(don’t) touch my elbow!

mes amis–

long ago, in a distant land of youth and jeuness, my gal pals at half straddle and i invented faux (but also perhaps real?) titles for the troupe’s eventual shows. i recall one of those titles was touch my elbow. descriptions and jokes about the show were oft accompanied by a slow and awkward touch of the elbow to any and all listeners brave enough to endure a conversation with yours truly (!)

today i was reminded of that title when a most rudine fellow on the street snarled out “oh, hey, beautiful lady–you are beautiful.”

(i mean really! at my age?! hmph!)

salty peppers have the most fun

naturellement, i ignored these statements and continued chatting with my theatre protege friend. we waited for the light to switch and as it did i felt a gross soft hand reaching out and cupping my elbow!!! i turned and looked and there this specimen leaned against a traffic sign. specimen isn’t even the right word. more like speci-yuck! a pair of vile, wiggling eyebrows met my own indignant ones. i declared, “don’t touch me!” later i reflected, kippy you should have spat in his face. but then that foolish desire to let it go overcame me. meanwhile, i was telling a tale to my theatre friend and couldn’t get narratively blindsided due to some horn dug. disgusting.

sarebbe stato meglio se fosse in italia al meno!

in other news, i recently heard about a woman flipping over when she tried to ride a motorized scooter up an mbta escalator in boston. she was from the south shore: no shock there. zing! j/k…poor lass. i wonder if she had a bad stomach ache or was perhaps heeding the calls of a heightened match of truth or dare. anyhoo, i love me some boston pride.

i love that dirty water

just recently some comments i made about the beantown accent in an upcoming articolo were censored. it was simple stuff. i was merely explaining to non-cognoscenti how the boston curly cue accent falls into two broad–yet distinctive–categories. those from the north shore pronounce the town of Dorchester as “Doah-chest-ah,” where as those from the south  pur, “Daw-chest-ah.” but being censored is childs play for this kippy and i must soldier on!

speaking of soldiers, did you hear about the two fellows who were stopped in seattle with contraband candy, ie kinder eggs? my friends this is not a joke but serious stuff. for kinder eggs are criminally delicious! the part that makes me most confucious is how i can easily buy a kinder egg at any third rate deli in new york city. (then again, the law often has creative applications here in gotham).

as if candy isn’t enough, there’s a toy inside!

as for creative laws. if you have a penchant for love and sweet tooth for sultry dealings: i suggest you read this. spolier alert  and a sample bit of text: “After a while, it dawned on Olympic athlete Lakatos: “I’m running a friggin’ brothel in the Olympic Village! I’ve never witnessed so much debauchery in my entire life.”

hubbah hubbah! i’ll bet those young olympians are good looking bunch. i hope they have the manners to not cup a stranger’s elbow!

a better weapon than erogenous zone

a bientot mes amis,
kippy

http://espn.go.com/olympics/summer/2012/story/_/id/8133052/athletes-spill-details-dirty-secrets-olympic-village-espn-magazine

a FEAST for sore theatrical eyes (artlog #5)

My friends and fellow world citizens—

I first met Andrew Ondrejcak in a ratty college classroom while swapping stories about recent real life theatrical moments. Most people in the room (tutti studenti, I should say) traded tales with juicy bits of dialogue they’d overheard while waiting in line at the grocer or shuttling into the subway.

All fine stories but Andrew’s tale marched to a different colour. With a flip of his flaxen hair, and an imperceptible eye roll, Ondrejcak described a far flung road trip with friends and how, circling through the cliffs of—California? or was it Cardiff??—he listened to French hip hop while watching borgonvilla flap furiously in the wind. “You know, just really hot pink,” Andrew said in his distinctive matter- of-fact clipped manner. I do believe he was the only person in the room to mention a color in his story. And what a color it was.

bougainvillea grows in tunis, not in brooklyn

It was therefore unsurprising that when I sped off some questions about his upcoming project FEAST at Incubator Arts Project (July 13-21) he responded in signature style.

—

I understand FEAST is a retelling of the ancient story of “The Writing on the Wall” … Can you re-familiarize us with that tale? What about it inspired you to put pen to paper? 
I wanted to make a really high-concept play about language and philosophy and history and death and love and hate and then I told Mac Wellman the idea and he was like, “Well why don’t you write a domestic drama at a dinner table instead.”  And so I remembered this old story about a feast with some concubines and I thought that it could be fun to have a stage full of concubines. In the bible, in the book of Daniel, there is a story about a feast held by king Belshazzar and this king took some sacred cups from the temple and that pissed off God, so God brought down his wrath. The tale has been retold and illustrated by artists (most famously by Rembrandt and Handel) yet my version has one foot in the circumstance of the story and the other foot in a very contemporary view of it. 

Oh  my. I still want you to write a domestic drama at a dinner table. But enough about me. Are there other Old Testament tales you’ve adapted or is this your first? 
This is my first and, perhaps, last.

Sacre  bleu! Tell us about your all star cast, what has the rehearsal process been like? 
Our rehearsal process was brief, but 4 of the 5 primary characters have been in a number of my plays so we have a very good understanding of how I work; they were able to cut to the chance and not complain too much and not ask too many questions and that made it all pretty great for me.  

I love to cut to the chance when I can. The Incubator website says your show “focuses on the formal qualities of words and punctuation” … will non-grammarians be lost? I’m already Confucious! 
I like punctuation and I also like when actors do something interesting and unexpected with punctuation. I prefer to give punctuation as a problem to solve rather than some sort of emotional or psychological motivation. In typing this, I realize that I do not know how to spell psychological. 

My governess used a method of inventive spelling with me…You were saying?
Language is dissected into monosyllabic words and then put back together into complex phrases and run-on sentences. And there are a lot of guttural sounds people make when they are eating which I remember from sitting at the dinner table with my father and his father before him. 

The set is done by Leong Leong architecture, what’s that about? 
I am a production designer for the fashion industry and I have a strong emphasis on stage images which can often override my text. In order to force myself to focus on text rather than image, I invited some architect friends to make the stage design.

What are your secret guilty pleasure influences? 
Spreadsheets and other ways of organizing information.

That oddly makes sense to me. So will your fans Robert Wilson and Marina Abramama be in attendance? What other VIPs can we expect to spy at performances? 
My mother will be there and everyone seems to like her a lot.  

Mothers are always the best audience. At least mine sure is. Since you are a man of the continent I will wish you merde as opposed to a broken leg.
Thanks Kippy.

 

yum

FEAST runs at the Incubator Arts Project July 13–21.

with performances by Okwui Okpokwasili, Yuki Kawahisa, Cara Francis, Jenn Dees, Peter Cullen & Jason Robert Winfield

Written and Directed by Andrew Ondrejcak
Stage Design by LEONG LEONG Architecture
Lights by Scott Bolman
Costumes by Adam Selman

do not fire, HIRE the hero (plus ombre hair and spike shoes)

mes amis–

a fan recently alerted me to this most peculiar story about a young floridian lifeguard being fired for saving someone’s life. quel horreur! who cares if the swimmer, now in critical condition, was a bit beyond the realm of patrol. lopez was responding to a higher law and now he’s been sacked. naturally, this news is reported on the anti-american bbc website. hee hee! those brits are in good company…with the rest of the world that is!

it’s not square

i say that 21-year-old lifeguard tomas lopez is better off without this job. he is living by his principals and saving lives! which is more than this kippy has ever done! i should add that i was touched to learn that tomas’s lifeguard friends also quit in protest. allahu akbar! i am egypt! i hope lopez enjoys his summer and breaks some hearts along the way… i bet he’s not so hard on the eyes…

do you have a sweet tooth for eye candy?

as for things that are hard on the eyes: i have been most repelled and intrigued by these ombre haircuts i keep seeing about. you know the kind. makes you wonder if that feathery blond is really letting her roots go. but then these people are all so stylish and the fades so super subtle that you know it’s on purpose. just like that tattered white-tee, with cotton so fine it is near silk-like in its soft suppleness. i mean, this is all fine and dandy in summer months but what of winter, hmm? i wonder. and yet i yearn for my own locks to look as such!

ole: ombre

then again, having been blessed with salt and pepper strands atop ma tête–and a full head of hair–since birth, this is not a style choice i need to worry about making. but, as you know, i take great care to be an arbiter of taste and so, after months of internal debate, i felt i had to weigh in.

speaking of taste, i would be curious to know what readers think of the spike shoe phenomenon. you’ve seen them around on subway platforms and planging the pavement. perhaps even those willowy blonds with the ombre hair styles are sporting them. little flat shoes with metallic spikes jutting out of the sides. worn, once again, by the unwaveringly hip. i quite like them, (the shoes, that is) but they are in too much proliference for me. bucking the trend, i’ll stick with my ukranian two steppers for now, thank you!

don’t tread on me

(i should add that if i had to buy a pair, i’d like to get them in a most docile shade, say a coral pink)

the most odious example of these spikes i have seen was an enormous black leather backpack (nerd sack) from which huge foam (thank g-d) spikes protruded. it worn by a young ruffian in the 14th ave train station who skulked and glared. i don’t care how much that bag cost or what foreign land the lad purchased it in. it was—to use a term from my jeuness dorée—fugly. just like the model himself!

on ebay this retails for $39. bet it was made in china

poor fellow. maybe he was just having a hard day. but who wouldn’t suffer with foam spikes protruding out of one’s back? no dates would want to get near him. honey catches more flies than vinegar, sweetheart!

bee!

a bientot mes amis!
kippy