And so we moved out, sad in the vast offing...

...having our precious lives, but not our friends.



I am really, REALLY looking forward to the first episode of Treme tonight. Sometimes, while looking forward to the beginning of a series like Treme, I consider how lucky I am to be living in this golden age of television, when so many are doing so much that is interesting with the form, and I could almost weep from excitement.  It feels, without exaggeration, like what it must have felt like to the avid theatregoers of London or Madrid in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, waiting for a new Shakespeare or Marlowe or Lope or Calderon piece to appear.  Never forget that those were the reviled and revered pop forms of those eras.

In almost equal measure to my excitement about this show, I am distressed by the recent death of David Mills on the set of the show.  He was a Washingtonian by birth, a Maryland Terrapin by education, a journalist with a gift for controversy of the most illuminating kind, and the screenwriter for some of the most admired episodes of some of my most admired shows (Homicide and The Wire).   It was only in the aftermath of his death, alas, that I learned about his very entertaining and thought-provoking blog, Undercover Black Man.

And so, by way of tribute, I offer this really brilliant clip from UBM, a clip that Mills was himself offering up as a tribute to Martin Short.  Because what is there not to love about a good meta-Broadway critique of race in musicals?

A Big Black Lady Stops the Show


A Big Black Lady Stops the Show from http://undercoverblackman.vox.com/

Do you ever have a day when you really love what you do for a living?

Today one of my Intro to Drama students gave me a YA novel called Another Faust, which she had inscribed with the following note: "To A, whose course made me want to be an English major (so I could learn more words like 'defenestrate'!)".




Grin.




Hey, not one but TWO Spanish Golden Age plays we read this semester featured defenestrations. (Apparently Madrid, like Scotland and Prague, is a place where you don't want to stand near a window in times of civil unrest.) I told them I didn't get to use the word very often, so I was going to make up for it by using it dozens of times in those classes. And I was as good as my word.

I also appreciated it when the last student out of the exam turned to me and said "I hope Duke sees the results of their hubris next year." 

Double points for Duke-bashing and use of "hubris" (a term ID from the exam).  He had obviously learned the lesson of a whole semester listening to me whine about college basketball and the plight of my beloved Tar Heels.


Confession

Of late I have been filled with blog ideas, but not filled with time in which to make them blog realities.  Between the end of the semester (and the consequent towering of Mt. Grademore), the complications of my first dual-nation tax season, and preparing to leave home for 7 weeks on Monday, I am utterly out-tuckered.

As a solution, I am going to attempt a series of shorter blog posts this week.  Let's see how it goes.