Asylum Improv – Pacifica Spindrift Players

Review: Asylum Improv
Pacifica Spindrift Players
Pacifica, California

I cannot imagine a more challenging social situation than trying to be improvisationally funny. Telling memorized jokes is easy. Reading a comedic script is a snap. Doing a stand-up routine that has been rehearsed and choreographed is a piece of cake compared to what the Asylum Improv does several times a year at the Spindrift Players in Pacifica, California.

It’s because of this that we don’t expect the actors of Asylum, lead by the very brave Roger Genereux, to be as funny as Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie, who are comedic geniuses, but they’re already funnier than Drew Carey.

It’s perhaps fortunate for the cast of Asylum that the audience consists primarily of the family and friends, and some die-hard community members, so we aren’t as critical as we could be. Asylum really does try hard to be funny, and one often gets the feeling that they are trying too hard. Sometimes desperately hard, which is evident when the look on an actor’s face plainly says, “Will somebody Please end this scene?” Which is echoed by Roger’s expression which says just as plainly, “Will somebody Please say something funny?”

There are, however, gems which make waiting through the embarrassing moments worthwhile.  We especially liked the efforts of Steve Mattes, Kevin Myer and Lourie (whose last name I couldn’t find, but he’s the bloke with the almost-Irish brogue, softened, I think, by his years in the States).  Lourie can always be counted on for a funny routine involving the alphabet and/or the English language.  Tricia Callero once again wow’d us with her superb vocal skills.  We can’t help but think that if the entertainment industry really was a meritocracy, she’d already be head-lining.

The presentation could be improved if Roger could just relax a little.  We think he’s very smart and talented, but he often comes across as if he believes his entire worth as a human being is riding on the success or failure of the show.  And considering the amount of work he invests at Spindrift, we can’t blame him for feeling that.   But Roger:  We are going to like you anyway.  You have already proven yourself.  So relax.  Also, if you can’t read one of those audience suggestion slips, you should just toss it.  There is no entertainment value in watching you try to decipher somebody’s scribble.  And we know that it’s supposed to be improv, but perhaps a little more structure would help lubricate the show.

And we will be there when you return in March!

Rancho Neblina 2009 – Foam on the Range.

The weekend of September 26 and 27, 2009, gave us the 9th Annual Rancho Neblina Traditional Rendezvous.  Sixty-three 3D foam animal targets at unmarked distances on three separate courses set on a 600+ acre cattle ranch near Petaluma, California.  The cows were not pleased with having to share their fields with 200 bipeds. In spite of promises for cooler weather, the temperatures reached 100° F (38° C) on both days, and the heat took its human toll as some archers passed out or dropped from the competition.

You can find pictures of the event here.

I didn’t do well.  This is a major league disappointment after spending all year training for this event, and then to have it all fall apart.  A friend commented, “You can hit all the difficult targets!  What is it with the easy ones?”

Indeed, it seemed like I couldn’t miss the difficult targets, including one I call The Carousel of Doom.

But when it came to getting the easy ones, some madness possessed my arrows and sent them on strange and unexplainable trajectories, without regard to how much I tried to slow down and concentrate on aiming.

Ah well, it’s all practice, eh?

Next year.

Update September 30, 2009 -- I left the competition site before the awards ceremony because allergies were starting to flare, and I had already used my limit of anti-histamines.  I left thinking that I had placed poorly.  A friend sent me a message on Facebook, “You came in second!!” While this certainly made me feel better, my thoughts were, “Okay, other people performed worse than I did.  That doesn’t mean I performed well.”

We are always our own worst critic, aren’t we?

Humans as Contraditctions

We humans are a wonderful set of contradictions, don’t you think?

I would like to offer as an example my oldest son, Galen.  When he was about three years old, he and I were watching Sesame Street together when he suddenly turned to me and said, “Real frogs can’t talk.”

We lived, at the time, in a rural area where encounters with wild life and livestock were common, and we ourselves had dogs and sheep.  Galen had no trouble at all separating fact from fiction, life from television.  I remember thinking at the time that he had an advantage over a lot of adults I could name.

On the other hand, Galen, like many three or four or five year olds, sometimes had problems with nightmares and worried about monsters in the closet or under his bed.  No amount of rational explanations about non-existent monsters was going to help.  So we made a game of it.  We concocted magic anti-monster juice (tap water), put it in a spray bottle and put an anti-monster spell on it.  When Galen complained of monsters which lay in wait in his closet, we would spray it with the anti-monster juice with drama and flourish, uttering the ancient incantation, “Out, out, damned Spot!”  Galen always slept better afterward.

Don’t get me wrong.  We never encouraged him to believe in magic or monsters or faeries or dragons or ghosts.  He has grown up to be a healthily skeptical young man who smirks at ghost stories.  Even so, he still enjoys a good story or sword and sorcery and talking frogs.  He’s far more active in the Society for Creative Anachronism than I am.

I am not a psychologist or neurologist, so I don’t know the words, but I believe that our consciousness is dominated by different parts of our brains in the light of rational day and the dark of mystical night.  And each state seems totally foreign to us when we are in the demesne of the other.  And though a child may give more voice to their inner fears, adults are not immune.  A good story teller is one who can transport the audience from one state to the other, sitting around the campfire, bidding the listener to abandon incredulity for just a moment in order to more fully appreciate the punch line. Strong relationships are built by sharing our irrational fears.

But come the dawn, it’s time again for the serious working and rational thinking.  Time to harvest, time to build, while we look forward to the next episode.

Poor Economy Good for Archery?

There seems to be an upturn in public interest in target and field archery lately.  I don’t have any specific numbers to give you, only personal observations.

It used to be that I could be assured of getting a lane at the Golden Gate Park archery range in San Francisco on a weekday, or if I show up early enough on a weekend.  Not anymore.  The attendance of newbies at the Sharp Park range in Pacifica at the Community Outreach Sundays has increased.  One could simply attribute this to Summer, but that would not follow the pattern of previous Summers.

On the other hand, attendance at organized events is down.  What gives?  We are getting more newbies but losing the established cadre?

The economy may be a driving factor in both of these phenomena.  People are starting to look for recreational activities that don’t involve a lot of money and can be done locally.

We all know how expensive archery equipment can be.  But when you compare the price of outfitting an archer to, for instance, the price of outfitting a golfer, we archers have to admit we have the better part of that deal.  Also, I don’t know any golfers who build their own equipment, and I don’t ever remember seeing a golf club (or a golf ball) that could be considered a piece of art.

We all know that there are some very nice golf courses in the Bay Area.  What most people don’t realize is that there are half a dozen very beautiful outdoor archery ranges within an hour’s drive of downtown San Francisco.   These golf courses can charge up to $60 and more even on a weekday.  That’s about the price I pay for my yearly membership to San Francisco Archers, which allows me to use the range at my leisure.

So, why is attendance at the organized events down?  I believe it’s because people are starting to pick and choose which events they want to participate in.  When times are good, we go to all of them.  Or nearly.  When the price of gasoline is high and the value of the US dollar drops, we only go to our favorites. I won’t be attending the Western States Traditional Rendezvous until the venue returns to California, or I start making much more money.  Hmm. I wonder which will happen first?

SCA Archery and the Labors of Hercules

On August 8th, 2009, the Shire of Cloondara, which is the SCA equivalent of San Francisco, California, hosted its annual Debardchery contest, a combination of archery and bardic contests.  As Archery Mistress, I ran the archery part.  It takes pretty much all year to plan and pull this off.

The Hydra from the Labors of Hercules as a homemade 3D target.

The theme of the even was the 12 Labors of Hercules, and we made our own targets.  Here you can see the Hydra.  The rest of the targets were painted on cardboard.  We used the Stymphalian birds as speed targets – The archer could shoot as many arrows as possible in thirty seconds.  There were six small targets, about six inches across, places between 5 and 10 meters distant.  The archer had to shoot each target once before shooting any target twice.

Debardchery 2009 Stymphalian Birds target

SCA Archery is restricted to traditional archery gear and wooden arrows, however the construction of the equipment is often modern.  After all, it is called “creative anachronism.”  This is due to the fact that “period” archery gear is near impossible to find on the commercial market, and most amateur archers are not comfortable building their own bows.  We’re comfortable making our own period garb, but functional weaponry, not so much.  There is, however, a “period archery” division in inter-kingdom competition. But if we insisted on strictly medieval construction for bows and arrows, we wouldn’t have many archers.  However, if you want to talk about homemade bows, I can publish some posts on that.

We're comfortable making our own period garb. Functional weaponry, not so much.

Medieval women shooting modern bow

We had a record turn out this year.  Thirty-three medieval archers ranging in skill level from “I’ve never held a bow before in my life!” to “Yeah, I practice every day for an hour before work.”  We separated archers as best we could into five separate skill levels.

The distances to the targets ranged from 5 meters to 45 meters.  However, one 12-year old intrepid longbowmen was allowed to shoot from 30 meters max, as his bow was not able to cast 45 meters.

My schedule for the weekend was a simple one: Saturday – Debardchery.  Sunday – the Cupid’s Gate tourney, which is a “mundane” or real world competition.  So of course, I woke up Saturday morning with a fever and a hoarse voice.  One of the Shire heralds was kind enough to be my voice for the day.  However, she couldn’t compete for me in the Cupid’s Gate, so I regretfully did not participate.

Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy

About a week ago, the following video appeared on my Facebook page:

There followed dozens of comments about what an incredible catch this was, and didn’t the girl show the guys how it was done!  Nobody on the list doubted that this event occurred.  Everybody wanted to believe it!  We all want to believe that people, especially the unsung heros, are capable of great things.  The video has gone viral several times over.

Okay, so call me a party pooper.

It didn’t take much time with Google to find the following:

“If that ball girl’s catch seems unbelievable well, you’re right it’s not real. It’s a viral video advertisement produced for Gatorade.”  Click here to read the article.

Yes, a major disappointment for those of us who want to believe that we are all, including minor league ball girls, capable of great things.

Well, it turns out that the Gatorade ad was based on an actual 1996 event involving a Seattle Mariners ball girl.  Go here for the video.

It used to be that you could tell the difference between commercials and programs.  It reminds me of the old, old joke, “What’s the difference between a faery tale and a sailor’s story?”  (If by some stretch of the imagination, somebody has not heard the punch line, it’s, “A faery tale starts out, ‘Once upon a time’ and a sailor’s story starts out, ‘No shit! This really happened!’”)

The problem is that people are willing to believe even the most fantastic things.  This is how magicians and email scammers ply their trade.  This is how urban myths start, and this is how political careers are made and broken.  In the United States at least, listening to the Republicans and the Democrats tell outrageous lies about each other and get away with it has become de rigueur.

Yesterday, I received for the upteenth time an email advising me that the planet Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in a lifetime, and will actually appear as large in the sky as the full moon.  It doesn’t take a Ph.D in astronomy to know that this is entirely nonsense.

But, as long as we still willing to believe in faery tales, that ball girls can fly, that congressmen eat babies for breakfast, and that planets can zip around the solar system willy nilly, this crap will still keep coming to us on the internet.

Review: The Colony

The Colony

Discovery Channel

“Reality TV”

From the network that gave us Mythbusters comes a show that seems to be a fusion of Junkyard Wars and Survivor. The show takes 10 people of varied backgrounds – a physician, a nurse, a handyman, a marine biologist, a couple of engineers – and sets them in a world where most humans have perished from a global virus.   Each episode has started with a head shot of Adam Montella, a “Homeland Security Advisor,”  telling us “We are on the edge of a global catastrophic disaster.”  The background shows a grim picture of Century City in ruins.

The “world” where these 10 survivors spend the next 10 weeks is located in an abandoned warehouse park on the edge of the Los Angeles River.  They are cut off from communication, electricity, and running water.  They must solve the problems of shelter, food and water and even the occasional “marauder” in the archetypal form of a motorcycle gang.

If you read the credits carefully, there is a disclaimer reading, “The participants in ‘The Colony’ experiment are presented with situations that were created by the producers.  They receive support from off-camera experts when their health and safety may be in danger. Viewers should not attempt to engage in the activities depicted in the experiment.”  So, they aren’t really cut off from the world.

I don’t believe this show was envisioned to be an actual show about people surviving.  You know they are going to survive for ten weeks, or they wouldn’t have a show.  There are experts on hand to advise and help the cast with their projects.  However, it does provide a vehicle for inspiring discussion about how people react in extreme conditions.

There are ethical questions to consider:  Is it really okay to steal food from somebody else, knowing that you may have condemned them to death by starvation, just so that you can have another day’s worth of food?  Would it have been better to invite the guys who owned the goats to join them in the Sanctuary?  (Not in the script, though.)  In order to survive for long, they are going to have to reinvent agriculture, a very labor-intensive activity without 21st Century technology to help.  They’re going to need every hand they can get come the harvest.

Questions of desperation: How hungry do you have to be to eat a carp caught in the Los Angeles River?

Questions of personality: Okay, the handyman is probably over-reacting in order to get more air time on the show.  Do you notice that the camera rarely focuses on the quieter, more rational types?  The handyman is an a-hole, but his skills are necessary for the survival of the group.  When does one side of this equation overrule the other?

The show offers a lot of instruction — I didn’t know about the wood gasifyer, but, day-um!  How kewl is that?  I suspect that the little two-stroke engine that they attached it to won’t last long on that fuel, but it’s still a good idea!

I don’t believe this show will offer a lot in the way of plot twists and surprises, but it’s still good fodder for discussion of human nature and survival.

What are You Doing? Twitter is Really Stupid

BJMendelson Just got in to Santa Montica, have to do some paperwork and then if I’m feeling brave, walk over and get some photos of the ocean

This tweet came to me over the cell phone today.  I have no idea who BJMendelson is and never requested to follow his Twitter.  I set my the Twitter account so that I have to specifically request to follow people, but the cell phone’s text message In Box fills up every night with tweets from people I never knew existed.  Except for Wil Wheaton – I know who he is.

I have never held the concept of Twitter in any esteem.  There is not a single person on this planet that I want to know moment to moment details of.  My kids are all adults now, and some things they do are frankly none of my business.

And Dearest Heart, if you are reading this, do not take umbrage.  You know that the feeling is reciprocal.  If you knew what I was doing 24/7, you’d start to wonder why you ever married such a boring person.

I changed my mind about getting a Twitter account when a few of us at Fearless Fitness had the idea of creating an extended support group for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  The idea was that we would all get Twitter accounts, and we would follow each other.  That way, if one of us had an idea for a healthy recipe, or if we needed help staying away from the mid-afternoon munches, we could send a text message, and our compatriots would all get it.

I thought, Okay, this is a good use of Twitter. But I didn’t want the entire world to know when I was struggling with my diet, so I set it up so that only people that I approve could follow me.

So much for good ideas.   I didn’t have that account for five minutes before I had 21 people following me.  TWENTY-ONE!  I had approved NONE of them.  And shortly after that, I found that I was following 18 unknown people and one Wil Wheaton.  I blocked them all, I unfollowed them all.  To no avail.  They were back the very next day.

Some are obviously commercial accounts, and some are selling the World’s Oldest Profession.  Some are news outlets.

So, either A: Some people have been able to hack into the system at Twitter and force their tweets upon innocent people, and thus artificially inflating their following, or B: Some people pay for premium accounts that can’t be blocked.

I should mention that I disliked with a passion Wil Wheaton’s character Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  But I was always able to keep Wil and Wesley, the actor and the character, separate in my mind, and assumed that the actor was a nice enough guy who did the best he could with a character that the creative staff of Star Trek really messed up.

But if Mr. Wheaton has used either A or B mentioned above, then he’s worse than the character.

And users cannot even complain to Twitter about this.  The best you can do is post to a User Forum and hope that somebody else has found the solution.

So I cancelled the Twitter account, and my estimation of them has plummeted even further.

Dunsmuir Games

In the 18th Century of the Current Era, Highlander Scots began emigrating to the New World in large numbers.  Many, if not most, were forced to leave in what has become known as the Highland Clearances. One of the results of this diaspora is that there are now more sons and daughters of Scotland in the United States and Canada than in Scotland itself.

As a 21st Century resident of California and descendent of the survivors of the Clearances, I find myself surrounded by people who come from similar histories all over the planet.  Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Germans, French, Jews, Palestinians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Iraqi, Native American, Irish, you name it.  They are all my neighbors, and every one of them is a proud Californian.

It has become a part of the California culture, however, to honor the rituals and history of one’s ancestral homeland.  Not a week goes by when we don’t hear about another cultural awareness event taking place somewhere nearby.  You can tour the cultural world just by spending a year in San Francisco.  According to the San Francisco newspaper, there are more than 140 actively spoken languages in the Bay Area (including Esperanto.)  I’m sure it drives the Department of Motor Vehicles nuts.

We traveled to Oakland, California this last weekend, July 11 & 12, to participate in honoring the culture of my own ancestral homeland at the Dunsmuir Scottish Games.  We drank Scottish beer brewed in a local microbrewery, listened to fine Celtic music played by a California band called Banshee in the Kitchen, spoke with members of a clan that seemed particularly enamored of the longbow (be still my heart, though I don’t remember reading that the longbow was of any particular significance in Scottish history), spoke with members of Living History recreationists St. Ita’s of Cill Ide House of Nobles, watched as kilted gentlemen tossed a telephone pole, and a game of  Shinty.  It would seem that Shinty is to field hockey what rugby is to American football.

Now, according to some friends who still live in Scotland, almost nobody there plays this game, and those that do all live in the Highlands.  Did you know that there is an organization of Shinty players that started in Northern California?

What’s the point of all this?  I’m not sure, other than to wonder if I’m not getting a bigger dose of Scottish culture right here in my backyard than I would by traveling to Loch Lomond.  (The one in Scotland, not the one located in Lake County, California.)

Learning the flute

I have always been enamored of the etherial sounds of the flute.  It’s such a basic musical instrument that it seems to have been invented by every culture.  

I’ve never had music lessons, as I grew up in a family that was not so well to do.  My parents threatened to enroll me in accordion lessons once, but nothing ever came of that.  My mother had an electric organ in the living room.  I remember that it was a really big deal when it arrived.  Mom took lessons and played it with enthusiasm and skill.

Out of curiosity, I sat down at the organ and played with the keys, and read some of the beginner books, and thus became familiar with sheet music.  I picked out some Beatles tunes with the right hand, but that was the extent of my musical education.

I have always envied friends who could play musical instruments.  Some friends can play multiple instruments. A couple of my friends are professional musicians.  My youngest son plays a half dozen stringed instruments.  I always figured it would be too much effort and too much money to learn an instrument myself.

But a strange thing happens when your children leave home — you suddenly find that you have a lot more time on your hands.  My parents responded to this by watching a lot of television, going to bars, getting drunk a lot, having affairs and getting divorced.  Now, I love my parents dearly and I refuse to judge them.  However, I could suggest that this was not the most beneficial or healthy way to spend their middle-aged years.

 I responded to this by learning a lot of new skills, including the sword.

Well, it might be time to put the sword on hold.  In order to continue in my education of that martial art, I’ll need to invest in armor and start competing.  This doesn’t appeal to me so much.

My spouse and I were talking about music last week, and I mentioned that I have always wanted to learn the flute.  She said, “What’s keeping you?”

A very good question.  After doing some research via the telephone, I discovered that the local music store will rent me an instrument for $25 a month, and that lessons are $30 for half an hour.  We stopped by that music store on Saturday, talked to the owners for an hour or so, rented a beautiful Armstrong flute, and made arrangements to take lessons.  The shop owner also gave me a beginner’s book and a DVD with some instructions.

I was warned that forming the embouchure is a difficult skill to learn, but I figured it out in about five to ten minutes.  I believe the reason it’s considered difficult is that most students start learning it when they’re 10-years old.  I have a much more experienced mouth.  Perhaps being an old dog can be an asset when learning some new skills.  And speaking of old dogs, I’ve heard that learning music helps prevent Alzheimer’s.

Using the book and the DVD, I have learned the F Major scale.  I don’t play it rapidly or with any facility, but at least I know it.  While I practiced, my spouse dusted off her old alto recorder that has been sitting in the closet since college, and we managed to make some music together.  I wouldn’t call the cacophonous noise from that session a “jam” but it’s a start.

I hope I’m ready for the first lesson tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’m off to watch some Jethro Tull videos on YouTube.