Six Sentence Sunday: Con-Eire

Thanks, Linda Parsons.

The blog has moved: this is the last post that will be here apart from a housekeeping kind of post tomorrow. Everything's been moved over to the website for your ease and comfort. We'll play over there from now on.

It's Six Sentence Sunday again: they're going to be wrapping things up come January. It's a lot of work to coordinate something that keeps growing in leaps and bounds. I'm grateful for the new readers it brought me.

This week I offer a few sentences from my play Con-Eire which gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the workings of a spec fic convention. Having helped with quite a few of them, I have seen the enormous effort that goes into running them and the often capricious behaviour of 'big names' who have forgotten the fact that the people who run these are not paid and work only for the love of the stories, art, programmes and films that they love.

We catch up with the various members of the Con Com after news that their guest of honour, Very Famous Writer, has threatened to pull out because he discovered that the artist GoH is Very Famous Artist, with whom he has "history" as they say. But the complications multiply: we had a staged reading of this at Trinoc*coN which was a hoot, if I do say so myself. It was helped mightily by a very game cast and a whole lot of giggles.

 

MAEVE

Well, everything’s very hush hush—which is to say, nobody is too sure—but Minor Writer claimed that Very Famous Artist may be delving into her past for the next romance.

CONNOR

I feel like we need a scorecard.

DECLAN

Artists have to be free!

CONNOR

They always say that, but none of them gets anything done unless somebody else is taking care of the bills.

DEIRDRE

ANYway—

MAEVE

Well, that’s all I know: Someone from the past...

If you think you might like it, you can pick it up as an ebook at Amazon:

Women's Day, Con-Eire & BitchBuzz

Happy International Women's Day! A day to celebrate and a day to chastise because there's a long way to go yet and I'm getting more than a little impatient at fighting the same battles I have fought since childhood. There has been progress, I remind myself, but there's a long way to go until NO ONE gets dismissed or disrespected on account of gender. This is for all of us.

Of course, I celebrate the day in my usual way: a new publication. Well, not exactly new -- Con-Eire has been available in an expensive print edition which kind of missed the point of it being a fun and light-hearted thing. Now it's available for your Kindle or ebook reader for just $1.99.

Having just come back from a terrific con experience (which may have seemed anything but until it began), I had a lot of fun and chuckles while editing and updating this, including removing a couple of references to MySpace (!?) and some other tech innovations. Wow, so much has changed in just a few short years. But the over all issues remain the same for any event of this kind. I'm really proud that Lee Martindale (who also took a role in the premiere performance) gave me such a lovely blurb.

"From the bowels of back-of-house, from the deepest, darkest, most secret chambers of arcane ConComm knowledge, comes a screamingly funny glimpse into what’s behind the curtain at a science fiction convention. Fairy-dusted hilarity served with a side order of giggles."

It reminds me of the good old days of Trinoc*coN and there's a new dedication to Susan and Mildred (and Birdie and Ron) in it, with the hope that the next Three Mothers reunion won't be too far away. In the meantime, it's back to work including cleaning for the arrival of the Queen of Everything and Marko this weekend. Hurrah!

  

One of the things that simplified the process of making an ebook of Con-Eire was the wonderful new open source platform called Booktype. I was so delighted with it, I wrote about it in my column today for BitchBuzz.  I was really glad to find that:

 

"Booktype has been developed by the folks at Sourcefabric who have an ambition to foster independent journalism around the world by creating software to facilitate its development for print, digital and on air delivery."

Read the whole piece over at BBHQ.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Three Plays by Mae West

You think you know Mae West, don't you? The slightly risqué performer with the voluptuous curves: who asked Cary Grant to come up and see her, told Beulah to peel her a grape? What you may not know is how much she cleaned up her act for the movies. Three Plays includes Sex, The Drag and The Pleasure Man. West's plays are hilarious, full of street cant and scorching satires on the sexual and gender mores of her time. The first of the three landed her in jail for "corrupting the morals of youth" where she dined with the warden and his wife, and told reporters she only wore silk underwear. The press loved her and she got a lot of attention, but her next play which dealt frankly with homosexuality got tryouts in the provinces (Connecticut and New Jersey) but was kept off Broadway by the "Society for the Prevention of Vice" (an early morality group). Her next play The Pleasure Man, about the backstage shenanigans of vaudevillian Lothario featured an enormous cast of actors, acrobats, female impersonators and dancers -- all of whom were arrested on two of the three performances that took place. West and her cohorts were acquitted after the jury split their decision. One suspects it might have gone something like this wonderful scene from I'm No Angel:


  See the full round up of overlooked books at Patti Abbott's blog.

NT Live: The Cherry Orchard

"Who cares about Chekhov anyway? A bunch of old women moaning about ducks flying home to Moscow."

 ~ Withnail [Richard E. Grant] in Withnail & I

I am always grateful to the Spectrum 8 for hosting the NT Live performances; I'm also grateful that enough people in the Capital region attend them to make it lucrative. Keep up the good work! I need the lifeline.

After sneaking off for a matinee of Harry Potter in the afternoon (bad girl! should have been working -- yes, it was fun), I headed back to the theater for the evening's broadcast. Strange to realise that this was in the Olivier Theatre: I was expecting the Lyttelton, where the production of The White Guard had been. Chekhov's been getting a lot more attention lately, so perhaps this is to be expected. The sets by Bunny Christie were as evocative as those for The White Guard and there was a brief behind-the-scenes featurette where she spoke about the design.

There was a fabulous cast (of course) headed by Zoë Wannamaker as Ranyevskaya, Charity Wakefield and Claudie Blakely as her daughters -- each coping with the dissolution of their familiar lives in different ways -- Conleth Hill as the merchant Lopakhin, who probably makes the most changes within the course of the drama and Mark Bonnar as the nascent revolutionary, Trofimov (who's name I cannot hear without thinking of Monty Python).

Everyone was terrific: Tim McMullan and Gerald Kyd provided a light touch of comic relief to break up the wistful sadness of Ranyevskaya and her family. The timing was perfect. The costuming, too, was exquisite --

-- and yet I'm just not won over to Chekhov. Maybe I'm just a Philistine or part of that audience "weaned on cinematic jump-cuts who like their irony on a plate." Or I just don't like Chekhov. I have tried before and still I'm more fond of the Gumby version than any other. At least it's brief. I can understand the impact of Chekhov's realism -- and landy, we've had a huge trend in that direction ever since -- but while I can see how it would be wonderful to act in his plays, I don't much enjoy watching them. I do like dark humour, but maybe just of a different kind (Finnish, not Russian). Or maybe I just need the right production. This one was superbly skillful, so I'm not sure what it would take.