Well, dear readers, after having gotten maybe one hour of sleep, I am zombiefied and am sitting here like so much Night of the Living Dead fish. What happens when that happens is my voice gets trashed, my tummy gets upset, and I generally feel like the zombie from Sherman Oaks. I did doze off once, but only for about ten minutes. I watched a single motion picture entitled Renfield from earlier this year, a Dracula thing, a hipster “aren’t we so clever” rather inane film that cannot even sustain its eighty-eight minutes (sans end credits). The only saving grace is Nicolas Cage’s amusing performance as the Count. What does it in is its lame attempts at humor and its repetitive and over the top bloodletting and violence. A director’s job is to know when he’s gone too far and the he, someone named Chris McKay clearly has no edit button. The “plot” is dopey, it looks like a Brian de Palma movie crossed with a Quentin Tarantino in the style of that movie One Night in Soho or whatever it was called – Last Night in Soho. Universal, for the past five years, has idiotically tried to make a classic monster “universe” – I mean, how dumb are the people running that studio? And every film they’ve tried in that “universe” has flopped majorly. The actor playing Renfield seems to be doing his best to be Hugh Grant – it’s almost like he’s doing an impression of him. The leading lady, someone name Awkwafina, is okay. It’s nice to have a new Marco Beltrami score, but it’s mixed pretty low in the movie. All in all, a waste of time and not recommended by the likes of me, unless you want to witness the largeness of Nic Cage.
For my evening snack, I got McDonald’s via DoorDash, but not the terrible one near me, but the Encino one. I’ve had pretty good luck with that one, but I’m afraid McDonald’s has hit rock bottom – the Filet-O-Fish was okay, but the cheeseburger was beyond gross. I’m done with it.
Yesterday was interesting. As noted, I got about one hour of sleep – don’t know why, really – so I was up at around four-thirty and never went back to sleep. She of the Evil Eye arrived at eight-thirty and I left and went to the Coral Café for breakfast – very good – then to the theater to restage Do We. As I mentioned, I’ve been dissatisfied with my work on the number – it just didn’t feel right and it really wasn’t landing the way it should. I felt strongly that the audience wasn’t really getting it quickly enough. I’d also staged the first half of the song with the two people sitting on chairs and then after a short interlude, standing in back of the chairs. Watching it over the weekend, I figured out what was bugging me and it was the chairs. The number that happens five minutes prior to Do We is You and I and that is staged on chairs and that works really well. But for Do We, which is a perky and feisty number, doing it on chairs was too passive and the energy went into the chairs rather than out to the audience. Oh, it was cute, but I don’t like cute, I like laughs. I also felt we had to get to the lyric more quickly after the set-up lines that precede it. I added two brief things to the set-up so that the audience would understand instantly what was going to happen, and then I cut the four-bar vamp so that we get right to the lyric and the point. Having it on its feet right down front made all the difference in the world, and I staged it simply in about thirty minutes. It looks really good now, has a lot more energy, is more playful between the actors and audience, and the little tango interlude, which has never worked musically, now works with a slight musical adjustment. The actors were so happy doing it this new way – all the difference in the world, really.
After that, I came home and basically was a zombie. There was no way I was in any shape to write, so I just relaxed, got the McDonald’s bleccch food, had a couple of telephonic conversations, and then began writing these here notes, filled with nausea – tummy, not the notes – bleary-eyed and vaguely discontented, like a nightingale without a song to sing – what am I, Rodgers and Hammerstein all of a sudden? And here we are.
Today, I hope to get a really good night’s sleep. I’m going to hit the hay by twelve-thirty, for sure. Once up, I’ll do the usual things, I’ll definitely write, I have an idea of what I want for food, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
The rest of the week is writing, then Thanksgiving, then we’re back doing our show. Oh, I forgot to mention that I got three residuals yesterday, all from the Penn and Teller show. The total of all three? About $1.84.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do the usual things, hope for a good night’s sleep, write, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, hoping I get past this night of the living zombie malarkey.