The most hilarious performance I’ve seen in a while
During a Malaria Awareness Day commemoration in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday, President Bush enjoyed dancing with the KanKouran West African Dance Company and banging on some bongo drums. (CNN)
Posted by Lana | Monday, April 30th, 2007 | 0 comments
Guest Blogger: TOM KRUEGER, filmworks
From the moment I laid eyes on Miranda July, I knew I would do just about anything to become her lover. And being the hopeless romantic that I am, once an idea like this enters my heart, I will go to great lengths to make it come to pass, concocting the most elaborate schemes, and orchestrating the most complex set of circumstances so that a chance encounter might seem just that. But just as my mother would constantly remind me, ‘chance favors the prepared mind’, so I did my homework, searching for things we might have in common, interests, friends, anything that might further my mission. And as much as I’d like to think that I am relatively adept in strategic planning, in all my wildest dreams I never could have imagined that I would become her lover on our very first encounter.
Perhaps it was just my brown hair, as she stated that this was her only prerequisite, but I’d like to think there was something more. Something about me that caught her eye and she was equally overcome. As it turns out, we do have a fair amount in common, both raised in Berkeley, California, both filmmakers, and we do have a few friends in common. In fact, it was one of these friends that set up this serendipitous occasion on a cold night in early March. Miranda was in town to perform her most recent work, Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely are Not Going To Talk About, and I was sure to get to the performance early, hoping to secure a good seat so that I might study this enchanting woman more closely, and maybe, if I was lucky, she would even notice me and think to herself, ‘Who is that interesting man’?
Well I couldn’t have hoped for a better seat, only two rows back and dead center, and sure enough, just as I had hoped, Miranda came out on stage and during her seemingly informal prologue she asked the audience if there was anybody who was willing to come on stage and play the part of Kevin. ‘Oh, and they had to have brown hair. Well, it was like a surge of high voltage electricity which jumped straight from my heart and into my right arm causing it to instantly shoot up in the air. I did everything I could not to look too eager, as I certainly didn’t want to scare her, but there was no way in hell I was going to let anybody else play that part. And so, to my delight, she picked me, and the next thing I knew I was on stage for nearly an hour and a half, playing the part of Kevin, her lover.
I gave myself over completely to that part, and was stunned at how well Miranda had written it, how precisely she had captured the endless machinations that we hopeless romantics will devise and endure in the name of finding true love. How badly we yearn to make that sublime connection that will somehow elevate us from our daily tedium, perhaps even liberate us from our current relationship that by now has lost all mystery. In fact, it wasn’t Kevin at all who was being indicted for his hopeless romanticism, it was Miranda who was exposing herself as the one so easily seduced into illusions of finding something deeper, something better, something more meaningful and profound. And so I watched from what was undoubtedly the very best seat in the house as she held up a mirror for all of us to see.
Did this somehow cure me of my own romantic illusions? Not likely. In fact, her performance was so original, so eloquent, so humorous, and so insightful that I am now more determined than ever! Perhaps she will even read this very post and think, ‘Oh, yeah’ I remember that guy. He was pretty interesting. ‘Hmmm.’
Posted by Guest Blogger | Monday, April 9th, 2007 | 0 comments
