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Neighbor Ed scored freebie tickets to an Anna Deveare Smith thingie. He invited me. She was good, not great. Meaning: I probably wouldn’t have paid to see her. But then I didn’t have to, right?
Her schtick is a kind of fusion of Oprah and Studs Turkel with a frisson of Sedaris. That annoying Oprah thing: “There is a difference between hearing and listening.”
Uh. O-kay.
But she’s got a nose for good material and a pleasant speaking voice. She goes around the country interviewing interesting people, then edits and condenses those interviews into monologues. She’s not a particularly good actress, though. Or I should say, she may be a good actress, but her talents don’t loan themselves to the one-woman show format where you’re supposed to show off by channeling your subjects, speaking in their very voices. There wasn’t one moment while she was on stage that I wasn’t fully aware that I was listening to—not hearing, mind you, listening to—Anna Deveare Smith.
###
In Anna Deveare Smith’s Wikipedia entry, I came across this: Smith studied acting at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), where she was one of seven African-American women in her class, graduating in 1971. During her college career, they started to identify as black.
What the hell does that mean? I wondered.
Did she not identify as black while she was growing up? Is Anna Deveare Smith, Rachel Dolezal?
I would say as many as half of the world’s 15 million Jews don’t identify as Jews. (Yes, I know: An astonishingly small number considering that we control the world’s monetary supply and own all the movie studios. Did you happen to catch that subliminal shout-out to the Torah in Avengers: Endgame?) They change their names; they assimilate.
But that’s different, I can hear you saying. Jews are not a race.
But neither are blacks.
Scientists tell us that race has no basis whatsoever in biology. It’s purely a social construct.
Try telling Hitler, Jews are not a race.
###
Anyway, apart from that, I have done absolutely nada for the past few days except hammer out articles for various nutty clients and rule the island of St. Milo in Tropico. Fortunately, being a dictator on St. Milo is kind of like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: Every time I lose an election or the Axis invades or the rebels stage a successful coup, I can travel back in time and tweak the butterfly effect that paved the way to the inevitable disastrous overthrow.
I’m currently working on turning St. Milo into a cheesy tourist paradise. You should consider booking your next vacation there!
And I started running again. What I call running. You would probably not call it running. It’s been an odd spring: Usually the cavalcade of flowers has quite distinct cycles; the daffodils die before the tulips and the fruit trees bloom. This year, the flowers have been all mixed up.
And it’s May! How did it get to be May?
Her schtick is a kind of fusion of Oprah and Studs Turkel with a frisson of Sedaris. That annoying Oprah thing: “There is a difference between hearing and listening.”
Uh. O-kay.
But she’s got a nose for good material and a pleasant speaking voice. She goes around the country interviewing interesting people, then edits and condenses those interviews into monologues. She’s not a particularly good actress, though. Or I should say, she may be a good actress, but her talents don’t loan themselves to the one-woman show format where you’re supposed to show off by channeling your subjects, speaking in their very voices. There wasn’t one moment while she was on stage that I wasn’t fully aware that I was listening to—not hearing, mind you, listening to—Anna Deveare Smith.
###
In Anna Deveare Smith’s Wikipedia entry, I came across this: Smith studied acting at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), where she was one of seven African-American women in her class, graduating in 1971. During her college career, they started to identify as black.
What the hell does that mean? I wondered.
Did she not identify as black while she was growing up? Is Anna Deveare Smith, Rachel Dolezal?
I would say as many as half of the world’s 15 million Jews don’t identify as Jews. (Yes, I know: An astonishingly small number considering that we control the world’s monetary supply and own all the movie studios. Did you happen to catch that subliminal shout-out to the Torah in Avengers: Endgame?) They change their names; they assimilate.
But that’s different, I can hear you saying. Jews are not a race.
But neither are blacks.
Scientists tell us that race has no basis whatsoever in biology. It’s purely a social construct.
Try telling Hitler, Jews are not a race.
###
Anyway, apart from that, I have done absolutely nada for the past few days except hammer out articles for various nutty clients and rule the island of St. Milo in Tropico. Fortunately, being a dictator on St. Milo is kind of like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: Every time I lose an election or the Axis invades or the rebels stage a successful coup, I can travel back in time and tweak the butterfly effect that paved the way to the inevitable disastrous overthrow.
I’m currently working on turning St. Milo into a cheesy tourist paradise. You should consider booking your next vacation there!
And I started running again. What I call running. You would probably not call it running. It’s been an odd spring: Usually the cavalcade of flowers has quite distinct cycles; the daffodils die before the tulips and the fruit trees bloom. This year, the flowers have been all mixed up.
And it’s May! How did it get to be May?
