suit and a dunnage bag.

But, howsoever humble he be,

By the Living God, he has the sea!

 

The long, white leagues and the foam of it,

And the heart to make a home of it,

On a ship that kicks up waves behind

Through the blazing days and tempests blind.

 

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to love —

But he has the huge, blue sky above

The everlasting waves around,

That wash with an eternal sound.

 

So bury me, when I come to die,

Where the full-sailed, heeling clippers ply;

Give up the last cold body of me,

To the only home that I have — the sea!

 

 Harry Hibbard Kemp dubbed himself the “The Hobo’s poet” leaving one to assume his works were roughhewn and simple. But they weren’t. Far from it. His poems were overly complicated and overly polished, and, if the truth be known, not very good at all.  Critics of his day said Kemp was mostly all talk and little talent. Still, during his very long career, Kemp was the favorite of the literary bohemian crowd.

Move ahead to 1910, when Upton Sinclair and his wife Meta, said to be a woman who dripped of sensuality,  built a house in the single-tax village of Arden, Delaware. A year later, Sinclair invited Kemp to camp on the couple's land. (A bedding fit for a “hobo’s poet) Sadly,  Meta swooned for Kemp and left her husband for the poet, all leading to a nasty divorce. (Prior to Kemp, Meta had  an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis; they had a son together named Ben.)

But Meta, a noted neurotic, wasn’t the Hobo type. She was descended from one of the First Families of Virginia, and had high ambitions for herself and dropped Kemp as quickly as she had picked him up.

Sinclair blossomed with his next wife Mary Craig Kimbrough, another woman from the American elite who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis.

Kemp (and Meta) faded into oblivion. He became a regular denizen of Greenwich Village in New York City and Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he was associated with the Provincetown Players. (There is a street named for him, Harry Kemp Way, in Provincetown.) He died on Cape Cod in 1960.

 


 

OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS

  OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***


FLEAS ON THE DOG is open for submissions
Oh Drat! The gutter press is back!!! Yes, the unnatural heir to ‘The Beats’ is itchin’ and twitchin’ for QUALITY fiction, poetry, plays and nonfiction for our milestone (drum roll, please…) ISSUE 10!!! We’re hungry for junk that’s full of spunk and kick ass funk that will put your family and friends in denial for months! So do the politically incorrect thing and send us your bling! See our guidelines for details and learn new ways to sabotage your literary career!

***
The Growing Stage – The Children’s Theatre of New Jersey is committed to expanding the canon of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) through our New Play-Reading Festival. This program provides a wonderful opportunity for artists to have their unpublished and unproduced work presented before a family audience by a cast consisting of both professional and amateur actors. Four finalists will be selected and one script will be presented as a fully mounted production in the Growing Stage’s 2022-2023 season.

***
5th Floor Theatre Company has always been committed to helping the New York City theatre community grow and thrive, a mission that has become especially critical as the arts continue to regain their footing in a post-COVID-19 environment. 
Beginning this Fall, 5th Floor Theatre will renew this mission through Groundbreakers, which will award up to five individuals and/or groups to support their development of theatre projects in New York City. Grantees may receive up to $2,500 USD based on the scope of their project. 

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** TOP 10* MOST-PRODUCED PLAYS OF 2019 - 2020 ***

~ A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath: 12 (TIE)
~ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, based on the book by Mark Haddon: 12 (TIE)
~ Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe: 10 
~ Bright Star with music by Steve Martin (also book) and Edie Brickell (also lyrics) 9 (TIE)
~ Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau: 9 (TIE)
~ Tiny Beautiful Things adapted by Nia Vardalos from the book by Cheryl Strayed: 8 (TIE)
~ Admissions by Joshua Harmon: 8 (TIE)
~ Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee: 8 (TIE)
~ The Children by Lucy Kirkwood: 8 (TIE)
~ The Great Leap by Lauren Yee: 8 (TIE)
~ Murder on the Orient Express adapted by Ken Ludwig from the book by Agatha Christie: 8 (TIE)
~ School Girls or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh: 8 (TIE)
~ The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse: 8 (TIE)
~ The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe: 8 (TIE)

*Actually 14 because of ties.

More:

***
In many ways, the work of the thirty-seven-year-old playwright Lucas Hnath grows out of the authorial complexities of that older generation of writers. (He owes something to Tom Stoppard, too.) But instead of writing directly about the experience of writing or not writing, inventing or not inventing, Hnath has now found himself by parsing and filling in a story he didn’t write, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” (directed by Sam Gold, at the John Golden), Hnath’s invigorating ninety-minute, intermissionless work, is an irresponsible act—a kind of naughty imposition on a classic, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s signature play with the humor that the nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises a number of questions, such as What constitutes an individual achievement in this age of the simulacrum, when everything owes something to something else?

Ibsen was born about a hundred and fifty years before Hnath, in Skien, Norway, into a family of merchants. His parents were unusually close, and he was both fascinated and horrified by their relationship. The question of intimacy—and its connections to money, Christian morality, and gender roles, or, more specifically, how a woman should behave—excited his dramatic imagination and also made him a critic of the mores he grew up with. Widely considered the father of modern realism, Ibsen wrote “A Doll’s House” in 1879, and it changed everything. Before that, he’d produced a number of scripts in verse, but poetry had sort of prettified his characters, and the restrictions of the form prevented them from getting to the heart, or the marrow, of their stories. Ibsen switched to prose for its more immediate effects—and as a way of shocking audiences out of their complacency. “A Doll’s House” did just that.

More...

***
At its worst, the demon of depression would tell me that my family would be better off without me. When I expressed that sentiment to my therapist, she told me in no uncertain terms that the children of parents who die by suicide never recover. It was a statement that would save my life as I could not bear to put that burden on my son.

“Every Brilliant Thing,” which Hope Summer Repertory Theatre (HSRT) has been producing this summer, explores the effect of a mother’s depression on her son—of what his life is like because of the physical, chemical, and emotional changes wrought upon him by a distant mother. 

When a mother is hospitalized after a suicide attempt, her 6-year old son starts making a list of things worth living for—things in life that are brilliant. The list started with “ice cream” and would grow throughout his life until it reached a million. The audience-participation one-person show displayed in poignant ways how the mother’s depression continued to affect her son throughout his life in ways both expected and unexpected.

More...

***
The teacher is trying to explain a poem to her class, but an echo keeps getting in the way. The echo, which reiterates words by Gwendolyn Brooks about young black men marking time on their way to an early grave, comes with a face, which only the teacher, named Nya, and the audience can see.

This phantom has the voice and visage of a lanky teenager who is still very much alive, Nya’s son. And this ghostly, reproachful recitation of Brooks’s elegy to doomed youth shatters the composure of a woman for whom self-possession is as essential as oxygen. The words on the blackboard behind Nya magically erase themselves, and she finds herself sliding out of consciousness.

That haunting rendering of a panic attack provides the strongest moment in “Pipeline,” Dominique Morisseau’s passionate but frustratingly unresolved play about a family struggling to outrun social prophecy. It’s a scene that captures the wrenching sense of helplessness that pervades this intensely acted production, which opened on Monday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

The play’s title refers to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” wherein underprivileged students are channeled directly from the public education system into American penal institutions. The subject was trenchantly explored in Anna Deavere Smith’s journalistic drama “Notes From the Field,” seen last year in New York at Second Stage Theater.

More...

***
Clap your hands, everybody, and sing along with Pol! That’s as in Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which wiped out nearly a quarter of that country’s population during the second half of the 1970s.

All right, to be exact, it’s not Pol himself who’s shaking a tambourine and urging the audience to get up and dance at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Lauren Yee’s adventurous, tonally scrambled “Cambodian Rock Band” opened on Monday night. Instead, this enthusiastic master of ceremonies is called Duch. That is the nom de guerre of the former math teacher Kang Kek Iew, a Pol confederate known as “Cambodia’s Himmler,” who ran the notorious S21 prison (read: death) camp.

The real Duch, who was the first of the Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for mass murder, is now serving out a life prison sentence. But Yee, a playwright of great heart and audacity to match, has seen fit to give her version of Duch the run of her brash but conventionally sentimental play, which features the songs of the Los Angeles-based Cambodian surf rock group Dengue Fever.

More...

***
Pack your bags, people — the apocalypse is coming. This warning comes to you courtesy of Lucy Kirkwood, whose cautionary disaster drama, “The Children,” scared the wits out of audiences at London’s Royal Court Theater and promises to do the same on Broadway, where it recently opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club production.

Its sterling cast intact, Kirkwood’s harrowing play exposes us to the drab lives and dark pasts of three nuclear physicists who meet in a cottage by the sea to contemplate the end of the world. Long-married Hazel (Deborah Findlay) and Robin (Ron Cook) live alone in this dreary cottage and seem to have no neighbors — understandably, since their snug little corner of the world has seen earthquakes, tsunamis, and a nuclear meltdown at the nearby power plant where they once worked.

After an absence of almost 40 years, a former colleague and friend named Rose (Francesca Annis) arrives on a mission that she dramatically refrains from revealing until the very end. But when the play opens, she’s splattered with blood from a fierce nosebleed – a plot detail that can’t be ignored in a talky but ultimately chilling play about the consequences of nuclear fallout.

More...

***
The reach of American culture may be wide, but it is not always as profound as Americans might hope. At a girls’ boarding school in Africa, dreams are built on the backs of whatever Western brands the students have heard of. Walmart and White Castle (“a castle with food!”) are just as good grist for the fantasy mill as a “Calvin Klean” dress to wear to the dance.

And so it is for theater. “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which opened on Thursday evening in an MCC Theater production, is a comedy built on borrowed templates: not just “Mean Girls,” as the subtitle admits, but also a whole genre of clique-bait movies including “Heathers,” “Jawbreaker” and “Legally Blonde.”

But something fascinating happens when the author, Jocelyn Bioh, a New York playwright and actor, applies those templates to the world of her parents, who emigrated from Ghana in 1968. The nasty-teen comedy genre emerges wonderfully refreshed and even deepened by its immersion in a world it never considered.

More...

***
The unfortunate truth is that we we’re being manipulated. In the first half of Harmon’s show, we’re being pushed to let our Secret Racist flags fly (“admissions” also means “confessions”), and in the second half we are, like Roberta, being taken to task. It’s a strangely religious structure: Confession and Repentance. Serving as maestro of this tonal shift — and Harmon’s voice-of-the-playwright character — is Sherri’s 17-year-old son Charlie.

Charlie comes raging into the play in its third scene, sounding less like a precocious 17-year-old and more like a jaded, hepped-up 30-something playwright. He’s been screaming in the woods for four hours, he informs us, and now he arrives in his parents’ living room, a logorrheic volcano spewing forth his fury, frustrations, blame, and justifications both racist and sexist for the fact that he just got deferred by Yale while his friend Perry (son of a white mother and mixed-race father) got accepted. While clearly not a teenager, Ben Edelman is a powerful, fiercely articulate actor, and his Charlie takes the play hostage with an epic monologue of white-boy angst.

“I am drowning over here, okay?” Charlie fumes, “I’m not an idiot, I don’t have white pride, but I don’t hate myself … And by the way, who even decides? Cause I would really like to meet the person who decides who counts as a person of color and who doesn’t … Cause my mom’s dad had to escape before like half his family was murdered by Nazis, but now when we all apply to college, I go in the shit pile … [because] — shocker! — they found a new way to keep Jews out: They just made us white instead, and the grandsons of Nazis who came to America go in the exact same pile as me, which makes absolutely no sense … But keep pushing me, keep fucking pushing me … tell me how white I am and how disgusting I am, I’ll just stand in the corner taking it all in until I can’t fucking take it anymore and I all of a sudden break out into a FUCKING SIEG HEIL!!!!!”

That’s just a fraction of Charlie’s rant, and it’s a frankly terrifying thing to listen to. It’s terrifying because the audience loves it

More...

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NYCPlaywrights" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nycplaywrights_group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nycplaywrights_group/c23dca89-808f-4fa3-9c7e-e49d0aefda16n%40googlegroups.com.