Fred Wemyss

A friend of mine, Mike Creighton, a very funny actor/comedian, will be hosting a show at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg on February 7th. I'm posting his announcement below. It's for a very good cause, which he notes. You'll like him.

By the way, you can see this announcement and his hilarious meditations at:
http://perpetuallynauseous.blogspot.com

Fred

MCC (finally) Has His Way (with Women)
Tues. Feb. 7th @ 8:00pm
Galapagos Art Space, 70 north six street, williamsburg.
Price: $10 at the door.
50% of the proceeds will go to The Nicole duFresne Memorial Scholarship @ Emerson College***.

Comedian/Performer Michael Cyril Creighton has always admired the allure of the "funny female." As a child, during recess, he would walk around with the lunch mother discussing the merits of Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller and the Ladies of Laugh-In, paying particular attention to Ruth Buzzi and Joanne Worley. He has spent 2 1/2 decades praying for Mattel to make a Madeline Kahn Fashion Doll.

Feb. 7th he hosts an evening of comedy, featuring some of his current favorites:

Desiree Burch
Pat Candaras
Claudia Cogan
Michelle Collins
MEAT
Becky Yamamoto
and Musical Guest: Erin & Her Cello.


***Nicole duFresne, an Emerson College Alumni, was a fearless and ferocious performer who was murdered last year on the Lower East Side. Emerson has started a scholarship in her name, which will be given to a young woman in the performing arts with a distinct voice and artistic vision. It is my understanding that the scholarship is approx. $6,000 away from being endowed, so even if you can't make the show, please do donate. Donations can be made online at https://www.emerson.edu/alumni/giving/


Other MCC things, more details to come soon:

Jan 27th, 10:30pm- Rage of Aquarius. The Annual Desiree Burch Birthday Performance Extravaganza. Email for details

Feb. 3, 10, 17, 24 @ 8:00pm- SEQUINS FOR SATAN, a new play by Rachel Shukert at Galapagos Art Space

Feb. 21st- Ritalin Reading Series @ Mo Pitkins, 8:30pm.

March 12th@ 8:00pm @ galapagos: GET INSIDE: A Benefit for the World Premiere of RIP ME OPEN

April 10- After School Comedy Show. 7:30, Petes Candy Store

April 7, 14, 21, 28 @ 8:00pm- RIP ME OPEN, a new play created collaboratively by Desiree Burch, Michael Cyril Creighton, Brian Mullan and OBIE Award Winning playwright, Kyle Jarrow.

I haven't paid to see a movie featuring Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston in the last half-decade. I bet most of the world hasn't either. I think it's high time this haggard trio started paying US, PEOPLE and IN TOUCH for the all the PR they've been getting. They're certainly not generating the public's interest on their own. Each day, at the book store of my employ, I re-shelve, many times over, stacks of magazines showing the faces of Brad, Angelina and Jennifer. These magazines are left in corners, on windowsills and on every available surface in our cafe. The three faces appear, piled up next to a stack of self-help books, a spilled Grande Cappuccino and a forgotten Scrabble square. While Jennifer, Brad and Angelina may not make a penny from the magazines which exist because of them, each one of them is getting the attention he or she signed on for when he or she first pretended to be casual in front of a camera. Since they've got America's undivided attention, they may as well pay US, PEOPLE and IN TOUCH, and if they don't, US, PEOPLE and IN TOUCH should sue them. After all, nobody actually buys In TOUCH, US or PEOPLE. They just sit in the cafes of monolithic book outlets, reading magazines about Brad, Angelina and Jennifer and then stacking them on the tables before waddling to the diet section. Somebody has to make money and since what Brad, Angelina and Jennifer have always needed is not money, but attention, US, PEOPLE and IN TOUCH should sue them until they're forced to work at monolithic book outlets, cleaning up after people who sit around for entire afternoons skimming through magazines about young has beens.

Saturday Night Asleep
[CORRECTION: In this entry I have misidentified Scarlett Johansson as Iris Johansen. Iris Johansen, whose last name I suspect I've spelled wrong in this correction as well as in the entry, is a romance writer. I work at a book store, so I see her name a lot. I also confuse Scarlett Johansson with Charlize Theron, but that's only when I see pictures of them side by side. I love Charlize. I suspect I'd love Scarlett Johansson, but I don't know if I do, because I only watched the first four minutes or so of the SNL episode she hosted last Saturday, which is what this entry is about, and I'm not sure I've seen any movies with her--with her on the screen that is. If she's been in the audience I haven't known it. I also really like "Scarlet Tide," which is on the soundtrack to COLD MOUNTAIN and is sung by Allison Kraus, whose name I'm also mis-spelling and who is also, as are Scarlett and Charlize, blonde, which Elvis Costello, who wrote the song, is not, unless ol' Declan (which is his real first name) has been dyeing it brown, which is a thing I've read Charlize Theron has sometimes done. Or maybe Scarlett Johansson has done it. I don't know, but, since I just read Internet Move Database's biographies of both Scarlett Johansson and Charlize Theron just now, which I did in order to get the spellings of their names right, I can definitely say one of the two actresses has, at one time or another, dyed her hair brown, because the fact was in the trivia section of the biography relating to the particular actress who has done this. Apparently it's very rare for a blonde actress to do this, gentlemen and gentlewomen generally preferring blondes. But--to the point: I really doubt Declan McManus dyes his hair. --Fred Wemyss, January 19th, 2005]

It's 11:55 p.m. as I begin to write. Tonight's episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE has been on for a half-hour. It may be on everywhere in the world, but it's not on in my house. The worst Sunday morning feeling you can have is to wake up knowing you watched an entire SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE the night before. Tonight's innovation was that the opening was a cartoon. An animated Pat Robertson got to say "Live from New York, it's SATURDAY NIGHT." The opening clocked in at less than a minute, which has to be a record. It takes planning to create an animated cartoon, and clearly Robert Smigel planned on demonstrating that brevity is the soul of wit. The credits were, of course, tedious, but it is always great to hear Don Pardo reading the names. It was a treat to hear him, with his game-show announcer's perfect pronunciation, uttering the words, "Death Cab For Cutie." The opening saxophone is still the least inticing entertainment lure on the air, and it was especially reedy when the hostess was brought on. It was Iris Johansen, and I'm sure I've seen her in a lot of things. She came on stage and then Amy Poehler came up on stage dressed just like her. They spoke dialogue indicating the fear of things going wrong which every post-credit-roll segment on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE has as its main joke. I shut it off. I'm more curious than usual about how the musical guest will be, if only because I think the Barnes and Noble where I work plays the Death Cab overhead, between Coldplay and Ryan Adams. I need to see the faces behind the earnestness. But the cast-member wearing the same dress as the hostess bit polished me off. Once you've seen Rosemary Clooney and the other gal in WHITE CHRISTMAS sing "Sisters" in matching dresses, no post-Generation-X duo thrown together by commercial fate can charm you, especially when you hear that same bellowing laugh of some NBC Exec in the audience you've heard guffawing since just after Chevy Chase quit. To everything there is a season. SNL had a season and a half around the time of the Ford administration. When the scientists break the time barrier and Fatty Arbuckle gets to host, I'll uncork the champagne for him. But until then, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE is dead to me. At least until next week, when I'm sure I'll take a peak and be as annoyed at myself as I am now.

Here's a reply I wrote to a post on a friend's blog. It was too long to fit as a reply, so I've posted it here. My friend had written about co-creating stories and drawings with a friend in his middle-school years. They stopped talking to each other. This reminded me of something, and I wrote this:
When I was in the seventh grade I began a whirlwind friendship with a classmate named Kevin. We discovered we each wrote short stories. The other kids din't know this about Kevin. They didn't know he took piano lessons either. He read hard-boiled detective novels from the 1940s and stayed up late watching old movies. We challenged each other, just before summer started, to write a detective story. I wasn't used to detective stories. I never read them. I only read funny writers. But Kevin was steeped in Dashiel Hammet. So he was supposed to come to my house and give me his story and I'd give him mine. His father worked in the city so he was dropped off at my house at 7 a.m. the first Saturday after the school-year ended. We spent the day walking around Greenlawn. We took a bus to Huntington and watched a tape of the Marx Brothers at the Huntington Library. We got the bus back to Greenlawn, walked to my house and I almost gave him my story. I'd stayed up the entire night writing it on typewriter my mother had given me. It was built in 1926! The story was 11 pages, single-spaced and was about a detective named Sylvester J. Iaganarella and his sidekick, Account. I finished it at 6:45 and went outside to wait for Kevin's father to drop him off at the corner. I don't know why I didn't just say they could pull up in the driveway. Well, I do know why. I had a crush on Kevin. Any other friend of mine would have been allowed to just knock on the front door. But my appointment with Kevin was secret. I don't think he knew it was secret. Anyway, I think I told him the driveway would be hard to find so we met at the corner of Oldfield Road and Tilden Lane. So, after our long day walking around and taking the bus to see the Marx Brothers videoptape at the library, we went to my house and I took hold of my eleven-page. single-space near novella and waved it in front of Kevin. "I can't show you this. But you can see this." I showed him a story I'd written in class that year. I didn't offer it to him to read, but I turned the manuscript over and showed him the praise Mrs. Doon, our teacher, had written. Kevin looked disgusted. His perception of me was crystallized then, I think. He considered me an egotist. The first thing that morning after he'd been dropped off he handed me his story. It was about a rough-and-tumble detective, miles away from my Sherlock Holmes knock-off. His detective stumbled home drunk and knocked a lamp over. Mine tossed off punning remarks to his assistant. Anyway, before Kevin's father drove his weary way from whatever semi-urban headquarters he'd toiled in that day and picked him up (again, at the corner of Tilden Lane and Oldfield) Kevin and I had promised to co-write a story about a mysterious figure. Kevin wanted to call it THE JANITOR. I daresay he envisioned some sort of lurid, three-in-the-morning study in psychology, while I wanted to write whatever Kevin might dictate. But he dictated nothing. We saw each other throughout the summer, Kevin getting increasingly short-tempered with me. It became pretty obvious what he had been prepared for was a friendship and I wanted some acknowledgement of longing. The first day back at school, after two weeks of Kevin not answering my calls (I learned early, but still haven't quite taken the lesson) I was walking out of my driveway, the school being a block away. A car which was sitting there honked. I looked and saw the driver wave at me. I saw a red-haired person in the back. I thought, "Oh! Sue from two doors down is being driven to work by her father and I'm being waved in." In to the car I went. I smiled at the driver, and then I turned to look at the person in the back seat. It wasn't Sue. It was Kevin, whose father looked, I realized then, a whole lot like Sue's father. The car drove on. I was too afraid to start a conversation. Kevin wasn't starting one. Why had they been sitting in the car outside my driveway. (I bet now that Kevin was trying to get his father to drop him off somewhat before the school so he wouldn't be seen being dropped off by a parent instead of on the bus like all the other kids.) We drove the block or so to the school. I actually managed to utter the words "Thank you," to Kevin's father as I got out. Kevin and I walked toward the door of the school. I was beginning to say, "I didn't know that was you in the car," when Kevin ran ahead quickly. Just before he went in he turned to me without looking at me. "Don't talk to me," he said and walked inside. From the first day of eight-grade until half-way through eleventh grade we never spoke a word to each other. (Except for the day after the day in ninth grade when I passed him in the hall talking to David Schwartz (who is now curator of the Americna Museum of the Moving Image.) I went up to Kevin, stopped, and punched him in the stomach. The next day Kevin went up to me, and, in spoken prose worthy of Dashiel Hammett, told me just what he thought I was. It's what I thought I was, too.

Let me stress this: I am in no way affiliated with Herb Alpert or with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. In this context, please do not equate Herb Alpert, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass or Herb Alpert and TJB with anyone or entities other than Herb Alpert, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass and/or Herb Alpert and TJB. Remember, too, that I have no connection with A&M Records, Alpert and Moss and/or Almo Music. Please, please do not forget that the music of Herb Alpert and his TJB is embedded in my brain. I am definitely affiliated with this brain of mine.

Let's get down to business: Picture a skinny child of eight. This is a profile shot. In the lower right of the frame is a tiny record player of the type parents give to their children when they begin to fear their child will start using their record player. "Now you have your own record player, Jimmy." (Or, as the case may be, "Now you have your own record player, Sue.") The parent and/or parents would also add "You like the Tijuana Brass, don't you? I/We got you a Tijuana Brass record." Entering the frame, the eight-year-old kneels in front of his new record player, rips the cellophane off of the record cover and takes a full thirty seconds in an effort to get the hole in the record over the spindle on the turntable. The spindle is the rejecting kind, and, even though the record is finally on the spindle, the child can't get it to slide more than a third of the way down, because it is blocked by the jutting portion of the spindle, which is designed to recede when a new record is supposed to drop down after the previous one in the stack has been played. "God damn it, do this," says the parent and forces the record onto the turntable.

Come back in six months and take the record out of the jacket (and try to find the inner sleeve, which is likely to be trapped beneath the leg of the bed and partly concealed by a throw-rug) and inspect the hole at the center of the record. The label around the hole will have craggly, somewhat circular lines made by the spindle during various attempts by the child to get the record over it. You can tell which is his favorite side of the record by the comparative number of swirls on the opposite side of the label. (Side two's label is more marked than the one on side one, so side one is the favorite.)

Look at the picture again. The child is putting the needle on. He's better at this now than ninety-nine percent of adults, not because he's careful with records, but because this record has an important beginning and he always has to hear this part. Okay, this picture isn't silent anymore:

A crashing, resonating percussive boom as a crowd cheers "Ole," and immediately, the braying of high brass. "Ba-daaah! Ba-da-ba-da-buh-bah-da-ba-daah! Ba-dah! Ba-dah! Ba-daaah!" The boy props the album cover against the dresser and watches the still picture on this cover. See the confident look of the man raising his glass to toast those listening to his record. Note the relaxed quality of the confident man. He is sitting. The chair he's sitting in could be used by a matador if he wanted to taunt a bull. The crowd cheers as a bass guitar which sounds as if spurs are attached to it proceeds, in pensive purposefulness, toward the center of the ring.

[I wrote this a few months ago and never got up to the part about psychedelic TJB]

January 3rd is here again.
Come on, Harry. Come on, Sven.
Sing the songs you once preferred.
Bring back January 3rd.

January 2nd ain't enough.
January 4th is rough.
Only one date pleases me:
A Firstmonth day called "3."

Won't it be a rousing night
Once we've lost the 3rd Day's light?
It's not even near absurd.
Hey! It's January 3rd!