Does it count as completely unprofessional if I occasionally gawk at my place of employment? I subbed for a day at Sesame Street and my little child-of-the-eighties heart was pattering like it was Christmas. It was a pick-up shoot for an Elmo DVD, just a couple producers sitting around discussing how Elmo best serves the emotional needs of children. Not the most exciting work on the planet but I got to sit on the steps where they sing the intro song ("sunny days, chasing the clouds a-way..."). Yup, I still remember the words. What of it? Snuffleupagus was hanging from the grid in one corner of the room and Big Bird's nest was shoved backstage with a mess of other props. The puppets were stowed in a rolling case painted with a mural of the set peopled with tiny Jim Hensons. The nostalgia was overwhelming, which is weird considering that as a child I was identifying with a glorified bathmat possessing Ping-Pong eyeballs. Entertainment can be so surreal.
Other news: Saw SubUrbia (trite... so trite... so cloyingly cliche...) and The Pain and the Itch which burned up the Steppenwolf in Chicago for good reason. A play poking fun at white bleeding heart liberals attended solely by... white bleeding heart liberals. Including me. I exhibit all those alarming characteristics - quoting PBS specials and New York Times articles, owning plenty of nice things but vehemently denying my materialism, appreciating the sanitized world of post-Giuliani New York. Ugh. I feel dirty inside.
Okay, okay. All the naysaying stagehands turned out to be wrong. We deserve a designer's preemptory swat. Two good ideas that had potentially devastating consequences were carried off without a hitch and with aplomb in this year's Fashion Week.
As related to me by some fellow workers, the blue candy filling Marc Jacob's (insanely gorgeous) Armory show was poured out two (TWO!) days before showtime. We were convinced that the roaches and rats of New York would pour, pied piper style, into the venue and devour the mountain of sugar that was waiting to rot mouse molar. Instead not a single model tripped over a rodent, not a single audience member ran screaming from a roach infestation. The show looked great and got a seven photo spread in the NY Times metro section. Slap slap.
And over at Y3 the runway design called for several conveyer belts running at different speeds and in different directions. Now, models have a tough job. They have to walk into a new place that was built from something akin to very expensive spit and glue, figure out how the runway works and get through it several times without falling over, hurting the wardrobe, or looking anything less than stunning, possibly all while high on coke, heroin, or both. By adding moving pieces of machinery we stagehands had concoted this fantastic image of model pileups and blood smeared across the catwalk by the end of the show. "It'll be like the last scene of Carrie!" one stagehand predicted. When the lighting designer(s) came in to focus DK's show in the morning, everyone gathered around him asking "How'd Y3 go? Was it a total disaster?" Nope, total success. More falling happened when one unnamed fashion maven polished his catwalk with bowling alley wax. Slap slap.
I'm still waiting for the model trainwreck. Maybe next year...
California rocked, as usual. Heather Carson's new lightHANGAR is enormous and daunting. It opens next week, so check it out if you can.
Cheesewhiz, burnt hamburgers, and brownies abounded at Jenny's bonfire. Sam took lots of pictures and I ate lots of food.
Jason and Yasmin were married in a wonderful, beautiful, small, non-fussy, totally perfect ceremony in Santa Cruz full of astonomers, fish biologists, and a person with no pants. Can I profess my love for the coastal region? The Santa Cruz waters were full of boats and surfers and children and the whole wonderful beach culture. Who cares about the pot-smoking, unemployed, flip-flop wearing, messy-haired, "yeah like totally man" stereotype? At least these people don't ever have to save up for winter... There is no winter in California.
Does it count as completely unprofessional if I occasionally gawk at my place of employment? I subbed for a day at Sesame Street and my little child-of-the-eighties heart was pattering like it was Christmas. It was a pick-up shoot for an Elmo DVD, just a couple producers sitting around discussing how Elmo best serves the emotional needs of children. Not the most exciting work on the planet but I got to sit on the steps where they sing the intro song ("sunny days, chasing the clouds a-way..."). Yup, I still remember the words. What of it? Snuffleupagus was hanging from the grid in one corner of the room and Big Bird's nest was shoved backstage with a mess of other props. The puppets were stowed in a rolling case painted with a mural of the set peopled with tiny Jim Hensons. The nostalgia was overwhelming, which is weird considering that as a child I was identifying with a glorified bathmat possessing Ping-Pong eyeballs. Entertainment can be so surreal.
