An American Elegy

This is one of my all time favorite musical pieces. Playing it is one of the most powerful experiences I've had as a musician.

The song was written by Frank Ticheli. It was written in the wake of the Columbine Tragedy. Ticheli wanted to write a song that said: We're going to rise above this. After every tragedy, there's still beauty. There's beauty in how we come together. There's beauty in the rebuilding.

It's a song most everyone who's been in an honor band of any sort has played. It's a song almost exclusively played by high schoolers and college kids. It's a song played by the people who weren't too off from the ages of the victims of the tragedy. It's a song that's played by people who aren't too far off from the ages of those who brought the tragedy upon those victims. It's impossible not to think about that when you play the piece, not to wonder what it would have been like if it was your school, your schoolmates. It's a bizarre experience playing such a beautiful uplifting song when you're thinking about your friends being murdered (or worse, being murderers). I count the evening I performed it as one of the most powerful experiences art has ever given me. There were a lot of tears. But there also was a lot of community. There was a band, coming together, making music. There was a community of parents and teachers and friends, coming together, making an audience. And we definitely weren't perfect. I missed notes. Clarinets squeaked. Someone coughed during somber, emotive moments. It was not, I can say with confidence, the most beautifully executed piece of music in the history of high school bands. Nor is this recording that I've posted here. I know the score of this piece like a part of my soul. There are plenty of missed notes. I have squabbles with how it was conducted. It's not perfect. It's not everything this song can be. But it's still beautiful. And I am still moved. We're rebuilding right now. We're going to take actions. We're going to come together as a community. We're going to do it imperfectly. It's probably going to take a lot of rehearsal. It's not going to be the everything a movement can be. But it's still going to be beautiful. Because there is so much beauty in rebuilding. There's so much beauty in overcoming something together.

Language, LARPS, and Learning.

This Sunday, I headed out to my friend Marshall’s new Arlington apartment with the purpose of playing an immersive storytelling LARP game...thing. I hesitate to call it a LARP, because in my mind that term conjures up images of a large heard of nerds in renn fest costumes, hitting each other with foam swords or throwing birdseed. This was just a small gathering of friends around a table: Jack, Shayna, and Alex, all three of whom I had recently explored the MD Renn fest with, Davey, who I had never met before, Marshall, and Myself. No swords. No birdseed. No high-fantasy.

The game we were playing is one that Marshall had recently played with the game’s creator up at GenCon, called Sign. To understand the premise of the game, you need a little historical background.

Flash back to the 1970s, Nicaragua. There is no deaf community. There is no sign language. Deaf people, having only a few gestures and simple signs to communicate to their family, are otherwise completely isolated from any other person. It is a stark and lonely existence.

A school was formed, as an attempt to find a solution. The intent was to teach the children lipreading and spoken Spanish, with teachers limited to only using fingerspelling signs, and nothing else. The program wasn’t successful. Students couldn’t grasp the concept of any of the Spanish words, and they remained linguistically isolated from their teachers.

But on the playground, in the streets, outside of class, something amazing was happening. Students were talking. Sharing their home signs, and creating new ones. They were forming a shared sign language. The simpler, pidgin-like language used by younger children is now the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragünse (LSN) and the more formed language used by the older children, complete with complex gramatical conventions like verb agreement, became the Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). Both the ISN and LSN are still used today.

The game, Sign, starts off with a brief explanation of this history. From the instructions, “In Sign, we follow a small piece of their journey. Together we will share the frustration and loneliness of not having a language. We’ll slowly develop the tools necessary to express what’s important to us”

Marshall read to the intro to us, and explained the structure of the game. Two warm-up exercises, three class sessions, three recesses, and a final class. In the first warm-up, we were to go around the circle and each say “hello” in various ways that somehow conveyed more than just a greeting be it flirtatiousness, excitement, sarcasm, etc.

It felt dumb, and silly, and very much exactly like how warm-ups feel in any and all acting classes I’ve taken. Also, it was pretty abundantly clear that I was in a room full of performers, something I had already suspected. The second warm-up was much the same, only we replaced “hello” with a wave. From this point on, we were not to use any spoken language for the rest of the game.

At the end of the two warm-ups we were told to flip over the papers in front of us, which had two characters we could select from. I chose Sofia. According to my bio, I find people to be hurtful and angry when I can’t understand them. They scowl and get angry and wave their arms around a lot, threateningly. So I take to hiding from them more often than trying to understand them. I have a pet cat, Whiskers, who I love dearly, and who I miss. I didn’t know until this morning that I would have to leave whiskers at home. Below the description of her past and personality, it said: “Truth: I’m afraid Whiskers thinks I’ve left her” and two goals: “I want to tell______  a story about my cat.” and “I want to trust ______  with a secret”. These are the only ‘victory conditions’ found in the game. We’re to convey our truth to other students, and try and accomplish those two goals.

Before the game truly begins, we’re given three guidelines for language-creation: Draw from your character, draw from the setting and draw from each other. It also explained that we may have to compromise between what we want to say and what we are able to make understood. Whenever we feel there’s been a failure to fully understand, we should make a tally mark.  

The game begins. Marshall, who is playing our teacher, sternly points at a sign that said
“Sign your name. Take turns”. He points to me. No time to think. I make two air quotes by my cheeks, thinking it as something close to the concept of me mixed with the concept of cat. The class repeats it. Jack draws the top of his hand under his chin in a smile-like shape. Alex’s flattened hand shoots up across his chest like a rocket. Davey thumps his chest with a closed fist over his heart. Shayna’s hand circles and then pops outward, as if throwing confetti. We’re sent to recess, with the (written) instruction to try and talk to every other student.

It’s amazing to me how almost immediately we are able to communicate rudimentary concepts. We start with the familiar. Names. Waving to say hello. Shayna’s character (circle-pop? It’s hard to put the name signs we gave ourselves into words) and I (cheek-quotes) manage to convey the concepts of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ through the (admittedly heteronormative) drawn out curve of a tall woman’s body beside the straight up and down of a tall man’s. At some point, using mother and father, we establish a new sign- sibling, a hand held out to the side at around shoulder height. The sign only made sense when shown next to mother and father, but through repeated use became something we all understood as a stand-alone concept.

You sibling? Circle-pop asks, by tilting her head and looking curious while pointing at me and throwing her hand out at shoulder height. I shake my head no. I want to tell her about my cat. I ponder for a moment, and throw up a finger in the universal sign of ‘wait a moment’.

Sibling. No. I sign. I hold an imaginary cat in my arms and pet it. Circle-pop looks confused, and makes a tally on her sheet. Wait, I sign. I made an imaginary cat again. I take my hands and make triangle ears on my head. I then draw whiskers on my cheeks. I make the cat again. She looks excited and makes the cat too. She points at me, and then makes the cat, and then makes whiskers. I nod. We have established I have a cat.

Conversations much like that go on throughout recess, using known signs like mother, father, or sibling alongside easy pantomimes like whiskers or pet to create new signs. By the time we’re called back to class, we’ve had entire conversations, told jokes, and even invented a name for Marshall’s stern teacher character (a mockingly angry face combined with three shaming points in front of the body. Point point point). I’d learned the others’ families and personalities. Circle-pop’s mother is dead and her dad is alive, but she i’st too excited about him. Chest-thump has a brother, whose name was exactly like his, but with an open hand instead of a fist. He loves his brother. His parents are farmers. Smile-hand has parents, and one is presumably very old (I was wrong on this point). Smile-hand also loves magic and being funny (I was half right). I’d shared that my parents are mean, and made me scared, but I have a cat with orange fur who i loved. Rocket-hand, or.. Uh, Alex had decided to sit out the game at this point, so we knew nothing about that character.

In the next class, Pointpointpoint lays out a bunch of cards with words on them, indicating that we should pick one, and make a sign for them- an important tool in getting across our truths to the other students. Nearly half of the words, like “Family” or “Scared” or “Love”, we had already established signs for, but now was our chance to really cement those concepts. Chest-thump picks “sibling” and tries to sign it by holding an invisible baby, but we all instantly correct him. We already had a sign for sibling. We all throw our hands out at our shoulders. Sibling. He nods in agreement. We just standardized an aspect of our language.

In the class after that, we write down our own word to sign. I write “lonely” and show the class. I sign love (which I accidentally stole from ASL; two hands crossed over the chest in a self hug), and then make a sad face and throw my hands out away from myself- no. No-love. Lonely.  

At the next recess, we try to convey our truths to each other. Circle-pop signs to me:  I mother hope read.  I look confused, and make a tally. I. Mother. Hope. Read. Hope. I. No, she says.

You… hope-read? Pray-book? I ask. No. I’m wrong. Tallies.

Mother. Hope. I. Read. Write. Read. Certificate….

OH! You mother hope read write certificate cap diploma handshake congratulations? I clumsily attempt to mime.

YES! She is excited now. I mother hope read write graduate. I afraid no hope. Her mother wanted her to graduate college but she is scared she won’t. That’s an incredibly complex concept to convey, but we did it, albeit with a few tallies.

My turn. I love cat.  She nods. I continue. I afraid cat lonely. I here. Cat away.

She asks me, cat away… parents?

I respond, Yes. Cat away. Cat and parents. I afraid cat lonely.

We join the other two. Chest-thump is afraid his brother is lonely. Smile-hand…. Is afraid of something related to old people and ears. We’re confused until he finally concludes “I afraid not funny”. We assure him that he is funny. Circle-pop and I explain our truths to them, with some help translating for each other when concepts get confusing.

By the time we’re all called back for our final class, we’re able to joke ask questions and share deep truths about ourselves. We’re able to make fun of Pointpointpoint without him understanding what we mean (at one point in a previous class, I had asked him you lonely? You no family? In an attempt to connect with the very stern and unkind character, but my peers had all interpreted my signing as ‘are you lonely without a woman’ and laughed uncontrollably. It’s still not a perfect language).

In our final class, Pointpointpoint points at us all in turn, and the entire class is to describe the spotlight student. We do so, all in sign, agreeing with or contradicting each other. We have a discussion without any words. And like that, the game is over, and we can speak again.

As we get over the jarring sound of each other’s voices after nearly two hours of silence, we go around and read our character bios, and share our impressions. Chest thump (real name Alfonso) was an adventurer and mischief maker who was scared his brother would forget him. Smilehand (real name Jose) loved his grandfather, who had large ears, and was afraid people would stop thinking he is funny. Circlepop (Violeta) was a hopeful girl who’s mother died a year ago. She was scared that one day she’d lose hope.

We then talked about how the game made us feel, and what we’d learned. Some mention the anxiety and sadness brought on by being limited in how much of themselves they could express. Jack, in particular, who’s character (and self) is so focused around making jokes and laughter, felt the dissonance in how humor works in a signed language versus a verbal one (although, during the course of that discussion, I learned that ASL puns are a thing, as are ASL poetry slams).

To me, the experience was honestly a departure from anxiety. Two hours of deliberate, thoughtful communication with three ‘classmates’, made up of people I barely knew, was a balm for me. I’d never felt more listened to or included.For two hours, I had three other people painstakingly trying to fully understand not just what I was saying, but what I meant, and I was allowed to do the same for them, without judgement of being 'too analytical'. There was no tl;dr to these conversations, or listening for keywords and then responding off of those. No one could really monopolize a conversation, and it was blatantly obvious when miscommunication happened. I felt, as I imagine the children that this game was based off of did, less alone, and for the first time in a while on an equal communication playing field with those around me. It was an intense, powerful experience of true human connection. And it was one of the rare shared creative experiences where I felt that everyone in the room contributed to the end product equally, a very very hard task to achieve in a room full of actors and creatives.

The game, should you want to check it out, is free online. It works best for small groups (3-6) and takes around 2 hours. I really, really want to find a way to run something similar to this as an event at a science festival. If you have any ideas, or want to collaborate, please let me know.

DC Theatre Roundup: Meeting a New Arts Scene

I moved up to DC from Atlanta in late May, right before my hometown’s fringe festival was getting started. It’s hard enough to leave behind Atlanta’s badass arts scene, where we’ve been growing innovative art and incredible artists on a regular basis, but it becomes even harder when you leave right in the middle of an incredible grassroots festival run by some of your favorite people in Atlanta…but I was determined fill that arts and theatre void somehow in DC.

I hit the ground running once I got up here. My first night in my new apartment was spent awkwardly hunched over on an air mattress, alternating between ordering furniture and facebook stalking the insane number of theatres and theatre companies in the DMV. And there’s a lot, y’all. I subscribed to events, I joined mailing lists. I was going to get out there and meet people and see art (a moving pro-tip: It is so much easier not to be an introverted hermit when your apartment has no furniture or books or internet or literally anything for the first three weeks you live in it).

The first show I saw was brought to my attention through a Welcome to DC facebook group I was added to. The show, LiveArtDC’s The Merry Death of Robin Hood, took place at DC Reynolds Bar in Petworth, DC (for Atlanta friends: Petworth is basically the Kirkwood of DC- a place just riding just far enough below the crest of gentrification to still have energy and verve). The show was exactly what I wanted my first DC theatre experience to be- intimate, home-grown, small-scale and raw, just like we make ‘em back home. The audience sat around in the cozy, just-grungy-enough bar as the eyeliner and safty-pin clad britpunk merry men mourned the death of their friend and leader Robin Hood, acting out scenes from his life as they reminisced. The show was fun, rowdy, and intimate, with performers occasionally ousting audience members from their seats to make room for fight scenes and love scenes alike. Everyone was a part of the action (including me- over the course of the show I got married and had a child with one of the merry men).

After the show the director, Jason Schlafstein, came over to me, having overheard me tell one of my fellow meetup attendees that I was getting into playwrighting when I left Atlanta. He introduced me to the rest of the cast, and we chatted about the various theatre companies in DC, and what I should check out coming up.

Among those suggestions was the next show I saw, Mindy Kaling’s Matt and Ben at Flying V (the company of which Schlafstein is Artistic Director). This one was set in a much more traditional theatre setting (one that reminded me a bit of Dad’s Garage’s new space). In the show, two young actresses embody Matt Damon and Ben Affleck from there college years, and what happens one day when the script to Good Will Hunting suddenly falls from the sky and onto their coffee table. The show was light, hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable, and while the text itself wasn’t terribly substantive, watching two women perform in drag forced a spotlight on all of these weird confusing feelings about gender, how we portray it, and even how we portray gender-bending and drag… but then the play made no attempt to tell the audience what to do with those feelings. It didn’t address them at all. It just left them there, undigested, and my brain is still chewing on them weeks later.

For my third show, I went big budget and full production, managing to charm my way into being the +1 of a theatre critic who was writing a review of Jason Robert Brown’s new musical The Bridges of Madison County at the Kennedy Center. As someone who grew up on Parade, and who is known to belt Songs from A New World in the shower, I’m a reasonably big fan of Jason Robert Brown (he even dated a fellow cast member from the first ever play I was in, so I feel a special weird two-degrees-of-kevin-bacon sort of effect with him). While the Kennedy Center was gorgeous, and I totally fangirled when I found out that Jason Robert Brown himself was conducting the orchestra, the show itself was underwhelming. It was far too sterile for what was meant to be a story of a passionate romance, and the storyline top-heavy and spread thin. That said, the lighting designer, Donald Holder deserves every possible award known to mankind, and his design is worth the cost of going alone (says the girl who got a free ticket, but still).

Last night marks the opening night of Capital Fringe. Seeing a show and knowing no one involved in the process is a foreign feeling for me already (I quite literally grew up in Atlanta theatre- my first show was when I was 9 years old), but trying to navigate an entire three and a half week long, 100+ show festival when I have no working knowledge of the theatre scene is daunting at best. Luckily enough for me- I’ve somehow managed to make friends with three fringe reviewers.

I went with one of them to see Petunia and Chicken by Animal Engine, a charming two-person storytelling team touring the show around the fringe circuit. Being southern, and growing up in the home state of Joel Chandler Harris (father of Brer Rabbit, among other stories), storytelling runs deep in my blood, so this show felt a bit like home, and it brought to mind the rough, bare-bones storytelling teams who used to perform quasi-educational folk stories for us in elementary school. Armed with nothing but a hat, a scarf, and folk songs, the performers (Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher) tell a story of two young lovers in the nebraska prairie at the turn of the century, in a story based on the writings of Willa Cather. The show is well crafted, and it’s nearly impossible not to become deeply invested in the story, which takes you from light-hearted and goofy to a handful of heart-wrenching moments of loss and pain. But the show still feels like a rough draft. Muasher and Brown have some great raw material to work with, but there are moments of tension cut a bit too short, and interesting narrative devices that aren’t quite uniformly used in the show (for example, there is a brilliant use of breath as a way of creating setting and pacing and character used very strongly in the beginning of the show that is quickly and randomly abandoned until one random and jarring moment near the end when it returns). But that’s also the joy of Fringe, right? Seeing plays that are still in the process of growing. I’d love to see where this one is going.

I’m planning on trying to hit at least one fringe show a day over the next few weekends. I’ll try and post my thoughts and observations here as I get to know DC and the theatre scene more, but anyone who’s followed my blogs in the past knows not to trust my promises to update regularly (I say, fully aware that I haven't updated this blog in over a year). But if any of you are ever in DC, I’m happy to grab a drink and share all I’ve learned so far. If you have suggestions of other shows or theatre companies I should check out, let me know in the comments!

Confessions of a Child Model

When I was 8 years old, my mother finally gave in to my obsessive begging to let me take acting classes. My first acting teacher, Barbara Handcock (who had the last on screen dance with Fred Astaire), thought I was cute and rambunctious, and she encouraged me to go to auditions the theatre was holding.

That's her, in the dress. (source: IMDB)

Somehow, my precocious charm won over the casting director, and I got cast in my first play, Chess (for those of you who aren't musical theatre nerds, it's a play about chess champions and USSR/USA relations set to music written by the guys from ABBA). After working in professional theatre, I was hooked. There was no getting me out of show business at this point. So, my parents bit the bullet and got me headshots (for theatre people, headshots are pictures of your head. Not something in Call of Duty).

Apparently, they read somewhere that when you get your headshots you should take the sheet-o-choices to an agent, so they can tell you which ones work best in 'the biz'. We did this. Apparently, I was photogenic enough that the agent we went to really wanted to represent me, so she could get me into modeling.

Yeah, I don't see it either....

I should note: There are a TON of scams to dupe little kids and their over-eager parents into thinking they're getting into modeling. They'll tell you they want to make you a star, so long as you pay a couple grand to take their classes and workshops. This is not how REAL agents work. Real agents agree to represent you with absolutely no charge. They will then send you on auditions and go-sees (which is the modeling version of an audition, where the company just figures out if you look like your picture and makes sure you're not a total brat). If you get a job, they take a percentage of your pay. Anything else is a scam.

Anyway, not long after this meeting, I became a professional child model. I was doing photoshoots 3-4 times a week, and as a result of that I had to be pulled out of public school and homeschooled.

Here are some interesting tibits about my life as a child model:

• There were absolutely no diets involved. I was a skinny kid naturally. I can't speak for all child models here, but I never caught any hints that any of them ever dieted, either. We were just active, normal kids as far as that went.
• Pagent kids (or more aptly, pagent parents) were frowned upon. The very first time I worked with Clay, the photographer I did most of my shoots with, he asked me if I did pageants. A number of agents were known to scout modeling clients at pageants, and so it wasn't uncommon for models to have that in their background. The fact that I had never even considered doing pageants gave me some serious brownie points in Clay's eyes. Pageant kids tended to be much more high strung, and pageant parents tended to be.... well, not too far off from what you see on Toddlers and Tiaras. There was one pageant girl I occasionally modeled with who had such horrible anxiety from her pageant and figure skating and modeling schedule that she often plucked out her eyelashes, rendering her unable to model for weeks at a time.
• I had a shoe bag. Modeling clothes tended to all be shipped to the photographers in the same size, but the clients never provided photographers with shoes (because models foot sizes can vary so widely). This led to me having a giant bag filled with shoes of every conceivable color and style.
• No high heels or platforms allowed! The one thing we had to be extra careful of when buying shoes for the shoe bag was to avoid any heel or platform. When it comes to kids' modeling, the girls are starting to hit puberty a little faster than the boys, but photographers don't want one gender dwarfing the other. Often we'd even have to employ tricks to make the boys look taller, like making me sit while he stood, having him stand on a box out of frame, or having me crouch awkwardly.
• Very few shoots were 'on location'. Often in magazines you see pictures of people on the beach or on a street. Very, very rarely did we ever shoot any of these shots outside the studio. Shooting outside meant not having complete control over the lights and other aspects of the shot. I often opened up the weeks paper to the nice surprise of seeing a photo of myself at the beach.

That's funny, that baby next to me appears to be floating on the sand.

• Clothes were shot out of season which means that when we did shoot on location, you could guarantee I wasn't comfortable. Winter sweaters in the summer heat. Bathing suits in the winter. But part of being a model is smiling, no matter how much you hate the clothes you're in. 

I vividly remember absolutely hating the photoshoot on the left. It was 100 degrees and the sun was right in my eyes. Bonus fact: that was one of my homeschool text books. 

• Clothes often had giant holes in them. The photographers told me it was to keep anyone from having to pay import taxes when shipping them, because they clearly weren't for sale.
• As a kid, at least, modeling is way more about being professional and easy to work with than being super pretty. I was a cute kid, for sure. But there were definitely more beautiful girls out there who got way less work than me, because I never had 'diva moments'. (I once knew a girl who pitched a complete fit because the photographer had spelled her name Sunny, not Sunni on the contact sheet. Guess who didn't work with the photographer again). 
• Modeling 'families' are hilariously unrealistic. My 'mom' would often be played by 20 year olds.

No Mom, I don't judge you for having me when you were 11.

• The number one thing I learned from being a model is to never trust adverts. The number of giant sandwich clips and safety pins they use to make your clothes fit nicely for the camera is hilarious. I often looked like some sort of stegosaurus with all the clips down my back. I don't think we ever took a picture of the clothes as-is.
• There is a LOT of photoshop that goes into modeling. Even with kids. Actually, especially with kids. I was a normal 9 year old. I had scrapes and bruises all down my bony legs from playing in the woods. I was often completely covered in mosquito bites. It's amazing what a little makeup and a good photo editor can do. 

In the picture on the right, where I'm in orange, I had a fat lip from playing basketball with my dad. You'd never know. Also, there are at least 5 mosquito bite scars absent from my legs. 

• Some of the kids I worked with did go on to become famous. I never wanted to. I was happy with the success I had locally, so I never went out to LA for pilot season (not planes. TV shows). 

Those two pictures on the left are with Devon Werkheiser, star of Ned Bigby's Middle School Survival Guide. I also got to kiss Lucas Till (Havoc from X-Men first class) on the cheek a bunch, but those were all in commercials that I don't have copies of. 

• You make a fair amount modeling. I paid taxes to the government as a 4th grader. You make about $95/hr doing photoshoots, and even more for modeling commercials. That being said, if you factor in the gas money to and from location, the cost of headshots, the cost of my acting classes, the cost of my shoe collection, etc... It's not as amazingly lucrative as you might think.
• Modeling was 150% less catty and demoralizing that public school. If it hadn't been for the economy tanking and the modeling industry slowing down so much, I would have had a hard time going back to public school. I feel like I got nothing but good things out of my experience modeling. I learned about professionalism, interviews, punctuality, and responsibility. I also learned some neat makeup tricks from working with makeup artists! I worked with a ton of absolutely amazing people and I earned money for college! 

(Hey guys! I'm about to make a fancy new blog where I plan on only posting my highest quality creative writing, journalism, and science communication. If you want to help me make that dream come true, PLEASE check out my Patreon page. You'll be my favorite person in the history of all time. And remember, I know famous people. You'll be more favorite than famous people. Imagine that). 

Things that surprised an Irishman about America

So, someone posted this on facebook:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/michael-koh/2013/11/16-people-on-things-they-couldnt-believe-about-america-until-they-moved-here/

For those of you who don't click links, it's a list of things people found mind blowing about america once they moved here.

I decided to ask my resident foreigner about what he found fascinating about America.

• Cracker Barrel (Stephen has an overwhelming love of Cracker Barrel. If given the choice between going there and going just about anywhere else, he will ALWAYS pick Cracker Barrel). I ordered pancakes, and they brought me like fourteen plates of food. There was sausage and bacon and eggs and so much deliciousness. It was awesome. 
• Free refills were pretty awesome, too. You can ask someone, "Can I have another Coke?" and they'll pour it. And you ask "How much will that be?" and it's FREE. 
• Planes are like taxis. One time, I missed a plane. They were just like, "Oh, that's okay. Just catch the next one".  If you did that in the UK it'd be another $400 and a long wait. 
• There's free booze in casinos. FREE booze. 
• Deep fried turkeys. The idea of frying a whole turkey in Ireland is ridiculous. Or, how in the south you can see people barbecuing a whole pig on the back of their car. 
• People are so friendly in the south. You can walk down a street and say hi to someone and they'll say hi back. People wave at you from their cars as they drive by. In Ireland, if you wave at someone, you're going to get something shouted at and something thrown at you. 
• America is huge. It's just... it's massive. And there's so much variety. Mountains, beaches, deserts, forests..... 
• This is the only place I've ever seen dirt poor people. I mean, seriously dirt poor. People wearing hand me downs held together with rags. People talk about Ireland being poor, and it is, but it's nothing like the dirt poor people you can see in the south here. 
• Aside from that, quality of life is generally better here. Things are huge. Everything's cheap. Food is awesome. 
• That people have this weird romantic view of Ireland. St. Patricks day, Irish pubs everywhere. On several occasions I've had Americans argue that they were 'more Irish than me'. 
• Americans seem to hate their own country. living there, you don't see how huge and gorgeous your own country is. You haven't lived in just one small country all your life. So many Americans think america sucks. It really doesn't. It's pretty bad-ass. 

Then I asked him what people in America are most surprised to learn about Ireland.

• That we have cars and electricity. And tvs. And trains. People think Ireland is a little back water. We have modern amenities.
• How heavily influenced we are by American culture. (I, personally, was really surprised to hear that he had played cowboys and indians growing up. Those only existed in America, so I assumed it was an american game). 
• I have never ever eaten corned beef and cabbage. That is an american dish. Not what we eat. 

Pages from an Angsty Mars Rover's Diary

I forgot to post this a few weeks ago when it went up on scenemissingmagazine.com, but today's MAVEN launch has brought it back into my mind.

So, first. Scene Missing Magazine. It's run by the wonderful Jason Mallory, who I became acquainted with through my work with Write Club Atlanta. He sends writers a movie trailer (mine was 2009 space-thriller Last Days on Mars), and then asks them to use that trailer as a prompt. There is also an awesome live show version of this every third Wednesday at the Highland Inn Ballroom. It's awesome. Next week will be full of Chevy Chase.

So, here's the trailer for Last Days on Mars.



I got this only a few days after the end of the Government shutdown, and for whatever reason it led me to question what poor Curiosity, the lovable Mars rover, was up to while NASA was on furlough.

Oct 2, 2013
Dear logbook,
I haven’t heard from NASA in 2 days. Normally, I wouldn’t complain. Everyone needs time off, right? However, usually they’re polite enough to give some warning. Normally, I get some sort of explanation for the silence. But this time? Nothing. Not a damn thing. No “Hey, Curiosity. How’s it going? Thanks for discovering WATER ON MARS. By the way, we’re going to take a few days off, and waste your more than valuable time while we go have some sort of nerd-fueled frat party with Wil Wheaton and Sandra Bullock.”

I mean, it’s not like Mars rovers last forever. I’m still young. I still have some life left in me. But, hell, so was Spirit, and that poor fucker got stuck in a sand pile and had to be repurposed as a glorified robotic weatherman. And then there’s, oh, you know, every other hunk of metal they’ve sent up here who just stopped being able to communicate with NASA at all. It’s not like I wouldn’t jump to THAT conclusion.
I don’t want to be a huge fucking exhaust pipe or anything, but this just isn’t cool. I happen to take this job seriously. I happen to think what I’m doing up here is a bit more important than whatever the hell it is they’re doing instead. I can’t think of a single damn thing that would be so important that it would warrant completely abandoning a two and a half billion dollar piece of state of the art machinery to its own devices. What, did Firefly get approved for a new season? Did Half Life 3 finally come out? Did someone leak naked pictures of Felicia Day? Great. Awesome. Good for them. Meanwhile I’m just sitting up here on the planet those idiots fixated on for years, twiddling my gears.
Maybe I’m overreacting. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. In the meantime, I’m going to go laser some rocks to blow off steam.
-Curiosity.

If you're curious about what happens next... click to read it on the Scene Missing Website.

And, of course, come see the show this Wednesday at 9pm at the Highland Inn Ballroom. See you there!

Why I Donated to WABE

I grew up listening to WABE.

I had a brother who was 4 years older than me, so my childhood was always an arms race of privileges. As soon as Robert would get one, I would want it. When I was 3, Robert started listening to the radio at night. I was immediately jealous. They wouldn’t let me listen to any of the pop stations (because I wouldn’t fall asleep). Instead, they put 90.1 on my dial and said that classical music was good for sleeping. Out of rebellion, I would stay up late listening to symphonies and chamber music and operas. It’s no coincidence that I would later become a huge classical music fan.

In 4th grade, I started homeschooling. I was pretty much given free reign over my curriculum, so long as I got it approved through mom. Checking the WABE schedule for programming relevant to my interests became a huge part of my schooling. I became an expert on what shows were on when, and excitedly run up to my mom and tell her to turn on the radio every week for Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

In 6th grade, I was back in public school and I had discovered the joys of the band program. As a budding french horn player, there was nothing better for inspiring me to practice than to listen to From the Top. I’m still a little sad that I never got to be on that show, but it was definitely a huge influence in my life.

In high school, podcasts had just become a thing, but I didn’t have an ipod. Instead, I’d burn NPR podcasts onto a cd, and listen to them on the bus to and from school.  I’d also put a cassette tape into my boom box on friday nights to record the radio as I was heading out the door for marching band, because I simply couldn’t stand missing my favorite programs: From the Top, A Night on the Town, and Weekend Radio (where did that one go, by the way? It was the best thing I’d ever heard. I think I’m the only 23 year old who knows who Bob and Ray and Peter Sellers and Victor Borge are, and it’s thanks to that program). I’d get really mad when football games would go into overtime, because I knew the cassette only lasted till about halfway through Weekend Radio, so I’d miss the end if I wasn’t home on time.

As I’ve traveled into my adult life, I’m fairly certain that my car’s radio has never left 90.1. I listen to it on the way to work, I listen to it on the way home. Heck, I once got a speeding ticket because Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and I got so caught up in pretending to be a conductor that I was paying no attention to my driving.

I've had countless bonding moments with volunteers at work over our shared love of various programs. I've introduced several people to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and My Word who are now die hard fans. I once drunkenly sent a fan letter to Peter Sagal and squealed like a 12-year-old belieber when I got a response. I got really excited about going to Write Club in Atlanta because I found out that someone involved actually worked for WABE.  I met someone who works for Storycorps and may have made her feel a bit odd with how enthusiastic I was about her job. Even now that I’m friends with Myke Johns, and see Amanda Plumb every so often around town… When Aleck Ragsdale interviewed me at Dragon*con this year, I felt ecstatic.

So, why is this my first time pledging?

Well, one- because I’m broke. With my part time job at the Aquarium (surely you understand the frustrations of working for a non-profit) and non-existent writing career, I don’t tend to have any spare change.
And two- because ever since I endured my first pledge drive, I told myself that when I was a grown-up, I would pledge. It became this huge thing in my brain. My one true sign of adulthood would be my ability to pledge for WABE. Well, I guess I’m a full grown woman, now. I can’t pledge much… but every bit helps, right?