Wednesday, January 31, 2007
ANDREA's growing!
My bank account’s dwindling because I make – can you guess? Take a guess. Two hundred fifty U.S. dollars a month. Yep, that’s right. Oh, I get a few freebies thrown in with my teaching contract – free soup in the school cafeteria, which I and the rest of the teachers choke down at our table in the corner while the kids scream and bicker and throw spoons. You can tell the teachers’ table from the kids’ table because we have a cloth tablecloth, and they get paper.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Kundera rides the rails
I've forgotten the sparse fields, which in less than a week during spring will blossom green and generous, outside my window. I've managed to tune out the snoring old man en route to a doctor's appointment. I've somehow ripped my eyes away from the wild-eyed Czech girl sprawled across from me, her shirt entirely undone save for one button near her midriff.
I'm busy.
I'm reading.
Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
I wrestled to make sense of that then.
Today I've stopped wrestling, but I still find Kundera's concept interesting.
Doesn't love tie these two desires -- sleep and sex -- together?
In Prague, they didn't. But in Prague, what I had was not love. What I had was a name, a single being on which to focus my feelings when the loneliness grew like ice.
Today, what I have is different.
Better.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
"Good Day"
Good Day
Luce
Well I wake up to a sky so blue
With my girlfriend in the other room
Got the coffee on and the pancakes done
The cat's sleeping outside in the sun
The tv sings its morning blues
And it’s all the same with all the news
But she walks up, smiles, kisses me
And says your coffee’s done.
Then starts singing.
Yeah yeah yeah
She is singing.
Well It’s a pretty good day.
I’m lookin’ forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day.
again...
Well it’s a pretty good day
I’m looking forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day
Yeah we’ll have a good day.
So I lace my boots up and step outside
Catch a cab cause my car died
And I go to work with my friend Dan
Paintin’ houses the best we can
On my way back home I try and mix it up
Walk halfway then take a bus
And as it pulls up and the doors open
I hear the bus driver say "step up" please "STEP UP"
And I’m singing, And I’m singing
Yeah yeah yeah
And I’m singing yeah yeah yeah yeah
Some guy looks over and says ‘how ya doin’?’ I say...
Well it’s a pretty good day
I’m looking forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day
Yeah yeah yeah
Well it’s a pretty good day
I’m looking forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day
Yeah we''ll have a good day
And through the window
There’s a whole world
And I’m watching all the people
All the faces and the places I have yet to go
And the sunshine now it’s fading
And my girlfriend she’s waiting
And I bet that she’s outside
Sleeping in the shade
Cause it’s a pretty good day
I’m looking forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day
Yeah, again...
Well it’s a pretty good day
I’m looking forward to tomorrow
To have a pretty good day
Yeah, we'll have a good day
It’s a good day
Yeah.....yeah....yeah
It’s a good day
Monday, January 22, 2007
Constant Contact
I've also been finding TheaterMania and Fractured Atlas great resources, and wanted to give them a public thumbs-up.
Vinohrady, that's where I want to be!
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Be ANDREA's MySpace friend!
Get your daily dose of ANDREA updates!
It's right over there -- yeah, there, to the right.
If you subscribe, I promise not to spam. I promise to entertain. Pinky-swear!
Friday, January 19, 2007
The official FRIGID page(s)!
And here's the show-specific page. Check it out!
Show Schedule
Monday, March 12, 6 pm;
Tuesday, March 13, 7:30 pm;
Wednesday, March 14, 6 pm;
Friday, March 16, 10:30 pm;
Saturday, March 17, 5:30 pm;
Sunday, March 18, 1 pm.
All shows will be at the Under St. Mark's theater, 94 St. Mark's Place between 1st Ave and Avenue A. Subway denizens: 6 to Astor Place. Tickets are $5. I'll buy drinks for those who applaud the loudest.
Here's "Andrea"!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Allison Landa
2214 ½ Grant St.
Berkeley, CA 94703
(510) 654-6512 – home office
(510) 588-6943 – mobile
Think Your Roommate’s a Nightmare? Meet ‘Andrea’
Berkeley, CA – January 18, 2007 – She’ll make a key for you. But if you bring friends over, make sure they don’t steal nothin’.
Allison Landa decided not to rent the room. But she’s re-enacting her meeting with a frightening potential roommate – and this time, you’re invited. Landa will perform her solo show “Andrea” at New York City’s FRIGID Fest from March 11-18, 2007.
“Andrea” is based on Landa’s six-month teaching stint in a small town an hour outside of Prague. “I did more learning than teaching,” she recalls in her show. “I learned that I wasn’t a small-town girl. And I learned that I wasn’t a teacher. Obviously, things were going to have to change.”
That hope for change materialized in the form of Andrea, whose Prague apartment just happened to have an empty bedroom. Furnished, even. But the deal wasn’t so sweet.
“She represented everything I feared at the time,” Landa recalls. “She was lonely, angry, a substance abuser, a McDonald’s addict. She hated the world and everything in it. And at the time, I was starting to feel the same way.”
She declined Andrea’s offer and rode out the teaching gig. Then she came home to the San Francisco Bay Area and began to build a life she could love – a Masters degree in fiction, a career as a freelance writer and editor, and a relationship with a nice Jewish boy she met almost immediately after coming home from Europe.
“Maybe I should thank Andrea,” Landa says. “Who knows?”
She may actually get the chance. Two months after the FRIGID Fest comes to a close, Landa will bring “Andrea” to the Prague Fringe Festival. “If she shows up,” Landa says, “I’ll make sure she gets in for free.”
For more information about “Andrea”, call Allison Landa at (510) 654-6512 or visit the show’s homepage at www.andrea-solo-show.blogspot.com. To learn more about Allison Landa, visit www.allisonlanda.com. For more information on the FRIGID Fest, visit www.frigidfest.com.
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