Quoth the Puppets

So, dear bloggy blog, you've probably noticed I've been posting much less. One of the reasons is I'm now also ghost blogging (in the guise of WebSpider for Puppet Treehouse). Don't worry, you're still important to me! I'm just learning to balance the various directions of my writing.

Other distractions include having the book finally assembled and getting reader comments. Soon, gentle readers, soon!

But for now, here's a poem I wrote for Puppet Treehouse that I'm just obscenely inordinately proud of, which means you get to read it too. With full apologies to Mr. Poe, and in honor of the holiday (ALSO! If you want to hear our recorded podcast of the poem, follow the link at the top of the post to Puppet Treehouse):

Sometimes writing is overrated

That's where turtles come in.

Canadians make the best Acrobats - review of Traces

In the mood to see an innovative circus troupe with specialty acts, songs, stunts, ensemble dancing, and humor?

Don't bother with Cirque - see 7 Fingers's Traces, playing at the Union Square Theatre.

First off, what they have in common - they're both French-Canadian creations, and the founders of 7 Fingers are in fact Cirque alum. Both Cirque and 7 Fingers have acts with hoops, with ropes, with chairs, with poles. But 7 Fingers wanted to create circus work that they wanted to work on, and they wanted a more ensemble feel to the show - rather than having performers come on for ten minutes, do their thing, and then disappear until the curtain call, 7 Fingers performers are onstage nearly the whole time - if they're not participating in the current act, they are watching from chairs lining the back wall.

And ... dude. 7 Fingers is so much better.

Jukebox Musicals: The Return to Old-School Broadway?

In ye olden Broadway days, the days of Gershwin, Berlin, Cohan, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter - in the glory days of Tin Pan Alley - Broadway musicals dictated the popular songs of the day. Especially prior to the collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein on Oklahoma!, which started the trend of integrating songs more thoroughly in character and plot, most showtunes of the early 20th century were generic enough in their relation to plot that they were easily extracted for a larger audience (and even almost frighteningly interchangeable within the show itself - as evidenced in film adaptations like Anything Goes or Babes in Arms, which rewrote plots entirely while maintaining the original score).

I hasten to add, before Jerome Kern takes a hit out on me, that these songs were well-written. Many of them are still considered classics, long after the shows originally containing them are forgotten and unrevived. [Did you know "The Lady is a Tramp" is from Babes in Arms, though it was inserted into the film Pal Joey? Did you know it was written for a woman? You did? Good for you, now go sit in the corner; I'm still talking] Other fun examples include "My Funny Valentine," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Night and Day," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," etc. These were good songs, these were popular successful songs, and they were written for the theater (these scribes also found success composing songs for film musicals as well, including hits like "Puttin' on the Ritz" and "The Way You Look Tonight."

The Self-Editor's Lament

So I'm making progress on the planned book first germinated in this post: a collection of short stories, shorts, and other collected pieces. I went through the hard drive and email folders, dragging the lake for pieces new and old that might be workable. I assembled them all into one epic document, and then went through the patchwork-quilted monster, making the format uniform.

THEN I got to go through and proofread and fix some of the grosser Bad Writing that inevitably crops up. My next step was to print up the entire thing in quarter-size and shuffle and shuffle and shuffle, which took me back to mix tape days.

Now I know what you're thinking: "Gee, A girl named Zelda, this doesn't sound that bad. Why would you title this post with the word Lament? 'Whine whine whine I have to mix and match a bunch of stuff I've already written!' The hard part's over!" Or perhaps "Is it lunch time yet?"