I just watched the video of this TED Talk tonight, and it occurred to me that almost everybody I know might get a lot out of watching it. Dr. Brown is a researcher from Texas who speaks very honestly, personally, and humorously about the challenge of embracing vulnerability in life and relationships. True human connection, she says, requires the willingness and courage to be vulnerable and imperfect.
Theater review: ANGELS IN AMERICA
December 20, 2010I subscribed to the Signature Theatre Company this season, devoted to the work of Tony Kushner, specifically so I could buy $20 tickets and take Andy to see Angels in America, which he’d never seen before in any form. Then I dilly-dallied around during the membership ticket-buying period and it was sold out until way into the new year. We ended up getting on the priority waiting list, which meant we might have had to sit on the stairs for all seven hours of this two-part epic. But we did not.
As I say in my CultureVulture review, “Angels in America… means a lot to me, having followed it as a journalist since it existed only as an unproduced manuscript being handed around by excited literary managers. I saw the 1991 world premiere at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco (when “Perestroika,” the second play, was still a work-in-progress), and then the first fully staged production the following year in Los Angeles, both parts as they debuted on Broadway in 1993, and then the Mike Nichols movie, which I watched twice. When the Signature Theatre Company scheduled a revival of Angels in America as the opening show in its current season devoted to the work of Kushner, I didn’t know if I had it in me to sit through the seven-hour thing again. I was almost dreading it, partly because I heard very mixed word-of-mouth about the cast. Well, forget all that. The Signature revival is a triumph for everyone involved.”
You can read the whole review online here.
Andy reported overhearing someone in the lobby reading the above sign and murmuring, “I hope the haze doesn’t obscure the nudity.” It didn’t.
Quote of the day: SLEEP
December 20, 2010I am concerned about how poorly people sleep in our culture. The use of medications is at an all-time high, and these drugs do not reproduce natural sleep. Most of them suppress dreaming. One detrimental influence on our sleep is our ability to light up the night, which is a significant change in our environment over the past hundred years. There’s a body of literature suggesting that exposure to light at night, even briefly, greatly increases cancer risk, especially risk of breast cancer in women. Women who are blind from birth have very low rates of breast cancer. Women who work night shifts have high rates of breast cancer. I tell people it is best to sleep in complete darkness, and if you have to get up in the middle of the night, don’t turn on the light, or else use a red Christmas-tree bulb, because it appears that light at the red end of the spectrum is safest.
— Dr. Andrew Weil, interviewed in The Sun
Photo diary: dinner in Brooklyn
December 20, 2010
We had dinner in Brooklyn with Dave and George. Dave bought this vegetable with Andy in mind. Andy inspected it and immediately used the word "fractal." Bingo!
It was Andy's first time meeting Buck. They bonded heavily.
The desserts were cupcake babkas and fruit tarts from Crumbs in Grand Central.
This guy did not come to dinner.
Neither did this guy.
Theater review: BABY UNIVERSE
December 17, 2010Wakka Wakka Productions’ Baby Universe sounded like an intriguing puppet-theater show, so I went to see it at Baruch College. I’d never been there before, and when I got to the address, I was confused, because it was All Saints Hospital. Turns out that’s where Nurse Jackie is filmed, and indeed while I was collecting my tickets from Jim Baldassare, the publicist, there was Edie Falco walking across the lobby in scrubs, looking absorbed in her work.
You can read my review of the play online here.
another eye opens 