Alberty's Blah Blah Blog

Sometimes I just burst into song. And it’s usually a weird pinched falsetto running commentary on what I’m doing at the time. Think Robin Gibb suddenly singing, “Washin’ out the stew pot!”

I have been known (only by me and perhaps my wife) to carry on an operatic farce while cleaning dishes and picking up my office.

“Clack the stapler with a click, click, click. With the scissors going snip, snip, snip. Click it, click it”

“Click it, click it!”

“Snip it, snip it! Sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii— Oh, hey honey. Nothing. Just cleaning the office.”

I’m guessing, although you’re not surprised, some of you — even my closest friends — did not know this about me. I have been able to keep that little quirk pretty closed to the world, because it usually only happens when I’m alone.

Well, for the last two years I have rarely been alone. I have had my son with me.

He is a sponge.

I’m afraid I’ve turned him into a tiny non-stuttering Mel Tillis. I’m assuming this allusion blew past a good number of you. But, believe me, if you lived in Oklahoma in the late seventies and wore ivy print shirts with a green yoke and faux pearl snaps, you would know the name Mel Tillis.

My son has taken to spouting out strange phrases, sometimes sing-songy, sometimes in what I call his monster voice.

Recently he has taken to singing out the phrase “Sushi Popo.”

Now if genetics manifested itself in language quirks this moment might just prove that he is undeniably mine.

He clearly loves saying things that are fun to say. Today I caught him saying “More mower, more mower, more mower.” Not to anyone in particular. Actually I think it might have been to Eeyore, but I don’t think Eeyore was that interested.

“Sushi Popo” is, without a doubt, fun to say. It is the name of a restaurant where we, unfortunately, had a rather disastrous dinner. By disastrous I mean it was one of those rare nights that my wife and I went out to dinner and had a truly awful experience. Not disastrous in the way it might have been if my son had pooped in his hand and thrown it on other patrons. It’s a toss up as to which we would have preferred.

Anyway, my son has been singing “Sushi Popo” ever since.

Another thing he’s been doing, which is by turns hilarious and disturbing, is gravelling in his monster voice the phrase, “I love meat!” He says this through gritted teeth and while clinching his fists so tightly I’m afraid he’ll pass out.

After surprising me with this phrase, he’ll look at me sideways then yell, “I’m funny!”

Today after a particularly impressive poo in his potty I was performing the requisite “Tinkle in the Potty” dance. He was not. He was simply looking at me. This was a little strange because usually he really gets into the “Tinkle in the Potty” dance. But I finally stopped and said, “Give me a high five!”

He said, “No. Uh uh.”

I was a little stunned and, sillily enough, a little hurt.

Then he burst out with a little song that consisted of the words, “Bump it!”

That somehow made it all okay for me.

And it taught me a little something about my singing tic. It’s a little self-therapy.

So, I guess if that’s some bizarre little quirk he got from me, I’m okay with it.

I just hope it doesn’t get him beat up.

Unless he was funny, too.

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Yes, you’re correct. I am talking about my internet access.

I have been without home access to the internet since Friday night.

I know, I know. You probably read Monday’s blog posting. Uploaded from the theatre the night before, not from the comfort of my home.

I am utterly surprised at how much it’s killing me. I’m driving out in my pajamas at 11:00 at night to my secret internet access points and sending/receiving email.

Then, in the morning, I’m packing my kid up and doing the same thing.

I feel like a junkie.

And the thing that’s really killing me about this is a two-prong bident of frustration poking in the ass of my self-esteem. 1) I am such a technidiot that I can’t fix it myself; 2) my wife, who can fix it, is at the end of the school year and simply doesn’t have the time to fix it yet (and she’s eight and one-half months pregnant) so I can’t whine to her about it.

Oh, and my freelance work is online and email based.

Oh, and the game that I am utterly addicted to needs internet access to run.

Oh, yeah, and the other game I got to soothe the lost access of the first more addictive one has run out of levels and is telling me I need to purchase it to move on.

And …

Give me a second, I’m sure it’s worse…

Nope, that might be it. But isn’t that enough?

Oh, yeah! I knew I’d think of another one. I’ve been waiting to get a rather important email with the scripted sketches I need to memorize for a show two weekends from now. How the hell am I supposed to obsessively check my email every twenty-three minutes if I’m having to toss my kid in the car, drive to my secret coffee house access point, and read my computer hunkered in my car with my sunglasses on while trying to fend off my kid from eating his twelfth pack of bagged applesauce because we’ve already spent nine hours in the car online today? Huh? Come on!

Okay. Now I have to pack up and go to the parking lot of a local grocery store with wi-fi access to upload this post. And it’s raining.

But I don’t have an addiction. I could quit any time I want to.

I might pick up a Ben&Jerrys while I’m there, too.

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I certainly wish that I woke up this morning to have forgotten this weekend. It was the monkey that stole my joy peach.

The weekend began to deteriorate about three minutes into the Saturday performance of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I had just come out of the restroom — that’s what I do during the first few minutes of a show I direct — to hear the sound of a woman nearly wailing in the lobby. I can hear her husband saying, “There’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s just go in there and be with her and see how it plays out.”

There were flares of anger and crying and consoling. There were a couple of “How could yous”, which are the ones that really got me.

What happened? Well…it was all about miscommunication. It is a long and sordid tale that I will cut short by just saying they brought their daughter who was hearing impaired. They expected the theatre to provide the interpreter, the theatre —in the past —has paid for interpreters provided by the patron. I’m sure you can see what happened.

It absolutely broke my heart. I called the two SL interpreters that I knew, but neither answered their phones.

At intermission I went in and met the father — the mother and daughter had left — I apologized profusely, offered comp tickets for another show with the guarantee of interpreter, personal tour of the backstage, meeting and photos with the cast. I just wanted to make it right.

Then today I read the email that the mother sent the theatre. Devastating. It will live with me for a bit.

Then Sunday…oh, Sunday! Fifteen minutes into the matinee performance … the tornado sirens went off. At first we ignored it. After-all we are Iowans. Then the sirens went off a second time, people were seeing funnels south of us, and we couldn’t ignore it.

For the first time in my long history with the theatre we stopped a performance to take the audience down into the basement. It was nuts.

So I spent that thirty or forty minutes worrying, talking with cast members, and trying to figure out how and where we start the show back up.

It also happened to be the day we had our photo shoot after the performance. It also happened to be the day that they were bringing in the refurbished organ.

Today was one of the longest theatre days I have had.

So after I finally got out of the theatre at 7:30, all I wanted to do was get home, sit on my favorite sofa and finish a freelance writing assignment that is due this morning. Ahh, my favorite spot on the sofa.

Covered in dog vomit. A perfect capper to an awesome weekend.

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Sometimes I run across a phrase or an image that gives me years of giggly pleasure.

It’s even better when it’s a simple mix of image and phrase.

Here is a short and simple gift from me to you.

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So yesterday we did something that seems anathema to stageplay…at least for me. We put on a play beginning at 9:45 in the morning.

It just doesn’t seem right to me. Plays occur in the dark, late at night, when fairies and elfkind play with people’s imaginations.

As an actor, I always hated the Sunday matinee. There is a decidedly different energy in the house. A strange, sluggish, thick energy that seems only half awake. I never felt at peak on Sundays. There are actors, community and professional, unknown and famous, that speed their performances on matinees, so much that I have seen ten to fifteen minutes cut from shows — not from dropped lines, but simply by speed.

Ironically this sometimes improves the performance. But not always, and not often. It is a sad mentality toward an audience that often pays the same price for a ticket that an evening-going patron pays. But, alas… it happens.

Well, yesterday we had one of those strangest of strange stage events: a school show. We played to a house of nearly 500 fifth graders…at 9:45 in the morning.

Now I love the idea of captivating 500 young eyes and bringing each to understand the power of theatre. But reality is reality, right?

I have to say that my cast did a pretty good job. I sat in the balcony and watched as the majority of kids leaned forward and became captivated by live theatre. It was pretty cool.

Sometimes a cynic can find salvation. Even at 9:45 in the morning.

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You must have come back (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this), so thanks for understanding my need to take last week off.

Well, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe opened to a sold out house this weekend. That was pretty exciting. Things went pretty well, considering the huge amount of tech, the ridiculous number of mics and sound cues, thirteen dance numbers and thirty actors, 17 of whom are kids. Whew.

Usually I’m nervous on opening night. I’m up in the balcony pacing back and forth. But there was standing room only Friday night, so there was no way I could pace. I made it about ten minutes into the first act before I had to go into the lobby. I essentially missed the whole first act.

But I got myself back together for the second act. I was able to watch most of it without blacking out. The 500+ audience members seemed to like it, so it was all good.

I was, naturally, sick. A cold that I acquired early in the week dropped into my chest. It got so bad that on Saturday night, our second sold-out show, I gave my pep-talk to the cast and crew then went home. It was the first time — for any show that I have directed — that I did not stay to watch the whole show. Going home made me feel guilty. But laying in front of the TV in my all-flannels hugging a box of tissues and drinking hot tea made me feel a lot better.

Something else happened last week that really got me jazzed. I was offered a freelance writing gig for a local start-up company. I am pretty stoked about it because it affords me the chance to mix together several things I love, teaching, writing, and food. We had a second meeting on Thursday to go over some samples I created and sent them. I wasn’t really feeling that it was my best work, but they liked it. So  I signed some papers and talked some projects and left pretty happy.

I’m a little nervous about it now, because the guy I met with seemed pretty excited to get me some texts to review after he met with his CFO. I was pretty sure that he would get them to me Friday night so I could begin working on them during the weekend. But I have yet to receive them.

Over the last few months a couple of projects I’ve been pretty stoked about have fallen though, either due to timing issues or lack of interest on the other’s part. So, I’m hoping this one doesn’t mysteriously fall into that category.

The final good bit of new news involves my favorite summer activity: The Classics at Brucemore. For those of you who don’t know, the CaB is one of the first outdoor theatre events in Eastern Iowa. It’s been running now for sixteen(?) years…I think. You know how bad I am with time. I was lucky enough to get involved with it the second year of its existence.

It’s a once a year theatre experience that has a core company of actors who’ve now been working together for quite some time. I’ve directed the last couple of shows, but this year I finally get to play on stage again.

We’re doing The Tempest. What a beautiful show for our outdoor space.

I’m playing Sebastian, one of the heinous “brothers” that people this show. Come to think of it Leslie, the director, has now cast me as a murderer, a crazy Nazi, and now a totally amoral doof. Hmmm… And each role has been crazy-fun. I can’t wait.

Most of my scenes also happen to be with a great friend of mine who had assistant directed for me many times. But, oddly enough, we have never acted in a scene together. Again, I can’t wait.

Now the bugaboo of the week, other than my illness. Our modem went kaput. I’m trying feverishly to finish this posting at a coffee house, so I can get home and finish all the work I know my wife wanted me to do this weekend.

Both of us are online so much (most of my work is done online) that this is going to suck. But my wife usually has some wizardy hoo-doo with technology, so I’m afraid to go out and buy a new one in case she can get the old one working.

Okay, all caught up. Now to scoot back home and get my vacuuming on. That sucks too.

Sorry.

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Sorry Gang.

I have to go with the mental health on this one and concentrate on opening The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this week.

So catch back up with me next Monday, May 16th.

Thanks.

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Well, we did not eat at Denny’s. Nor did we spend an hour at the library.

We ended up going to a new restaurant in town. I was particularly excited, because, quite frankly, there is a paucity of good fine dining restaurants in town. Two, maybe three if the price to taste ratio isn’t too big on your list. Our best place suffered first from the flood, then second from our inept city government, but I digress.

Anyway, there was this new place in Czech Village. I was pretty excited because it is a neighborhood really trying to reinvent itself. We went. We ate. We probably won’t go back.

My expectation for dining out is eating something I wouldn’t make at home. I had something that I might whip up on a Tuesday night. It was not the “one special thing” for our anniversary.

Then we went to a coffee shop to work.

Sigh…

Okay, the necklace.

About a month and a half ago I went to my favorite friend/actor/jeweler/marx-brothers-scholar to design my wife’s anniversary gift.

When my wife and I went to see her best friend’s new baby my wife noticed her “push-prize” — a phrase I find strangely offensive — of a really cool charm bracelet. I mean it was über cool. My wife really talked that thing up. So, I worked on designing her a charm bracelet. I was even working on designing a couple of specific charms for the thing.

Then…

One day she came home really excited about a gift she got her sister for graduation. Can you guess?

A charm bracelet. It was beautiful. I pretended that I was really excited about it, all the while wondering if I could get away with still giving her one. There is kind of a weird sister thing going on that I don’t fully understand. It’s a bit of a funky mine-field sometimes, so I try to just not walk it, you know.

Anyway, it was different from the one I was working on. Her sister’s was this cool thick bracelet with some glass beads and pearls. My wife’s was going to be silver with silver charms. So I was good.

Then, at the height of her excitement about this gift, she related to me about how, during her childhood, she and her sisters would exchange these “cheap, stupid, little silver charms that [she] just hated.”

…

Sigh.

I guess it was good that I knew, right?

I was a little down about it, I admit. But her necklace seemed to turn out okay. She said she liked it.

Then the bathroom. Our bathroom has been in a state of decorative disrepair since we moved in. Our house was basically a wallpaper showroom. We both hate wallpaper. And, although we had an army of friends help strip it, by the time we got to the bathroom we were totally tapped. We got some of the wallpaper removed. Most not.

Then the mold started to feed the on remaining wallpaper paste. It was, to say minimally, unseemly. Then the vanity light began to rust.

It didn’t help that the bathroom was decorated in the 1950’s Whatthefuckwereyouthinking Style. Large pink wall tiles with a thin maroon tile trim and pink and brown tiny floor tiles. Nice.

I think we both knew that once the wallpaper was down we were going to need to choose a paint color to go with all that pink. So we put it off. For two years.

I thought with the new baby coming that it might be another two years. But the mold was beginning to affect my dreams. So I decided to strip the wallpaper while she was out of town for a weekend.

…

Then I hired someone else to do it.

Risky move with a parsimonious spouse. But I think she was just as relieved to have it stripped as I was.

Someday I might be able to discuss the gift my wife gave me …

I haven’t seen it yet.

She hasn’t seen it yet.

Actually, she hasn’t chosen it yet.

She thought, since the sixth anniversary is wood, she would get me a tree. It’s a very lovely thought. But there were so many crazy issues with the right tree in the space we will plant it that …

Well, she felt really bad that she really didn’t have any gift for me, so I suggested that since the sixth anniversary is wood, I could give her a little something more, but she declined. We both had work to do.

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Let me begin by saying that I love my wife. In fact I love her so much that sometimes it’s painful … in a good way. That’s why I feel like I can relay the events of our recent anniversary.

I’m calling it my “Manniversary.” This is because I now feel what it must be like to be married to a “normal” man. If you believe in gender identification, you might say that my wife has some very particular male tendencies. She’s hyper-competitive…I’m going to stop there before I get in trouble.

Anyway, her male-side really cropped up for our anniversary: our sixth. Although we have been together for a while … with several kooky side-roads.

TANGENT: I’ve decided that this post may be the post I overuse the ellipse (…).

So, I had been looking forward to this anniversary for some time. It’s been a while since my wife and I had a night together. And the last night we had as a date, we got a babysitter, went to a coffeehouse and worked. Yup. That was our last “date.” We worked.

I just wanted a nice romantic night with my wife. I wanted to sit over some good food and get reacquainted with her.

We both have been under some very heavy stress lately. Her work is crazy and I am in the manic last two weeks of rehearsal before my show opens. We see each other maybe two, three hours a day. We have five weeks before our new kids is supposed to be born, so there is a ton of house stuff to do. A car just went out so we have to buy a new one, yada yada life, you know.

I went out and designed a necklace for her gift, which I need to get to later. Then I had someone come in to rip out old wallpaper from our bathroom and put a primer coat on it as a couple’s-gift, which I’ll have to get to later.

We also had a gift certificate to one of the area’s best restaurants, which we had been sitting on for this purpose. I was going to take her necklace to the restaurant and have them bring it out as her appetizer. It was going to be great!

Well …

Our anniversary was on Sunday. That will instantly click for those of you who have restaurant experience. Saturday night I went online to check to this special restaurant’s menu (which changes monthly). CLOSED. Naturally. But not a killer, because we have another favorite place in town we could go. Although last year, when our anniversary was a Saturday (I think) someone had rented out their entire space. So when we drove up and were turned away I was crushed last year. I think we ended up eating at Subway.

So …

Okay, let me get to Sunday.

First let me say, my wife is pregnant. She is a teacher at the end of the school year. Saturday night she worked Prom. We have a two year-old very active boy. And she has a particular level of maleness.

When we woke up Sunday morning, the first thing she said to me was, “Happy Anniversary.”

The second thing she said to me was, “Look, I know we are going out to dinner tonight, but this week has been crazy and I am so behind in work, so I hope you weren’t expecting that we were going spend time rebonding.”

Remember: my wife is pregnant. She is a teacher at the end of the school year. Saturday night she worked Prom. We have a two year-old very active boy. And she has a particular level of maleness.

Still …

Okay, so with that hovering in the air, I went to a costume parade. This is a several hour-long process of looking at actors stand numbly in the center of the stage while the director and costumer go, “Hmmm, I like the melon socks, but the butternut frock seems too mealy. How about something more puce? With flowers.” And, “White Witch! White Witch! Can you move comfortably in that bustier? Is the fur trim getting in your eyes? Good! (Costumer, make that fur trim longer.)”

So that lasted about four hours. Then I walked to our favorite restaurant — with necklace gift box in hand — to find they too were closed … it was, of course, Sunday.

Oh, for those of you who know me, you can probably imagine how dramatically defeated I felt at this moment: two restaurant plans down, a wife who would rather work than hang at a restaurant and chit-chat. A butternut frock. It was pretty bad. I saw my anniversary night ending up with a meal at Denny’s and an hour at the library. Yea…

I have reached my word limit…

Come back Friday for the …

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Okay, the days are counting down to Albercainty v.2.

The bun, as I am referring to him, is about five weeks from total bake … at least if you believe conventional obstetric reasoning. Our first kid was ten days late, which is exactly when our Bradley method stuff said he’d show up. So …

Anyway, we are going to give the Bradley Method a go again. So the wife and I are gearing up with a rereading of our manuals and notes and, hopefully, we will start “practicing” again.

We’ve been wanting to get into the practice for a while, but already having a kid bopping around has really put the squeeze on our practical time together. Couple that with her working during the day and I directing a show at night, we get about three hours together a day: two of those with kid, one working on our respective projects. Not much time to get ready for the new baby.

And that concerns me.

We were so ready for our first kid. I haven’t really felt that confident about many things in my life. We went into the hospital and told them we wanted a Bradley birth. We were in there for eighteen hours, most of that time just the wife, me, and sometimes a nurse. It was great, just the two of us working it. Those contractions would hit and I would roll on with the focusing and encouragement, my wife would work through the pain. During the downtimes we worked the relaxation and envisioning. And when he came out, he really felt like ours, not just my wife’s, you know?

There really aren’t many things I would change about the first birth. Two really. The first thing is that I wish that my wife screamed her profanity a little louder. At least loud enough for her parents to hear through the door. Because, quite frankly, I learned some new phrases and a couple of highly creative ways to put certain words together to create whole new meanings. It was like she held these little sixty-second mini-classes on profane locution.

The second thing I would change really helped me better prepare for the upcoming birth. And it is this: Don’t look back. I mean it.

When your child is born and your wife is crying and you step forward on your way out the door to tell the awaiting crowd about the new life you two brought into the world, your wife may say something like, “Honey, I love you.” Or perhaps she might say, “Tell them he’s beautiful.”

What you must —MUST — do is keep facing the door and say, “I love you, too,” or “I will,” respectively. Under no circumstances should you turn around and look at your wife to engage in this seemingly short discourse. Because if you do, you can’t take it back.

My wife likes to say (about many things) it’s all about the angle. Well let me tell you, she looks a hell of a lot different when you are at the head of the bed looking down at her feet than she looks when you are at her feet looking up.

From the head angle everything is pretty magical, and by that I mean clean. But you go down to the business end and… sorry, I need a minute to get myself together here.

Look, it’s been almost two years and I’m still feeling that moment.

But it taught me a good deal about life, I think.

The best things, the best moments aren’t always the prettiest. Sometimes you have get rather dirty for the big payoffs, simply because that’s how things work.

And when those moments hit, and when you know things have changed, never, ever look back. It will do you no good.

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