Supplement to the previous post - my showbiz relatives

I forgot to mention in my last post that last Saturday, John and I met up with daughter B and her friend J and Dan's girlfriend, Casie, to see our son, Danny in his latest endeavor. It was an excellent play. The acting was very good and truly, a good time was had by all!

The play was Five Flights (more specifics can be found a few posts back). It was about three sibs - actually two sibs, the friend of one and the wife of another who is mentioned but never puts in an appearance. They are left after their father's death with a broken down aviary - a monument to their father's grief at the death of their mother. The argument is whether to create a church to birds (long story) or to let it just decay back from whence it came. Our son, Danny, plays a hockey star who plays for "our team." His fellow hockey player, is a straight man, originally from Russia or Latvia or the Ukraine (sorry I forget - he had an Eastern European accent!) - and provides the comic relief for the play. Danny plays a gay man who instantly starts to fall for one of the brothers in the family who owns the aviary.

The fellow he falls for has been deeply hurt before and is unwilling to be hurt again, so he backs away, though the attraction is mutual. His sister has a crush on a woman she's met at the library who believes that God is embodied in birds (or something to that effect) and believes the sister is a sign from Heaven. Unfortunately the woman cum aviary preacher wannabe does not return the sister's affections. The sister-in-law wants to tear down the aviary and develp the area into a place where people can live or play. I think the sister-in-law more or less represents what most of us in the audience would do were we placed in a similar situation. Interesting that her husband is not present at all and that she is the only one who is not a blood relation of the father who has died.

The brother and sister decide they want to let the place crumble. In some ways this is a reflection of their resignation and desire to avoid the suffering and risk that love entails - the love and grief their father had - grief only quenched by the creation of an edifice to hold the spirit of his departed wife.

There is a lot of humor in this play and a great deal of sadness, as it looks at the human condition and our desire to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. What I really appreciated about the play was the way that it focused on love and little, if any, attention was paid to who (or what gender) was loving whom - which is how it really should be.

I'm sure I've only scratched the surface, but the play was worth the trip and the dinner we all had together at the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant was lovely.

Great job, Dan!

My "lil sis" Christina is DJing in Baltimore tonight. She is known as EmpressDJ and is in the process of promoting her own CD of drum and bass music. You can find her on Facebook where there is a link to one of her songs -and it's quite good!

Break a leg, Christina!

Soon to come in October, Casie Platt, Danny's GF, will be playing in Tony Kushner's award-winning play, Angels in America about the AIDS crisis in the US. HBO presented a five-hour version of Angels back in 2003 and I have the DVDs given to me as a Christmas gift from one of my many offspring. If you live in the DC metro area, it's definitely a must-see, so keep yer eyes peeled for it!

Break a leg, Casie!

Well, that's enough for one day - until next time, GBWYTWMA+