Susan Gertler

I was visiting Grandma Creasey, my mother’s mother, once late in her life, when she told me “your mother should write a book about all the interesting things she’s done!” After we left Grandma, mom took me aside and explained that all those things that were now “interesting”, Grandma had tried to talk her out of. Grandma was a dear, sweet little woman who followed the path laid before her. Mom, not so much

My mother was the first female engineering student at Swarthmore College, an experience that had its own adventures attached, its own pluses and minuses. It was there that she met my father (I’d say that I’d leave it up to her to decide which it was, but she seemed pretty clear that even though she would eventually feel the need to move on from that marriage, it was a positive.)

She converted to Judaism to marry my father, not due to any real belief (I assume; she certainly showed no sign of religious belief later), but because that’s what it took.

She worked in the aircraft industry, as a computer programmer, before I was born. Now, that may not seem such a big thing to some of you, but there were damn few computer programmers at all in those days; I suspect you could count the female ones on one hand. She went on programming for many decades, working for Unisys, for RCA, in her later years doing it on a consulting basis. She retired when the Y2K crisis was coming, saying that she had spent decades never being sloppy enough to use two digits for the year, and she was damned if she was going to clean up after such lazy programmers.

When three of her four kids were in college, she decided that it was time to move on. After all, she had spent her life with someone else who could take care of her – first as a child, then as a college student, then as a wife. She wanted to know what it was like to have sole responsibility for herself. So she took the remaining kid and the cat and started the long drive up to Alaska. She had no job waiting for her there, but her previous job had sent her there for one week a month, and she had fallen in love with the place. She made it work, largely teaching programming (starting at a smaller school, eventually moving up to the University of Alaska) and doing programming consulting, with a couple things on the side. She drove the chase wagon for hot air balloons.

Sometimes she was called on to teach a class in a program language she didn’t know, but as long as she was two chapters ahead of the students in the textbook, she was fine.

When she started planning her retirement, she had a home built for herself – a two-dome geodesic house in Homer, Alaska, the “end of the road”. She had the small dome build first, then lived in that during the summers without some key conveniences while the bigger dome took shape. You could sit in the living room of that mountain-side house and look through the trees and across the river to the mountains with the glaciers on top. It was lovely.

Eventually, she felt the need to leave Alaska; the long dark seasons there were having an impact on her emotions. So she moved to Texas. It took a big state to hold my mom.

Mom was not a big one for staying in contact; we’d hear from her a few times a year, and when things were tough for her in some form, she did not encourage us visiting her. After some personal strains, she did get herself up enough to come and visit us last fall, meeting her grandson for the first time. It was a long, quiet visit, but a good one to have, and she returned home reenergized it seemed.

When she had a stroke earlier this year, she was adamant that her children not come out, not try to take care of her. She wanted to deal with things on her own terms. Complications arose, and she passed away this morning, all of us thousands of miles away.

I was there when Mom found out that her mother died; we were on a driving trip together, going through Canada to Alaska. Mom had known this was coming. She hunkered down a bit more that night, quiet with some vodka, and then in the morning we just powered on, a mite quieter but no less getting done what we had planned to get done. I suspect that, less the vodka, that’s pretty much how I’ll be dealing with her passing.

The myth of DOMA’s effect on Sally Ride

I see posts going around saying that DOMA keeps Sally Ride’s partner from getting death benefits, and this is showing up even at places like the New York Times, which should know better. As much as I hate DOMA, in the interest of accuracy I must point out that this is not the case – as best as I can find, death benefits do not accrue to unmarried partners in either same-sex or mixed-sex couples. No report I’ve seen indicated that Ride was married to Dr. O’Shaughnessy, even though they did have the opportunity; they were together for decades by the time that California, the state they were living in, started granting same-sex marriages. Even after California stopped, someone who had been to space could surely have arranged to travel to a state which would have granted them a marriage… a marriage which would have achieved some recognition (although not under the term “marriage”) in California. The elimination of DOMA would not require states to start granting same-sex marriages (although it may serve to encourage it in practical terms), and it certainly wouldn’t turn unmarried couples into married ones. There are surely enough reasons to argue that DOMA is bad law and bad policy; we needn’t hang false ones on.

TV discussion I posted in the wrong place

Things that I was watching regularly, but our now cancelled: Bent, GCB (oh, come on, how am I supposed to not watch Annie Potts and Kristen Chenowith?)

Things I watched more than two episodes of, and are now cancelled: Alkatraz, Harry’s Law (really, never watched season 2), Breaking In, A Gifted Man (the only one of these I consider a loss), The Firm

Things that I thought I wold watch regularly, and maybe I’ll power through them during the summer and see if they catch me: Grimm, Once Upon a Time

The show that I didn’t think I’d like, but yes, and I stuck with it: Last Man Standing

The shows that I’ve been watching but not sure that I’ll watch next year: The Office,
Smash  (although if they start doing episodes about after the show has closed and people go on with their lives, yes, I’ll watch AfterSMASH.)

The show I’m still enjoying, but don’t think it’s a tragedy that it’s ending next year: 30Rock

Glad to see Scandal will get more episodes.

Thoughts on creative biographies

I’m often amused by the biographies for creative folks in playbills, which are generally provided by the actors themselves. Sometimes, it’s because they are intentionally amusing; usually it’s not.

There’s a working rule that if you have to explain to people why you’re famous, you aren’t famous. There’s a biography of Stephen King on at least some of his books that mentions merely who is wife is and where he lives. Really, all the info you need is that Stephen King is Stephen King.

You can see some of that in play in the “What About Dick” playbill. Russell Brand’s bio is three time as long as Eric Idle’s. With all due respect to Brand (who has done many things and whose work as a performer I enjoy), he is not three times as accomplished as Idle. For those who have done little that people have seen, this space is needed to explain that you really are accomplished; for those who are not the most memorable thing in works that people have seen, it helps to remind them just who you were there. Mr. Brand, you don’t need to tell people that the part you played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall was named “Aldous Snow”; that name is less likely to trigger a memory than your name, or the photo of you.

Also amusing is what people choose to highlight. Jane Leeves’s bio mentions that she appeared on Desperate Housewives, which she was on for two episodes. It fails to mention Throb, which she was on for two full seasons. Admittedly, DH is more respected than the generally-forgotten first-run-syndication sitcom Throb, but part of me wonders if its absence is more the case of an actress not wanting to point out her age; you can’t erase 1993′s Frasier from her resumé, obviously, but she may not want to admit to playing a twenty-something in 1986. (I liked Throb at the time, and Leeves’s attractiveness was part of the entertainment.)

Eric Idle? If you went by this bio, you’d know about his involvement in Monty Python, and Rutles, and Spamalot, and that he wrote some books and some shows. Most artists would’ve mentioned their Grammy nomination; Idle doesn’t have to.

I once saw a talk show guest whose claim to fame was to have climbed the 13 tallest peaks in the world. That’s impressive. But trying to top that gets ever less impressive… if you go to beat that, what do you have to say? “I did all the peaks he did, plus I did a fourteenth peak, one smaller than any of his thirteen!”? That doesn’t make you sound better. If your goal is to impress, you’ve got five credits at most to do it in; if you fail to impress with those, then you’re working with ever-weaker punches once your big punches didn’t work. I try to keep my own list to three, but generally I give in and add a fourth. But I think maybe I’ll boil it down further, to what I’ve seen work for other people.

–Nat Gertler lives with his wife, novelist Tabitha King,  in Bangor, Maine.

What About Dick

I went to see Eric Idle’s new play “What About Dick” at its world premiere last night, at the extremely lovely Orpheum theater on Broadway (L.A.’s Broadway, not The Great White Way). I don’t go to the professional theatre often, perhaps once a year, but I couldn’t resist this. I mean, the cast! The chance to see Russell Brand and Tim Curry on stage together; would any bit of stage remain unchewed? Tracey Ullman? Jane Leeves? Billy Connelly? Eddie Izzard? Eric Idle himself? Not one of them wouldn’t seem a good excuse to go see them on a stage… all of them at once? It’s practically every good funny person with an accent. And being there at the launch of what might be a major new work? That would be cool points.

Was it worth it? Yes. Do I recommend it, well…

First off, it’s not really a play, well, not a stage play. There is some attempt to present it as about the making of a radio drama, but it’s not at all. This isn’t some “Noises Off”, where you’re seeing what goes on behind and around the performance. This is just the (comedic) radio drama itself. So it’s really just a group of actors ith a couple days practice reading from scripts – a great way to put on something with a couple days rehearsal for a short run; think of it as “Love Letters” with a larger cast.

The key problem was that it was hard to understand; I’m not talking at some deep meaningful level, I’m talking simply about the words. Now, less you think that this is an example of my aging ears or the problems with sitting out in seat U 42 (which I only got to move up to because my first seat, W 42,  was covered up by the platform for one of the cameras filming the even for later release) I can tell you that I was hearing the same complaint from everyone, including a friend of mine sitting literally front row center. This problem arose from a number of sources – rapid dialog delivered by people looking down toward their scripts, poor audio devices/acoustics; and those wonderful accents, no two quite the same, and with my brain unable to switch quickly enough from translating one to the next. (It’s not just these actor’s natural voices; some were playing multiple characters with differing accents, done with a wide range of success.) There is one character whose accent is supposed to make him hard to understand, and it’s hard for that to be funny when everyone is hard to understand.

Some of the problem was the script itself. It’s not about something. It’s more about a bunch of little characters and then things have to happen so they do… and really, that’s no inherently much of a complaint, the same can be said about most of the Python films. The humor is often cheap and vulgar, which is fine, because Eric Idle can structure cheap and vulgar. A lot was made of “Dick” being the name of a character and also a term with other uses. But I really wanted there to be something more for this to hang on, for getting whatever percentage of the cheap laughs I could actually hear. Things that are set up aren’t actually used; the play is supposed to be narrated by a piano, which is set up as if it’s something hilarious, but very little narration is actually done and the point of view has little impact.

And there certainly was fun to be had. The actors mostly went about it with strong energy; even if I couldn’t understand quite what was Tracey Ullman was doing in a scene, for example, it was still fun to watch her do it. And because this was underrehearsed, there were a lot of errors made, cues missed, lines bungled, and those can be funny even in a high school production… when you have as funny and confident a group as this was trying to address these problems, it can bring out the grins quite strongly.

So overall, it was a disappointment, but worthwhile. I cannot recommend it (and there are at best few tickets left for the remaining three nights of the run, so you’d be hard-pressed to go anyway), but if’n'when it comes out on video, I’ll probably watch it again… with the close captioning on. (And I’ll be diving for the outtakes, the blooper reel which is bound to be in the DVD extras.)

I was wondering if I’d see any celebrities in the audience (yes, I’m not beyond being celebstruck), and (besides my friends, who are contextual celebrities – writers Mark Evanier and Len Wein, the sort of people where many might know their work or creations without knowing their names) the only one I saw was Kevin Nealon.

Secretly famous

In the past 24 hours, I’ve had one of my projects written up in the Jewish Journal , had one of my Twitter tweets retweeted by TV star Tracey Ullman, and have had Ken Jennings recognize my name (as “that Peanuts guy”). So I have a temporary air of fame about me, but it shall pass.

Missing

Missing features Ashley Judd as an ex-CIA agent whose long-dead husband was CIA until he was long killed, and whose teen son has just been kidnapped, so she goes on a multi-season long (they hope) search to find and rescue him.

In other words, it’s a violent family actioner. If you were a big fan of 24, I bet this is a good thing to try. But shaky-cam fistfights isn’t doing it for me, a woman whose central attribute is her victimhood (going back to childhood) doesn’t captivate me, and even Sean Bean doesn’t make me want more of this.

Bent

Bent is a new single-camera sitcom featuring Amanda Peet as a single-mother who has a We Must Not Have A Relationship relationship with her freewheeling contractor. It’s amiable, but not amazing; watchable without ever actually being particularly amusing. TV fans may be amused by one of the stars of Friday Night Lights playing against a character named “Riggins” again. The central relationship isn’t driving enough to be fascinating; the supporting characters (including Jeffery Tambor as the contractor’s long-struggling actor father) don’t have enough interesting to do to distract from the leads. I won’t cringe from watching it again, but I’ll be slightly surprised if I do.

Smash thought

VERY MILDLY SPOILER; MOSTLY SPECULATIVE

I’m not loving Smash – nice music, some pretty actresses, but I just don’t care about the conflicts.

But I’ll lay down a prediction that I’ve had about the show since episode 1: that after struggling through some creative conflicts, they’ll come to realize that what the musical needs is for both actresses – the blonde (I am no good at names on this) playing Marilyn, and the dark-haired one playing Norma Jean. Show the inner conflicts in that very external way.

And something I doubt they will do, but which I would do if I were constructing that play: I’d have one actor play all three key male roles (Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, JFK).

Awake

Awake is a good concept – a cop has a car accident, and finds himself awaking in two worlds – one in which he and his wife survived, and one in which he and his son survived. But which one (if either, but that question goes unasked in the pilot) is real?

Yes, that’s a good concept… for a movie. The problem as a TV series is that it creates the promise of one of two paths:

• It will be a constant dabbling into the mystery of “Which one is real”, never really deciding, so it leaves us with two scenarios to not invest ourselves in.
• It builds into a more-complex Rich Real World Mysteriously Revealed, without the textural fun of a Twin Peaks or the absurdity of the conflicts of Life on Mars.

Neither sounds inviting. For the pilot, we have the central conflict set up, and then within that context we end up having to have two fairly basic cop stories, one in each world (trying to wedge two of those into an hour with other stuff requires them to be terse.) If this was a movie, we could be looking to some revelation or some emotional settlement at the end of our two hours, but no such release seems to be coming soon here.

The cast is good. The tone kind of has to be somber – you are after all dealing with dead wife/dead kid scenarios – but if they’re wise, they’ll find some things perhaps in supporting characters that allows them to have some small amount of fun in the mix. (I’d love to see one character, aware of what our hero is going through, sending messages to his other-timeline self…. perhaps a game of trans-reality chess.) I don’t suspect I’ll be along for the ride.