Bowling for State 2007
Posted By Kathleen David on February 10, 2007
OK everyone put out the good mojo for Ariel and the rest of her high school bowling team today. They are in the county finals for a place to play in the State Championship later this month. They placed first in their division so they get to play the team that went last year which is a school they are big rivals with. The contest starts at 9:00AM EST but if they can keep winning then they will be there most of the day.
My computer is back which means that my husband is too. I am glad that he had a good time up in Maine.
Yale School of Drama Story [which is also why I crack up when I hear about anyone going to Maine] Part of the YSD philosophy for the Stage Management students when I went there was to be as well rounded as possible in terms of being able to “speak” everyone’s language. This so I could translate a vague note from rehearsal into something that all departments could understand. To do this, they had us take at least one course in just about every discipline offered at Yale.
My scenery teacher was Ming Cho Lee [For those who know theater design yes it was the K2 designer Ming Cho Lee] Ming had a habit to speak in pidgin English when if he wanted to he could speak perfectly unaccented. My guess is that he got away with more if the other people thought that he couldn’t understand them.
We would be given a play or a musical to design and two weeks to put together our ideas and sketches. We would then present these to the class (One of my proudest moments was when Ming praised my ideas for a set design for Three-Penny Opera including turning to his students and inquiring why they hadn’t though of that….but I digress) If he didn’t like a design he would inform the designer, “Broadway? Why you think Broadway? No, no, no. You go design in Maine. Best place for you.” That became a catch phrase among the stage managers for some strange reason. “No, no, no. You go [fill in the blank] in Maine.” Still cracks me up because I can hear Ming saying it.
So Peter is back from Maine. Caroline was not sick last night. Ariel is bowling in the county tourney. I got one more clothing item sewn and 2 more cut out. Not too bad.
I am grateful that Ariel’s team came in first in their division again.
“Threepenny”, eh?
I first saw “Threepenny” (and, for that matter, “Inherit the Wind” and “Godspell”) at Furman University – the extremely devout Southern Baptist school which declined a Federal grant to build a new Science Building in the 60s because it violated their concept of separation of Church and State. All three were presented uncut, at a time when “Godspell” was being picketed by funnymentalist Christians in other cities… (As a matter of fact, i ran across a German copy of the script in the Furman Library, which had apparently been used in staging the play – it looked as if they did their own translation – and there were several places where there had been two possible translations, and, in each case, they had taken the stronger.)
After my Mom and i went to see it – i think it was while Dad was overseas for his company – i found out that Dad had been a member of the Theatre Guild at University of Illinois, and they had put on the first post-war presentation of “Threepenny” in this country (or possibly it was during the later years of the war).
Hitler (well, Goebbels, probably) hod done his best to stamp “Threepenny” out of existence – they had a German prompter’s script, two or three incomplete recordings of the songs in different languages, and very basic sheetmusic (like for solo piano) of most of the score.
They had to work out their own translation and staging, and work up their own arrangements for the score…
I wish i’d been there.