A Child Of Atom

My apologies to anyone who reads this blog through a feed, or an RSS subscription. I've been going back and editing posts to add tags, which is a new feature in Blogger, and it never occurred to me that all of these would be popping up on the feeds again as new posts! I've edited almost 300 posts in the past few weeks! I'm so sorry!

Does this sound like you?

1) You are in New York City
2) You enjoy one or more of the following things:
a) Cabaret performances
b) Comedy centering around either washed up starlets, broadway in-jokes or gay sex
c) Two bitchy queens bickering onstage
3) You are free next Monday night

If that sounds like a description of you then I cannot more highly recommend anything to do to fill your Monday evening than going to see Cake Returns at the Duplex, starring Vinnie Costa and Tom Privitere. (On the full disclosure front Vinnie is a friend of mine, and one of the people that I regularly play geeky card games with.) The show is great fun, including lots of really funny Broadway style songs, and lots of bickering and play fighting between Vinnie and Tom. I had great fun at tonight's performance. The Duplex is hinting around that they may want Tom and Vinnie to extend the run beyond the planned two performances, so get in there next week and support them!

After meeting his friends for breakfast on Sunday Kid Flash and I decided that we would hit some of the sites included in Open House New York. Open House New York is a two day event where buildings, parks, and other sites all over the five boroughs are opened to the public for tours. Most of these sites are normally closed, or charge admission to gain access, but for this one weekend they are open to anyone who cares to come and stand in line long enough. We chose a handfull of places to try and visit, but because we got a late start we were eventually only able to make it to two of them.

The first was The High Bridge Water Tower. This tower on the east side of Manhattan was formerly part of the Croton Reservoir system and had a water tower on the top of it that helped service the water needs of northern Manhattan. The water tank burned in the 80's but it has been replaced by an observation deck that overlooks all of northern Manhattan, part of Queens, and part of the Bronx. From the height of the tower you can see 9 or 10 of the bridges that cross onto Manhattan, including the George Washington. The restoration of the tower is amazing, and is part of a larger restoration project in the works for that area that will include the High Bridge. High Bridge was partially a pipeline from the reservoir, and partially a pedestrian bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx. I'll be excited to see that project complete, it was a great area and High Bridge was cool. I'd love to walk across it. Anyway...

There was a moderate line formed by the time we got there, but it ended up only being about 45 minutes long. After that there was a climb to the top of the tower. Waiting at the top was a park ranger who gave a brief talk on the history of the place, and tried his best to explain what had gone on in the tower, and answer our question. I say tried because there was a guy there who was obviously an engineer or something and kept asking questions about the reservoir system and how the water was pumped to the top of the tower, etc. The poor ranger tried his best but just wasn't up the task of the physics of the place. It was obvious during the climb that this place wasn't typically open to the public. Some of the hand railing was missing, and the floor boards were uneven in places. Still it was incredibly exciting to see this space. Even with the park rangers and the lines it had the air of having snuck in somewhere forbidden, but really cool. Part of the point of this whole thing I guess.

The views from there were amazing. Kid Flash was able to point out the building he works in across the river, we could both see our neighborhoods. The GWB from that angle was also awesomely cool.

After that we realized that we were running really late and so we prioritized which place from our list we thought we might be able to get to in time. The decision was to head over to Roosevelt Island and to try and see the Octagon Lighthouse. Neither of us had ever been to Roosevelt Island, so it seemed like the best choice.

We got to The Octagon just as they were letting the last group in. The Octagon was originally built as part of an insane asylum, and is the last standing part of that structure. It's a beautiful building, and probably would have been incredible to see 20 years ago, unfortunately it has been bought and incorporated into a luxury apartment complex. The portion that we were allowed to see is now the lobby of that complex, including the gym, and the play room. It's a great renovation, and I'm sure the apartments are beautiful as well, but looking at the photos of the wrought iron spiral staircase that once dominated the space (in place of the very modern one I photographed here) made me sad for what was lost. Still cool to see though.

Roosevelt Island itself was bizarre. The entire island is dominated by high rise apartment buildings, and by virtue of it's placement in the East River directly between Manhattan and Brooklyn I'm sure the apartments are quite pricey. There are a few dots here and there of older, cooler structures, but the apartment buildings really do provide the only visual cues about the island. The overly homogenized sameness of all the buildings lends the place a highly artificial quality that is eerie in a way. The lack of street traffic (most of the island is off limit to cars) as well as foot traffic left the place feeling pretty vacant. Kid Flash also observed a distinct lack of retail spaces in the places where you'd normally expect them to be in NYC. The whole thing added together meant that the island, while part of New York was VERY distinct from it, and different. It was a fun discovery, but not a place that I think I'd want to go to on a regular basis.

Next year I'll be looking to do this again, but with some better planning. There were some really tempting places on the list of available sites that I'd love to spend a few minutes in.

Okay... so things are going well enough on the romantic front that I've decided that a nickname for blogging purposes is probably in order. And so... Kid Flash it is. (He's a runner... I'm a geek... what can I say.)

My sister and I used to make this recipe on a nearly daily basis. I was so excited when she called me last week to say that she had come into possession of a copy of it again. Now officially these are called "No-Bake Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies." We always called them "Dookie Cookies" for.... well... if you make the recipe you'll see the fairly obvious reason. We never bothered actually spooning the mixture out into cookie sheets and making actual cookies, instead we preferred just to eat it with a spoon directly from a bowl. But then like most kids I always did prefer the pre-cooked form of most sweets to the final form that they were supposed to be in. Regardless, it's a tasty recipe and I can't wait to try it again.

2 cups sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa
1 stick butter
1/2 cup milk
1 cup peanut butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 cups oatmeal
Waxed paper

In a heavy saucepan bring to a boil, the sugar, cocoa, butter and milk. Let boil for 1 minute then add peanut butter, vanilla and oatmeal. On a sheet of waxed paper, drop mixture by the teaspoonfuls, until cooled and hardened.

It's happened a half dozen times in the last few weeks: about 10 or 11 o'clock someone in a nearby apartment begins playing an electric guitar. They never play for very long, and it isn't wild or loud, and I can never recognize a song. It's just 10 minutes or so of improvisational playing with a bluesy sound.

I love it.

Normally the NYC sounds drifting in from the street below me annoy me. The cars with too loud music. The old men playing dominos. The hoochie girls arguing over some boy. They annoy me, and keep me awake, and make me wonder how much training I'd need to use a sniper rifle from my window.

But this is different.

I've never made it secret that guys playing instruments is just about the hottest thing ever. And guitar playing is just plain out aural sex. In my mind the mystery guitar player is tall and thin and lithe with muscular forearms covered in blonde hair. He's sitting up in that apartment somewhere on a milk crate in worn cotton boxers and a white v-neck t-shirt, barefoot, with a beer on the floor beside him. (Given the demographic of my neighborhood this is probably far from true, but allow me my fantasies, please.)

The first few times I heard it it was just an anomaly, one of those NYC things that happens now and then. But I didn't hear him last night, and I actually wondered about him. Somehow, this random stranger I've never even seen has become a part of my daily life, which definitely IS one of those NYC things that happens now and then, and that makes me happy.

Because I use the word "atom" in my blog title I often get hits from search queries that are obviously designed to locate something related to science. It distresses me a little that in the past week I've had nearly a dozen hits searching on the phrase "quarts in an atom."

Just a hint... if you arrived here from a similar search they are called "quarKs" not "quarTs" and you should be looking here or here. Good luck!

Now for those of you who have been arriving here with various search strings involving the word "child...." well, there IS no help for you.

In roughly chronological order...

1. Marathons and running
2. Presidents who can speak clearly
3. Lindsay Lohan's breasts
4. Vegetarianism
5. The Baby Sitters Club
6. V.C. Andrews
7. Harry Potter
8. Robert Jordan
9. Mercedes Lackey
10. The relative merits of reading or not reading overly popular books
11. The Da Vinci Code
12. My old neighborhood
13. Apartment prices in NYC and other parts of the world
14. Geocaching
15. How to read a GPS
16. How starlings came to America
17. Inwood Park vs. Central Park
18. Mormonism
19. How to tell an accordion from a concertina
20. Lawrence Welk
21. Getting into museums for free
22. What fear feels like
23. Ren Faires
24. Badly painted murals
25. Zoos and zoo psychosis
26. Family
27. Prams
28. Collections you never intended to start
29. If more people would be better at math if teachers were better
30. Choosing underwear for the day
31. Naps
32. Scars
33. Kissing technique
34. Best friends

Oh... and what to do next time.

Everyone who has ever worked in theatre can watch the movie Waiting for Guffman and recognize some part of themselves, or of someone they have worked with or for in the past. (For the uninitiated Guffman is a hilarious mockumentary about a small town putting on a play about their history.) The saddest part is that doing theatre out in the "real world" away from New York or Chicago, or Boston where theatre is frequently performed, is an awful lot like being in Guffman. The people don't really understand what it takes to mount a production sometimes. The audience may not fully get the conceptualization of the idea. But I have to say... it's not all bad.

My current situation is this: I'm working in a TINY town in Connecticut, designing an opera. The company is great, has a great reputation among the people in the area and has resources that I would kill for in the city. The budget is great, in fact I am so used to having smaller budgets and producing shows in the city that I am hard pressed to imagine how I'd ever spend the budget they gave me without hiring an entire phalanx of carpenters, or sending the set out to a shop to be built. The people are incredibly nice. I am staying with a patron of the theatre who owns a largish house, and has been gracious enough to allow the opera to house me there. In fact all of the singers and tech crew are staying with various patrons around the city, as well as borrowing cars from them in many cases. The town though, is so small that everyone here knows who we are.

The town is a small tourist community, right on the ocean. It is situated on a peninsula about three blocks wide and twenty blocks or so long. It's a lovely historic community where every house was built before the revolution, and if you tore up the sidewalks and street paving it would probably look about the same ass it did back then. During the summer I imagine that the place is teeming with tourists, but now there's just the locals, and the people working for the opera. Twice now I've been recognized as being "Not One Of Us" and asked about the production. The full time residents of the town are all, it seems, fairly wealthy, as you'd have to be to live in houses like this and a town like this. One of the benefits of this is that they all have the latest tech gadgetry and there are open wireless networks all over the place, which allows me to post here, while sitting in a gazebo on the edge of the ocean watching the boats rock in the harbor. A fringe benefit of small town theatre that I don't often get, I'll admit.

The theatre was kind enough to hire me a carpenter to help with the build. He's been amazing, but since he's a real carpenter, used to building cabinetry, and has never done theatrical carpentry before it took me a while to convince him that I didn't need things to be measured in 64ths of inches.

The patrons have also been very generous with their belongings. A few days ago I spent the afternoon going to various homes and looking through their furniture to see if there was anything that I needed to borrow for the show. "Oh, you need a 19th century dressing screen? What color? I have three." Never have I had such a wealth of antiques available that people were wiling to allow me to put on stage.

I have three more days of sitting in parks to check my email, and building theatre in Small Town, USA, then it's back to reality in the big city and back to doing theatre the way I've grown used to doing it: cheaply, with unskilled volunteer help, and almost no resources. Sounds like fun, huh?

One of the worst things that happens to me as a freelancer is that I occasionally lose work because I already have work. That was the situation today. A theatre that I have worked for quite a bit in the past called me to check my availability. They usually have their schedule down to within an inch of its life so I was expecting that the work would be for October or November, but today that wasn't the case. They need a design for a show that went into rehearsal... yesterday! Since I am out of town for the next 6 days they regrettably said that they would probably have to look elsewhere, but that they would look at the schedule and see if it would be possible. I extended the only solution that I have, which would be for me to take a train back to the city on Saturday to meet with the director, since I have Sunday off here. It remains to be seen if that will happen. The frustration of knowing that there is a job going undone (by me at least), because I am already working elsewhere is killing me!

Click here and go order this books. (Just trust me, it will only cost you $1.54 if you buy it used!)

Sometimes I just feel like reading something fluffy, and sometimes I just feel like reading something with gay protagonists (do you know how tired I get of reading about straight romances? I mean... really... I can sympathize only SO much). And sometimes I just feel like reading both. That quest led me here. After reading the back of the book (A high school jock and nerd fall in love senior year...) I was expecting a light romp without much substance and maybe a few salacious chapters to make me blush on the subway. What I got was a great romantic comedy that had me alternatively laughing and crying (I hate crying when I read on the subway).

The story is told through diary excerpts, inter-office memos, emails, lists, court transcripts and more. It really gets moving in chapter two when the plot jumps forward 20 years to find the two boys both living happy lives on separate coasts, until one of them decides to change all that. The result is comparable to "Forget Paris" or "My Best Friend's Wedding" and the best of cinematic romantic comedy.

If you've ever wondered what happened to your first true love, or if you ever had a first true love, then this is the book for you. If you've ever travelled even a few hours to show up on the doorstep of your first true love (which I have and don't really recommend unless you ARE a character in a book) then this book is REALLY for you.

Now my biggest problem is that the book that was supposed to last me through my train ride to Connecticut (to work on the opera) has in actuality lasted me less than two days and has left me bookless for my journey. The good news is that I have a new favorite book to re-read whenever I'm feeling depressed or lonely.

I loved it so much in fact that I just ordered it for BFE Michelle, and though he doesn't know it yet Mark will be reading it this week. (Let's see how a straight guy feels about being on the other side of my romance coin! Ha!)

Every family has a way of making it. Everyone has their preferred method. Their perfect amount of sugar. Just the right number of tea bags. Here's mine:

First: Lipton Tea bags. This is important. None of that Tetley bullshit. Not the "cold brew" kind (more on that in a minute). And none of those single tea bags that are supposed to make whole pitchers. You'll need 8 tea bags.

Second: Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Now... do I measure out two quarts? No, of course not. I fill my medium sized pot, (and yes I only have one medium sized pot, I'm not that gay) about halfway. I'm guessing that it's about two quarts. It's important that the water be boiling before you put the tea bags in. I hope it goes without saying but pull all the little papers tags off the tea bags. Some people go to the trouble of tying all the strings together so that the bags make a little bundle... I find this unnecessary but if you're feeling bored while you are waiting for the water to boil, go ahead. After the water boils, drop the tea bags in. You can drop the heat a bit, but keep the water at a boil.

A note about so called "cold brews:" Someone came up with the brilliant notion off dropping several tea bags into a cold pitcher of water and letting it "steep" for a long period. This, along with "sun tea" has to be some weird Yankee method of making iced tea. The resulting tea is weak, and flavorless, and has no place on the table of a southern home. Avoid it!

Third: In a gallon sized pitcher place 1 cup of sugar. One. ONE! I know people who put up to three cups of sugar in a gallon of tea. That's overkill. We're making a beverage here, not some sort of iced tea syrup.

Fourth: Here's where the real art comes in. I prefer a nice dark tea. Some people prefer a lighter tea. I usually let my tea boil for 3 minutes or so. Up to 5. The tea should be a deep mahogany color in the pot, in it's undiluted form.

Fifth: Pour the hot tea into the pitcher with the sugar. Use a spoon to keep the bags from falling into the pitcher. Gently squeeze the remaining tea out of the bags. Be careful not to rip or burst one of the tea bags or you'll end up with tea leaves in your tea. Stir the hot tea and sugar allowing the sugar to dissolve completely.

Sixth: Fill pitcher with cold water, stir, and refrigerate. The resultant tea should be a dark red-brown.

Seventh: Enjoy!

Advanced Preparations: Fresh lemon is a time honored tradition to southern iced tea, as is a mint leaf as a garnish. Either are acceptable. Raspberries are to be avoided. They do not grow in the south and are not an acceptable ingredient. Raspberries are a leftover holdout from the 90's. Remember when everything came in a raspberry flavor? If you are simply dying for a berry flavor go with blackberries. Lipton makes a variety of flavored black teas. Mint, blackberry, orange spice, or honey lemon would make decent additions to southern style sweet tea. Simply replace on or two of the tea bags with the flavored type, depending on how strong a flavor you desire. One is usually enough for me. Do NOT be fooled by Lipton's raspberry flavor. Ignore it. Every company makes mistakes. For further proof of their mistakes check the mixes and powders that they also make. Avoid these at all cost.

Enjoy your tea, and if you are not normally an iced tea drinker but you try it based on my instructions, let me know!

Yesterday afternoon on the way to my weekly VS. card game I decided to swing by a public plaza in the area and check out a geocache, I looked for one earlier this week in a park near my neighborhood but couldn't find it. This one though was in a city street area rather than a wooded area. The truth is I didn't even need my GPS unit, which might be "cheating" but I figured it would attract more attention seeing me stumbling around looking at a bright yellow hand held device than it would for me to just look at the map and figure out where I was headed. To be in the public and a highly visible area it was pretty ingeniously hidden tucked behind a metal post and held up with magnets. The plaza itself was tucked between a couple buildings, one of those great NYC places that you'd only ever really know about if you lived or worked in the neighborhood and looked in just the right direction as you walked by.

I'm surprised by how many caches there are in Manhattan really. Several dozen, and most of them hidden in very public areas, not in the parks or the few wild areas as I expected. It's a different style of geocaching than what I was doing this summer, but fun in its own way. It's weird sometimes to think of all the things in the city, in the world really, that you might walk by every day and be completely unaware of because you just didn't know where to look.