Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Lighting board, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

After this weekend, it will be curtains for Curtains in Arlington, MA, and I am really going to miss this show. I started working backstage for them in February and soon worked my way up from worst painter to worst lighting tech!

Yes, I have risen so far in the Arlington (MA) Friends of the Drama that now I have to climb two ladders when I go to work, in the tiny lighting booth above the back of the theatre.

Fortunately, I now enjoy climbing ladders. Thank heaven I lost my acrophobia somewhere, most likely in Second Life where avatars easily leap from the tops of tall buildings (the quickest way down), crash to earth, stand right up, and just feel perfectly fine.

The songs by Kander and Ebb (they also did Cabaret and Chicago) are toe-tapping and singable. The singing, dancing, dynamic cast is such fun to watch, and let me tell you I have now watched them quite a few times but I still hate to look down when the light cues require my attention. If you live near Arlington MA, there are still some tickets for sale there for this weekend’s shows. And be sure, if you come, to be amazed by the great lighting.

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Forgive my long non-blogging, but I have been “making trouble today for a better tomorrow” elsewhere … multiple elsewheres, for too many yesterdays.

English Sunday traditional roast beef with Yorkshire pudding just got multiple updates–from a bright orange Mexican plate to the colorful veggies, steamed lightly to please modern taste buds.

But this photo is symbolic–not so much of what I’m eating as it is of the too-many too-tempting things distracting me from my current blog troubles.

Aside from Gilbert and Sullivan, lectures on Darwin, springtime in Iffley, work on my book, trying to set up a non-fiction writers’ workshop, and the glories of Oxford Botanic Garden, there are distractions less delightful taking up far too much time…grocery shopping with no car, just for a starter.

And then there are cross-cultural gotchas, like the dry cleaner who phoned to tell me that somehow he’d broken all eight buttons on my best jacket. He did pay for ten new buttons and sew them on free, but I did have to go find them in a tiny second-floor sewing store on a small back street.

Do less, write more–what a good plan. I plan to try that plan now.

From today’s NY Times, here you see mother and daughter jaunting and laughing through summertime in side-by-side bus seats, because “My daughter and I wanted to see the Swedish countryside, and a bus is a good way to do it.”

I always love visiting Mary in her lovely and welcoming small-town NH library. I’m glad NY Times photographer Jacob Silberberg captured her and Kerstin in such a lovely but truly typical moment. I’m also glad he mentions that Mary is 60.

It seems to me that the natural active fun for a person at any age is whatever stuff that exact person has real fun doing.

My Time Goes By friend Ronni Bennett pushes back when older people talk about being active or happy as feeling young. I know why she does–for the same reason I once wrote about “I’m too bleeargingledly for my shirt.” But I think what most people mean by “feeling young” is just that we don’t feel some (bad) way society told us we’d feel when we got “old.”

My mom when she was 80 liked gardening and doing crosswords and reading Colette, and far be it from anyone to say that she should have been out riding back roads on a giant Harley while clad in black leather. Though that’s an image that would have made her smile…

And far be it from anyone to say she shouldn’t have ridden those roads and that Harley if she wanted to.

Smoked salmon with horseradish-flavored whipped cream

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Mmm, restaurant food–but that quickly gets old.

My quick-dinner fall-back, which I learned about in the Netherlands, is handfuls of mixed chopped vegetables tossed into the boiling water when I’m cooking pasta. Top with pesto or nuke some chunky red sauce in the microwave.

Today’s NYT has 101 more ideas, including an easy recipe for gazpacho.

Nextbigthingitude? What a great word Halley has dreamed up for Twitter. But it’s more than that.

Twitter is an experiment in turning OFF a few social taboos, to see what happens next.

Twitter, like blogging, shuts down the taboo that says “Don’t talk about yourself, people don’t care.” Twitter, like Orkut, gives delicious permission to ask for and offer friendship to people you like, while withholding your friendship from people you don’t like so much.

Don’t string theorists believe that the world has tons of extra rolled-up dimensions? Twitter-ers are playing games with the social dimensions, collapsing a few just to see what might happen next.

And what happens next is, most likely, that we all get bored. Or maybe we don’t.

Maybe we decide we want this crazy new-fangled interaction toy that nobody wanted before it was invented–just the way we decided we want email and cellphones.

Besides–it’s fun being part of this experiment–join me!

Here you see Einstein (happy birthday, professor!) on the front porch of the Princeton house where Frank and I later spent about eight happy years.

It’s an artist’s conception, so you don’t see any tourists ringing the doorbell.

Welcome to my new blog. Please pardon me if it’s now a (messy) open house. I had been planning to fix it up more before sending out any virtually-engraved invitations. Things moved too fast for me.

Einstein’s ninth law is that nothing moves faster than gossip through the blogosphere.

Or maybe something moves faster–but that something sure isn’t Betsy!

Wow, looks spacious–clean–no cat hair on anything–we’ll, we’ll soon fix that.

Cecil Coupe with his MvManila software managed to collect all the posts and all the pictures I created using Manila over the past four-years-plus, and move them into WordPress so that they all link to each other in the appropriate way, despite the changed URL. Pretty amazing–we ran into some ISP obstacles along the way–through it all, Cecil remained a (very hard-working) pleasure to work with.

Thank you, Cecil!

I found Cecil using a Google search for “move Manila blog” but I put some links in here so that you can find him even faster.

People around the world are interested in the crazy excesses of political spin.

What was the funniest TV ad this campaign? The stupidest? The meanest?

Go to MSNBC to see some amazing candidates. Here’s one election where it’s not (yet) too late to vote.

It would take Democrats three turn-overs to control the US Senate. And, at 9:42 p.m. they project….

• R — Sen. Santorum out in PA…
• R — Sen. DeWine out in OH
• R — Sen. Chafee out in RI

Nashua’s Crowne Plaza has free wireless–and a lot of happy Democrats here celebrating.

I now am the veteran of, not just a “visual” but (later on) something called a “knock and drag.”

I think Paul Hodes is going to defeat (former) US Congressman Republican Charlie Bass.

BULLETIN: UnionLeader.com has learned that Republican U.S. Rep. Charles Bass is preparing to call Paul Hodes and congratulate the Democrat on his victory.

Woo hoo!!!! And late-comer Carol Shea-Porter is currently “tied” with Congressman Jeb Bradley! (That is, she’s ahead so far, but not by much.)

One candidate and two Republicans in Nashua, NH

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

There were a bunch of local candidates holding signs, plus some local Democrats holding signs for Paul Hodes (Democrat for Congress in NH-02) and John Lynch (popular Democratic NH Governor).

So who was there for the Republicans? Exactly one man, a campaign worker who had come up from Virginia to hold campaign signs. (Later, a woman from Mississippi joined him. But I can’t complain, since I drove up from Massachusetts.)

The other Republican in this picture is someone who came to the polls to vote for Paul Hodes.

Wow–this isn’t statistically significant, but it sure sounds good so far.