A boring text blog

I opted not to go the video route this time around. Sorry if you're disappointed. If you're relieved, well, you're welcome.

I write to you now from my uncle's swanky house in Freeport, another town on Long Island, where I am house- and cat-sitting for him and his girlfriend while they are vacationing in Africa. That's right, Africa. Like "Out of Africa" Africa. They are going to Kenya for a week and a half, and while they are gone I get to live in their house, play with their four adorable cats, and make use of my uncle's unlimited train pass. Bingo!

I got an iPhone in Manhattan yesterday, and so far I really dig it. It was tough trying to get used to it while walking around Manhattan, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I still have my old phone number, so fear not if you need to call me for some reason. The sad thing is that it's already distracted me from other old fashioned, non-techy things I occasionally do, like, I dunno, read. I hope I don't become a total slave to technology, and more specifically, a slave to Apple. But you know, they make really awesome products, so more power to them. You don't see them merging with other computer companies or relying on selling printers to keep their business afloat.

Last night I was a volunteer usher for Nocturne at the Soho Playhouse. The people at the theater were very cool, and it was a nice little space. Before the show, I actually got to meet Adam Rapp, which was pretty mindblowing. He's such a cool dude, very chill and at ease. I had the fortune of being able to drop a name of a friend of mine who was in a show he wrote/directed called Bingo with the Indians, so thank you Missel Leddington for being my conversation starter. (Incidentally, I read Bingo, and it is a fucked-up script. It's good, but it is some seriously wacked-out stuff.)

Nocturne was great, needless to say. Dallas Roberts, who originated the role, performed it again for this one-time show, and he was wonderful. He did the whole show sitting in a chair, occasionally sipping from an unusually tall can of beer, and (get this) reading from the actual script of the play. When I first saw this I thought, "Did he not bother to memorize the lines or something? They didn't just throw this together, did they?" But that couldn't have been the case, because he's done the show literally hundreds of times. It wasn't until the subway ride back to Penn after the show that I got to read Rapp's note in the program about the first time Roberts ever did the play, reading it for an audience of five in a dorm room in West Virginia, and what a charged experience it was, and he wanted to recall the sensation of that first reading for this performance.

I spent most of the first half of the show watching Roberts work from a technical standpoint, trying to understand how he uses his hands when he acts, how he works with the incredibly descriptive text of the play, and how he related to the audience through the character, especially in the moments of humor. (Oddly, the little moments where I would smile to myself when reading the script and think "oh, that's funny" turned out to get fairly big laughs from the audience. Guess it goes to show what that live interaction between actor and audience can do.) And the best part is I got to see it for free. I gotta do this more often.