Headline: ‘Great American Pastime’ Not as Horrible as Expected

A couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed one of the perks of living the life of a consultant: an invitation to a ballgame, all expenses paid. The game in question:

            
Cleveland Indians vs. Minnesota Twins

This being the first professional baseball game I have ever been to, I did not have high expectations that I would enjoy the game itself, but I did do my best to go into the game with a good attitude and an open mind. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful to my hosts, after all. I have watched one or two baseball games on television (boring), but the experience of being there live is definitely more interesting. It also didn’t hurt that we were not sitting on bleacher seats, and in fact were in a ‘luxury suite’.

Here is the setup of the suite. You walk in, and immediately to the left is a bathroom, private to your group. Next a coat closet, and finally into the main room, a living room style room with comfortable couch-style seating, a big screen television on the wall (playing the game, of course), food set out along one wall (typical ballpark fare: nachos, hot dogs, etc.), a kitchenette on the rear wall (one fridge stocked with various soft drinks, one fridge stocked with beer), and finally one wall of mostly windows looking out onto the field. There were also 8-10 stadium seats available, which were out in the larger seating area, but privately accessible only to your suite.

The game started out with a bang: the first inning ended with the home team (Cleveland) up 4-0. The score crept up to 4-3 by the final inning. There are many nuances of the game that I’m sure I missed, but the crowd energy was high, and I did enjoy myself (again, the suite didn’t hurt my opinion any).

Did I mention the dessert cart? While most of the food was a help-yourself sort of arrangement, dessert arrived on a cart in the hallway outside the suite (and I believe was charged to the host on an item-by-item basis). Also while most of the food provided was decently presented, but still ‘ballpark’ quality, the desserts were a cut-above in both presentation and quality. The layered chocolate mousse creation I selected was wonderfully decadent.

A Spoiler-Free Harry Potter Post

The long-awaited and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released this weekend. It was probably entirely too important to me that I be able to read the book before anyone ruined any of the surprises that I knew would be contained in the final book. So after picking up my pre-ordered copy at the local bookstore just down the street (and even for several days before, as there were reports of leaks–some of which turned out to be genuine), I took a strategy of avoiding all radio, television, and Internet until I was through reading the 759 pages for the first time.

There are some people that don’t mind having the surprises spoiled in movies or books, but I am not one of those people. In fact, as I was walking up to the bookstore to retrieve my copy, somebody walking out with their copy was already turning to the final pages to see what secrets they might discover (thankfully they did not spoil anything before I was past them and out of earshot).

As the headline promised, there will be no spoilers contained in this post. Those wishing to discover the many secrets of the book have only to perform a simple Internet search and all will be revealed. I will say, though, that reading the final book was very satisfying, and a worthy conclusion to a very entertaining series of books.

Bodies on Display

Last weekend, Kurt and I visited the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

I had heard positive comments from several people who had seen one of the several Body Worlds exhibits that are touring the world, but it is a bit hard to really know what to expect. Cadavers of real human beings, placed on display: it’s almost a taboo concept. And you could even debate the ethical questions of whether anybody should be able to make money from such displays (all specimens in this exhibit are obtained through a voluntary donation process, but it is the exhibitor who stands to make a lot of money from their display).

The first surprise were the vast crowds of people lined up to enter the exhibit. Tickets are sold with a specific entry time, and so I assumed that would lessen the crowded lines phenomenon. Not so. It was slightly more controlled in that you were in a line for your specific time slot, but there were still hundreds of people waiting to enter at the same time. They sell a lot of tickets for each time slot, so even once you enter, your pace is dictated by the speed of everyone around you.

Part of this exhibit’s trademark is preserved bodies which are in various poses (sitting, kicking a ball, etc.), but the exhibit also includes many other variations including individual organs (under glass), and preserved ’slices’ of an entire body.

In one of my college science labs they brought in a human cadaver to allow us to observe actual anatomy examples, but the specimen quite resembled only one thing: a corpse. The flesh had been preserved (stinkily so), but it was off-colored and very ‘dead’ looking. This is NOT what you get at Body Worlds. These specimens are preserved with a fairly new process dubbed plastination that preserves the bodies with natural-appearing coloration and without any disturbing smells.

I’m sure some of the draw of the exhibit is of a voyeuristic nature, but I think its greatest strength is for education. What better way to learn anatomy than from actual examples, preserved in such a professional manner. In fact, I did see several college-aged students with textbooks and notebooks in hand, apparently there for just that reason.

Even so, there is a certain morbidity in visiting a Body Worlds exhibit. I had to wonder, for example, on a couple of the specimens, how recognizable they would be to a family member or someone who knew the person when they were alive. There are also a number of preserved babies and even a mother, pregnant with child, that reminds you of lives cut tragically short.

This isn’t an exhibit for everybody (one woman fainted during our visit), and Kurt found that he even got a few negative reactions from people where he works (“You went to see what!?”). My experience was very positive, however, and for my money, worth the visit.

31st Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

I am so excited about attending the “Humana Fest” this year, finally, after hearing so many good things about it. It’s only a 3 1/2 hour drive from Columbus, OH, so the only reason I hadn’t gone before was lack of people to go with. A friend of mine and I went down to Louisville, Kentucky this weekend and we saw three of the festival plays (all synopses below are from festival web site).

The As If Body Loop by Ken Weitzman

Aaron’s sister Sarah is succumbing to a mysteriously icy illness and to save her, his family must save…well….all humankind, starting with one guy. With great humor, tremendous compassion, and a good dose of mysticism, maybe the apocalypse can be kept at bay by a group of eccentrically dysfunctional, but loving, people.

Strike-Slip by Naomi Iizuka

In the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, three diverse families each carry a dream, but a recent shooting creates an unexpected seismic shift that rocks each family’s foundation. Faults that were once inactive or dormant suddenly appear and abruptly change the way they think about themselves, their community and their dream.

The Unseen by Craig Wright

Imprisoned by a totalitarian regime and mercilessly tortured for unknown crimes, Wallace and Valdez live without hope of escape or release. When an enigmatic new prisoner arrives and begins communicating in code, both men develop new relationships to each other, their captors, and themselves. A darkly humorous examination of faith in an uncertain world.

All three plays were very well-written and I enjoyed seeing each one of them. The As If Body Loop was quirky, at times serious, at times hilarious, and felt the most ‘contemporary’ and fresh.

Strike-Slip was a well-crafted play with multiple interlocking stories, but I did feel at times that all the interconnections were perhaps a bit too convenient. This play was the most grounded in realism of the three.

The Unseen was the most serious play of the bunch, and the one that made me think the most. It also features probably the strongest acting, as it consisted primarily of two men on stage talking to each other, but in separate jail cells, and unable to see or directly interact with the other actor.

This was my first visit to Louisville, KY, and overall I was impressed with my experience there. We stayed in a grand historic downtown hotel (and even got to go on an unexpected “ghost tour” of the building), within easy walking distance of the theaters. Louisville has a much more active downtown than Columbus, with lots of activity, especially on the weekends.

I would have loved to have stayed longer and seen more of the plays, but I’m still excited about the plays I did see, and am looking forward to going back again next year.

Double Feature

Yesterday was a good day. Of course, any day I get to see more than one play is automatically a good day in my book. First, I ushered for a matinee performance of the touring Broadway show “All Shook Up”. After a couple of hours break, a friend and I went to see the World Premiere of SITI Company’s “Radio Macbeth”. They were pretty extreme opposites. “All Shook Up” was kind of fun, but entirely too predictable. “Radio Macbeth” featured some of the most compelling acting I’ve ever seen and an intriguing adaptation.

This Film (This Film is Not Yet Rated) is Not Yet Rated

Got that? “This Film is Not Yet Rated” is a documentary film about the MPAA movie ratings system, a system flawed by the fact that its actions and board are super-secret, yet its members get regular face-time with big movie studio executives.

This film features interviews with several prominent filmmakers who discuss their experiences with submitting their films to the MPAA ratings board, and their frustrations when their films were given an NC-17 rating (which often translates directly into lost $$ due to lack of marketing or even distribution by a movie studio). The film also compares scenes from various films to show the inconsistencies with which the film ratings have been applied over the years. Perhaps most interestingly, the filmmakers hired private investigators to discover the identities of the MPAA board members, and these scenes created dramatic tension, and when the identities are revealed you feel a kind of sneaky satisfaction.

This is a fascinating and yet strangely disturbing documentary that also addresses some of the more general dangers of big business (a small number of companies control distribution of the vast majority of films and therefore have enormous power). The filmmakers outline several flaws in the current system and call for a major reform.

Incidentally, the film was submitted to the MPAA and given an NC-17 rating, but was released to theaters without an official MPAA rating.

Mamma Mia!

Just thought you all might like to know that last night I finally saw the Broadway musical “Mamma Mia!” (the touring version) and it made me very happy indeed. For the uninformed, “Mamma Mia” is a musical based on the songs of ABBA. I could listen the the “ABBA: Gold” album for hours on end, and so it didn’t take much arm-twisting to convince me to see a musical that incorporated those songs.

The first couple of songs felt a little bit like a stretch, but as the show goes on the songs ‘work’ better and better, until you actually wonder whether the songs were written for the musical (they weren’t). The story is about the pending wedding of a girl who was raised by a single mother and who doesn’t know who her father is. Based on what the girl has read in her mom’s diary, she secretly invites three of her mom’s former loves to attend the wedding, hoping to figure out which one of them is her father.

The other people I went to the show with had seen “Mamma Mia!” before (the same touring version, in fact), and had some complaints about certain singers not being as strong as the last time they saw it, but I, having nothing to compare it to, was completely satisfied. My only complaint was that there were a number of small technical blunders (wandering spotlights and microphones cutting out), but you almost come to expect some of that with a touring show.

The bad news is that I’ve become very picky about where I sit at a big show like this. We were in the center section, on the floor, in row S, and that was almost too far back. Gone are the days when I would accept a nose-bleed-section seat just to see a show. If it’s not worth paying the extra for a good seat where you can actually see the actors faces clearly, the show is just not worth seeing.

The short recommendation is: if you like ABBA, you’ll like “Mamma Mia!”