Intrepid comes from the Latin word intrepidus, itself formed by the combination of the prefix in-, meaning “not,” and the adjective trepidus, meaning “alarmed.”
Umbriferous (uhm-BRIF-uh-ruhs) Casting a shadow. From Latin umbra (shade,
shadow) + ferre (to bear). Some related words are umbrella, adumbrate, and
somber.
for Erich and Patricia
List of things to
banish
Can include words,
people, theoretical apparatuses
Can take the form of a
grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto
Can read like a
personal ad of unwanting
Can summon aid to help
with banishing
Can be uncertain of
what will remain
Can have no positive
mission statement
Can be written in a
language other than language
Can circulate amongst
FRIENDS ONLY
Can evade being
imagined, written, embodied, archived
Can go like this
Can make itself
irrelevant
Can include buildings,
brushstrokes, and other abominations
Can mean my way of life
is unlivable
Can mean my life is as
yet unlived
Can mean I must become
a menace to my enemies
Can undo futurity
forever in favor of *******
Can remake futurity
into someone who doesn’t recognize herself
Can punctuate the
present like a cup of coffee or a Monday
Can be dreamed up and
shot down and elongated
Can tell us something
Can include forms and
fantasies, even the ones getting us by
Can instigate an
interregnum
Can be unfinished
Can include hope
hopefully
Can be blank
But don’t kid yourself
It isn’t
And it can’t include
History
The Great Black Heron
Denise
Levertov - 1923-1997
Since
I stroll in the woods more often
than
on this frequented path, it's usually
trees
I observe; but among fellow humans
what
I like best is to see an old woman
fishing
alone at the end of a jetty,
hours
on end, plainly content.
The
Russians mushroom-hunting after a rain
trail
after themselves a world of red sarafans,
nightingales,
samovars, stoves to sleep on
(though
without doubt those are not
what
they can remember). Vietnamese families
fishing
or simply sitting as close as they can
to
the water, make me recall that lake in Hanoi
in
the amber light, our first, jet-lagged evening,
peace
in the war we had come to witness.
This
woman engaged in her pleasure evokes
an
entire culture, tenacious field-flower
growing
itself among the rows of cotton
in
red-earth country, under the feet
of
mules and masters. I see her
a
barefoot child by a muddy river
learning
her skill with the pole. What battles
has
she survived, what labors?
She's
gathered up all the time in the world
—nothing
else—and waits for scanty trophies,
complete
in herself as a heron.
Biden and Xavier Becerra
I can’t come to grips with the fact that we actually need to protect
orphans and foster kids from lunatics who want to change the children’s sex.
If these were kids from stable homes with at least one parent in place,
this would never be an issue. But it is an issue. So much so that Rep. Jim
Banks, has unveiled a bill to protect the adoption rights of parents who want
to raise kids based on biological sex.
Remarkably the bill protects the kids from the loons in the child welfare
agencies…who are charged with housing and protecting these children from
loons…. preventing them from denying prospective adopters who say they will
raise kids in a manner consistent with the minor’s biological sex.
The increasingly bizarre US Department of Health and Human Services
announced a rule aimed at ensuring minors are placed in homes accepting of
their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Okay, sounds harmless enough but in the fine print…. weasels love fine
print…..the rule "would require that child welfare agencies ensure that
each child in their care who identifies as LGBTQI+ receive a safe and
appropriate placement and services that help them thrive. The proposed rule
would protect LGBTQI+ youth by placing them in environments free of hostility,
mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status. And the proposed
rule would require that caregivers for LGBTQI+ children are properly and fully
trained to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s
self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender
expression"
Kids in these circumstances are traumatized, they will more than likely
fail in this life at everything they do and they will die relatively
young.
Those are the undisputable facts, the last thing they need is this crap.
Banks’ bill would prevent child welfare agencies and related groups that
receive federal funding from getting those funds if they refuse prospective
parents who insist against the child’s stated LGBTQ status.
That includes prospective parents who say they will refuse a child’s
desire for medical, surgical, pharmacological, and psychological treatment if
it is inconsistent with their biological sex.
In the matter of foster kids, foster carers and agencies will have to use a transgender
child’s “identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an
age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified
gender identity and expression”.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra thinks that messing with these
traumatized and directionless children even more is a positive thing. “This is
going to change the complexion of how we view foster care treatment for our
foster kids, but more importantly, how we look at the people who we rely on to
care for foster kids.”
Try to sell Gay to his rich kids and see what happens to
you.
The people who are fighting this rule are the many
faith-based providers of foster care, but you see, that’s why the whack jobs
at Health and Human Services wrote the rule in the first place.
When the government goons who wrote this rule put it in
print they knew it violated the US Constitution and discriminated unfairly
against Christians who hold traditional orthodox beliefs on marriage, the
family, and sexual morality by forcing them from the sector.
Really what this is about is two things, one is to force
fostering parents and related religious agencies to override their
consciences and the other is to push the Catholic Church…which raised me
within the Connecticut foster care system…out of the fostering and adoptions
services they offer. Without faith-based organizations and foster homes,
the foster care system, which survivors only through miracles, would
collapse, plain and simple because the rule would severely limit the number of
available foster homes. What that will do is force the federal and state
agencies to pour even more money into a foster system that doesn’t work.
Let me simplify that…in the end, the ones who will get hurt
are kids from dirt-poor backgrounds who have no way to defend themselves, but,
you see, that’s the brilliance of the government plan.
Island
%20Prima%20di%20natale%20%5BBefore%20Christmas%5D,%202020.jpg)
As I
approach seven decades, I have become much more aware that aging is many
things, an accumulation of changes that happened in quick succession causing
some parts of me to grow while other parts of me decline.
I’ve
become more cognizant of the important matters in my life, which, more and
more, are always things, while, willfully, I am less aware of the
insignificant, which, more and more, are people.
You have
no doubt heard the expression “Age is just a number” is a dumber way of saying
that our sense of spirit, my eternal being, has gotten better and seems to get
better with every passing day.
I think
this change is due largely to my growing and ever-expanding reliance on my
intuition. Unlike the use of my legs or the ability to lift heavy things, my
intuition has gotten better with age, and the more I rely on it, the more
reliable it has become. I feel wiser for using it and I wonder if the use
of our intuition is a natural part of aging. When we are young, for
men anyway, we can rely on our quickness and our strength, as we age, at least
in my case, fast no longer defines me, in fact, I avoid fast things now, they
tire me out. As I said, my terrific strength, built by decades of
manual labor that I hated is far, far less than it
was. Nowadays, before lifting anything seemingly heavy, I have to
ask myself “Is it worth a heart attack?” a real possibility in my
case. Of course, we have to be careful in our use of intuition because as we
age, cognition and emotion impact the decision processes. It's simply a part of
life.
The
older we get our deliberative processes, the ability to critically examine an
issue lessens. That is balanced out by our stability and emotional
processing increases. The bottom line is it all balances out. By relying more
on our stability of emotions and less on our declining deliberative faculties,
the quality of their decisions is significantly improved. As Camus wrote, “To grow old is to move
from passion to compassion.”
“They shall not
grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years
condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.”
Laurence Binyon
A true story of glamour and tragedy
Review:
“American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the ‘It’ Girl, and
the Crime of the Century” by Paula Uruburu
DEC
6, 2023
This
book, published in 2008, isn’t new but neither is the story of love, loss,
betrayal and passion. Evelyn Nesbit’s connection to the Adirondack region is
through her stay at Chateaugay Lake in 1915, while hiding from hordes of
reporters during her husband’s second murder trial in New York City.
In
1900, when Florence Evelyn was 15 years old, she moved from Pittsburgh to New
York City with her mother (confusingly named, Evelyn Florence) and brother.
Painters, sculptors and photographers had already re-created her likeness so
often that her face was everywhere: magazines, advertisements, newspapers and
even in church stained-glass windows. In NYC, the trend continued. She was
slightly built, a “waif” who stood barely 5 feet tall, due mostly to
malnourishment her entire childhood. Her father died when she was 11 years old,
leaving a financial mess for her ill-equipped mother to untangle. Once her
neglectful mother realized her daughter’s beauty was a valuable currency,
Florence Evelyn became the family breadwinner until her mother remarried and
cut off all communications with her daughter.
Although
Florence Evelyn read every book she could find and dreamed of fulfilling her
father’s dream that she attend Vassar College, instead of attending high
school, Florence Evelyn worked in a department store during the day and posed
for painters and sculptors in the evenings. Her younger brother worked in the
same store while their mother dreamed of becoming a clothing designer. She
often left the children with family members for months at a time while she
searched for work with no results, and the family continued to live in poverty.
Even after moving to New York City for Florence Evelyn’s career, they fared
little better. She continued to work during the day, posing for artists. In the
evenings, she played the role of a Spanish maiden in the musical Florodoro, and
then she partied into the mornings. She was 16, with inconsistent parental
supervision. During this time, she changed her name to Eve Nesbit.
Men
began to notice the girl’s beauty. She became an obsession for countless, much
older, men. On a nightly basis, her dressing room was filled with flowers, love
letters and gifts from admirers she didn’t know or even care to know. Until
Stanford White, millionaire architect, made his entrance, Eve was uninterested
in the men who sought her attention. White was 46 years old, married and a
father. White kept up his carefully cultivated public persona as a patron of
the arts, but he privately preyed on young girls like Eve. She wasn’t the
first, nor the last. This is only the beginning of Eve’s story.
Even
if you don’t know the tragic story of Evelyn Nesbit, you can probably guess
some of what this young, vulnerable girl endured. But there is much more to the
fascinating story in Paula Uruburu’s book. I recommend reading the tale of the
“It” girl at the turn of the century. American Eve is a little bit like a
reality television show mixed with a melodramatic telenovella and a Bollywood
movie, but sadly true.
Central Florida foster care agency failed to pay bills,
caused kids to sleep in offices, suit says
By ANNIE MARTIN | anmartin@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando
Sentinel
December 3, 2023 at 7:00 a.m.
Embrace Families, the lead agency for foster care in Central
Florida, is being sued by a contractor that says the nonprofit owes it more
than $1.3 million for services it provided, including for children who had to
sleep in the contractor’s offices because space was not available in foster
homes.
An unexpectedly high number of children needing care have
“overwhelmed” the foster care system during the past couple of years, prompting
a crisis, according to the complaint filed last month in Orange County Circuit
Court by Children’s Home Society of Florida.
The nonprofit is alleging that Embrace Families, which
administers foster care and related services for roughly 3,000 children in
Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, did not reimburse it for expenses,
including transportation to school and medical appointments, as well as
mentoring services, for children sleeping in Children’s Home Society offices.
Embrace Families has said in recent weeks it is in dire financial straits and
may have to abandon its foster care role.
A spokeswoman for Children’s Home Society, which serves
at-risk and foster children across the state, declined to comment on the
matter.
Maureen Brockman, a spokeswoman for Embrace Families, wrote
that the complaint concerns expenses beyond the organization’s original $32
million contract with Children’s Home Society, which ended last year. The two
nonprofits are in mediation and working to resolve the dispute, she added.
Embrace Families is in a “financial emergency” and board
members wrote last month in a letter to the state that they expect to run out
of money in the coming months. Though Embrace Families gave the required six
months notice to end the organization’s contract with the Department of
Children and Families, board members also warned the state they anticipate they
will deplete the nonprofit’s funding “much earlier than that date.”
Embrace Families is one of more than a dozen organizations
across the state that manage these services through contracts with DCF. A
spokesperson for the department told the Sentinel the department has expressed
concerns for over a year that the organization was mismanaging its finances,
placing children in unlicensed settings and providing too little support to its
contractors.
But Embrace Families has blamed rising expenses and
insufficient support from the state for its financial woes.
Board chair Angela Folger wrote in an email to the Sentinel
that the area is home to 12% of the state’s children, yet Embrace Family
receives only 7% of the funding provided to the organizations that manage
foster care across the state.
Gerry Glynn, the organization’s interim chief operating
officer, noted that disparity this week in his comments to the Orange County
Legislative Delegation, which met on Wednesday in Orlando. The group includes
state House and Senate members whose districts are located partially or
entirely in Orange County.
He also said the Legislature had agreed to fund a request
from the Embrace Families for nearly $13 million to cover deficits, but that
DCF has not released all of the money to the organization. As a result, Glynn
said, board members decided to end the state contract.
“Despite consistent efforts to collaborate, it became clear
that we were not making progress with the department,” Glynn said.
But a bill filed less than a week after board members wrote
to the state could help Central Florida in the future, he said. The
legislation, filed by Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Miami, is intended to promote
“prevention, family preservation, and permanency” and provides financial
incentives to lead agencies in the foster care system that achieve those goals.
Embrace Families leaders have said they are penalized unfairly for keeping more
children with their families, which diminishes the funding they receive from the
state.
Glynn encouraged local lawmakers to support the bill, saying
that he thinks it could result in a funding increase of as much as 20% for
whichever organization steps in as the area’s lead agency.
“We think the children and families in Central Florida
deserve a more equitable funding formula and we would encourage you all to
continue to support that push for equitable funding,” Glynn said.
I’ve worked in a managerial capacity in many statewide and local campaigns, and in each campaign, the rule is the same, campaign accounts are almost sacrosanct. They are almost always parked with a licensed accounting or law firm and under the sole direction of the campaign’s treasurer.
Campaign funds are never to be used to pay for one personal lifestyle.
Why?
Because it's stealing.
Yet this horrid George Santos, representative from New York’s North Shore District spent campaign funds on everything from Botox treatments, casinos, porn, and $6,000 on Ferragamo shoes.
Six Thousand dollars. On shoes.
And then there is lying, blatant, seemingly insane lying. Among many other fibs he was dumb enough to put in writing, Santos claimed to have worked in an upper management position at Goldman Sachs, (not true) and that he had relatives who were not only Holocaust victims but 9/11 survivors as well (He isn’t Jewish, and no such relatives exist)
He failed to mention that he committed check fraud in Brazil in 2008, and was arrested but failed to show up in court for his hearing (Brazilian authorities revived the case in 2022.) He has also had several judgments against him in the US concerning eviction and personal debt cases. In 2022, he was accused of failing to pay thousands of dollars in judgments from the 2010s. Another case of theft by deception was dropped in 2017. He had written bad checks in the amount of $15,000 to an Amish dog breeder from his account. He said that his checkbook had been stolen in 2017 and his lawyer successfully argued that the signatures on the checks were not Santos's.
The Washington Post reported that three other Amish dog breeders alleged that they did not file police reports against Santos and were never paid.
Allegations of mishandling funds
In January 2023, he was accused of stealing money donated to a GoFundMe fundraiser. Santos had set up the page under his alias Anthony Devolder. The fund was to raise $3000 for a homeless vet who had to have a life-threatening stomach tumor from his service dog would cost $3,000. When the $3000 was raised Santos closed the fund and withdrew the money. GoFundMe banned Santos.
There was a claim that Santos stole cash from an inheritance on several occasions, used a friend's Brazilian tax information to buy jewelry on credit, never repaid her, and threatened the victim physically.
Santos's name also came up in a 2017 international credit card skimming scheme perpetrated in Seattle by Brazilians.
In February 2023, Derek Myers, the prospective staffer filed a sexual harassment complaint against Santos with the House Ethics Committee, alleging Santos had touched his groin inappropriately while inviting him out to a karaoke bar and telling Myers that his husband was out of town.
In May 2023, a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York indicted Santos on 13 criminal charges: seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. Prosecutors accused Santos of "three distinct schemes": fraudulent solicitation of political contributions, unemployment benefits fraud, and making false statements on the financial disclosure reports he submitted to the House of Representatives. In the fraudulent solicitation scheme, Santos allegedly persuaded two supporters to donate $25,000 each to a limited liability company controlled by him and then used the money for personal expenses. Santos also allegedly obtained a total of $24,000 in unemployment benefits from mid-2020 to April 2021 while drawing an annual salary of $120,000.
Despite all of that. it took three tries…..three votes……for the House of Representatives to throw this clown out of Congress.
That means that 112 Republicans and two Democrats believe that this guy belongs in Congress. And at that, the final count against him was hardly the landslide of indignity that it should have been, and Santos almost survived the third attempt to kick him out onto the street where he belongs.
None of it fazed him. You know what he said as he left the Capito, Building? He said “Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place”
The Seattle Times editorial board
The cases handled by the state
Department of Children, Youth and Families are some of the most difficult faced
by any state agency, and its overhaul of foster care is long overdue. That work
focuses mostly on the front door, where young children are removed from their
families.
But one group of foster youth has been
pushed aside for decades, at incalculable social cost. These
are the kids for whom case workers cannot find stable placements. Instead, they
sleep in hotel rooms, unlicensed facilities and, until very recently, empty
offices. To expect these children to pick up their backpacks in the morning and
happily trot off to school is a fantasy.
Last year, 358 of them, some only 10
years old, spent 4,570 nights languishing in hotels and repurposed group
facilities.
In 2015, when Patrick Dowd, who
monitors outcomes at DCYF, first learned of this population, he was aghast. At
the time, children had spent 120 nights in these “exceptional placements.”
Today, the number is nearly 40 times higher.
These are kids the state promised to
raise better than their biological families had. The state’s failure not only
breaches that vow, it also puts others at risk.
Last year, kids in unlicensed
placements attacked staff 49 times. Sometimes, the assaults occurred in a
moving car. In one case, the “youth held scissors to the throat” of the driver,
commanding them to cover their face with a pillow as the kid took off,
according to Dowd’s most recent report.
Another youth broke down the door of
their hotel room, shoved a fire extinguisher through the crack and doused a
staffer and security guard before running onto the highway. Later, the same
kid, being driven to another site, threatened to kill the worker if she did not
pull over. When she tried to comply, the youth snatched her car keys from the
ignition and threw them out the window. In a third instance, the same youth,
now in a hotel room, pulled the supervisor’s hair, “dragged her across the
room, and kicked her several times in the face.” The assault continued for more
than 10 minutes before law enforcement arrived, according to Dowd’s report.
We can’t put it any plainer than he
does: These assaults “are a direct result of multiple systems’ lack of
appropriate resources, placements, and services” for kids in dire need.
It is time for Ross Hunter, secretary
of DCFY, to turn his prodigious energies toward this group of young people.
He has overseen a few steps in the
right direction. Where kids spent 771 nights sleeping in DCYF offices during
2021, there were no office stays last year.
As of last month, most of the kids who
had gone 20 days or more without a real home had some form of stable housing.
But five remained in unlicensed holding facilities, four were in juvenile
detention, and three were “currently missing from care,” meaning on the street.
Two, having turned 18, aged out of foster care and, unsurprisingly, declined to
extend their time in the system.
DCYF was sued by three such youth in
2021, and in response the department promises an array of changes by the end of
next year.
They include creating a corps of
professional foster parents trained and paid to handle young people with
extreme behaviors; building a system of “hub homes” run by similarly trained
foster parents, who can provide respite breaks for one another; and standing up
a program for teenagers more suited to living on their own — with case
management — than in a family or group home.
Dowd endorses all of these approaches.
But the likelihood of meeting the 2024 deadline is not promising.
There is no polite way to say it:
These kids are on the road to joining Washington’s ranks of those who are
homeless or incarcerated. It does not have to be that way.
The Seattle Times editorial
board members
are editorial page editor Kate Riley, Frank A. Blethen, Melissa Davis, Josh
Farley, Alex Fryer, Claudia Rowe, Carlton Winfrey and William K. Blethen
(emeritus).
Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery.
The subject of this image is named Arp 282, an
interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom)
and the galaxy IC 1559 (top).
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark
Energy Survey, J. Schmidt
The Frank Moffett Mosier Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language for 2023-2024.
Monetary award to playwright: $3000 for works with a running time of at least
40 minutes.
Submissions must be in a heightened version of the English language in order to
provide a meaningful challenge to the actors. This includes, but is not limited
to, works using metre, verse, rhyming schemes, pidgins, creoles, and
code-switching.
***
Relentless Award 2024 ~ The Relentless Award, established in honor of Philip
Seymour Hoffman and his pursuit of truth in the theater, is the largest annual
cash prize in American theater awarded to a playwright in recognition of a new
play.
***
Heartland Theatre Company is seeking eight 10-minute original plays to be
considered for production in June of 2024 as part of our 21st annual 10-Minute
Play Festival. This year, the theme is GHOSTS.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** PSYCHOLOGY OF THEATER ***
Why do we need live theatre? Many artists suggest that theatre can improve
empathy for those who are different from ourselves, but until recently, there
has been little research on the psychology of attending live shows. This is
surprising, since theatre has been a major part of our lives both recently and
throughout history. For example, before the pandemic, according to Americans
for the Arts, about 44 million Americans attended non-profit theatres in the
United States each year.
My colleagues and I set out to investigate the effects of attending live
theatre.
More...
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/psychology-live-theatre-can-seeing-theatre-increase-empathy
***
Elliott Loverin, a junior majoring in Psychology with a minor in musical
theater, is focused on the intersections of developmental, abnormal and social
psychology. He’s also intrigued by the interactions between individual
psychopathology and group dynamics, especially in young people.
“Gaining insight into the processes that govern human behavior inspired me to
pursue psychology, and its diverse applications allow me to investigate the
topics I find interesting within the field.”
Loverin’s theater career began with an audition for “A Christmas Carol” at the
Berkshire Theatre Group in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Although he wasn’t cast,
the 10-year-old was invited to perform in the background chorus for the annual
holiday concert.
More...
https://trinity.duke.edu/news/psychology-student-hones-critical-thinking-skills-theater
***
Drama therapy is the intentional use of drama and/or theater processes to
achieve therapeutic goals.
Drama therapy is an embodied practice that is active and experiential. This
approach can provide the context for participants to tell their stories, set
goals and solve problems, express feelings, or achieve catharsis. Through
drama, the depth and breadth of inner experience can be actively explored and
interpersonal relationship skills can be enhanced.
More...
https://www.nadta.org/what-is-drama-therapy
***
Community-based theater is a form of sociopolitical theater that takes a
critical position toward social issues, often focuses on creating original
works, aims to raise awareness, and works to alleviate social frustrations and
conflict. This form of theater functions from a community-citizen empowerment
and social justice perspective and is designed to be inclusive ( 4 ). Community-based
theater activities often exist outside mainstream theater institutions and are
intended to benefit not only individual participants but also communities and
societies ( 5 ). These are interdisciplinary and hybrid practices based within
a wide variety of contexts around the world. Community-based theater projects
emphasize the dialogical nature and ongoing process of creating empowering
workshops and performances. These are often grounded in established theoretical
or logistical structures, such as Playback Theater, Sociodrama, Theatre of the
Oppressed, or Agit-Prop Theater.
More...
https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.3.306
***
“Actors work hard to embody and personify their characters,” Sherman said. “If
they just pretend to be a character, their performance is not genuine.” When a
musical’s character experiences mental illness and other characters react to
that illness, she continued, actors “really want to portray the illness
accurately. They have to get in touch with that emotional internal experience
to portray a character accurately on stage.”
While inhabiting a character is central in a performance, Sherman said her
study participants told her it can also present personal challenges.
“What you take in you become,” Sherman said. “That is why musical theater is so
potent. It can do beautiful things, but it can also do damage.”
More...
https://www.minnpost.com/mental-health-addiction/2021/08/study-investigates-mental-health-themed-musicals-significant-toll-on-performers/
***
“I wanted to get ahead on the lunches,” Diana tells her husband, Dan, as she
frenetically lines up slices of white bread on the floor and begins piling on
the lettuce and mayo.
That is the moment in “next to normal,” the new musical at the Booth Theater,
when Dan (J. Robert Spencer) realizes it is time for his manic-depressive wife
(Alice Ripley) to go back into therapy. As artistic portrayals of mental
illness go, the moment is fairly tame. Wonder Bread doesn’t have the same
dramatic bam as, say, gouging out the eyes of six horses (as in “Equus”). But
that quotidian element is perhaps what makes “normal,” which opened on Broadway
on Wednesday, so unusual.
Mental illness on the stage and screen is often portrayed in extreme ways, and
not just for dramatic effect. In Western culture psychic pain has tended to be
seen as the territory of the artist, visionary, rebel and genius, from Emily
Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Friedrich Nietzsche to John Forbes Nash Jr. So it
should be no surprise that madness is often used to signify creativity,
sensitivity or spiritual and intellectual depth.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/theater/19cohe.html
***
“Our findings indicate that collaborating with the theatre industry could be
helpful in producing theories about social interaction that could also be
investigated in the real world,” said Dwaynica Greaves, lead author of the
study. In particular, the researchers are hoping that future work in this space
can focus on how participation in theatrical activities might help people with
autism.
This is the first time that neuroscientists have been able to record brain
activity in actors during their performances, Greaves added. The actors were
fitted with brain imaging technology while they rehearsed scenes from
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The researchers then proceeded to call
out each actor’s name while they were performing, measuring brain activity in
the prefrontal cortex.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, showed that
when actors heard their names while performing, their response was suppressed
in the brain region associated with self-awareness. These results were
consistent across the six actors who were tested during rehearsals, several
times a week. While they were not performing, the actors responded normally
when called by name.
“The shout of a person’s own name is a powerful and compelling sound which
normally makes the subject turn their head. It also engages the prefrontal
cortex of the brain. However, our findings suggest that actors may learn to
suppress their sense of self as they train in the theatre and take on a
different character,” Greaves said.
More...
https://www.theswaddle.com/brain-activity-of-actors-shows-they-really-do-lose-themselves-while-performing
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