Best use of scientific research money this year

I don't want to know about the black smokers of the deep ocean (okay, actually I do), I want to know more of the Secrets of the Phallus.

Well, that did it...

I've been wanting to cut my hair short for a while. I figured that I'd go back to my a-line short bob style that I had a few years ago. But then I sorta changed my mind.

Not in that "oh, no, I'll keep my current non-style" way, either.

No. I decided that I had to do this...
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Yeah. That's me with my hair, at it's longest, 6 cm.

Awesome.

I'm so loving it. It's somewhere between Alyssa Milano in her Phoebe cut from Charmed and Mariska Hargitay from SVU during her supershort days.

TheBrit likes it because he will no longer get a face full of hair when nuzzling my neck. Or having to deal with trailing wet hair everywhere. It dries in 10 minutes. YAY!

The downside of the hair is that it kinda requires styling and makeup if I'm going out. I think that as I get used to the hair then I won't feel like I have to do everything and can pare down to mascara and lipgloss on the down days.

But I'll still need to put goop in the hair.

But it is awesome. Any woman that dreams of going supershort? Don't dream it, be it. Find a style you like, take it into your stylist, have them do you up right.

Proof that there are people more wrong than me

Overheard:
'So he went up to the guy and said something along the lines of “I don’t care how much, how hard, or how crazy you’ve fucked my mother. I’ve been deeper inside her than you’ll ever be.”'

Apparently, the guy is not a fan of his mother's new partner.

How long did it take you to go from "ew" to "well, that's true" to "bwahahah!"?

Spring Awakening (Novello Theatre, West End)

Spring Awakening... It is to late 19th century Germany what Heathers was to 1980s America.

Random? Yeah.

Accurate? Sort of.

I wish I had the program in front of me, because it had an excellent blurb about the original author and the reinterpretation as a rock musical. The long and short of it is this - dude who originally wrote it was writing a commentary on the stress of German education among the upper echelon and how it led to a potential spate of problems, especially when dealing with arbitrary measures to determine who can proceed and who cannot. When it was published and originally performed, it was so censored that the entire point that was trying to be made was lost on the censor's floor.

100 years later... Some one else comes across it and goes "hey, let's turn this into a musical" and so current day Spring Awakening was born.

A few things that made my American brain go "bwuh" was the vowel sounds from British mouths. The difference between "Gowd" and "Gahd" was making me go "oh, almost!" from having listened to the soundtrack so many times. Changing the name of one of the characters from "Fanny" to "Laura" or some such also mildly irritated me, but I realized that it was a serious enough part of the play that the invariable titters from the audience would break the tension. (Fanny, in BritSlangSpeak is roughly equivalent to pussy in American - a euphamism for the external female genitalia without the insulting quality of cooze, twat, or cunt.)

I also fell completely in love with the actor who played Georg. I think he out of all of the cast embraced their character without overacting. Melchior was good, but a little shy at times, which was not in character. Hanschen hammed it up a bit, but I think his character leans that way. Otto was grand. Moritz had a HUGE problem with controlling his volume, particularly when miked, and blasted out the audience's collective eardrums when he was supposed to be intense or enthused. His energy was good, but his control was lacking. The girls were generally unremarkable, but they were designed to have a role that progressed the boys' plot. Though, the girl who played Anna (I think) looked remarkably like a young Emma Watson with the way she was styled.

My favorite part, and the part that it seemed took the audience the longest time to catch onto was the manner in which the adult roles were treated. All of the adult characters in the play were performed by one actor and one actress. The commentary on the essential interchangability of adults in a teenager's life is a wonderful insight into the size and scope of an adolescent universe.

I wish that I'd been able to get a photo of the set. It was a combination of controlled chaos, but it incorporated everything that was needed for each scene without being cluttered. The use of vertical space is what kept it from being too insane.

A big thank you to Kevin Spacey and the other producers (both executive and assistant) for having the faith and the vision to bring this to London. Yeah, it'd done well in New York, but American audiences are different from European audiences, especially when it comes to how they view their children and schools.

Avenue Q (in London)

First, let me say that the only way this could have been more awesome is if it were "Avenue Z" because then the Brits would be calling it "Avenue Zed" and that would have sent me into a titter every time.

TheBrit and I went to see Avenue Q the weekend after I arrived back in London. I'd been wanting to see it for a while, but the main impetus was that it was CLOSING. (What?!) So we got tickets to see it the last week it was in town. (Much like when we went to see Spamalot... last week of showing.)

Since we saw it, it apparently became so much in demand that it's now on hiatus and will be re-showing in a new location starting June 1.

I don't know if TheBrit grew up on Sesame Street like I did (I suspect not), but the Muppet Movies were ubiquitous throughout the Western World. At least there was a bit of commonality there.

I seem to recall finding out when I was younger that Sesame Street was supposed to take place Small Town, New York. Stony Brook, or something like that. Someplace where there was still a small town feed, but a need for the brownstone type buildings. So, this was a bit like going to see Sesame Street's big city cousins (being located in Brooklyn).

The composition of the set was fantastic. I was half-expecting a bodego to stand in for Mr. Hooper's store (I'm dating myself here), but it was just an apartment block and the people (and muppets) that resided there. Kate Monster, Trekkie Monster, Princeton, Rod and Nicky, and Christmas Eve, Gary, and Brian. Two things struck me during the watching - the use of screens that gave the little PSA-type cartoons ... I don't remember that from my tenure of Sesame Street, though it may be happening now, and that when addressing the muppets the puppeteers and the human characters looked at the Muppet they were talking to, not to the actor.

The music was fantastic, and translated well to a London audience, most of who had limited exposure to Sesame Street. There were a few jokes or callbacks that were Ameri-centric and may have been slightly lost on the average Brit: Gary is Gary Coleman (whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis?) and the development of a Monstersorri School...

Music, muppets having sex, the Bad Idea Bears (more booze, more fun, yay!), and the energy was just suck you off your seat awesome. The most amazing thing to me, though, was when the puppeteer for Kate Monster also had to do the voice for Lucy The Slut, the muppets were on two different people, but the voice actress ran the entire conversation. It took me a bit to realize it was the same person because I'd been sucked into the entire "the muppets, they're real!" world they created.

I think, though, that my favorite part was unintentional. The woman hired to play the role of Christmas was Chinese. The character of Christmas is supposed to be Japanese and limited to working in a Korean restaurant. (Though, they did change that line to something else because Korean restaurants aren't as prevalant in London as in New York.) [Edit: looked at the cast info for the London crew - either they've changed actors or I mis-read the blurb - she's Filipino, but has studied in China. Playing a Japanese woman. Who's mistaken for Korean. Awesome.]

It's strange. It's twisted. It's a great story that hits home if you're a muppet, a monster, or a human. Trekkie Monster's porn fixation is phenomonal. A song just for me ("Schadenfreude") was great. TheBrit and I went and found the Broadway soundtrack a day or so after seeing it. My singing Trekkie Monster's part during "The Internet is for Porn" caused him to almost fall off his chair with laughter (though that may have been me pelvic thrusting against him with such ferocity) and we now have a number of inside-joke-slash-catchphrases from seeing that show.

Go see it. If you don't, my only response can be... Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Ahh, the housewife life

Since TheBrit went to Amsterdam for 36 hours for work, I've gotten loads done around the flat. Two loads of laundry, the crumb tray of the toaster (uh, darling, you did know there was a crumb tray, right?) cleared out, cooking, cleaning, tidying. Ahh. If I didn't have plans to go to Kew tomorrow, I'd be sequestered in the bathroom cleaning like a madwoman.

Soon - reports on The Dinner, Spring Awakening, and Avenue Q.