Finding Sources for Interviews is Hard
This is my third blog post assignment for my Journalism class. I went for the reflection option this time instead of the news topic option because I had something to say about my experiences with the class in the last two weeks.
As I've worked to find people I can interview for my feature article, I've found that it can be really difficult to actually connect with even one person who can address the topic in question. Many people will simply ignore interview requests.
I'm sure part of the problem is my choice of subject. Not that many people know about Bitcoin, after all. What's more, privacy and anonymity are cornerstones of Bitcoin's design. That makes them part of the user culture…or maybe that just means Bitcoin attracts privacy fanatics.
In any case, I've successfully found only one source, an assistant professor of economics here on campus. I found him through the head of the economics department, and even that wasn't in time for me to include in my first draft anything he said. (He's only on campus on Fridays, and I didn't get his name until the Saturday before the Thursday my draft was due.) I also couldn't take the time to properly write my first draft. It was probably the roughest piece of writing I've ever submitted to a teacher, whether graded or not. (Well, there were those bits of writing I did in elementary school, but I won't count those because I don't count those years as part of my real education.)
On the social media front, I've had a nibble or two, but no real responses. I got a really good referral on Twitter from someone I interact with pretty often, who told me about a Bitcoin fanatic he knows, but this fanatic 1) has a private Twitter stream and 2) ignored my attempts to get in touch. What I said about privacy before definitely applies to this guy.
Actually, a follow-up message to the economics department chair here at Brandeis fell through the cracks when I asked about another source within the department who might be available for interview sooner — in time for my first draft. (I hope it fell through the cracks; the alternative is being ignored, and I don't like being ignored when I'm trying to do an assignment. No, Brandeis' email system doesn't lose messages. Google Apps has higher reliability than that. I use it for my personal domain, so I have some experience there.) I guess that can't be blamed on the Bitcoin culture.
Having failed to find any more sources in the week since turning in my draft, I plan to launch something of a guerilla campaign on Friday. (The rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday will be dedicated to making sure I finish my Java programming assignment by the deadline, and to studying for my Hebrew midterm on Friday morning.) My current campaign hit list includes the economics and computer science departments of several colleges, a few friends of mine who must either know about or know someone who knows about Bitcoin, and a couple of legal firms with which I have connections. This last item is important, as I need to understand the legal environment surrounding Bitcoins competing with the United States Dollar (and with every other nation's currency).
May my campaign result in a deluge of responses. If it doesn't work, I guess I'll be asking my professor for help on or around Tuesday afternoon.
As an aside, Bitcoin is also hard to research. In looking for material online (for not much has been said about it in physical media), I followed many dead links. The system is somewhat unstable, as shown by what happened when the Mt. Gox exchange was compromised (a part of my research); the information resources about it are even more so.
Thanks to my source-finding campaign plans and my need for better research, I foresee that my weekend will be full of work for my journalism class. Well, the part of it that is not taken up by tech week for The Last Night of Ballyhoo, for which I am the sound designer.
Perhaps I should just say that I will be having a busy week(end).
Google Books and the Book Industry
I wrote this for my Journalism class at college, but figured I might as well share it here too.
The New York Times ran a story Monday about a new lawsuit filed against HathiTrust, a partnership of universities and research libraries that maintains a digital book collection on its website.
Plaintiffs in the suit include three major authors' groups: the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, and the Québec Union of Writers. Eight individual authors are also party to the filing, among them Pat Cummings, Roxana Robinson, and T.J. Stiles.
The objections raised in the suit center around the HathiTrust collection itself. "[S]even million copyright-protected books" (according to Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as quoted by the NYT) are available without any consent from the authors. The Authors Guild and its fellow plaintiffs say that the collection violates copyright law.
HathiTrust's collection consists of books digitized by Google, Inc. as part of the Google Books project, which has been steadily scanning books from participating university libraries across the United States.
The Google Books project has been the subject of many lawsuits over the years since work on it was begun in 2002. A few examples will help provide context:
- 2005: The Authors Guild sues Google for "plain and brazen violation of copyright law" (archived press release from AG via Archive.org)
- 2009: French court halts Google Books in France: the ruling applies only to books published in France under copyright (Los Angeles Times article)
- 2010: Several professional photographers' organizations bring a class-action suit regarding the reproduction of copyrighted images within the books scanned by Google (Mashable.com article)
The Authors Guild has been involved with this issue before. This time, the fight has been brought to an organization with a bit less might than Google.
But never mind who sued whom, for what, and when. The issue is really quite simple, and most of the lawsuits against Google Books have had little to no merit.
United States copyright law (the laws under which most Google Books lawsuits have been filed) contains a doctrine known as Fair Use. It was originally intended to protect commentary, critique, and parody of copyrighted works. However, the principles of Fair Use (Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute):
- "the purpose and character of the use" — e.g. for commentary, critique, parody, scholarship, etc.
- "the nature of the copyrighted work" — published/unpublished, fact/fiction
- "the amount and substantiality of the portion used" — how much of the work was used, and how significant the used portion is to the work as a whole
- "the effect of the use upon the potential market" — if the use of that portion will negatively affect demand for or the value of the original work
(Thanks to Stanford University's Copyright & Fair Use information center for helping me refresh my own memory of these concepts.)
The way Google Books works is carefully designed to fit within existing copyright laws. Books in the public domain are fully accessible, with no restrictions. Copyrighted, in-print books allow whatever access the publisher has specified. For in-copyright books that do not have a publisher, Google restricts access to "snippets", which show just a few words surrounding the user's search term.
So: Whenever Google Books shows a significant portion of a book, it has permission from the publisher to do so. Without permission, Google Books displays tiny fractions of the full work in an immensely transformative manner.
Google Books falls well within Fair Use doctrine, at the very least. Displaying card catalog – type information about the book plus at most a sentence or so for each search result (I'll go down the Fair Use list):
- Is for scholarly reasons
- Uses published works
- Displays at most a few percent of the whole book
- May actually increase demand for the books featured in the results
(Parts of Lawrence Lessig's 2006 video discussion of Google Book Search came in handy for an overview of how Google Books works.)
So why are publishers and authors suing Google and HathiTrust?
As far as I can tell,[original research?] HathiTrust follows the same rules as Google Books. This makes sense, as the content is from the Google Books program.
HathiTrust's entire archive is intended for academic use. It's unclear why the various plaintiffs in this new lawsuit are suing for the removal of their books from the archive, rather than suing for better access controls. If the concern is that anyone can access the books (which they can), then restricting access to verified researchers would clear up the problem.
It's like big music, film, and television. The music industry figured out that it could simply adapt to the Internet and start offering content over the new medium, giving people an alternative to pirated copies shared through services like Napster, LimeWire, and BitTorrent. Film and television haven't yet figured that out, and I guess the book industry is still working on it too.
So… That’s Surgery, Doc
Wow, has it really been almost seven months since I last published? Blog fail! 
I figured I should get this post, at least, out the door before 2011. It was mostly written in September, so there might be some things that are no longer true. The vast majority of the text, though, is not publish-date-sensitive. Hopefully more to come, filling in my summer at the very least.
I now know what it's like to go through surgery. Thanks to my former appendix for the lesson.
My family planned a vacation to coincide with my brother's college graduation in August. After the graduation festivities, we set out for the Outer Banks of North Carolina by way of Washington, DC. The Outer Banks are a great place to go to just get away from everything and enjoy the ocean. I spent uncountable hours reading Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand — a very engrossing and relevant book) at the beach, and countless more hours taking photos of the ocean and my five-year-old nephew being his unashamedly cute self.
The Outer Banks were so enjoyable, in fact, that we extended our stay. However, that might not have been the best idea: I felt a little off the day before we were to leave, and I felt really bad the day we planned to leave. I felt so bad that I actually wanted to see a doctor — an extremely rare state of mind for me.
Onset
The day I felt a little off was probably related to the eventual diagnosis, but at the time I (and everyone else) thought it was just heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Earlier that day I spent significant time (at least two hours) constantly in the sun. I eventually decided that I had to get out of the sun, no matter what, and spent the rest of the day feeling really exhausted. It felt really good to get to sleep that night, and I figured I'd feel a lot better in the morning.
Morning brought some relief, but I still felt tired. I had a mild headache, but that happens often enough that I thought nothing of it. I figured I'd push right through the day, but my stomach started aching just before lunch time. Since I'd had a good-sized breakfast (the remains of last night's dinner), I decided to try to take a nap instead. Sleep didn't exactly come readily. By the time Mom came to check on me, I was well past a stomach ache.
I had what felt like very bad constipation, only the usual tricks didn't work. It also kept getting worse. From the pain scale I later saw in my hospital room,1 I judge in hindsight that I was at a 3, moving to a 4 when I decided to go to the hospital. (I try to avoid doctors whenever possible; in general any problems I have resolve themselves given a little time.) I finally just gave up trying to solve the problem on my own. Whatever it was, I needed an expert.
My mother stopped to tell Dad where we were going on the way to the car. All I could think was, "Less talk, more driving." I told her as much when she made it to the car, but I think it was more funny than anything else considering my weak, tortured voice at the time.
At the hospital, I dragged myself in and leaned heavily on the reception desk. My stomach demanded so much attention, I could barely answer the basic diagnostic questions posed by the woman working there, but that probably gave her plenty of information right there. I let Mom fill out the blank form I received; there was no way I was going to sit there and write all that data. All I wanted was to move as little as possible.
Diagnosis
When the hospital staff called me into the triage room, I was at about 6 or 7, pain-wise, and that's what I told the nurse when she asked. A few questions later, I had a room and a hospital gown — the first time I can remember being given a gown in my life.2 I changed and gingerly set myself down to wait for someone to come and see me.
A female doctor (of whose name I can remember only that it started with an M) came to examine me and ask more questions. She hypothesized that I might have strep, given my slightly sore throat, and listed three tests I would receive: strep, blood chemistry, and CT scan. She left and returned after a brief eternity to take the strep test. I don't remember her coming back after that; a nurse came to draw blood.
My mother, who was hanging out for a while to provide moral support, left to take her usual walk on the beach (and because the nurse said I should rest). Sometime after that, there was a shift change. I got a new nurse by the name of Philip, who was very good. He was direct and to the point about everything, no matter what I asked him. Of all the people I met at the hospital, he was one of my favorites.
I also got a different doctor, not that I can remember his name either. All I remember is that I sort of liked him better than the first. It was something about his personality.
Later, a man from the radiology department came by to drop off a bottle of Sprite® with barium solution added and a questionnaire; he instructed me to finish the bottle within an hour and a half and to answer all the questions on the form.
The form was the easy part — I could do that all at once — but there was no way I was going to chug a full bottle of soda all at once. (I can't even chug soda when I'm feeling good; the bubbles make it difficult.) So I sipped. And forced myself to sip again, five minutes later. And again. I had just one sip to go when the radiology man came back for me, and I didn't have to finish it. Too bad; by then it was starting to taste pretty good.
Actually getting the scan was an interesting process. The machine sounded like a jet engine once it really got going, and the technicians kept making announcements over a speaker in there. I was told to breathe, hold my breath, let it out, breathe, let it out, take a deep breath, hold it, wait for the machine to scan me again, let it out... I didn't understand why the breath control was such a big deal, but I did my best. Apparently all those years of practice in singing and theatre classes weren't enough; I couldn't always hold it long enough. (It didn't help that my soon-to-be-diagnosed condition accelerated my respiration.)
When I got back to my room, I waited a good while for the results. I used the last dregs of battery power in my cell phone3 to recall my mother so she could hear the verdict as it arrived. She came back just in time; the doctor brought the news within a few minutes of her return.
So, I had appendicitis. Not exactly what I expected to happen on vacation. Apparently I was bucking Outer Banks statistics; Philip later told me that it was common for vacationers to catch appendicitis on the first day of a trip, not on (what was supposed to be) the last as I did. But then, I've never been one for conformity.
The doctor said he thought I'd be taken care of that night, and left to relay my case to the surgeon for a second opinion. Less than an hour later (if I recall correctly), I was meeting with the surgeon and getting the run-down. The anesthesiologist came by to check on allergies and explain how that part of the procedure would work. It took just long enough to call in the crew for the rest of my family to join us at the hospital (though my best friend, with us for the trip, was absent).4 As they were coming from one direction, the two orderlies who took me to OR were coming from the other.
"It"
Dr. Lowe, the surgeon, was a kind, competent-seeming man. From the moment he first entered my room, I had an overwhelming feeling that he knew exactly what to do and how to do it. His confidence-inspiring presence helped alleviate the few qualms I had (by then) about going through surgery.
I had an entourage all the way down the hall to OR. It was actually kind of fun, since I was finally about to have the problem corrected. My family parted ways with us at the big double doors to the OR department after eliciting a promise from the surgeon for pictures (which I have yet to see; my mom said she thought she left them in the waiting room).
On the way to OR2 (the specific room within the OR used for my procedure) I began to notice that the doctors had a really good sense of camaraderie among them, a welcome addition to the auras of competence and warmth projected by nearly everyone I met. Dr. Lowe, the anesthesiologist, and the assistants all knew each other well and kept up a non-stop humor stream as I was wheeled in. I did my best to join the fun in the few minutes before the point where I can no longer remember anything. I can barely remember being told I was about to get very sleepy. My last thoughts were of relaxation and of trust in the skills of the people around me.
Operation Successful
I woke up in a timeless world, feeling like I'd just dozed off for a moment. I was in a bed, but the last place I remember moving was an operating table; I honestly don't know how I ended up on a bed in a shadowy nook of the operating room, but I did. A woman was sitting at a desk, relaying somehow the details of my case to someone else; I will never know to whom she was speaking, but the nurses in the ward where I was later taken are good candidates. I was floating on a cloud of white linen, not really feeling anything except drowsiness — Dr. Lowe's promised numbing medicines were working. Eventually someone came over to greet me, and then I was wheeled to an elevator, floating along to my room for the night.
Mom and Dad showed up with my sleeping nephew, quipping that it looked like I'd have a roommate. I tried to keep up conversation, but I really wanted to just go back to sleep. With my side of the conversation consisting mostly of single words (several of which sounded like "sleepy"), I convinced everyone that I felt fine and just needed to rest. But first, they made me "play" with a breathing apparatus "to help avoid pneumonia"...or something like that. Then everyone left and I drifted off...once a nurse managed to make the IV pump stop beeping about an obstruction every two minutes. (I heard identical beeps from other rooms from time to time, so I knew it wasn't just me.)
About an hour later, I woke up. I had three pressing concerns: a beverage (my mouth felt like plaster), a trip to the bathroom (how much saline did they put through my IV?), and the breathing tube in my nose (which was getting to be quite annoying). I fought with myself for a few minutes, trying to combat my usual reluctance to bother anyone else with my desires, finally remembering that helping me stay comfortable was half of the nurse's job. I pushed the call button, hearing a faint electronic ring echo down the corridor outside my door. All was quickly taken care of (my vitals got checked, besides, "as long as you're awake") and I went back to sleep much more comfortable, after the nurse painstakingly placated my IV pump — again. I noted more discomfort around my incisions than before (the medications were wearing off), but no way was I going to let that keep me awake.
The Next Morning
In the morning, the dawn came up like thunder through my window and hit me across the chest with golden strips of sunlight. I snoozed for an hour or so until someone poked a head in to check on me around 07:30. She told me I had breakfast coming — my first food in nearly 24 hours, not counting that wonderful CT-contrast5-and-Sprite® solution the day before. While I waited, I heard the distant beep of an IV pump; a nurse poked her head in just long enough to say "That's not you, is it?"; I grinned and told her "Nope, sorry." Finally free enough of physical irritants to be bored, I broke down and turned on the television, finding a decent show (Boy Meets World, which I used to watch several times a week, years ago) just in time for my food.
Eating presented a problem. I still had an IV in my right arm, so it wasn't a great idea to eat normally — the IV pump would have kept beeping away. I tried to eat left-handed and use my right hand for things like holding the little margarine cups so I wouldn't set off the beeper, but even that tripped the finicky pump. That same nurse came in; sheepishly I said, "Yeah, this time, it's me." She fixed it and started to leave, but it began beeping again before she could reach the door. Rather than try to have me work around it, she just shut it off and disconnected me. "It's just keeping the line open, anyway. We'll let you eat in peace."6 The line just had to stay usable until my pre-discharge antibiotic at 10:00 (pulled to 09:30). So I had nearly full use of my right arm, but I still had to be pretty left-handed; I didn't want to stress the IV by bending my elbow all the way.
Breakfast took me long enough to eat that I had to find a new channel to watch in the middle of it; a nurse checked on me and, surprised, asked, "You're still eating?" What could I say? It was slow going with that blasted IV in my arm, even if I didn't have to worry about angering the pump unit. She brought over a syringe of saline solution "to keep [my IV] from clotting over", used it, and was gone. I still had half of my breakfast left, but trying to be left-handed was a good challenge.
Eventually I finished the tray (not bad for gourmet hospital food), with still an hour to go until that antibiotic. I found passable shows to watch, mildly amusing but not at all substantive. (I thought of the cable cliché, "500 channels and nothing to watch." It seemed appropriate, even though there were only about 50 channels.) While I was waiting, the anesthesiologist dropped by to check on me. I was glad of that; he'd done such good work the night before, I just had to thank him.
I was pleased when my IV showed up, even if it meant being tethered again; in my book, maintaining a state of forward motion is always a cause for happiness. I even found a good show to watch while the IV ran: National Geographic happened to be playing a very timely Naked Science piece about hurricanes.7
My nurse came to tell me about the discharge procedure and what I shouldn't do/eat while I was recovering. My phone was too dead to place a call and the room phone didn't allow long-distance calls, so I gave her Mom's cell phone number to call for my ride. Mom proceeded to pull her usual act of not answering the phone. (That Mom rarely answers her phone is a big running joke in my family. 
) In the mean time, I got to get dressed — in my real clothes. The nurse returned to say she'd left a message; I suggested trying Dad, who almost always answers his phone. When she called him, he said they should leave me on the curb. Thanks, Dad, I feel so loved. 8
Getting dressed, I started to notice that my body was not quite itself. I felt like an overinflated balloon being shaped into an animal as I bent to pull on my jeans, and every little jostle bothered the gauze-covered spots on my abdomen. Putting on my shoes was an interesting experience. Had anything fallen on the floor, I don't think I would have been able to pick it up at that point; luckily my habit of not dropping things had stayed with me through the ordeal. A few times since the surgery, one nurse or another had discussed this concept of "gas" being left inside my belly, gas that had been used to facilitate the laparoscopic procedure. I wondered, but never got around to asking, why so much of it had been left when it was such an inconvenience. They all said it would take about two days to be absorbed and removed, but that did me no good that first morning.
Everybody showed up for my release. Mom, Dad, Conner, and Marty all came in to see the final outcome. I guess you could say I was unsurprised when a nurse brought over a wheelchair for me; I haven't been to many hospitals, but I've visited enough to know that you always leave on wheels. On the way down I got a veritable torrent of cautions and warnings from the two escorting nurses; one of them threatened to cut me if I even thought about going swimming in the next two weeks (heh 
) and waved us goodbye. The other saw me to the car and left us with a couple of restaurant recommendations. Too bad I never got to try them; I'll have to remember to try The Food Guys on my next trip to the Outer Banks.
Recovery
The first stop for the day was "breakfast", even though it was almost 11:00 and I'd eaten not long before. I ordered some fruit and eggs, figuring they should be safe. Not bad, but it was almost too much food. (That restaurant, the Ship's Wheel, is another item on the list of things to return to on my next Outer Banks visit. It most definitely did not get a fair chance on account of my state at that time.)
I wanted to go back to the motel and rest after eating, but was taken to the aquarium instead. After that, we went to Fort Raleigh. I didn't really want to do a lot of exploring, but I got into a good conversation with the woman at the gift shop counter and found out about a possible theatre job for next summer. The Lost Colony (a drama about a British colony at Fort Raleigh that disappeared around 1590) has been performed at the Waterside Theatre since 1937 and is apparently a big summer job draw for college students. (Within a week, I emailed the company to inquire about getting involved; as soon as I can get all the materials together, I'll apply and see how it goes.) Dad and I traipsed over to see the theatre while Mom and Conner went to see the earthen fort.
For the first few days I had to limit myself to a slow amble; anything more and I got uncomfortable very quickly. Even so, that first afternoon was probably overkill for me; when we did get back all I wanted to do was lie down and not move. Of course that was the night when Marty invited his best new buddies over for dinner. Figures.
But things quieted down soon enough. Aside from Conner getting carried away and forgetting to avoid my abdomen (...ow...) the evening was all right. Then I got to relax.
The next day, Tuesday, I read. And read. Thank goodness nobody wanted to do much. It was nice to return to the hotel's beach pavilion (which had been my usual hangout for most of the previous week) and get back to reading Atlas Shrugged; I was to write an essay about the book for a contest, due on September 17, and the deadline would not wait for my surgery.
That night we went in search of go-carts. More specifically, Marty and his friends wanted to go go-carting and Conner got into it. So we had to find kiddie or family carts, which of course were unavailable at the track where Marty et al went. I would have loved to drive Conner around again (we'd found go-carts the week before) but I didn't feel up to it. Mom got to act like a speed demon while I tried — and failed, miserably — to take pictures of the carts speeding (at 15 miles per hour) around the night-lit track. (It was after 20:00 and dark, despite the floodlights. Not even CHDK could help me get pictures of fast motion with so little light.)
Conner and Dad were to fly home early Wednesday morning, because Conner had a Kindergarten orientation to attend on Thursday. The nearest airport was 90 miles away in Norfolk, VA; Mom drove them at 03:30. But first, we had a great closing dinner at Owen's, across the street from our motel. Marty, Mom, and I would drive back by way of Fuquay-Varina (a suburb of Raleigh, NC), where we visited an old friend of Mom's.
I got used to sleeping flat on my back for those first few nights. Sleeping on my side was out of the question, let alone rolling onto my stomach. But I got my sleeping position freedom back steadily, and surprised myself by waking up on my right side Wednesday morning.
Back to (Almost) Normal
It took a while to get my abdominal strength back, but I was ready to do crunches by the time I started theatre class 20 days after my surgery.9 I even did everything in dance class, which was quite pleasing. I half expected to have to bow out of some of it to rest my muscles, but that didn't happen. Hooray for the human body's capacity for repairing itself, eh?
On second thought, maybe it was a good thing we delayed our planned departure. If we'd left on schedule, I would have contracted appendicitis on a highway surrounded by corn fields, the nearest hospital possibly a hundred miles away. (Worse yet, our original — and aborted — summer vacation plans were to take us to outback China... Scary thought.)
Every so often I would still get the occasional protest from some part of me that wasn't quite back up to spec, but I'm back to my usual self now. I've been dancing, climbing ladders, hanging lights, and generally getting down to business these past few months, with no complaints from any part of me. (Well, that doesn't include my stomach. Sometimes I get so busy at the theatre that I forget to, you know, make time to eat. )
So now I've been through surgery, and recovery. It got annoying at times when I couldn't do certain things, but for the most part it wasn't as bad as I feared. I hope I don't have to do it again, at least for a really long time; but if it is necessary I'll be a lot less anxious in the future.
- This copy from Pacific University, Oregon
[↩] - I've never been in to a hospital for something major, so maybe that's why I just stayed in my own clothes on those rare occasions. [↩]
- Like an idiot, I forgot my cell phone charger at home when we left on this month-long trip. My phone was only alive at this point because my brother's phone uses the same charger as mine. It had been almost two weeks since I was last able to plug the phone in. [↩]
- Marty, who knows me probably better than any of my friends, was not with my father and nephew at their aborted dinner that evening. [↩]
- I believe the additive was barium-based. [↩]
- Or something to that effect. My memory of some of these exchanges is a bit foggy. [↩]
- Timely, because the big concern of the weekend was Tropical Storm Earl and whether he'd force an evacuation by turning into a big bad hurricane. He did. And all tourists were asked to leave the following Thursday, so we did, but not before watching the motel get boarded up. It looked like they had a lot of experience with hurricane preparedness. [↩]
- My dad has probably the driest sense of humor I've ever encountered. Fortunately I'm used to it. [↩]
- I considered quipping to Liz (the principal, who's known me for almost twelve years) that "I'm back again! Well, most of me is." [↩]
Full Circle: WordPress.com Adopts Windows Live Spaces
Four and a half years ago (give or take a few days), I started blogging on what was then known as MSN Spaces. My first post — just a few sentences about Wi-Fi issues I had with my Pocket PC — went up on March 27, 2006.
Since then I've gone from writing a few dozen words to writing a few hundred words (and occasionally a few thousand) and transitioned to two different platforms. I moved from Spaces to Blogger on October 10, 2006 because Spaces was far too clunky. Blogger served me well until I migrated to WordPress between late October 2009 and mid-January 2010.
I kept a curious eye on Spaces, observing the transition from MSN Spaces to Windows Live Spaces in 2005 – 2006 with amusement; I never understood Microsoft's need to rebrand. Mostly, I was watching for a critical feature: redirection. Leaving Spaces and taking search engine placement along to the new site was impossible in either incarnation, so I had to be content with a prominent link to the new site at the top of the home page.
Spaces never really developed into anything I'd want to go back to using. Apparently it was neglected at Microsoft, because just the other day I saw announcements trumpeted around the blogosphere that Windows Live Spaces and WordPress.com had teamed up. All Spaces should be turned into WordPress.com blogs by Spring 2011.
This is a bittersweet moment for me. Having gotten my blogging start on Spaces, it's a little sad having one of my first Internet homes put on a trailer and hauled cross-country (to use a slightly strange metaphor). But it's also gratifying to see that even if I hadn't gone through the process of migrating to Blogger and then to my self-hosted WordPress site, I would still be using WordPress today (or in the near future).
I jumped on the migration bandwagon and set up a new WordPress.com site with an import of my Spaces content. It looks alright, even if it does lack that shiny Spaces look. I don't know yet what I'll do with that site.
But while I try to decide, I'll be thinking also of the days when I used to use Internet Explorer 6 to access My MSN (my homepage at the time) and blog on MSN Spaces, and how far I've come in four and a half years.
As for the next four and a half years... Who knows what changes await me?
Goodbye, Albert
The students of Saint Bernard's School put on a fine production last week. After starting a theatre program eleven years ago, the school is shutting down this year (like Folwell Middle School, where I played Cinderella) and I think the year's ending with a decent bang.
As with Carnival!, playing Bye Bye Birdie made for an intense week. Even more intense, in fact, since I had fewer rehearsals in which to learn the music. I joined the St. Bernard's pit at the last minute, following an eleventh-hour decision at Lion's Gate Christian Academy that cut out most of the pit orchestra for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat. I could have had four rehearsals before tech week, but I thought I was already booked this past weekend. Heh. Fortunately the Birdie score is a lot easier on the strings than Carnival!.
So, the Tuesday tech was my first rehearsal. I had to share music with another player, as the school only rented three scores. (Their original plans included only three violins, but looking back the orchestra's conductor was glad to have added another.) To say that I muddled through would be pushing it. Frankly, I sucked on Tuesday; I couldn't read half the notes, but it did get me familiar with the music. I took home a score to use the next day; one player wouldn't be there on Wednesday.
Score Issues
At rehearsal time on Wednesday, I got set up with my borrowed score. I arranged to get a copy made for the next rehearsal. My playing was better, mostly because I had my own music and could actually see the notes. I was also more familiar with the cuts and so on.
Thursday, I had a photocopy waiting for me. It was excellent, save for about ten pages that had notes cut off the edge. Apparently the copying was done by a student… I made do and listed the pages that needed to be recopied after rehearsal.
Friday, I got replacement copies of the unusable pages. Oddly, two were blank save for a large black rectangle, but fortunately they were the two least critical replacements. I never asked to have them recopied properly; by that point in the process, it was easier to fill in the missing notes mentally.
Evolution
I would like to do an abbreviated version of what I normally do for shows I'm fully involved in. This being a high school production, there were a lot of happenings that I would like to record.
Unusually, this production placed the pit orchestra on the stage, behind the action. That decision made for some interesting events over the course of the week.
Tuesday
Not a whole lot to write. Some set pieces and props were still under construction, and the actors weren't yet used to doing all the technical bits; it was only the second time they'd had any of the extra material. The performances, however, were already quite good. The run-through had to be stopped part-way through the second act, so I didn't get to hear all of the music.
Importantly, the actress playing Mae broke her foot. The crew turned out the stage lights during the break and she fell off the front of the stage in the blackout. "Actor down!" That delayed the rehearsal a bit. It was not amusing that she got hurt. However, the cane she used for the rest of the week added to her character. Really too bad that it happened, though.
Scene change music hadn't yet been set, so a lot of experiments were conducted (in both applicable senses of the word).1
Wednesday
The scene changes were smoother, and the actors' performances improved markedly as they got used to working with the extra pieces. A typewriter was added to the opening office scene, but it was broken; the carriage didn't advance. Half a dozen people clustered around it trying to figure out what was wrong — myself included, since I used to use my parents' typewriters when I was younger. This model was too old for me to figure out, though.
More scene change music experiments.
The light fight, as I believe I will remember it, began on Wednesday. The tech crew wanted the orchestra stand lights covered with blue gels so they weren't shining into the audience so much. They also ruined a lot of the stage lighting with the excessive glow, mostly during scene changes. We got through the run; a sheet of gel sat nearby, waiting to be used.
Thursday
More improvements to all the actors' work.
On arriving for Thursday's rehearsal, we all found sheets of gel taped to our stand lights. The crew had used small pieces of black duct tape — a very bad decision, and a mistake that was never remedied — never mind that some of the stand lights were so dim that the gels made it impossible to read the score. By the end of the first act, most of the gels that hadn't been removed by musicians unable to read their music had all but fallen off; heat from the lights melted the adhesive on the duct tape.
The orchestra was promised gaff tape for opening night, the next day.2 One or two brass players joked that they would quit if they didn't get usable tape.
Friday
The show's opening night was great! Musically, at least — the only facet I was really qualified to judge. I know that the acting and dancing were both good as well, but I honestly can't say much about them because we were still making changes to the music between numbers. I can say that every number went about the best it had ever gone up to that point — it was a peak. Timings, coordination, and a hundred other factors all came together.
Somewhere between Wednesday and Friday, the typewriter was fixed. I never found out what was wrong with it.
No gaff tape arrived, however. Many of the stand lights had long strips of black duct tape wrapped around them to hold on the gels so heavily insisted upon by the crew. Of course, it cut down on the light emitted by each light — the desired effect so far as the crew cared — but it also made many of the lights useless. Many gels were ditched, at least partially.
Saturday
From my perspective in the orchestra, the show didn't go as well. There were a lot more timing and coordination issues — we played catch-up with the singers a lot when they jumped cues. Both nights, I had (different) guests in the audience; both nights, the guests were pleased with the show. I think there was some Second-Night Slump going on in both the cast and orchestra.
The violinist to my left brought her own gel and a bunch of clips to hold it on. The rest of us had even more tape added to our lights, and still no gaff tape. Ridiculous. Many resorted to removing the gels and just turning the lamps off when not playing, a solution embraced first by the conductor. (She removed her stand's gel not so she could see her music but so we could see her; the stand light was the only light by which she could be seen by the orchestra.)
Sunday
Both Sunday shows were back up to Friday's standards. Maybe one or two timing issues occurred, but a tiny fraction of what happened Saturday. The show really closed with a bang. So what if Gloria Rasputin lost her balance a bit at the end of her tap dance routine? It just made the moment even funnier.
The light fight was pretty much resolved, too. Turning off the lights when we weren't playing became part of the routine, and the gels no longer fell off. Finally!
Favorite Memories
First and foremost, "We Love You, Conrad" is currently right up there with "Ten Minutes Ago", driving me nuts with its incessant playing in my head. Really, sometimes I wish musicals didn't always have one song that you can't get out of your head for a month. Ah, whatever. It's all Jack's fault.3
I love how Albert's history as an English teacher lets Rosie needle him about his grammar: "You and me, English teacher." Then he's so worried that he'll mess up again, he second-guesses himself: "I'm so glad that you and I — you and me—could [make this trip together]." A classic grammatical mistake, and yet believable because of the joking around just a moment before.
Changes in language usage between the time of the show (1959) and the present (2010) led to a likely-unintentional joke between Albert and Mae. As Mae is exiting after her first appearance, in which she finally meets Rosie (after hearing about her in Albert's letters for years), she admonishes her son Albert to do several things. It's stereotypically motherly. Among the reminders: "Wear your rubbers!" Double entendre much?
His house taken over by Albert, Rosie, and Conrad Birdie, Harry MacAfee's morning is completely disrupted. Doris (his wife, Kim's mother) forgets to make his coffee and offers him a warm 7-Up instead; Randolf (his son, Kim's younger brother) clips out "a few" articles about Conrad Birdie before the morning paper makes it to Harry. Faced with the upset of his routine, Harry declares that "the democracy is over; Parliament is dissolved; Nero is back in town." He escapes the approach of a drowsy Conrad from upstairs by announcing that he is going to "go burn Rome."
The last scene before intermission is the television broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hugo, Kim's "steady", punches Conrad Birdie out in a slow-motion bit. Everyone on stage did a great job of coming up with something to do. For instance, Conrad's guitarist takes off his guitar and swings it at the oncoming Hugo, who ducks to avoid it. The guitar takes out a television crew girl instead; oops.
Everyone scatters after Conrad is knocked down, save for two people tending to Conrad. Rosie tells Albert that she let Hugo in. Best line of the scene: "Oh, Albert, you're not alone. You're on television." (She exits.)
In one scene, Kim flops down on her bed. A Conrad Birdie lunch box and a bobblehead, both sitting on top of her bed's headboard, fell off on different rehearsal nights. Since they were right over our conductor's head, we all held our breath when that scene arrived and wondered why the props weren't secured. The lamp and alarm clock on Kim's night stand were never in the same place twice, either, and the lamp came close to falling off a couple of times too. Once the set came out with the lamp leaning on the headboard.
Considering the cell phone announcement before every show — "there was no such thing as cell phones in 1959" — there were two very interesting props. In the opening scene, Albert takes "a severe overdose of Aspirin" from a plastic pill bottle with a child-proof cap. (A: "No, that's too much. Break it in half." R: "Albert, you're thirty-three years old. You can take a whole Aspirin." ) Later in the show, as the press men are covering Conrad Birdie's arrival in Sweet Apple, Ohio, at least one of them is pretending to write with a Bic mechanical pencil. I'm pretty sure that neither of those items had yet been invented in 1959…
Mae, Albert's mother, is a great character. Every time Albert does something, she thinks up some remark. When Albert tells her he's dissolving the Almaelou Music Co., she slumps over: "Mama, what's wrong?" "Nothing. You killed me." Later: "And don't worry about renting a limo for [my] funeral; I'll walk." Or: "When you get back, don't forget to come into the kitchen, turn off the gas, and pull my head out of the oven." Or, simply: "Goodbye, Albert." (She lies down between the rails of the train track.) "Don't worry about the coat. You'll have three mink stoles after the train passes over me."
Charles F. Maude, the bartender in Act Two, is also a great character. He has great exchanges with both Hugo (H: "I'll have a double rocks on the scotch, and put some rocks in it this time. [...]" M: "How old are you?" H: "Thirty-two." M: "Get out!") and Rosie (R: "Alvarez is the name, but I want you to call me Spanish Rose." M: "Spanish Rose?" R: "Si?" M: "Get out!").
Rosie rants on a bit about having a right to be in the bar after Maude tries to kick her out. Over her rant, Albert phones the bar. When he asks for Rosie, Maude yells over: "Hey, Fidel Castro, there's a fella by the name of Peterson wants to talk to youse." Rosie tells Maude to "Tell the weasely little rat I'm not here!" Albert shouts over the phone, "That proves she's there! Who else would know I'm a weasely little rat?"
Oh, and there was the one night (I think it was Saturday) that the bar sign moved after the scene had started. Like, the stage manager wanted it flown in further but the fly master didn't pull on the line until the scene had started. It was odd to see the sign jerk toward the deck in the middle of a scene.
All of these memories will be with me for a long time.
Future of St. Bernard's Theatre
St. Bernard's School is closing at the end of the school year, but that doesn't mean the theatre program is going to disappear. Parents are trying to create a community organization out of the current program, one that would welcome all present and past St. Bernard's students as well as anyone else wanting to get involved.4 I doubt, and hope, that we haven't heard the last of St. Bernard's Theatre.
More Small World
I seem to keep running into people I know. The actor who played Charles F. Maude (the bartender in Act Two, if you missed the note above) was a former choirmate. In fact, our mailboxes in the choir rehearsal room were next to each other on account of our adjacent surnames.
This is on top of running into choir parents in the cast and audience of The Sorcerer and another former choirmate at Concordia University's Carnival!. The world seems to be shrinking; I wonder who I'll run into next…
Upcoming
Last Monday, the day before starting Bye Bye Birdie, I auditioned for the Rosetown Playhouse summer production of Oliver!. I got my acceptance this past Monday, exactly a week later, via my mother. Apparently, someone at Rosetown misread the email address on my audition form and the message sent to me bounced; last time I checked the DNS, technobabble.es didn't exist… D'oh!
Anyway, I got into the chorus, which has the opportunity for solos and/or a small character role as well. Rehearsals start Monday. (Lots of significant Mondays with these Rosetown people, eh? Three in a row!)
It's worth noting that the title of this post is an homage to the character of Mae. She says those exact words to her son before lying down between the train tracks at the station in Sweet Apple, Ohio. (Don't worry, Albert pulls her back up. He doesn't "have time for that nonsense."
- That is, 1) experiments were run and 2) they were conducted by a conductor. [↩]
- Duct tape and gaff (or gaffers' tape) use different types of adhesive. Since gaff is designed for use in all things theatrical — including lighting, with all the heat that comes with it — its adhesive has high tolerance for heat and doesn't come off the way duct tape's adhesive does. [↩]
- A running joke, one of my top memories from this show. Our flautist didn't come to half of the rehearsals, so we blamed him whenever anything went wrong. [↩]
- Well, I'm assuming about the "anyone else" part. In the past I have tried to get involved with supposedly open organizations that turned out to prefer that members of certain groups not join. Consider my assumption to be an optimistic hope. [↩]
Reflection Squared: On Clifford Stoll’s “High Tech Heretic”
The other day, I was browsing the computer shelves at a local Border's book store. I came across Cliff Stoll's acclaimed book, The Cuckoo's Egg. My dad's recommended the story to me in the past, and the premise was intriguing. After all, who wouldn't want to read a non-fiction account of cyber espionage that reads like a top fiction mystery? I picked up the book and proceeded to spend the next two hours engrossed, reading right through the soft muttering and louder tapping of the woman in the chair beside me.
Of course, the time to depart arrived and I had to stop. Still, I read about 25% of the book in one sitting. I replaced the book on the shelf, noting to look for it at the library and/or add it to my wish list. (Even if I wanted to buy it, I wasn't exactly in a position to do so.)
The next day, en route to the upstairs computer lab, I checked the public library catalog. The Cuckoo's Egg wasn't in stock, and was checked out until the 21st of April, but I noticed that one of Stoll's other books was: High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian. On impulse, I checked the book out.
What I found inside, later, was intriguing. My parents have been skeptical of computers for a while. Though my dad uses them for his business, and my mom is warming up to them after years of asking me why I find them so interesting,1 there's still a big disconnect between us.2 I've vaguely known the reasoning behind their conclusions for years, but High Tech Heretic has shed some light on the details — and not monitor glow.
Programmed Instruction
Despite my parents' computer skepticism, I took my entire high school education online. I believe it was a good experience, though not for the reasons one might expect. It's not that I necessarily learned more than I would have in a conventional school — though I probably did, since the online coursework better fit my learning style — but rather that I spent a good chunk of my "school" time correcting the course material. Lazy QA teams had left the text, quizzes, and tests riddled with little errors. Through my teachers, I sent corrections, and my correction work earned back more than a few points that were wrongfully denied me in nearly every course — though I never got so much as a "Thank you" from the course distributors. (A rare few courses were bereft of glitches. I treasured them, because I didn't have to keep second-guessing everything.)
What was interesting about some of the corrections, though, was that sometimes it was just a matter of input formats. Most of the graded tests were multiple-choice, but many of the in-text "Self-Check" quizzes featured free-text inputs. Such quizzes were graded by JavaScript code, to give students an idea of how well they understood the material. But some of them had vague or quirky requirements about how answers were entered, and some of the quirky expectations made by the programmers resulted in points lost by students.
Stoll addresses the issue on page 16, in reference to B. F. Skinner's experiments with programmed instruction in the 1950s. Skinner's approach was nothing new, really — it mimicked a popular learning method preached by many educators then and now: repeat a topic until the student demonstrates understanding. Skinner's machines rewarded students for correct answers with further exploration of the topic, while incorrect answers led to review.3 However:
…programmed instruction flopped. The machine forced kids to regurgitate whatever answers the programmer wanted. There was no place for innovation, creativity, whimsy, or improvisation.
This sounds very familiar. Almost too familiar. The quizzes in my online coursework sometimes had bizarre expectations for what was to be typed into the text boxes. I once had a quiz (thankfully not graded) that balked at accepting a floating-point number (0.17 or something) with the leading zero; the expected input was .17 and too bad if you've been trained to put in the leading zero. The programmers were treating all text box inputs as strings, rather than parsing the values into numbers when appropriate. We all know that programmers are lazy, but certain kinds of laziness are inexcusable.
Skinner's ideas persisted, even into the years of my childhood. I had plenty of educational computer games in my youth, and maybe they did help teach me. Very little of what I know comes from conventional schooling — I know that much. Reading, writing, arithmetic, higher math, typing, (amateur) programming — all of it I learned outside the classroom. Reader Rabbit, Treasure Math Storm, and Edmark's Mighty Math software deserve more credit for my education than any school classroom I ever set foot in. Forgive me if it sounds like bragging, but I could read and write circles around most of my traditionally-educated friends all through my schooling. Kumon and my learning-friendly home environment can take the credit for my perfect score on the ACT's English section, not the school system.
Stoll also brings up computers in the classroom repeatedly. One great example is the replacement of science labs with computer programs. My local high school has a chemistry/physics lab, but an unscientific sample of the classes taught in the room shows much greater use of the computers for experimentation, rather than the lab equipment.
Learning the Tools, Not the Trades
Stoll also brings up the issue of learning how to use specific tools rather than the concepts underlying them. Chiefly discussed in the chapter "Calculating Against Calculators", the arguments focus on numerical fields; however, the thread is present practically from the beginning and applied to all subjects.
Through school, students are handed calculators in math class. They're trained to punch in the numbers and trust the calculator to come up with the right answer. Now, common sense dictates that one should always be able to estimate, so as to be able to catch errors in a calculation. In theory, students are taught to mentally check the calculator's results; in practice, assignments are turned in with answers stating that a radio tower is a fraction of a millimeter tall.
On page 85, the University of Illinois is used as an example. The school developed a calculus course centered on the Mathematica software. As such, the students learned how to integrate functions using Mathematica, rather than learning how to integrate. Students trained to use certain software programs for problem-solving often didn't know what to do when the electronic part of the equation (sorry) was removed.
In my math classes, I can remember very few times when I wasn't encouraged to use a calculator. A TI graphing calculator was a requirement for high school math classes, but I got through four years of online instruction with a photoelectrically-powered scientific calculator, used mostly for checking myself and dealing with nasty decimals. (I was fine graphic linear equations on graphing paper, but I did cave in and download a software program to do the parabolic and asymptotic functions for me.)
Learning tools at the expense of the underlying concepts isn't just limited to math. From my own experience, as well as friends', I've seen courses teach how to use a particular software program to solve a problem, without explaining what the program does. Modern English course requirements for electronically-submitted papers just begs for students to rely on spell-checking software. Many of my fellow students routinely misspelled even the most common and simple words. I can't help but blame Microsoft Word; it's the de facto standard for word processing these days, and defaults to automatically correcting a huge list of common misspellings so sometimes the user doesn't even know he's made a mistake. That's a bad idea for software used in education.
Systems Design Philosophy
Perhaps one of the best points made in the book is taken from David Gelernter's thesis: "Technology's most important obligation is to get out of the way." This point, from page 139, illustrates the basic purpose of machinery: making life easier. Bad design and useless features remove the helpful aspect of technology and replace it with nuisance.
Ah, PowerPoint
Following chapters on, among other things, the wiring of libraries and the planned obsolescence of computer systems, an entire chapter is devoted to PowerPoint and its fellow presentation software products. I thought the best part of this chapter was the section discussing the use of presentations in schools.
With my online learning experience, I was thankfully spared most of the PowerPoint junk that has made its way into the school curriculum. However, I had teachers in the offline world as well, and a few of them used PowerPoint to disastrous effect.
One such teacher followed the model for meetings presented earlier in the chapter: Notes for the students, slides on the screen; the lectures consisted of reading the slides aloud, with zero additional information presented in the spoken words. I was always bored to tears in that class. It was ironic that the course title was "Public Speaking", since such a class should be teaching students how to keep an audience's attention instead of how to make the audience yawn.
Another teacher — this was in a public school — taught her AP U.S. Government course using PowerPoint. She read from the slides, often rushing through and/or skipping slides for time (no worries, the slides were available on her personal Web page for study at home). Her habit of putting paragraphs on the slides wasn't exactly prime PowerPoint use, but at least she added extra tidbits to her lectures that weren't in the textbook or on the screen.
I should also note that part of that Government class was a group presentation project, on which I got a good grade just by going up and reading a few of the several slides produced by my group while I was sick. That isn't a complaint — I like good grades just as much as the next guy — but I didn't really have any input whatsoever on the project save for a few grammatical corrections. (I won't get into how my classmates made it difficult for me to contribute, even though I was perfectly willing to do my share.4)
I present these examples mainly to illustrate my own personal experience with the problems Cliff mentions on pages 182 – 183. (It's interesting that his main classroom example also involves a social studies teacher.) I'm sure educators would be quick to defend the growing use of PowerPoint in schools by citing technological familiarity for future job use, same as they would for school Internet connections (which are useful, but often inadequately restricted).
Dated Material?
I did have the thought throughout the book, however, that perhaps some of Stoll's opinions would be quite different if written today. In particular, page 189's assertion that professional editors and journalists just don't exist on the Internet is no longer true. That assertion is a fundamental point in several arguments following — arguments that would probably be different (if only slightly) if written from a 2010 perspective instead of a 1999 perspective.
Similarly, page 191 asserts that search engines don't understand concepts and ideas, only words. Today's indexing engines aren't perfect, but great strides have been made in machine understanding of language. Just look at services like Aardvark. (This is, of course, just a tiny subset of the possible examples I could have pulled from the book.)
Of course some things — unfortunately — never seem to change. I stupidly didn't note the location of it, but somewhere in the latter part of the book Stoll laments that search engines rely on correct spelling to find information. Spelling is a skill seldom taught or learned in today's world (it seems), and we rely more than ever on spell-checkers. Many services offer their own (see Gmail & Google Docs as examples) in the event that the user's browser doesn't have one already built in. Search engines have been trained to recognize our mistakes in queries (à la Google's classic "Did you mean?" lines) and sometimes I think they also detect mistakes in pages they index.
Overall
High-Tech Heretic contains a good many well-placed warnings, and I very much appreciate Stoll's opinions on the replacement of human and paper resources with technology. However, I hope that his later writings are better edited. This book has quite good spelling (good, since he brought up that issue) but the grammar is lacking in a few spots; I found a decent number of omitted or misplaced words.
Nitpicking aside, the message of the book is clear and appreciated. Technology has a place, and we shouldn't let it get out of the corner we've set aside for it.
Update (05/04): Corrected missing markup that caused most of the text to appear as a giant footnote. Proofreading failure on my part; sorry!
- She's begun asking me about websites and such: Hosting recommendations, platform suggestions, that sort of thing. It's kind of cool that she's interested now. [↩]
- I used to go to my dad with questions about the computer. Now, he comes to me with his questions and I use search engines to find answers for my own. [↩]
- I had several experiences with this type of learning, including both online (with Stanford's EPGY program) and off (with Kumon, a Japanese-originated curriculum in math and reading). [↩]
- Schools seem to use group projects a lot without teaching students how to collaborate, kind of like a lot of theatre classes tell the actors to project without getting into the mechanics of doing so. [↩]
Fraud Much: Follow-Up
Looks like having my credit card number stolen hasn't had too bad an effect on my life. I received and activated my replacement credit card about two weeks ago. Also, in the interim, I found out that my dad had one of his cards disabled, too.
The people who called my dad about his card explained that the latest scam going around is just to generate random card numbers. Looks like my research was right; that was one of the top possibilities I found browsing through discussions around the Internet. Unfortunately, algorithms for creating random, valid card numbers do exist for testing purposes. Since both of us had our cards compromised within a week of each other, I think it's safe to believe that we both were victims of the same scam and there was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened to me.
What kind of grossly inadequate security must credit card processing systems have that someone can successfully (attempt to) authorize a transaction with nothing but the account number? There must be another piece to the puzzle…maybe shady merchants who don't bother verifying any of the information, or something like that. For now, I'm quite thankful that fraud-detection departments are so vigilant.
Even though I was probably just a victim of a random number generator, I'm still going to see if my card issuer supports generating temporary account numbers for use in online shopping. That seems like a good idea: If one of the numbers is compromised, I can just kill it, rather than dealing with deactivating and reissuing the card. (I have long used this same principle for email addresses. I used to use Gmail's "plus-addressing" feature to add keywords to my incoming mail; now I give most sites a unique address at technobabbl.es. Both approaches also allow me to track data leaks — which usually result in increased spam — directly to the responsible party. )
A Summery Summary: Cherubs
I started writing this on August 22, 2008. I should have started about twenty days earlier and finished at least by the end of the year, but I'm really not good with publishing these things on time, am I? Oh well. unfortunately. This one's for you, Margaret. 
I've preserved as much of what I initially wrote as possible. Inevitably, there are gaps; I can't do much about that, but hopefully the incompleteness will motivate me to be better at getting these things done in the future.
A lot can happen in five weeks... And I mean a lot! Let's see, what did I really do during my summer at Northwestern University?
(Begin text 100% from 2008; footnotes excluded)
Overview
Lots of things happened at the same time at Cherubs:
- I put on a fully-mounted 50-minute show with four weeks of rehearsal time1
- I had a good two-and-a-half hour workout every weekday morning (core classes)
- I learned about sketch comedy, how to simplify stories into the most basic possible beats, and about solo performance
- I learned about theatrical lighting
- I got to help change over the lights for two shows, and ran the light board for a dress rehearsal
- I got to watch the other 14 performances completely unencumbered by any cast/crew duties whatsoever, and got to watch the four performances I crewed, as well, because lighting people were basically jobless during a performance unless they were working the board
There's lots of stuff that should be in that list, but there's just so much... I'll leave it at that. Some things are too subtle to list, anyway.
Opening Days: Elective Preferences and Monologues
After arriving on Sunday, we all checked into the dorm and had the first of many meetings, during which we were acquainted with the basic rules of the program and the general layout of the next five weeks' schedule.
Monday morning, beginning bright and early (08:30), we began the tedious and nerve-wracking process of performing 168 90-second monologues in one day. We also turned in our preferences for electives, which we decided on Sunday night using the handy elective catalog provided in the introductory materials. With only a forty-five – minute break for lunch, the process of reciting monologues took until about 15:30, when we had a tour of the campus. Once the tour was over, we were free until the meeting that evening.
At the evening meeting, we received our elective schedule sheets back, along with assignments to core classes and production companies. After the meeting, it was time to go back to the dorm and go to sleep.
The First Day of Classes
Core on Tuesday morning was pretty much the first thing we did after monologues, since it was pretty much time for bed after the meeting Monday night. It was a reasonably gentle class, since it was the first day. (And the rooms were still pretty close together; details later in the post.)
It was then time for the first of many 11:00 meetings, at which we discussed many things. I can't remember any of them; however, I do know that most of the meeting related to the afternoon and evening coming up after lunch. Then it was time for lunch, and then "A" day electives. I had lighting crew for my very first elective period — and crews are double the length of other electives! — of the summer! That day was just a tour of the theatre.
Free time came after crew for me, and I went to the library to check my email and such. Then it was time for Everyday Theatre, which I really enjoyed (this class was also moved; details later in the post).
Dinner was after that, and it was followed by the first rehearsal of Company G, which was putting on a production of Tristan & Yseult. We did some weird team-building stuff and called it a night.
All in all, the first day was pretty chill compared to what was to come... It didn't take long for things to get intense.
The Loss of Fisk B1
Well, it wasn't that dramatic, but it did cause quite a shift in my schedule. After about the first week, it turned out that one of the classrooms we'd been using wasn't actually assigned to our program. It made sense in a way, since it was the only room we used in that building (normally reserved for the journalism program). But it wasn't simple to move to another place.
For a few days, my first core section was shifted to the stage of the theatre, and Everyday Theatre (which had also met in Fisk B1) was pushed to different rooms depending on the day. (Fortunately this happened right before the weekend, so there was time to resolve the room changes without worrying about temporary locations — most classes are suspended on weekends.) I actually liked being in the theatre for core; the space was wonderful, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from the second half, just in the other wing of the Theatre/Interpretation building.
It didn't last.
It was announced the following week that the worst was happening: my Voice & Movement core (the affected section) was to be moved to Tech Auditorium. On North Campus. Just under a mile away. So that was fun. Not. But it allowed for a little improvement in my running, so perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Too bad I didn't appreciate it.
Game Night
You know a program is different when it makes a game night mandatory. Game Night at Cherubs was mandatory, meaning one couldn't go and relax in one's room for a few hours. I wanted to at first, resenting the required attendance, but soon relented after getting into one of the activity choices — one I hadn't played in a long time: Four Square.
Astonishingly enough, I began to enjoy myself. Despite being given the chance to switch games in the middle of the event, I stuck with it. And I got to know a few other people.
Field Trips
There were several field trips during the summer. Two of them were to go see other shows (we first saw Lookingglass Alice at the Lookingglass Theatre, and then Funk It Up About Nothin' (an "ad-rap-tation" of Much Ado About Nothing) at Chicago Shakespeare), and there was an all-day trip to Chicago in the second half of the program.
Lookingglass Alice was actually so good, I went back to see it again after Cherubs was over, and brought my mom. I wasn't quite as impressed with Funk It Up About Nothin'; while it was entertaining in its own way, and cleverly rewritten in rap style, it wasn't my favorite show of the summer.
The Chicago field trip was basically just knocking around the Navy Pier area (for my group), since we opted to go see Chicago Shakespeare's production of Willy Wonka (and Chicago Shakes is on Navy Pier). Then we just killed time exploring, and convinced one particularly reticent companion to go on the Ferris Wheel. (I have pictures of us up there, somewhere, but I haven't uploaded them yet.) Oh, did I mention that we got caught in the on-again, off-again, rain? Yeah, the clouds really couldn't decide whether or not to dump dihydrogen monoxide on us.
(This isn't supposed to be a collection of show reviews, but I should say that I wasn't super impressed with Willy Wonka either. Both CST shows were technically good, and the actors were obviously talented; it was the scripts that I didn't really like.)
Electives (My Afternoons)
I enjoyed my elective classes, for the most part (and I'll include crew in here just for simplicity, since it was during the elective portion of the day). The classes I had were (with their periods; A3 was my free hour):
- Sketch Comedy (B2)
- Everyday Theatre (A4)
- Solo Performance (B4)
- Lighting Crew (A1&2)
- Core Text Classes
- Text Analysis (B1)
- Performance Theory (B3)
The first three classes were the true electives, which had the opportunity to present at the elective recital in the last week before performance.
Anyway, here goes...
Sketch Comedy
Sketch Comedy consisted of about nine of us trying to come up with ideas for sketches (skits a la Monty Python and Saturday Night Live) that would be funny. I didn't do particularly well at coming up with ideas; my strengths were more in the realization phase, improvising a scene once a premise already existed. We had a bunch of ideas for the elective recital, and ended up picking "Preppy Gangs", which involved a verbal duel between the Ivy League and the J. Crew. (Polo shirts were a must for this presentation.)
Everyday Theatre
Everyday Theatre was a good place to explore the little scenes that happened to all of us every day. Once again, there were nine of us; each class period, we brought in one or two (usually funny) anecdotes. Nine stories were cut down to the three most interesting ones and we then split into groups of three and developed short skits.
For the elective recital, we did a few stories that we had particularly liked.
Solo Performance
Solo Performance wasn't exactly my first choice. It had been #4 on my list for that period, but I got it over Speech and Dialect. I found some of the exercises to be somewhat esoteric, but I at least got a rough poem out of it that I may eventually finish and publish here.
Text Analysis
Text Analysis was just that... usually. We were instructed to read three books before attending Cherubs (this year they were The Play About The Baby (Edward Albee), Offending The Audience (Peter Handke), and Shakespeare's Henry VI. Following the field trips to see shows (only Alice and Funk It Up), we discussed them instead of the books. Occasionally the discussions were interesting, but I usually had very little to say; this was the most English class-like period of my entire two-day cycle, and I'm not fond of English class discussions.
Performance Theory
Performance Theory was more interesting than Text Analysis, if only because we discussed Improv Everywhere for two days and staged a 'freeze' in the cafeteria during lunch one day (using all four of my teacher's sections). We got into much more interesting discussions in this class, and I decided it was definitely a high point of my 'B' days. As in Text Analysis, both shows we went to found themselves used as material.
Lighting Crew
I liked my 'A' days better than my 'B' days, and much of that is due to the fact that I had lighting crew on 'A' days. For a full two hours (well, 1:50, but who's counting?) we all got to mess with lights, cables, fly rail, weights, and R-FU (ARE-foo), among other things. All four lighting crews worked on the same lighting plot, and we used the same lighting plot for all ten shows. So there were a lot of lights to hang. I felt most at home on lighting crew, and I enjoyed it more than any other elective period. (Except, maybe, for my free hour, which was right after crew, during which I usually went to the library.)
(End text 100% from 2008; the rest was written this month.)
Lighting crew was also great fun at the performances. Eight of us were chosen from each pair of shows (AB, CD, EF, GH, & JK) to be on electrics crew for the following pair. Since mine was show G, I got to be on crew for shows J and K. My duties mostly included changing the gobos2 and color gels3 after each performance to prepare for the next one, and getting a shot at actually running the light board. (Each of us on the crew got one run, to give everyone a chance.) During the shows, we could watch or hang out, and we all did a little of both since we crewed the shows twice.
Reflections
Looking back on the experience from nearly two years in the future is possibly a good perspective for the writing of some posts. The details above were fresh from my memory in 2008, when I wrote them, but now most of them are new again. Now, when I think of the summer I spent at Northwestern, I think of Tristan & Yseult, David Chapman, and lighting crew. I think of the fire alarm test they did at 22:30, after rehearsals, while some of the kids were showering and getting ready for bed. I think of a lot of things — things that have changed, that I've lost, that I've gained.
Most importantly, I think of how that summer shaped the last two years of my life. Thanks to Cherubs, I discovered a passion for technical theatre that has guided my decisions ever since. I would never have gone to Colorado Springs or to Emerson if I hadn't made the discoveries I did at Northwestern University.
Sure, the show was fun. Yes, it was awesome how the faculty set up the last day of classes so we all ended up together and did something involving twine and a balloon that I still don't understand. Of course it was fun both to hang and to strike the lights for the shows, and to run the light board for a dress rehearsal. And it was fun how the director of show K included the voices of the crews in the ending of his show.
But on top of it all, there's the influence that summer had on me, as a person. It's really stuck, and it was totally worth it.
- OK, OK, the hours spent rehearsing were equivalent to several months of the usual theatre I would do at home. We had three to four hours of rehearsal, five days a week at Cherubs. [↩]
- A gobo is basically a metal template that allows the lighting instrument to project a pattern onto the stage, instead of a flat wash. [↩]
- So named because they used to be made from gelatin. A favorite trick back in those days was to send a newbie to "wash the gels" — they'd disintegrate and the newbie would panic. [↩]
Fraud Much?
So. Last Friday afternoon I got frantic calls from both my Falcon office and my bank. Some jerk stole my credit card information and tried to buy $1,300 worth of jewelry1 with it on Wednesday. Nice try. It set off the fraud alert.
It helped that on Thursday, I tried to renew my cell phone's air time without actually getting the card out of my pocket and mis-remembered my CVV the first time. Then the crook made a $1 pre-authorization at Apple on Friday, which was enough suspicious activity for the card company to call me.
After I confirmed that yes, I bought the Net10 air time, no, I didn't try to buy $1,300 of jewelry or visit Apple, they shut down the card. I won't get another for about a week. Joy. Meanwhile, next thing on my agenda is to find out what happened to the charge for the air time I bought on the day in between fraud attempts. I don't want Net10 to kill my account because of a chargeback, but it should be OK because I did tell the Falcon office that, of the suspicious transactions, that one was legitimate.
The list of possible "mea culpa" breaches is very short: My credit card information was stored in only a few places online. Many more brick-and-mortar merchants' employees have had access to it since the card was activated last June. From Internet research, I see that I'm not alone in having this happen. I also see that there are myriad ways the crook(s) could have gotten my information.
Random guessing is pretty high on the list. Algorithms exist to generate valid card numbers for testing, and mine might have just randomly come up. I use library computers a lot, so one of them could have had spyware on it that was monitoring the information flow. Maybe Net10's website isn't as secure as I thought. Perhaps an employee at one company or another abused data access privileges and stole card information from customers. Could be that a company I bought from was hacked, or the payment processor was. Google Checkout might not be as secure as it claims to be. Maybe funds transferred from bank to credit card company are sent unencrypted and the crook grabbed info that way. (These are getting less and less likely, to the point of pointless speculation.)
Thing is, I don't believe the CVV was stored anywhere except the back of the card and my memory. Armed with only a name, billing address, and an account number, what are the possible ways an attacker could use the stolen information? I don't believe a billing address or CVV are required for telephone purchases, but then how to explain the Apple pre-authorization?
Whatever happened, I've placed a 90-day fraud alert on my credit report (as recommended by the FTC), changed several passwords and removed the deactivated card from all online accounts. Apparently this happens to some people every few months, but that just makes me curious about how lax such individuals are with their information security. I intend to be even more careful than before.
- Way over my limit. [↩]
The Sorcerer & Jack and Rochelle Wrap-up
So, my month-long commitment to two shows is over. Both The Sorcerer and Jack and Rochelle closed Sunday afternoon, March 28. Obviously I wasn't at both shows that day; I did my last run of J&R the night before, and played pit for The Sorcerer on Sunday while my replacement did projection at the JCC.
I hate to say it, but there's no way I'll miss running J&R as much as I'll miss playing pit for The Sorcerer. Normally I really hate to close a show, but Jack and Rochelle is quite honestly rather depressing, despite its overtones of romance and destiny. It's great to see a real-life love story blossom with the Holocaust as a backdrop, but the show kind of pulled me down every time even though the director tried to use as little Holocaust material as possible. To use the words of one man lured to the show by his companion with promises of hilarity, it was not a comedy.1
By contrast, The Sorcerer is a comic operetta written in standard Gilbert & Sullivan style. Not a moment went by during those runs when I wasn't chortling at a line of dialogue or a physical gag (thanks to the video monitors in the pit). The show is so over-the-top with word play, physical humor, and pop culture references that every performance seemed to end just as we were getting warmed up. The directors took more than a few liberties with the script. I wrote up a summary including some of the better gags from this particular staging below. (It was originally going to be part of the normal flow of this post, but then it got to be really long.)
However, I don't mean to be unfair to Jack and Rochelle. That script has only been around for about five years (the show was originally workshopped at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins, MN in 2005), and the director readily admitted that there were problems with it. (Some parts of the show were downright confusing because the dialogue and stage directions given in the script were grossly inadequate to describe what was happening.) The Sorcerer has had the benefit of over a hundred years to age and improve, and every production over the years has added new enhancements to the show's "vernacular".2 J&R will probably evolve in much the same way.
My Duties
Jack and Rochelle
In Jack and Rochelle, I spent the show in front of a computer. No, really. It was a full MacBook with all the amenities. The director brought his laptop for me to use before every show because he decided that the projections should be run from PowerPoint. His original idea was to create a DVD version of the projections that could be run from the existing equipment in the booth, but timing it out would have been problematical for the actors — no two shows went exactly the same, and a couple of the sound cues were already stretching the limits of timing sensitivity — and my equipment was switched from DVD player to laptop before any discs were even created.
Conveniently, using PowerPoint allowed me to add notes directly in the presentation interface. During tech week I used them to remind myself where things would happen as well as to give feedback and suggestions to the director, who was still revising the projections. Once the run started, he'd given detailed status information and cue lines in the slide notes, and I used my own sense of timing to revise a few of them. I also added some extra details for when I wasn't there. That was the thing: I had to have good notes in place because previous commitments to play in The Sorcerer pit orchestra meant someone would have to do my job for four of the twelve shows. (The canceled matinée is included in that total.) So I added as many details as I could to the notes.
Despite having 70 slides, I still spent a good chunk of the show (about 40 pages straight, out of 66) doing nothing. (From page 22 through page 65, there were no projection cues at all, and so I had nothing better to do than watch the show. Again. I think the long stretch of having nothing to do was responsible for most of my boredom with the show. It was a great show for the first few runs, during tech week, but once I knew what was happening it got pretty uninteresting — not that I ever got bored of running the projection cues; a couple slide transitions had some rather challenging timing, and I came up with new ideas and notes during every run.
The Sorcerer
In The Sorcerer, my only responsibility was to provide as solid a rendition of the second violin part as I could. Yeah, "only" responsibility. Right. Arthur Sullivan certainly knew how to write intricate music. The rhythms in some of those pieces were, shall we say, demanding, and I must admit I fudged some of the higher notes — those above fifth position. (Who in their right mind would write a second violin part with notes in seventh position or above? That happened in Guys and Dolls too. Bah.) But hey, when you're playing in an ensemble led by Courtney Lewis, assistant conductor to the Minnesota Orchestra, you're on your very best fudging.
Unexpected Meetings
The Twin Cities area makes for a very small world. Before my first performance of The Sorcerer, I ran into Mather Dolph, who played the sorcerer himself. Mather and I go back a long way; I sang in the Minnesota Boychoir with his son for about six years.
Given that I played only seven performances of The Sorcerer, it was still ridiculously difficult to find a night to actually go and see the show as an audience member. The night that I did, the last Friday, only happened because I begged off of a pit rehearsal for Cinderella (I just said I had "a conflict" and couldn't go). That Friday was a good night, though. After the show, I ran into my former orchestra conductor from the local high school, as well as three more Boychoir parents. (One of the moms in the latter group sported an Android phone. Win.)
Bloopers
What's live theatre without bloopers, right? There weren't really that many compared with what usually comes up in productions involving my age group. (Actually, I shouldn't imply that these were all-adult shows. Jack and Rochelle actually did have a couple high-school students in the cast, and The Sorcerer did have a fifth-grade cast member.)
In its last weekend, The Sorcerer did start to lose it a bit. First Mather's voice started to go. The Friday that I saw the show was actually Mather's last performance as his role; the final two shows had his character played by an understudy. Then the cast had to be shuffled around to cover the loss of a principal on Sunday. Dr. Daly couldn't perform on account of a prior commitment. There was even some thought given to me stepping in for his understudy in the chorus, but the directors and I both agreed that that would have been a bad idea.
Jack and Rochelle provided a better blooper. There was one show, also the last Friday, when it seemed like a lot of things went wrong all in one performance. The audience that morning consisted of—as predicted—seniors. One of them wasn't exactly present, mentally, and she once shouted "What?" at the stage by way of requesting a repetition of a hard-to-hear line. Also, a cell phone rang during the show, and the lantern that the actors used for the last 20 or so pages of the script was knocked off stage in its first scene; it remained on the floor of the house, visible to most of the seats on far house left, for the rest of the performance.
Moving On
So, after a brief hiatus, I'll be back to it in just a few days. (Nothing got scheduled during Easter week? Really?) Friday I have another Cinderella pit rehearsal — actually a sit-sing, so the actors will be rehearsing with us. Saturday is back to StageCoach and our cheesy musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew—codename Best Beware My Sting, and I have a booking at the JCC a week from Sunday for the Jewish Film Festival.
Not that I have next week free; it's tech week for Cinderella, and the show opens on Friday. If they have a Sunday matinée that they haven't told me about by now, well, too bad, 'cause they're going to lose their second violin.
Below, my overly footnoted, longer-than-the-rest-of-this-post summary of The Sorcerer, if anyone cares to read it.
Appendix: W.S. Glibert(ies)
No, I didn't make a typo (and it's not a reference to GLib). The Sorcerer's directors really did take a lot of liberties with the script, to great effect, and I thought I might include some of the better gags along with a summary of the show. For instance, in this production, Dr. Daly (the village priest, "dear old tutor" and "valued pastor" to Alexis, the male lead) comes out after the conductor takes his bow at the start of the show and sings what we called the "Cell Phone Song":
Now that you're at the the-a-ter,
You can call your mother later.
Please don't try to text your mate
Or anyone else; just turn it off.Please turn your cell phones off.
Turn them off and please don't cough.
Please turn your cell phones off.
Dr. Daly, from the 2010 GSVLOC production of The Sorcerer
The song really sets the mood for the rest of the show. It should be quite plain which bits came from the text and which were rewritten, but I'll note the less obvious ones. Larger quotes are footnoted to their sources, but indeed all quotes large and small from the show are either from the same online source or transcribed from a video recording I have of the sixth performance. Square brackets note alterations in the name of either truth to this performance or clarity.
Act One
The overture underscores stage action: Several couples move about the stage, courting, chatting, some failing in their attempts. Cupid perches on top of a large, nondescript set piece just in time to see a girl "hide" on the far side of her perch while a frustrated young man3 moves to loiter on the other side (everything he has tried to gain her affection has had some ill effect on her). Somewhat forcibly, Cupid brings the two together behind the set piece to kiss. The two emerge briefly to reveal their newfound affection, and then duck back behind it; clothing is then thrown about above the set piece while Cupid hides her eyes to avoid the sight.4 After a beat, the couple emerge slightly rumpled, with veil and top hat, all ready for a wedding.
After more amusing but less remarkable comic action, a heart-opening recitative from Constance to her sister5 Ms. Partlet more or less confessing her love for Dr. Daly, and an elaborate betrothal ceremony — in which Alexis tries to surprise Aline (the female lead) but is foiled when she turns away from him every time he tries to reveal himself — lies the first real scene of the show.6 Alexis describes to Aline (but more for the audience's benefit) his belief that pure and lasting happiness comes only from true love. He expounds upon his vision of a world where people can love and be loved without discrimination by (among others) wealth, education, age, rank, gender, religion, credit score, or investment portfolio — a subject on which he has campaigned from New Hampshire to Iowa, and "the citizens have all agreed that love should be for love alone."7 Aline mentions that some people think Midwesterners are not open to argument; both agree, on that and that the farm hand is the highest intelligence (when he is quite sober). Based on his theories of happiness, he expresses his desire to distribute a love potion secretly among the villagers at an upcoming gathering, so that all may experience the happiness he feels at being in love.
To get a love potion, Alexis contacts a London sorcery firm and awaits the arrival of John Wellington Wells ("the sorcerer", or the show's title character). Reacting to Aline's fear of meeting a real sorcerer, Alexis soothes her: "I trust my Aline will not yield to fear while the strong right arm of Alexis is here to protect her."8 (He of course holds up his left arm, to great embarrassment a moment later.) When the sorcerer arrives, he introduces the various items carried by his firm's shop at Number 70, Simmery Axe (St. Mary's Axe, a London street). Among them are polyjuice potions, gillyweed, cloaks of invisibility, and all the latest broomsticks (including the all-new Nimbus 1800).
Mr. Wells agrees to sell the love potion to Alexis at a 25% discount in light of the latter's MPR membership, after alleviating Aline's concerns that many of the villagers are married people ("Madam, this [love potion] is compounded on the strictest principles. On married people it has no effect whatever."9), and a fearsome incantation ensues. Alexis puts the potion into the tea at the gathering, and the villagers unwittingly drink it. Everyone falls asleep just before intermission, many collapsing on stage and remaining until the start of Act Two.
Act Two
'Tis twelve hours since the villagers have unknowingly consumed the love potion, and at this mystic hour the magic drink will manifest its power.10 Before the action of Act Two begins, Cupid makes as if leading all the women in sleepwalking around the stage, mixing them all up.
As they awaken, the men wonder aloud: "Why, where be oi, and what be oi a doin', a sleepin' out, just when the dews du rise?" And of course, the women answer: "Why, that's the very way your health to ruin, and don't seem quite respectable likewise!"11 Then everything goes haywire; the mixed-up couples see each other and fall under the love potion's spell. Not that they care, of course, but there will be problems later.
The first sign of trouble arrives in the form of Constance, who has fallen madly in love with the Notary, a hard-of-hearing old12 man, but is fully aware that her love for him has replaced the love she formerly felt toward Dr. Daly. She bemoans her cup "not of nectar", flitting about the stage as before, with the Notary tottering along after her and asking that she repeat what she says in the faster sections of the song as he is "a very deaf old man"; the chorus oblige.
Behind them, Alexis and Aline have entered. As the others disperse, Alexis muses on the success of his plan. The world may consider the resulting matches ill-advised, but he and Aline are "far wiser than the world". He points out the benefits: "The miserly wife will check the reckless expenditure of her too frivolous consort, the wealthy husband will shower innumerable bonnets on his penniless bride, and the young and lively spouse will cheer the declining days of her aged partner with comic songs unceasing!"13 But his desire that he and Aline also drink the elixir elicits anger from Aline: "Oh, Alexis, do you doubt me? Is it necessary that such love as ours should be secured by artificial means? Oh, no, no, no! [...] If you cannot trust me, you have no right to love me — no right to be loved by me."14 Alexis interprets this as an indication that Aline's love for him is but fleeting, and concludes that "It is not love".15
Fortunately, Dr. Daly arrives to divert the couple's attention. Men and women darting across the stage intermittently punctuate his lines as he muses on the strange happenings. The whole village has, after all, just come to him in a body and asked to be married with the least possible delay. It has spurred in him a longing for companionship, but before he can spend too much time puling16 he is interrupted by the arrival of Alexis' father, Sir Marmaduke, accompanied by none other than Ms. Partlet (a pew opener17 and quite possibly the village's poorest resident). She unintentionally throws Alexis' philosophies of true love and happiness back in his face as she pledges to confer upon Sir Marmaduke "the great and priceless dowry of a true, tender, and loving heart".18 All the while, Dr. Daly sighs wistfully at Ms. Partlet's comeliness19 and finally he congratulates Sir Marmaduke on his newfound love. The quintet "rejoice that it's decided",20 briefly recognizing that Dr. Daly has "no one left to marry him", and the two couples exit; Dr. Daly follows them with a sigh.
Mr. Wells enters, reflecting on the results of his cooperation: "Oh, I have wrought much evil with my spells! An ill I can't undo! This is too bad of you, J. W. Wells — What wrong have they done you?"21 Lady Sangazure enters, her mood melancholy at being left with no companion.22 Still, she has been exposed to the potion, and so she falls in love with Mr. Wells. He is not amused. He tells her to hate him because he drops his H's, has a room full of Elvis souvenirs, drinks beer from a can, and is a NASCAR fan — but Lady Sangazure will have none of it. She offers to go ice fishing with him ("No, you'll catch a cold") and shop at Wal-Mart, also to no avail. Finally, Mr. Wells lies that he is engaged "to a maiden fair, with bright brown hair, and a sweet and simple smile"23 who awaits him on a South Pacific isle. Lady Sangazure is so distraught at this that she pulls out a knife24 and threatens to commit suicide in her family vault. Mr. Wells follows her, hoping to avoid tragedy.
Following Mr. Wells' trouble, Aline reaffirms her love to Alexis: "Doubt me not, my loved one! See, thine uttered will is sovereign law to me! All fear — all thought of ill I cast away! It is my darling’s will, and I obey!"25 She drinks the love potion and tries to go and find Alexis, but her exit is blocked by Dr. Daly, who is lamenting that all the villagers are "Engaged to So-and-so".26 He plays a tune using a synthesizer app on his iPhone (which displays a small keyboard when he shows it to the audience).27 Aline throws it off stage at the end of the song;28 she is madly in love with him because of the love potion,29 and has been making every effort to get him to notice her during his song. Finally, after he finishes, Dr. Daly sees Aline and falls in love with her as well, also under the influence of the potion.
Alexis soon discovers the two of them together. At first he is happy that Aline has tasted the potion, as he wished, but his joy turns to anger when he learns that she has fallen in love with Dr. Daly instead. He calls the villagers, and when they have gathered he begins to publicly denounce Aline. Dr. Daly will not stand for it, and explains what has happened: "Hold! Be just. This poor child drank the philtre at your instance. She hurried off to meet you — but, most unhappily, she met me instead. As you had administered the potion to both of us, the result was inevitable. But fear
nothing from me — I will be no man's rival. I shall quit the country at once — and bury
my sorrow in the congenial gloom of a Colonial Bishopric."30 Alexis gratefully accepts his old friend's sacrifice, but Aline will have none of it. Dr. Daly repeatedly pushes her toward Alexis, but she returns to him several times before giving up. (He finally resorts to placing a hand on her head to hold her off as she swings her arms wildly, reaching for him.) She moves off, upset; Alexis sees Mr. Wells and asks him what is to be done.
Mr. Wells thinks for a moment, and can think of only one possible solution: "Or you or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it wouldn't be fair on the shareholders."31 Alexis stands ready to give up his life to set everything straight, but Aline won't let him. "Mr. Wells, if he must die that all may be restored to their former loves then what is to become of me? I should be left out in the cold, with no love to be restored to!"32 Not having thought of that, Mr. Wells appeals to the others to decide which man shall die.
The villagers choose Mr. Wells. He hands his wand to Alexis, who attempts to kill Mr. Wells. When it doesn't work, Mr. Wells takes his wand, whacks it a few times, and passes it back. Alexis tries again, and fails; Mr. Wells gives up on that wand and goes to his carriage to fetch another. While he is off stage, Alexis shrugs, with the wand, and finally succeeds. The spell is broken, and as Mr. Wells' spirit rises up stage left, the villagers return to their former loves. Sir Marmaduke invites them all to another feast, and the opera ends with a joyful dance.
- Thanks to my mother for picking up that gem while I was shutting down my equipment that night; apparently it was a good time for her to see the show. [↩]
- The score from which this production worked included many such enhancements, such as dialogue traditionally added but never put in writing and original versions of songs that were rewritten after the score's original publication. [↩]
- The youth is played by a man who appears to be in his thirties, but none of the actors are really that young, except for Cupid. [↩]
- It would have been funny in just about any circumstance, but this Cupid was played by a fifth-grade girl. [↩]
- In the original score, Ms. Partlet is Constance's mother. However, for the purposes of this production, the two actors were deemed too close in age to believably portray mother and daughter; thus, the relationship was altered and the associated lines rewritten. [↩]
- It should be noted that, for all intents and purposes, the overture and the first three numbers of the show are played practically back to back. Constant music means constant playing, which kept me from seeing most of the opening until I got a DVD and managed to actually see a live performance on the one evening I could do so. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- Shamelessly adapted from the first four lines of "'Tis twelve I think", the opening number of Act Two. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- Relatively speaking. Constance is "nearly eighteen" and the libretto pegs the Notary at "sixty-seven nearly". He is not terribly old by modern standards, but this is the 19th century, after all. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- The number's title. [↩]
- Of which he accuses himself; basically, whining. [↩]
- In short, an usher in a church. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- The script uses the word "comely" quite liberally for "attractive"; my usage follows from that. [↩]
- The musical number, "I rejoice that it's decided" [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- So perhaps there is someone left to marry Dr. Daly after all! This must have been intentionally overlooked when the show was written, to facilitate this scene and the next. This sort of plot device would most likely be categorized as a "plot oversight" by the venerable Phil Farrand, author of The Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers
. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- From the foam cut-out shrubs downstage, no less. What awkward blocking that was. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- The number's title. [↩]
- The score calls for him to play a flageolet, but historically, most actors playing the part have not done so (according to the score's preface). In this case the instrumentation was played by another actor on an electronic keyboard backstage, but Dr. Daly could just as easily have played another instrument had the actor been so inclined. [↩]
- Unfortunately, while I know for a fact that the prop table held two mock iPhones, I never did find out when the second one (displaying the home screen) was used. [↩]
- Due to careless rewriting done for the 1884 revival, Aline falls in love with Dr. Daly almost immediately after drinking the potion. The original 1877 version has the potion take effect in half an hour, but the duration was lengthened to twelve hours for the revival — a change that was not reflected in the Act I finale or in this scene. [↩]
- Quotes directly excerpted from PDF libretto found at the Boise State Gilbert and Sullivan archive. [↩]
- This line was slightly modified from the libretto. [↩]
- This line was slightly modified from the libretto. [↩]
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