French Comedy+Desi Playwright =Everybody Wins!

My university has never staged a play by an Asian playwright. Not in over 75 years. We've hit all of the other continents (except Antarctica, of course... I don't believe there are any Antarctican playwrights, but I could be wrong). But somehow we've left out Asia.

So when I started planning the Hyderabad trip, nearly a year ago, I told my faculty committee that I wanted to stage a play by an Indian (or Indian-American/desi) playwright when I came back.

It would, after all, be a first for the university, and if we marketed it correctly, we had the potential to tap into a large desi audience.

We tossed around the idea for months, analyzing the pros and cons.

One of the cons -- the one that made the season selection committee the most nervous -- was that our department had no desi acting students, and things might get a little racially tidgy if we had white students playing brown characters.

I countered with "well, you don't have to do Muggy Night in Mumbai -- if we did one of the kajillion plays based on a section of the Mahabharata, we could pull a Peter Brook and cast anyone we like."

And, theoretically, color-blind casting should work the other way around (although, truth be told, it rarely works the way it was intended to -- and one of these days I'll do a post on why).

But in the end, and probably for the best, we elected not to pursue this option.

When the season was chosen, I was given Moliere's Tartuffe. Which will be fun; it will be my first "comedy of manners" play, and there is plenty of opportunity for glittery silliness.

As the director, of course, I get to choose the translation.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered there was a verse translation of Tartuffe by Ranjit Bolt.

Looks like my university gets its first desi playwright after all.

Blue Feels Blue

Hi, team... looks like today I'm down for the count with some kind of stomach bug. It may have been related to a recent trip to the movie theater and the fact that I purchased movie-theater-nachos. (When I ordered them, the woman behind the counter handed me a plastic container full of chips and directed me to a self-serve "cheez" machine against the wall, where I was to squirt out my own orange-colored, room-temperature goo.)

I felt badly enough to stay home from temping, which -- when one considers I didn't miss a moment of work when I had Neha's flu, or the day after I got my India vaccinations and I was sitting in my cube shivering and trying to adjust to four different low-grade virus strains -- means I must be feeling pretty darn awful.

(I am the sort of person who doesn't vomit well. My sister, who grew up getting carsick, pukes in stride; I generally crumple to the floor and cry out for higher powers to "make it stop.")

But my inner critic keeps rearing its ugly head, to remind me of my current low status in both the economic and working worlds, and to ask why I am claiming a privileged status (that is, taking a "sick day") when I have not yet earned that privilege (that is, having a job which offers paid sick days).

In short, it's reminding me that plenty of working people drag themselves to work when they are far sicker than I am; and, as 50 percent of American workers do not have paid sick leave, there is no reason for me to expect that I ever will, even when I move on to a job beyond temping.

My inner critic is saying "get out of bed and get yourself into that office, if only to practice for the future."

After all, losing a day's pay is losing a day's pay ($48, in my case, after taxes) and I can't justifiably say that I don't need the money, not when I have a plane ticket to Hyderabad I've got to pay off.

But I've also slept about fourteen hours out of the last seventeen, and even drinking water makes my stomach spin.

So chalk me up as a member of the Entitlement Generation. I'm staying home.

(Editor's Note: It did occur to her that if she could quantitatively prove that it was the movie theater nachos that made her ill, she could sue the theater and recoup her $48. But she's never sued anyone before, and she leaves the country in a matter of days. So she'll go back to sleep and hope for the best.)

By Jove... no, sorry, I can't.

Okay. In the past year or so, I have fallen in love with a great many things... lime pickle, Shahrukh Khan, Carnatic music, Malgudi Days, Amit Chatterji, etc.

But I have to draw the line at P. G. Wodehouse.

I don't get it. I mean, I do -- there's this guy, and his butler, and they keep trying to pull off these crazy schemes -- but I just... it just.. um... I don't find it funny.

Of course, I do find "mmmm... donuts" extremely funny, so maybe it says something about my sense of humor.

I've got my flame-retardant blue jeans on, so retaliate away!

Recent posts in favor of Wodehouse:

Ash's post
Falstaff's post

My Less Impressive Frozen-Naan Cheesy Spinach Melt

DesiPundit linked to a beautiful chapati pizza cooked by Indira at Mahanandi.

Yeah, I do that sometimes too.

But somehow it doesn't look quite as good.

Tasted fine, though.

Once again have to give the shout-out to how much I adore spinach.

(And Daniel, I plated this one twice to see which plate coordinated better. You tell me!)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mother shares her birthday with the opening of the Simpsons film. ^__^

She is totally cool and doesn't comment half as much on this blog as she should.

(Stop lurking, mom!)

I hope she got her present in the mail...

Simpsons Day: Paint It Yellow!

I know, Harry Potter got an entire week and the Simpsons only get a day. Which is funny because I like the Simpsons much, much, much more than I like Harry Potter. (Eight years ain't got nothing on eighteen, after all, and I grew up with the Simpsons but was only introduced to Mr. Potter in my later life.)

Anyway, here's another image to add to my collection of "can I make it look like me?" avatars:

Make your own here!

BTW -- heard Apu has only a line or two in the film. I'll be interested to find out what his particular lines are. We can probably guess what one of them will be.

One More Note on Miss Junie B.

Please examine the opening paragraph of the NYT article.

At her all-day princess-theme party for her graduation from preschool, Lyra Alvis had her face painted, went first down the water slide and was even allowed to eat the flower on the cake. "It was the best day of my life," said Lyra, 5, who lives in Nashville.

At least until bedtime. That is when her father, Lance Alvis, did something he?d never done before: Midway through a book that was a gift from a friend, he insisted she pick out something different to read.

"But I love this book," Lyra said.

The paperback in question was about Junie B. Jones...

So this kid got an ALL-DAY PRINCESS PARTY for her graduation from preschool, to which her little friends were asked to BRING GIFTS.

*facepalm*
*facedesk*
*facebrickwall*

I would say that learning how to read/speak/write will be the least of this kid's problems.