A Double-Post Wednesday Night!

This is straight from Chris Kelly's Huffington Post...post called "God is my Doorman: Mark Sanford for Non-Christians." Enjoy.

Hemingway said that the problem with Henry Miller was that he got laid in the afternoon once and thought he invented it. Governor Mark Sanford got laid in Argentina two weeks ago and the way he continues to go on about it, you'd think he cracked cold fusion. The man won't shut up. If Henry Miller talked about his sex life as much as Governor Mark Sanford talks about his sex life, people would have started thinking he was some kind of perv.

So today Mark Sanford needed to amend the number of times he kissed the Spider Woman in the last year, for those of you keeping score at home. Now it's five, including two overnights in New York, one for general fornication and one more - approved by his wife! - that was supposed to be just to talk about old times. Sort of an adultery exit interview.

The fact that someone as unconscious as Jenny Sanford was in a position of authority at Lazard Frères makes it amazing that there's a banking system at all.

One thing Mark Sanford isn't doing is resigning. Why? Because God Himself wants Mark Sanford to stay on as Governor of South Carolina. Just ask Mark Sanford:

"Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign - as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise - that for God to really work in my life I shouldn't be getting off so lightly."

And if anyone knows about getting off, it's Mark Sanford.

But more importantly, the Almighty insists that Mark Sanford stay in office. South Carolina is his punishment. Like when Job got boils.

And the citizens get to help God help Mark Sanford be a better man. Which I think we can all agree is what public service is all about.

"While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride."

That and years and years of adultery. But mostly pride.

Here's what I always thought I kind of missed out on as a Catholic, instead of whatever horseshit Mark Sanford practices: Self-diagnosis. When it came to sin, we didn't get to call our own balls and strikes like that.

"If I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one - and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm."

Again, what else can we do for you, Gov. Sanford? I'm glad the taxpayers have this chance to let you improve yourself, but is that enough? Next time you're boning someone in South America, can we hold your dick?

Okay, now clearly Mark Sanford is just a twitching loon who should be locked up before he hurts someone. What's cool is that he isn't even out of office yet, and he's already talking about God opening doors.

Our former favorite disgraced Christian egomaniac, Sarah Palin, waited until the week after the election, when she told Fox News:

"Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator's hands - this is what I always do. I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

The open door to which they refer, of course, is from Revelation:

"I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name." -- Revelation 3:8

American Evangelicals love Revelation, because it doesn't make a lick of sense and then everything explodes. Kind of like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But they love Revelation 3:8 most of all, because it sounds like God's promise that you'll win the lottery.

Evangelical business advice always comes back to Revelation 3:8. God opens doors. Like this one: Your opportunity to buy these timeshares.

God wants you to get rich working from home. The same way he opens the door to
a Palin Administration. Immediately followed by the Apocalypse. Don't say you weren't warned.

I'm not sure Mark Sanford's going to like the door that God opens for him, though. According to Revelations 21:8, adulterers and liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.

Forever.

Even if you've been to Argentina, and gotten used to the heat, that's still gonna hurt.

Zing!

An unusually thought-provoking Wednesday night, right? I had this and the Blais essay both emailed to me and thought the world should read them. One for the sheer pride and honor I take in the hometown of my memory and the second for the bat-shit craziness of politicians.

These are the things I'm thinking about when I'm not running lines.

From the Amherst Bulletin, or My Hometown

Professor feels at home in town's 'peaceable kingdom'

By MADELEINE BLAIS

Published on June 26, 2009

Sorry, Berkeley, Montreal, Washington, D.C., and Boston: You just lost out, in that order, to Amherst as the top college town in North America, according to Katherine Cohen, founder and CEO of IvyWise and ApplyWise.com.

This is no big revelation to those of us who live here.

I grew up next door to Amherst, in a town called Granby, which reveled in the rhythms of its ordinariness. My friends had horses, we ate homemade rhubarb pie, and most of the town's elders practiced a certain kind of penny-pinching Republicanism.

We scoured spring pools for the first flowering growths after winter. We nailed pails to trees to catch the sap. We really did swing on birch trees. At times we jokingly dismissed Amherst as 32 square miles of wishful thinking surrounded by reality (I checked with the town manager to make sure my surface area was correct), but in truth we basked in its ambient glow. It made us feel part of a larger, more sophisticated world, the world where in the 1950s earnest globe-trotting professors brought back slides from distant places and dutiful faculty wives served punch out of real punch bowls.

We were invigorated by the presence of the students at Amherst College and UMass, the children and grandchildren of presidents and shahs, the children and grandchildren of sales clerks at Filene's and firefighters from Hingham, gathered in the same place, with a common purpose, to build a better future. We lived, happily, on borrowed pride. Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry in a stately house on Main Street a century before I was born, but, even as a child, I was spooked by her telepathy. "There's a formal feeling in the house the morning after death," she wrote. How did she know what it would be like at 5 Center St. in the next town over when my grandmother died so many years after the poet's own death?

As schoolchildren in 1963 when President Kennedy visited Amherst College to dedicate the Frost Library, we were expected to tune in. We were expected to listen when he said: "I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft . . . And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction."

Personal distinction - Kennedy's expression - is one of the bulwarks of this town where, as the T-shirt makes clear, only the "h" is silent. Amherst is a strong taste where even the trash trucks have attitude. Emblazoned on the back of Amherst Trucking: "I recycle, therefore I am."

Amherst is dependably eccentric - where else does the police log report that three bicycles arranged precariously high up in a tree turn out to be an installation by art students, illustrating what principle of composition I am not certain.

In Amherst, the crosswalk signals in the center of town make chirping sounds instead of an ugly buzz. The pepper spray used by the police is alleged to be organic. Street vendors sell soy votives and a weekly farmer's market boasts up to 30 kinds of apples. The new movie theater used to feature vegetable-dyed M&M substitutes and to this day there is a handy dispenser filled with nutritional yeast to shake onto one's popcorn.

Above all, Amherst is a place bound by words and bound by nature.

The first is abstract, the other concrete, but both are willful, unsettling, and mysterious in their power.

"There's an atmosphere in Amherst of wanting to learn about things: not just books, but gardening, history, natural creatures, the landscape, the weather, the arts, politics, whatever keeps people curious and alive," says a friend, the poet Susan Snively. "In any case, I'm glad I don't live in Gravel Switch, Kentucky."

I lived away from the valley for many years, but when it came time to make one of the most profound decisions of my life, to pick a place in which to raise my family, I returned, convinced that this was at heart a peaceable kingdom which honored the land and the mind in equal measure and which valued seasons of all stripes, including the seasons in a person's life.

Amherst resident Madeleine Blais is a journalism professor at UMass-Amherst and author of "Uphill Walkers," a family memoir. She also wrote "In These Girls, Hope Is A Muscle," the story of the 1993 ARHS girls basketball team which won the state championship. The column first appeared in the Boston Globe.

Stardom

Plumbing in the kitchen still not fixed.  Landlord AWOL.  Kitchen sink remains unusable.  Just washed a load of dishes in the F'in tub.  Ugh.

But I am heartened by the fact that Marlon Brando went through the same experience when he was coming up, before he became big.  

What's that?  He didn't?  Oh, man...

A Big Push

Sometimes I need a really big push to get moving on things even when they're the things I want to be doing and the things I need to be doing.  Getting layed-off is as big a push as I'm probably going to get in terms of getting my career business taken care of (and now I'm also under the gun trying to find an apartment before september).  

Push away!

1.  I have been working out in McCarren Park and looking for monologues at the Performing Arts library at Lincoln Center.  

2.  I've been running lines for Fight Girl on my iPod.  

3.  I've been reading up on arts philosophy and taking meetings with friends on long-distance-relationship-philosophy (After an incredible dinner with Kelli and Caroline last night making food for hours, our sink pipe finally corroded and sprung a leak this morning, dousing Kate's feet).  

4.  I've been taking care of business with Unemployment to ensure I get a good-sized check every week (Four simultaneous jobs in Q1 of 2009 = Hey-O!).   

5.  I've been getting tips from friends on how to maximize the audition experience on both ends and, of course, going on auditions.  

6.  I am updating my blog.

For a long time I think the comfort and flexibility of my day job was good, but the time to step it up career-wise came and went and I was a little too complacent in that setting to make a move.  But now the job exists no more and I am free to kick ass again.  Soul Samurai was a huge boost for me and now another door has opened with this remount of Fight Girl and I have a chance to bring the pain once more.  I am going through the door this time.  

Republican Family Values In The News

In the immortal words of playwright Dustin Chinn:

"Oh, politicians.  Will you ever tire of whores?"

FIGHT GIRL BATTLE WORLD Returns!

Below you'll find the trailer for FGBW.  I stole it directly from Qui's blog.  Seriously.  I saw it there and I said, "Embed immediately!"  

Cut, paste, published under my name. 

Lee Strasberg, back me up on this:

When you steal a good thing, we say, "Good for you, darling."  

Only when you steal something that isn't worth stealing, 

something artificial that stops you or interferes with you, 

do we question it.

-Strasberg at The Actors Studio, p.45

Amen, you crazy bastard.  

It'll be at the illustrious HERE Arts Center this time around, home of Soul Samurai and many other amazing shows by smart downtown companies.   It was a great pleasure to work there this past February and I cannot wait to do it again.

Enjoy!

Rainy, Connecticut

Just did another reading at The Lark followed by an out of the blue opportunity to debut a new play at Shakespeare-on-the-Sound's reading series in Rowayton, CT.  It was called A Bed the Size of Portugal by Mat Smart.  Awoye Timpo, my friend from days of old, directed it and there were a lot of laughs all around.  

Wanted to stay in Rowayton (5 min from the Darien stop on the MetroNorth) to see Joanna Settle's production of Midsummer but it threatened rain and, as it's an outdoor theater, was ultimately cancelled.  The show has music by Stew, whose stuff I love, so it was a double disappointment there was no show that night.  The trip up from Grand Central was a good 50 minutes, so not too bad.  Will try and get out there again before it closes.