Liars and Saints

A good song is its own one-act play. "Just Around the Riverbend," from "Pocahontas," fits the bill. This is a classic "I Want" song. Pocahontas introduces us to the setting. We're outdoors, on a riverbank. The heroine makes an observation: What I love most about rivers is You can't step in the same river twice. The water's always changing, always flowing. But people, I guess, can't live like that. We all must pay a price. To be safe, we lose our chance of ever knowing What's around the riverbend. The problem has announced itself. The stranger has come to town. It's Pocahontas's gnawing doubt--her belief that something better exists in some un-populated corner. This doubt isn't even fully conscious; it's present just in the "I guess." But the doubt goes from something submerged to something insistent; that is the journey we take in this song. (Sondheim--not this song's author--has said that a mus...

All I can discuss at work is "The Staircase." I'm leaving soon, and I'm not well-equipped to handle emotional conversations, so, when one looms, I just ask: "Have you seen THE STAIRCASE"? (I'm working on this.) If you aren't a STAIRCASE True Believer, stop here. Otherwise, a few observations: (1) I can't help but notice similarities between "Blood Will Tell" and "The Staircase." In "Blood Will Tell," the local authorities found a soft-core porn calendar in High-School Principal's possession. Authorities then concluded: (a) High-School Principal was secretly gay, (b) HSP wanted out of his marriage, and (c) HSP opted out by gunning his wife to death, then running off to a far-away conference, so he could "look innocent." (There are some major leaps in that sentence! HSP explained that the calendar was a gag gift for a family friend, but this plausible story seemed not to gain much traction with people...

Sometimes, reading a David Sedaris book can be like pounding your head against a wall. The insistence on the quirky, the fey: It can be very, very tiresome. In the new book, "Calypso," for the example, there's an endless bit about feeding a benign tumor to a snapping turtle. Sedaris had a growth removed from his abdomen, and he felt an overwhelming urge to give it to a turtle in North Carolina. He seems to think this decision is inherently fascinating and worthy of commentary. It isn't. Every time the fucking snapping turtle appeared--and he appeared with alarming frequency--I wanted to throw the book across the room. Sedaris never says what the reader suspects: There isn't actually a strong bond between the turtle and the narrator, and the turtle is really there as a bit of artificial whimsy. Sedaris has fallen a bit too deeply in love with his own whacky-ness. It's strange to me that someone so gifted, and so established, wouldn't be a more demanding s...

Do you wonder what to do with your child, when the subject of math arises? It's Friday. No subject is sexier than math. I mean that sincerely. Here are some of the best ideas I encountered in my teaching career. -The spinner. You can manufacture a spinner at home. Cut out a small paper circle. Poke a hole through the center with the edge of a paper clip. Then, stick a tiny tube of straw down the stick-out part of the paper clip. Lastly, overlay a second circle--this one divided into sections. (For example, you could divide the circle into fourths, and label each part with a 1, 2, 3, or 4.) On the "base" circle, draw a long line extending from the center to one spot on the circumference. This is a spinner! The straw tube removes the issue of friction. (A little bit of science thrown in!) Ask your kid: "If I spin, am I most likely to land on 1, 2, 3, or 4?" Ask for a rationale. (It's fascinating that many small children won't intuit each outcome is equal...

"Sex and the City" is celebrating its twentieth birthday, and it's everywhere. And so: some observations. -"Playbill" tracks "the girls" through their varying Broadway careers. No surprise: Cynthia Nixon did the most--and the most-interesting--work. She landed her Tony for "Rabbit Hole." (Not one of the other three has a Tony.) Nixon famously appeared in two Broadway shows at once, when she was very young; she would slip off-stage, cross the street, and get into a new costume, night after night. Kristin Davis was in a 2012 revival of "The Best Man" with Elizabeth Ashley--who knew?--and Kim Cattrall made her Broadway debut opposite Ian McKellan. And, of course, Sarah Jessica Parker was once Annie. This walk down memory lane generated questions--for me, at least--about the most mysterious of the four women, Kristin Davis. Did you know she went to Rutgers? And she started drinking because she wanted to combat her own shyness, and the...

We actually had a choreographer, a dancer from "Wicked," and we were required to meet him at a Ninth Avenue studio for one planning session and one "touch-up." How I feared this first session! There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors everywhere, so your gut was visible from many angles. (Marc and I never had anything other than a small eye-level mirror in our apartment, a blessing for a neurotic and also not-very-disciplined homosexual man!) A host of musical-theater memories came back to me: "Dance: Ten. Looks: Three. And I'm still on unemployment. Dancing for my own enjoyment. That ain't it, kid! That ain't it, kid!" And: "Kiss today goodbye, and point me toward tomorrow..." And: "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it! How many people does he need??? " To my relief, the dance wasn't really a dance. It was more like choreographed walking. I was to spot Marc from the far corner of a crowded room; our eyes were meant to lo...

My theater bug: "Evita." I saw it in the fifth grade, and my life changed. I went to the North Tonawanda public library and borrowed the "Eva Peron" biography, and learned (a) prostitution is a thing, (b) Argentina is a country in South America, (c) there is a phenomenon, or at least a myth, called "sleeping your way to the top," (d) it's possible to be a movie star and later a major political figure, (e) if you're Latina and looking for a term of endearment, you can just stick "ita" on to a name, and (f) big-deal politicians from one country might travel to other countries, even other continents, simply as good-will ambassadors. All of this: news to me. Andrew Rannells writes today, in the Times, about feeling that gender is tiresome. He had that feeling in childhood. I had that feeling, too, when I saw "Evita"; if you were going to pretend you were an Argentinian alive in the 1930s, why not go ahead and make an additional le...