it's been a week and i have many things to say.

first: i performed last weekend in the 8th international toy theater festival with great small works at st. ann's warehouse in DUMBO. and had a marvelous time. my nerves were astounding: i had forgotten what stage fright felt like and really was not at all prepared for the scope of the festival. i walked in a suddenly felt a rush, knowing, somehow, that my work was contributing to this enormous event.

yesterday in the Wall Street Journal: Big Concepts on Tiny Stages. For those of you who do not click that link:

"For 'Duncan, Part One, or the Boy with a Bird in his Heart,' the compelling Hunter Kaczorowski, fresh out of Sarah Lawrence College, produced a potent vignette around the early life story of the painter Duncan Grant, whose color sense and artistic sensibility helped illuminate this doll-house-size depiction"

I'm suddenly famous and much cooler than you, by the way.


second: I finished Valley of the Dolls. I wasn't so much disappointed in the ending as i was personally disappointed with Neely's behavior. SHE WAS MY FAVORITE. Some thoughts (spoilers): i wasn't nearly as astonished by Anne's drug use as i think i was supposed to be. Evidently, this was supposed to signify her final collapse into failure but I sort of saw it as her acceptance of having to deal with her life herself. Neely and Jennifer had realized that pills were the way to deal with their problems (obviously this isn't true to life, but perhaps true to their world) and Anne's decision to fall into that sort of just represented the fact that she was not living in a fantasy. Lyon was terribly written, i thought. Clearly the men of this novel have NO IDEA. None whatsoever.



third: I started reading Teleny a novel attributed to Oscar Wilde which is quite possibly the first "Gay" novel of the English Language. a review can be found here. It is beautiful, erotic and languid -- flowing in and out between reality and fantasy. The history of the book is equally interesting, likely coming from an underground round-robin of the gay late-Victorian literati. Oscar Wilde's handwriting is clearly evident on the original manuscript so it is assumed the at the very least he contributed to it and at most godfathered the project.

"...How can i express all that i felt from the contact of Teleny's hand? It set me on fire; and, strange to say, it soothed me at the same time. How sweeter, softer, it was, than any woman's kiss. I felt his grasp steal slowly over my body, caressing my lips, my throat, my breast; my nerves quivered from head to foot with delight, then it sank downwards into my reins, and Priapus, reawakened, uplifted its head. I actually felt i was being taken possession of, and i was happy to belong to him..."