I checked. For a good 90 minutes I checked. For another example of a theater–a live theater with a stage and room for 60 seats–built inside a home. I couldn’t find one.
But here’s the story about the one that I do know of, the Cabrillo Playhouse in lovely San Clemente, California.
Latest piece about Orange County theater, a preview i typed about the Costa Mesa Playhouse’s production of Martin Mcdonagh’s breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
https://www.octheatreguild.org/post/beauty-queen-of-leenane-costa-mesa-playhouse
I readily admit i don’t know the first thing about artificial intelligence, although I sure hope it isn’t as flawed as so many examples of human intelligence that I have encountered in my time.
But I do know it’s a mighty big talking point. At WonderCon earlier this year, a panel of comic book professionals wrapped up with comments about the various projects they were working on with an extended dialogue about AI sparked by an audience question. The tone of the collective panel? Bleak. As borne out by one quote from Tom King:
“It’s coming for us all.”
I also know that AI is tied up in the Hollywood strikes, the weirdo from X thinks it will make humanity extinct (even as he creates a start-up AI company), the federal government is starting to use it to protect the country’s cybersecurity while there are calls in Congress to hold hearings to look into it (which always screams regulation to me), and it’s an issue that many in two industries that I am somewhat affiliated with, journalism and higher education, are very concerned about. See this story by a journalist about higher education and AI.
By and large there seem to be two opinions on AI:
Existential threat or greatest advance in human technology since Hot Pockets. And it tastes great and is less filling for Christians, too! (At least the Fox News kind of Christians).
Like any upstanding citizen who wants to be informed, I look to the internet (as you’ve no doubt noticed) and i read article after article but invariably my eyes glaze over and it’s time for a nap. I’m not a scientifically oriented person and, to use the academic phrase, I have no fucking idea what AI is, how it works, or what it can do.
But I do know about cats landing on their feet and Bob Dylan. So I did a little internetting and found a site that allows you to use ChatGPT, which somehow uses AI to generate text from prompts you type in and started fiddling around with it.
I am sure going to that site i’m now on several international watch lists and my phone will soon start blowing up with all kinds of wonderful deals on this or that AI product. But no one said the pursuit of knowledge didn’t carry inherent risks.
After using it, I still have no fucking idea how it works or how it could save or destroy us. But I am pretty sure that AI is better than us.
At least in generating a song about Bob Dylan singing about the mystery of cats landing on their feet. And here it is:
🎵 Well, there’s a mystery in this world, folks, gather ’round and see,
About them furry little creatures, as nimble as can be,
They got paws that dance like shadows, as they take a daring leap
, It’s the age-old question, how do cats land on their feet? 🎵
(Chorus) 🎵 Oh, it’s a twirl and a swirl, a mid-air feat,
In the dead of night or on a bustling street,
With their whiskers and their grace, they make a mystic treat,
Oh, the enigma of cats landing on their feet! 🎵
(Verse 2) 🎵 From the highest ledge to the lowest ground,
They spin and twist, not a single sound,
With their tails held high and those eyes so neat,
It’s a riddle of nature, cats landing on their feet. 🎵
(Chorus) 🎵 Oh, it’s a twirl and a swirl, a mid-air feat,
In the dead of night or on a bustling street,
With their whiskers and their grace, they make a mystic treat,
Oh, the enigma of cats landing on their feet! 🎵
(Verse 3) 🎵 Now, some say it’s magic, others call it skill
, A feline acrobat, with a purring thrill,
But deep down in their bones, it’s a secret they’ll keep
, Oh, the marvelous wonder of cats landing on their feet. 🎵
(Chorus) 🎵 Oh, it’s a twirl and a swirl, a mid-air feat,
In the dead of night or on a bustling street,
With their whiskers and their grace, they make a mystic treat,
Oh, the enigma of cats landing on their feet! 🎵
(Outro) 🎵 So the next time you see a cat in a leap,
Watch in awe and wonder, as they start to sweep
, It’s a nature’s puzzle, oh, so neat,
The timeless mystery of cats landing on their feet! 🎵
Now who owns the copyright to this?
I don’t know who owns the rights to the photo of the minstrel with the cat, but I plucked it off this website.
Upon entering any thrift store-like business, make a beeline to the toy section. Get over feeling like a creep. You are an entrepreneur.
Scour the shelves, which tend to resemble the organizational prowess of a 4-year-old on a Ritalin bender. Move shit around. When objects fall, as they will invariably do, leave them until your quest is complete. You are hunting for hidden treasure and there will be time to cover your tracks.
Try to not be too aggressive when muscling your competitors out of the way. Kids have many years of establishing physical dominance ahead of them;your days are numbered, so a little shoving and stepping on toes in the pursuit of profit is fine. It’s a jungle out there and it’s survival of the fitness
90 percent of the time, you will find nothing but shame. But self-contempt is a small price to pay when you strike paydirt in the form of a large plastic bag filled with small toys.
grab that bag with all the strength you can muster; if necessary pry it from smaller hands. Inspect the bag. Not for its contents: unless it is filled with superhero-related action figures or pre-1980 Disney toys, you have no idea what franchise or brand this junk comes from.
all you are interested in is the price tag. $6.99 or less it is a done deal. You can go as high as $10 if it is a freakishly large bag of if anything remotely looks like it can be tied to something from the Star Wars or Transformers universes.
pay for your lucre and resist the temptation to mumble some bullshit at the cash register about how your nephew or niece is going to love this
This is business.
AS soon as possible, preferably before you return to your disheveled hovel filled with the detritus of pop culture merchandise, rip that bag apart and commence to Google Lensing that shit.
Don’t worry if most of it is lame plastic farm animals or damaged or missing parts. All you need is one hit, one gold nugget in a pile of fool’s gold.
And when you see it, reflected in the sold listings on eBay, you are liberated from self-loathing and the burning question of how did your life turn into this pathetic sham no longer seems important.
not when you can turn that $6,99 purchase into a 300 percent profit.
From what I understand, to ensure that a blog fulfills all the essential requirements of a blog (fame, fortune, low carbs) frequent posts are necessary.
But what if you have nothing interesting to say? And what if the niche where your blog fits is the rather general category of non-niche?
This is an interwebz existential crisis.
I can’t go on. I must go on.
That is a Samuel Beckett pull
I just displayed my intelligence
Now I shall really launch this party with some incredible multi-mediaing
Boom
A stroll, no make that a waddle, down memory lane. In updating this site, i find myself so enraptured by my own words, that i am compelled to share. This is a cover piece from summer 2006, i believe, for OC Weekly in which i followed a magician named Johnny B. Good, as he visited Disneyland while wearing a fat suit.
The Chance Theater, that is. A theater in Anaheim I have watched transform from just about nothing to a very much something.
Yes, the rumors are true. It is my birthday today. But nip those perfunctory good wishes in the bud; this is not a day of celebration but one of lamentation. For this day, the day I turn an age I cannot bring myself to countenance let alone state, is a milestone that overshadows all others; and in that shadow lies the cruelest of indignities.
This is the day when the discounts become automatic, the day I officially join, and am constantly reminded of it, Them. And while surely the alternative leaves much to be desired, waking up and realizing you’re a member of the living built-in discount class is a hard row to hoe.
Although, I must admit, it does have its perks. I’m already six bucks ahead of the game, and it’s only 10 am., and I haven’t started puking yet.
But the instant the clock struck midnight, I could feel lured by its wicked seductions. Cheaper cell phone plans and airline tickets. Wednesday’s at Kohls, Tuesday’s at Ross.
But there is a price for entry into the member’s only portion of the Denny’s and IHop menu, this ultimate in backhanded compliments bestowed for doing nothing more than surviving to an age that eluded so many who deserved so much more. John Lennon. Bruce Lee. John Coltrane. Peaches Geldof (seriously, she was eighth on the fucking list!).
That toll is levied not only in aches and pains and fingers up your asshole that do not require a reach-around and the growing befuddlement that comes when one is saddled with a Tic Tac template in a Tik Tok world. But I cannot tell you what that price is; it is something that each of us must learn on our own, and learn it you shall if you reach this day, and does anyone know what time Sizzler opens?
To escape this unbearable plight, I am heading to the Channel Islands for a couple of days today. I hear it’s beautiful. I don’t care. I get four bucks off the ticket each way. But even with my improved economic position, I may hurl myself into the Pacific Ocean on the crossing; not out of depression or an inflated sense of my own mortality. Today is a day that ends in Y, and Those are constants. No, it is because I have a serious problem with the word ferry being applied to any moving conveyance that I am upon, and the strain may be too much.
So, as one is wont to do when faced with the prospect of ending it all, thoughts turn to legacy. What do I want to be remembered for? Nothing, really. What fucking good would it do me?
So instead, I will leave the two pieces of genuine wisdom that I have acquired in this quite useless and wasted string of years.
This is something that I already knew for the seed was planted by my dad who, on his days off when puttering in the garage, preferred to relieve himself in the nearest trash can rather than walk the 10 steps to the bathroom. While my mother found this horrifying, I sensed there was more at work. And that sense became manifest during the pandemic when, like so many, I embarked on a series of home improvement projects. Mine weren’t particularly impressive. They included nothing but basic shelving, brackets, dry wall screws, screwdrivers, and those motherfucking things that you are supposed to put in the wall before the screws. I think they’re called anchors?
anchors to the left; on the right my dad, John Gordon Beers, on patrol at a Missouri WalMart, circa 2012
Those who know me can readily attest to both my patience and carpentry skills. But without fail, at some point, usually around the three-hour mark of each project, covered in dust and with bleeding fingertips I hit a metaphorical wall while dealing with a quite real wall and suddenly found myself no longer holding a screwdriver, but a hammer. And even though the rational part of my mind knew that this was not the most prudent course of action, I had hit my Fuck It moment, and I would begin began whaling at that screw with that hammer like a 21st Century John Henry, hellbent on proving that nothing built by the hands of man was better at getting a job done than those hands, so committed he was willing to die of a burst heart with a hammer in those hands to prove the point.
And those screws did get hammered into those anchors, and that bookshelf did get completed and yes there very well could be consequences ranging anywhere from structural integrity to violating the willful destruction of property clause in the rental lease to the deep, intractable shame at not being able to complete what is, let’s face it, a pretty simple fucking task.
But none of that mattered. For with every fifth strike of that hammer ( when I actually hit that goddamn screw on the head), I was liberated; I had cast aside all social decorum, civilized constraints, all careful readings of instructions and basic common sense. I had hurled my Fuck It into the void of the universe and instead of the customary unrelenting silence, what came back was a resounding echo as life affirming as the sound of the pop when cracking a tall boy Modelo.
And you too can hear that echo whenever you are faced with whatever crisis may come your way. Keep slaving at screwing those goddamn screws into those goddamn anchors, or grab the hammer? Wait for Triple A to unlock your car or smash the window? Press send on that text or not?
The predicament is universal; the choice is yours and yours alone. But what I wish to impart to you is to consider seizing that day and owning that moment.
Fuck it. Go ahead and piss in that trash can.
An anecdote.
Years ago, I was considering moving to a neighborhood in Hollywood, into an apartment complex across the street from one of the buildings owned by the Church of Scientology. When giving me the lay of the land, the apartment supervisor, or whatever, mentioned that there was a small theater inside the building that occasionally hosted theater productions. At the time I labored under the delusion that I was a playwright, and my curiosity was piqued.
“So they let outside people do shows there?.”
“Yep.”
“But do they have any guidelines around material. Anything off limits?”
“I don’t think so. As long as it’s not two dogs fucking on stage, I guess.”
Two. Dogs. Fucking. On. Stage.
Oh, this scrawny chain-smoking cat continually wincing at the harsh slare of the 11 a.m. sun didn’t look it, but he might as well been the Buddha contemplating his navel beneath his bodhi tree, or Jesus pausing for a few remarks in between the loaves of bread and the fishes. Never have I heard wisdom so succinctly and yet so powerfully, something that cut through all the rhetorical bullshit and moral relavitism and subjective perspective of the “We make our own reality” mantra that justifies every cock-eyed opinion and support for the most groundless beliefs.
No, there are limits, lines in the sand that demarcate what lies beyond the Pale. Places we do not have to go, things we do not have to see, words we do not have to hear. That doesn’t mean censoring or canceling; it means another Fuck It moment, one in which you realize that someone has the right to express themselves however the want, but you also have the right to not rationalize it or to attempt to see a situation through their eyes or unique perspective. One must be careful to guard against overt or implicit bias and to heed the warning against plucking one’s eye out if it is offended; but even with that said you still have the power to say Fuck This and move on.
So if you ever are in a situation that looks, smells, sounds or feels like two dogs fucking, listen to your gut and walk away.
And then go find the nearest trashcan and take a piss in it. And if someone sees two dogs fucking in your action, simply tell them to go grab a hammer and start pounding something, as long as it’s not your pecker.
Now where’s that Sizzler?
The announcement last week that Stages Theatre, Orange County’s longest running storefront theater,is closing its Fullerton space is terrible news on several fronts.
First, it’s the latest reminder that the storefront theater scene, the best thing to happen in the history of performing arts in this county (although South Coast Repertory and the Segerstrom Center would no doubt disagree) has long peaked.
Beginning in the late 1980s to around 2002, some 13 storefront theaters, or company-based producing entities not affiliated with a university, municipality or other government institution, all of which tended to produce less mainstream, blue-hair fare, launched. Today, that number is four.
Full productions of original plays also take a major hit, as no theater produced as many new works in this county over the past 30 years as Stages. That number had waned compared to the blistering pace its first few years in Anaheim. Of its approximately 100 productions in its first four seasons, at least 90 percent were original.
But you could usually count on at least one new play every season. In fact, its canceled 2020 season included three works that were part of the inaugural Page to Stage festival that focused on women playwrights.
And then there’s the perennial warhorses wheeled out year after year which won’t be seen, at least not for a while, including its summer production of “Twilight Zone” episodes re-enacted on stage, and its annual holiday play, a radio play of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was usually followed by the excrement of the Reverend Slappy White and his Calcavacade of Comic All-Stars and their A Dolt’s Only Xma$ Pageant, which somehow had a longer run (1994 to 2019, with a few years here and there lost in an alcoholic-haze) than just about any other “holiday” production in this county next to SCR’s “A Christmas Carol.”
And not to make it about me, but this is my blog, so deal with it; and I’ve got one burning question I need answered right now.
What’s going to happen to all my photos in the lobby?
Well, the photos aren’t of me, and it’s not like I own them but a handful of the approximately 50 photos of past Stages productions on those walls were pictures of some of the 14 plays that I either wrote or adapted (and one I directed) at Stages from 1996 to 2006.
And I actually do know what will happen to them, the same thing that will happen to me. Once they come down from those walls, are stuffed into whatever box gets crammed into whatever storage unit that, once locked, may conceivably never be opened again, they will join me on my slow and steady trek toward complete obliteration.
So , while you can read the first part of my two-part series on Stages that was published today on the Voice of OC website,I’m choosing to use this space to put some focus on nobody’s favorite subject: me.
Sure, they may have been a complete waste of time, a turgid mass of long-winded pretentious bullshit, utterly lacking in strong female characters, easily forgotten and amounting to as much as any other plaintive barking into the void, but goddammit, some fool was stupid enough to greenlight them, and I shall etch them in the digital ether of this website , or blog, or whatever the fuck this is, as a notice to all eternity that once there was a man named Joel Beers. who wrote plays. And every one of the sad, miserable fuckers got produced. Most of them more than once.
But before I get to that, i guess I should say something along the lines that, for me, getting plays produced that people actually bought tickets for–and at least pretended to focus on for a couple of hours of their lives–was a fantastic opportunity. I’m sure far better writers deserved it much more. But the plays truly were secondary to the people. I worked with.
Some of my best friends (an admittedly tiny list) came through working at that theater and at least a few of them occupy that spot upon the Ultimate Test of Friendship list: If you call them from jail at 3 a.m., would they pick up?. Or at least listen to your voicemail and do something? True story: Patrick Gwaltney and Darri Kristin did.
I met the two people I married at that theater. Literally. I married Gwaltney and the lovely Tracy Purdue in a ceremony in Manhattan in 2004. The state of New York didn’t recognize my ordainment from the Universal Life Church, so they had to rent an officiant whose signature on the marriage license was legit. The only one they could find on short notice was a rabbi, who introduced me as the Reverend Joel Beers and did that get some laughs.
And even though my position as OC Weekly’s theater critic from 1995 to 2019 also afforded me the opportunity to piss off every single one of those friends more than a few times (I always felt a bit like Aesop’s bat at Stages, tolerated by the birds and the beasts in the great battle but never fully embraced by either) it’s the people, not my plays, whose memories I cherish. And if fortune smiles, there will be more memories to forge.
But forget about any more plays. I haven’t written a full-length in 14 years but if I ever do, I won’t be doing it at Stages, at least not unless they open another theater down the road. And let’s face it: ain’t none of us getting even younger.
But once there was a man named Joel Beers who wrote plays. And every one of those sad miserable fuckers got produced. Most of them more than once.
And the house where most of them happened was Stages Theatre. And here they are.
Fuck you, eternity!
1996. Second production of “Indio,” directed by Adam Clark. Originally produced by Revolving Door Productions at the short-lived Tribune Theatre in Fullerton, 1994. A little bit of trivia. The former tenants of that theater, which is today the Back Alley Bar and Grill and was once the printing operation of the Fullerton News Tribune, were the last Hispanic theater company in this company that had its own space, El Teatro Cometa.
1997. World premiere, “Roscoe Spitzer is Afraid of Dying,” directed by Patrick Gwaltney. Better than all the ones that came after.
1998. Adaptation of “Tartuffe,” directed by Patrick Gwaltney. I think we framed it around a TV televangelist.
1999: Second production of “Hate,” better than the first at the Tribune Theatre in 1995 and the third (2012) at Stages.
2000: Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People. ” Directed by Patrick Gwaltney.
2001: “Prophets, Profits and William Blake.”Second production. First was the Tribune Theatre in 1995. Directed by Patrick Gwaltney. Vastly superior to the first production.
World premiere of “Going to Greenland.” Directed by Patrick Gwaltney. This was basically a Revolving Door Production done at a different theater, as it featured Bradley A. Whitfield, Nicholas Boicourt, Steven Lamprinos, Darri Kristin and more than a little musing from Michael Mollo.
2002: Adaptation of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope.” Set in a Karaoke bar. Dave Barton hated it.
Directed Sam Shepard’s “True West.”
2003: World Premiere of “Rube!” Directed by Patrick Gwaltney. Subsequent productions at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center as part of the Orange County Theater Festival, and Brea Curtis Theatre were more fully realized, but nothing beats your first.
Adaptation of Joseph Heller’s “We Bombed in “New Haven. I think I was drinking heavily during this one, but even sober, I don’t think I could have ever explained it.The adaptation or the original.
2004: Fourth production of “Roscoe Spitzer is Afraid of Dying.” Directed by Patrick Gwaltney. Two productions in Los Angeles between this and first Stages show in 1996.
“
2006. World premiere of “The Don Juan Project.” Directed by Patrick Gwaltney; Forgettable.
2012. Third production of “Hate.” Directed by Barney Evans. They asked to do it and I said sure but by the third time, though the subject matter was unfortunately topical and would only get more topical–a look inside the screwed-up head of a coherent white supremacist, it really was just what it was: a half-decent episode of “Hill Street Blues.” BUT AT LEAST THIS HAPPENED!
FERMENTED BEERS 