Well, dear readers, this week is flying by, like a gazelle eating a chicken croquette. Does anyone still eat a chicken croquette? I believe the croquette, chicken or otherwise, has fallen on hard times. I haven’t seen a croquette in a ‘coon’s age. And yet, once upon a time you couldn’t get away from chicken croquettes, the world was infested with chicken croquettes, everywhere you looked was a damn chicken croquette. But now? Just try to find a chicken croquette on a menu. There, I’ve said it and I’m glad. And if anyone might have a clew as to what the HELL I’m talking about, please let me and everyone else know as soon as possible or as soon as you finish your croquette, chicken or otherwise.
Without further ado, I think we should have some videos in these here notes, don’t you? I do believe videos are the order of the day, although yesterday the order of the day was a short stack and eggs benedict at the House of Pies. But today the order of the day is videos and they’re calorie-friendly, too. I’m not going to overdo the videos today – I’ll parse them out over the next couple of days, just because I like the word parse – and croquette. Perhaps I’ll parse a croquette. Perhaps a croquette will parse me. So, our first video is our opening number from Sunday’s Kritzerland show – the singers are Maddy Claire Parks, Jenna Lea Rosen and Sami Staitman and the video includes the set-up.
Wasn’t that fun? Next we have a number by the talented team of Denis Markell and Doug Bernstein – we did this in my revue, What If and it’s just great. It has to do with the song Nothing from A Chorus Line and more I shall not say. The singer is our very own Robert Yacko.
He certainly nailed that, didn’t he? Next up is Shannon Warne doing my specialty number, I Can’t Dance, about a performer who always nails the singing part of the audition but who always gets cut as soon as the dance part begins. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. I wrote the parody lyrics and they’re all to songs from – A Chorus Line.
She hit that right out of the damn park. Here’s Maddy Claire Parks, eighteen-years-old, doing the gorgeous Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, It Might as Well Be Spring.
She’s so good, this girl and she is, of course, our Daisy Mae. Next up and our final one for today is Richard M. Sherman and me premiering the song we wrote together. You cannot imagine the thrill this was – one of the absolute highlights of my entire life. Best of all, everyone seemed to really like the song. The introduction in the video explains how it happened.
I don’t ever really want to tape our shows and I really haven’t allowed it much, other than the occasional number, but I’m really glad we got this one down. However, next month we’re back to the no taping rule. Tomorrow, we’ll have the two What If things we did, plus Sandy Bainum and Shannon doing the song from my book Writer’s Block, and a couple of others, including Sami doing Some People and Jenna doing Pulled.
Yesterday was a perfectly okay day. I was up way too early, at seven, stayed in bed and got up at nine. Then I did my morning ablutions, answered e-mails, and then moseyed on over to LACC to see the final rendering of our Li’l Abner set. We made one tiny adjustment to a stair unit, and I signed off on it. Then I went to House of Pies and had my meal o’ the day.
After that, I came right home and went right to work on the edit road map for our next release. I worked for hours on it and got it all finished – time consuming because it’s three separate scores. Then I sat on my couch like so much fish.
Yesterday, I finished watching a motion picture on Blu and Ray entitled The Stuff. It’s yet another weird and wacky Larry Cohen movie – he’s really not a very good filmmaker and yet there is just something so off-center about his films that they are hugely entertaining and The Stuff is just that. It’s laugh out loud funny occasionally, it features yet another off-the-wall lunatic performance by Michael Moriarity, and it also has the lovelier than lovely Andrea Marcovicci, not to mention Paul Sorvino, Patrick O’Neal and Danny Aiello – AND in cameos, Tammy Grimes, Brooke Adams and that “Where’s the beef” woman. The transfer is excellent, although it exhibits the same exact and I mean EXACT low-light crawling grain that people called “noise” in the Twilight Time transfer of The Fury. It wasn’t noise there and it’s not noise here.
After that, I had to listen to two upcoming Kritzerland projects – in fact, I listened to them twice and whilst listening I plotted out the edit road map for one of them, so I just have to type that up and we can get that one going. That all took up most of the evening.
Today, I have errands and whatnot to do, I shall eat, hopefully I’ll pick up some packages (I didn’t even get to the mail place yesterday), I’ll do some liner notes writing, and then I have a dinner meeting with a singer.
The rest of the week is meetings and meals, choosing the rest of the songs and finding our two male cast members – the women are set already. Then Saturday is the book signing for Red Gold and I’m really hoping a lot of our West Coast folks will be there.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do errands and whatnot, eat, hopefully pick up packages, write, and have a dinner meeting. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite chicken dishes and what is the strangest chicken dish you’ve ever had, bad or good? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall dream of the once-popular but now on hard times croquette.