Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Today my daughter The Spare is trying out for her high school's autumn production of "Romeo and Juliet."

There's just one problem. The play is garbage.

Mind you, The Spare attends a "Blue Ribbon School," which I guess is supposed to mean that the school pursues intellectual rigor. Trust me, the only rigor in that school is mortis.

For the third year in a row, the school's drama teacher has enlisted the assistance of a savage butcher ... clueless playwright wannabe ... bored kept woman with delusions of grandeur ... local mom to create a fall production that puts the "f" in FAIL. Not FALL. FAIL.

This time, the hapless target is The Bard.

The local mom (described above with acute precision, if you ask me) took the text of "Romeo and Juliet" and re-told the story from the point of view of the Nurse as she's sitting in a nursing home with dementia.

......

No, readers, I kid you not! I swear by all the Confederate Dead in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Maryland! I swear by every single drop of rain that has fallen on the Delaware Valley in the past two weeks! I swear by the best and brightest bored gods! I did not make this up.

Just imagine taking a wonderful play like "Romeo and Juliet," paring it down to a stinking two acts, axing all but seven characters, and wielding a mighty mean machete over the dialogue. Oh yeah, and then there's the whole point-of-view thing. The Nurse is trying to remember. Or thinks she remembers. Or ... but soft! There's Will Shakespeare moaning from his tomb!

It seems to me that a "Blue Ribbon School" with dance classes, a madrigal choir that has performed at the White House (resplendent in Renaissance costumes), and 100 kids clamoring for roles in a play, could actually put on the real "Romeo and Juliet," First Folio. We are six miles from Philadelphia. Don't tell me you couldn't find a sword-fight coach!

...

I have just returned from picking Spare up at the audition. She is downstairs crying. The drama coach called her up on stage first ("Let's do this fairly, in reverse alphabetical order, seniors first!) and did not call her for a second reading. She was the only senior who was not given the opportunity to do a second reading.

I'm no stage mom, trying to get my kid into Pampers commercials. To me, this thing is bigger than the Spare. It's about a despot in a small high school who takes good plays and makes them bad  (or writes worse plays himself). It's about a school full of kids who want to be in productions, and the school only offers two productions a year. With a cast of seven.

The only thing more tragic than "Romeo and Juliet" is "Romeo and Juliet" re-written by some fluff-brained Snobville mom. If that school deserves a blue ribbon, I've seen some Angus beeves that should be encased in platinum. Don't tell The Spare, but I'm glad she laid an egg at the tryout. Better to not perform at all than to perform in The Great Shakespeare Chainsaw Massacre.

Ah, but art imitates life, right? Look at the darling clip below! It's Mr. G's world! Might as well have been shot at Snobville Blue Ribbon High, it's that close to the real thing. Welcome to a new sub-plot at "The Gods Are Bored!" It's the small-school drama coach who thinks he can improve upon the Bard!

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Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," dishing out deities on demand! Collect the whole set!

Well, actually that would be impossible. You'd always miss a deity or two ... or a thousand, depending upon how far back you want to look.

In fair weather I set my parrot, Decibel, on the front porch. The local squirrel population sees Decibel's cage as a lunch wagon, and no wonder: Given that parrots and squirrels are both plant-eating tree-dwellers, they have much in common when it comes to noms.

The summer guarantee of good eats has kept the squirrel population pretty high at Chateau Johnson. There are nests galore, and almost always it's possible to see one of those bushy-tailed seed-snatchers on the lawn. My cats don't even chase them. I don't own a dog. Squirrel life is good chez moi.

Last week we had a pesky, itty bitty hurricane. Not! We had a whopper of a tropical storm. It dumped inches of rain, and then the wind blew ferociously for about 16 hours. There were embedded tornadoes in the area.

Couldn't have been a good time to be a squirrel.

I write this because, since the end of Hurricane Irene, I've noticed a big drop in the squirrel visitations to Decibel's Diner. I've maybe seen one or two squirrels, total, in a week. At the height of Decibel Tourist Season, there can be as many as a half dozen squirrels in my yard -- noisy, cheeky rascals -- and another three or four across the street, trying to figure out how to mount an invasion.

Did the storm kill the squirrels? If so, where are the remains? To my unending grief, Snobville does not contain a reliable vulture population. Vultures are very helpful in detecting the whereabouts of deceased critters, but in this case it's a total mystery.

(Come to think of it, what happens to vultures in a hurricane? Oh, now I'm REALLY depressed!)

I'm sure the squirrel population will rebound. Or maybe they're still in hiding. It's just curious to me, that's all.

This was my first full day of school, so of course I am totally preoccupied by the noticeable drop in local squirrel population. This may sound insane to you, unless you have taught school.

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Labor Day 2011 Edition! Please pay attention, because Labor Day will soon be a thing of the past ... and so you should make the best of the ones remaining. What are they going to call Labor Day when there is no more organized labor? I'll tell you: Monday.

A disturbing trend has followed me since I left full-time employment at Gale Research Company in 1987. I have found that, whatever I job I do, I quickly find myself working much harder for less money.

When I first left Gale Research back in 1987, they paid me very well as an independent contractor. They were so doggoned glad to have a trained worker willing to forgo health benefits and vacation pay that, for a few years, I made good bread. But as the whole "independent contractor" thing got rolling, companies like Gale learned that there were so many people eager to do the work for less money -- people who had never had benefits in the first place -- that the wages began to fall. First by a little bit, then precipitously.

It wouldn't have helped me if I had stayed at Gale Research. In the mid-1990s they laid off a number of the people who started working there at the same time I did. And we won't even go into the fact that the company is selling far more product with far less quality than it did in the day.

When I entered public school teaching, I thought that I'd finally found a profession that would be somewhat immune to this trend. But this year I am taking a substantial pay cut, what with our governor's garnishing our wages for health care and pensions and our local district's cost-saving measures. At the same time, my class sizes have increased. Last year my largest class was 24. This year my smallest class is 25. I'm despairing over the task of meeting the individual learning needs of 162 students -- all while being observed in my so-called "tenure year."

This morning I spent a long time sitting in sage smoke, arranging rocks I brought from Polish Mountain onto the Shrine of the Mists. The bored gods who visit my shrine have seen it all: vain rulers who exploited their poor subjects, tribes of people who knew that teamwork and profit sharing were the best means of survival, little bands of hardy individuals who crept from place to place. And then there are the deities of the Celts -- a people who valued the middle class. Isn't it strange? I can feel some gods whispering, "Nothing has changed," and others saying, "Everything has changed."

Wish me good luck in a new year of work, as I do more for less pay. I'm not a novelty. I'm the face of  modern America. Just one more pale face.

This time the ARTsy-team has gone "wild" with twinkling H2O colors.



Do you remember the colors? Maybe you are like us, having a lot of colors hidden in your closet or drawer :-)



Anyway, we have played with these watercolors, and hope to inspire a lot of you to take the colors and make the most beautiful backgrounds. Enjoy, and do leave a comment for us to see your card!



Denne gangen har vi lekt oss med Twinkling H2o. Husker du disse vannfargene vi lekte med tidligere? Har du som oss glemt fargene, og lagt dem langt bakerst innerst i skapet eller skuffen? Vi har iallefall tatt frem fargene, og satt i gang med bakgrunns lek. Håper vi kan inspirere mange til å ta frem fargene. Lek deg med fargene, og legg gjerne igjen en kommentar så vi får en titt :-)



This card is made with watercolorbrush and lots of water sprayed on the paper in front of coloring. Easy, fast and lovely colors!



This card is made by spraying water on a none stick matt and applying H2O-colors to the sheet. Background papier is laid down on the none stick matt several times until this result.





Background is applied on the background sheet with a spatel, water and Primary Elements powder. Flowers is colored with H2O and gesso, and the snow is made with gesso.



Background made with H2O painted on wrinkled tissue paper. Stamped with H2O.





Fish is painted with H2O and the background is made with H2O and salt.Fish is painted with 2O and the background is made with H2O and salt.



rd made to look as a closed book. Cardstock and book pages painteth H2O.

It's hard work being Rush Limbaugh. He has such a difficult time holding onto his "moron of the universe" title when there are so many other hard-working morons trying to unseat him. Nevertheless, he manages to do it. No doubt the opiate derivative medications help keep him sharp.

Earlier this week, the Limbaugh pestilence described the build-up to Hurricane Irene as "hype" created by the media. I guess hurricanes should be ignored unless they can completely decimate a city and leave a million people homeless.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" join the throng of Hurricane Irene victims calling Limbaugh's remarks EPIC FAIL.

Case in point: Yesterday I went for a walk along the murky little waterway near my house. The entire floodplain looked like someone had plastered it with mud. All vegetation was flattened and battered. As I perused this sad landscape, I stepped sideways on a hill, slipped on some muck, and fell on my face. (Actually I fell on my titanium hip and all that side of my body, and then on my face.)

So there I sat, checking for broken bones, plastered with New Jersey mud, and cursing myself for being clumsy ... and within 30 seconds I was beset by a swarm of mosquitoes.

Bitten, muddy, and humbled, I limped home.

Deep within the primal stem of my brain, at its lowest level of functionality, I must have believed Rush Limbaugh and considered the hurricane talk just so much blah blah blah. Why else would I choose to stroll along a floodplain just days after a catastrophic meteorological event?

The moral of this sermon is so simple even a moron could understand it. If the media calls it a dangerous hurricane, and you look outside and the weather's atrocious, and the fire sirens bleat at all hours for the next three days, and you can't walk a path because it's inches deep in slippery mud,  it must indeed be as the media says: a dangerous hurricane.

Words of wisdom, wasted on the wise. Morons don't read "The Gods Are Bored."


Photo credit: http://haddonfield.patch.com/users/bill-duhart