A Friend at the Fringe

I’ve written in the past about the fact that my friend Michael Merino is a fantastic playwright. I’ve seen readings of several of his plays by now, and he always seems to find a perfect balance between ridiculously intelligent ideas and hilariously funny action. On Saturday, his show The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs will be opening as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. I’ve seen readings of this play a couple of times already, at the Woolly Mammoth Playwrights’ PlayGround and at the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage New Play Festival and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a thought-provoking piece  — and damned amusing.

(Yes, I realize I might lack credibility because he’s my friend, but seriously,  I’ve loved theatre all my life — even minored in it in college — and have read and/or seen something like a jillion plays, and this is a damn good script. I haven’t seen this production yet, so I can’t vouch for that, but Michael’s work is solid.)

Here’s the official description:

Take a simple sentence. A typing drill. Nine words. 37 letters. What do the words mean? How are they related? How is meaning conveyed? Inspired by the texts of Lewis Carroll, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush and concluding with the inspirational metaphorical tropes of Barack Obama, the work presents five characters in search of meaning at an absurdist linguistic tea party.

There are five shows over the course of the next 10 days of the festival — some in the evening, some matinees, spread over weekends and weeknights — so if you’re in DC, there’s really no excuse for not making it. Tickets are available here.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… One of my vast collection of dead/ancient cell phones will be smashed nightly during the play. Fun!

173-193/365: The First Three Weeks of Summer

I’ve once again gotten a bit behind with posting my Project 365 photos — three weeks behind, to be specific. Loading 21 individual photos into the blog is fairly time consuming, so I decided to make a slideshow instead, which (surprisingly enough) is a ton faster. Enjoy!

“A Right Inestimable”

On my way to the airport yesterday, I happened to hear NPR’s “Morning Edition” team do their annual dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence. At the risk of sounding hopelessly corny, this part kinda makes me mist up a little:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s the most famous bit, of course, and Thomas Jefferson at his most stirring. I’ll admit that I usually zone out during the list of grievances part, but cruising up the BW Parkway allowed me time to listen. One particular item caught my attention:

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

And yet, 233 years later, the residents of the capital city of the nation formed by this declaration still have no representation, which is — to emphasize Jefferson’s words — “formidable to tyrants only.

Now, I don’t consider our goverment to be tyrants. Idiots, sometimes, to be sure, and misguided on occasion, but not tyrants. So, if you have a moment on this Independence Day, take a moment to remind your Representatives and Senators that there are 500,000 residents of the District of Columbia who are still waiting for “a right inestimable to [us].”

Visit www.dcvote.org for more information.

Oh, and Happy Independence Day!