Few people have tried to entice the local gay crowd more avidly than Fairy Fay. Entertainment-wise, that is. Start with that name, and move swiftly to the names he/she handchose for her/his bandmates: Polly, Wally and Doodle. Then on to the band’s name, Spunky Gal.

Yet when a mining-camp conflagration like this tries to work its rainbow magic at the Bullfinch, the only audience members rubbing their legs together are the crickets.

Why is this? Not because our beloved Bullfinch has somehow been pinched in the homo-friendly scene gene. Plenty of performers and patrons there are out themselves, or fellow travelers, or comforting or comfortable or curious. The percentage of actual closed-minded bigots is admirably low.

But the very open-mindedness which makes the Finch a hotbed of diversity can make it a lousy place for the, shall we say, excessively stylized. Heartwrenchingly sincere acoustic songs work well there. So do shouty garage anthems. So do long blues-rock jams. Raw rules there. Tightly-wound mechanical-beat leather-and-lace theatrics? Not so much.

More’s the pity, since FF and his devoted doodles in SG need and deserve a venue fit for their fetching flitting. They have this one song where they teach an original hip-waggling dance move to the assembled throng (or is that thong), and the attempt falls as flat as Fay’s brassiered chest when the crowd’s, you know, just not that into him (her). Fay’s personal brand of prissiness is simply too pushy for the laid-back louts at the Finch. And forget Hamilton’s, with its frat-boy swagger and stunted coming-of-age comings and goings. Too risky.

There are dedicated gay clubs in town. Some of them even have stages and not just bar counters which they convert into fashion runways at the drop of a garter. By his own admission, Fairy Fay has become delicata non grata at the joints which are most appropriate for his performances. He tells one version of the fall-out, they tell another, and it’s not ours to judge whether the truth is here or there, just that Fay cannot play there.

There is no doubt that he is a demanding, if diminutive, person. But Fay’s also a fine and fierce performer. Unlike a lot of local acts we could name, Fay rehearses a lot. Fay shines before a large and appreciative crowd, but gets surly when forced to appeal to those who don’t want him there. Think we’re being hard on him? In his own words: “I do a very specific thing for a specific type of person. I don’t need to do it for anyone else for the simple reason that it won’t get them off.”

We think he was talking about his music there.

Other sounds going around: Kinflicks opens the Bastard Out of Carolina tour stop at Dollaire’s Tuesday… Darkness falls, as usual, for High School Rock Nite at Hamilton’s Wednesday, with Regeneration, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall and Rubyfruit Jungle… Fried Green Tomatoes reunion Thursday afternoon where one of the old folkies works in the kitchen, at the Whistle Stop Café downtown near the train tracks. Come by 4 p.m. and get free fries, we’re told… Curious Wine and Boys on the Rock Thursday at Hamilton’s, a rare double-bill of original bands at the covers-conscious club… Dream Boy, Dancer from the Dance and Stone Butch Blues mixed-style marathon at the devil-may-care Bullfinch Saturday. Last time Dream Boy played there, he enlisted the Three Junes as back-up singers for his doo-wop plaint “Halfway Home,” but we’re pretty sure the sisters won’t be around this time since they have a gig same night at the Family, Country & Woods restaurant out in Francoeur… Front Runner and Sacred Lips of the Bronx tough-guy show at Hamilton’s Friday… and that’s more than enough scene love for now. Except we really do need to find Fairy Fay a place to play.

Patti LuPone— A Memoir. By Patti Lupone with Digby Diehl. Crown Archetype, 2010. 324 pages, with index. $25.99.

I’ve been doing Theater Books of the Week for a month now and I haven’t gotten to Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat yet? Thought it’d be nice to offer up Patti LuPone’s new autobiography first. In the same way that theater junkies have waited a lifetime for a book by Sondheim, LuPone waited her whole career for a shot at performing some of the key female roles in the Sondheim canon. She got her wish like crazy—multiple Sweeney Todds and Gypsys since the turn of the 21^st century—each on Broadway, but also for Chicago Ravinia festival, where she’s also gotten to do Anyone Can Whistle, Passion and Sunday in the Park With George.

I remember seeing LuPone perform at the grand reopening of the Garde Arts Center  in the late 1990s. This was an era when Frank Sinatra was called upon to be the first concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville and Liza Minnelli christened the new year-round indoor Oakdale Theater in Wallingford. The Garde was smaller and scrappier than the other swellegant venues of that time, and I thought LuPone was an ideal booking for the Garde’s rebirth. She had the same spunkiness and diverse up-down-up background as the Garde, and she dressed up real nice. She can go from snappy to slinky within the space of a single song.

…or a single chapter, as this book shows. It’s not a detailed and deep tome by any means (hence the “memoir” appellation rather than the more austere “autobiography”). But it’s plenty passionate and eager to explain the plentiful exasperations of LuPone’s long career. Since her own outspokenness has, over the years, helped frame what we think we know about her, this is a wonderful longform opportunity for her to explain and defend herself.

Some of the defensiveness seems eminently justified. After Evita made her a Broadway, she found it hard to re-establish herself as a dramatic stage actress, and you feel for this woman who’d done scads of Mamet and serious regional theater no longer being welcomed in that realm. Meanwhile, Evita wasn’t exactly pro forma Broadway—politically minded, supremely difficult to sing, rather sparse compared to the coming wave of high-tech  musical/lightshows. LuPone was a woman without a country. When she found herself on a hit TV series, Life Goes On, the thrill was muted because she’s felt a lack of chemistry with her on-screen husband from the very first audition.

On the other hand, LuPone is prone to protest too much, and you really start wanting to hear someone else’s side. The famous tale of her getting hired to be Norma Desmond in the London world premiere of Sunset Boulevard, then denied the chance (even though it was guaranteed in her contract) to open the Broadway production as well, is exactingly related by LuPone, yet considering how stringent she is with contracts and agreements throughout her life, it’s hard to fathom all the “I was never told…” aspects of her story. There are numerous bits in the book where she glides over what was probably considered abhorrent behavior at the time—forgetting to give castmates opening-night gifts, for instance—with weak excuses about her frame of mind. You get the sense that she wants to counter every accusation ever made against her, without giving readers a full sense of what the fuss was about in the first place. Co-author Digby Diehl, the L.A. arts journalist who also worked on the autobios of Esther Williams and Natalie Cole, is genius at arranging a text which really feels like it came straight out of LuPone’s mouth, but he can’t fill in the gaps if she won’t.

In any case, this is an excellent time for LuPone to be telling her story. The arc of the book is that she was always a precocious performer, producing musicals in parking lots as a kid, appearing on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour (the famed TV competition which she reveals was rigged), and getting into Juillard with an audition she herself describes as “flippant.” The struggles which follow are not so much with fame as with control over which roles she wants to be most identified with and how much input she has into how to play them. The memoir culminates cleanly and naturally with her Broadway success as Mama Rose in Gypsy—an opportunity which involved not only having to resolve a decades-long stand-off between her and the show’s director and original bookwriter Arthur Laurents, but having to re-interest Broadway audiences in Gypsy just a few years after Sam Mendes had directed his own maverick production with Bernadette Peters.

This Gypsy highpoint frames LuPone’s narrative. Here’s the book’s first couple of lines:

I’ve opened Gypsy four times. The first time, I played Louise (aka Gypsy) in the Patio production of the musical. I was fifteen years old.

That circularity is augmented by another recent expression of her daring and devilishness—when she played tuba as Mrs. Lovett in John Doyle’s brash Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd. The tuba was her childhood instrument of choice. Despite its self-serving lapses, this memoir is all the more resonant for how it connects Patti LuPone’s childhood dreams with her adult ones. Also for how it eclipses all her presumed prima donna pettiness with her desire for highly principled performances.

Tale of the tape

So Millie of the Model Marvels had a crush on Herve of the Pothunters.

We’re not blowing her cool for her by reporting it here; she’s written a song about it already, and scrawled a hear and initials on a well distributed flyer for this Wednesday’s TMM show at the Finch. (Due to some deft schmoozing of the Bullfinch management, the band is being allowed to break the midweek acoustic barrier and set up “the larger amps.”)

So amorous, amiable Millie made a mix tape and gave it to her bandmate Michael, who’s a good friend of her heartthrob Herve’s roommate Joe Derlesh. (they were in The Liaisons together). Joe asked Millie who was on the disc, then dug it so much he dubbed and kept a copy for himself. He happened to have it on—dancing to it, even, he says—when Anton of Ancient Regine stopped by his place, overheard a few tracks in a row and asked what the cool radio station was. A couple exchanges later, Millie’s mix actually was being broadcast on radio—our local hipster college station RGC 82, of course, where Friday “Hear and There” show host “Spawn” Smith (“manager” of the Dangeroos) attempted to credit the curator of the customized cuddle-inducing set but got it all wrong. Joe and Anton were handing out copies to whoever asked.

At this point, Millie reckons, hundreds of people have heard her private love letter, and dozens own copies of it.

But, as all the brokenhearted (not the band) demand to know, did the mix ever get to the two darling ears it was intended for?

We made a somewhat embarrassing phone call and can authoritatively report that yes, it did—but in an anticlimactic fashion. The ever-gracious Herve (heck, we have a crush on him too—who wouldn’t?) is in possession of the original edition of Millie’s munificent mix. But he heard it first on Spawn’s radio show, which mentioned someone else (who is the only embarrassed by this tale, and whose name we won’t mention even though it’s common knowledge and was broadcast for ten miles or more on a 100-watt radio station) as the intended recipient.

For the principal players in it, this adventure made for lots of laughs, and several rounds of drinks, at the Bullfinch last week. One of the lighthearted responses to the episode was that Millie and Herve say they’ll do acoustic covers of every song on the mix, maybe a month from now at one of those Wednesday happy hours like Millie’s playing this week. That’s where she’ll be debuting that song we mentioned at the outset of this column.

It’s called “Mitts on My Mix.”

Sharing the love elsewhere in scenesville:

Congratulations to the Little Browns. They are officially the one millionth band to jokingly self-title their debut album Self-Titled. Need ideas for the next one? Some riotous pun on Two/Too, perhaps. Release party Thursday at Hamilton’s…

We’ve been asked to inform you that the Doo Wop spectacular at Dollaire’s, put together by no other than Mr. Macmillan of ‘60s local harmony hotshots The New Americans, is exceptional in that all the bands include at least one original member. So at least one of the voices you hear in The Bantams, The Del Reys, The Groves, The Harlequins or The Hyperions will be exactly the same ones as on those scratchy old records you never listen to anymore.

Seriously, doo wop is too good an art form for Dollaire’s. The Pantheons’ “Center Street” put this town on the map. There a fervent international fan base of doo-wop devotees who care deeply, with the acuteness of a trainspotter or a baseball statistician, about the line-ups of these legendary groups. Many acts of the doo wop era lost (or never held) the rights to their names, and when the original artists did pesky things like ask to be paidl, they were erased from the groups they founded by evil managers and producers. Mr. Mac, whose own band was considered neo-doo wop back in the day, causing some bad blood with the traditionalists, says he’s always been a fan of the old school. The Dollaire’s bill proo-woo-woo-wooves it…

I did an interview with Ronnie Spector which should be running in next week’s New Haven Advocate. She’s been doing annual Christmas Day concerts at Mohegan Sun casino for years now, and has just released a 5-song EP, Ronnie Spector’s Best Christmas Ever—her first significant Christmas recordings since The Ronettes appeared on Ronnie’s then-husband’s classic album A Christmas Gift for You.

In her honor, then, here are 20 other R&B/Soul Christmas tunes which have been high on the Arnott household holiday playlist this season:

1. “I Wish You a Merry Christmas,” Big Dee Irwin and Little Eva:

“Big Dee, did anyone ever tell you you were big, strong, handsome kind hearted… and fat?!”

“Huh?!”

2. “Santa Claus is a Black Man,” AKIM and the Teddy Vann Production Company:

“He looked a lot like you. He was handsome…”

“I can dig it.”

“He was black.”

“Right on.”

“He had an Afro, he was really out of sight. Now I’m going to tell everybody that I saw Santa.”

3. “Fat Daddy,” Fat Daddy:

“I’m Fat Daddy. I’m Santa Claus.”

4. “Hurray for Santa Claus,” The Fleshtones:

“We spell it S-A-N-T-A C-L-A-U-S!”

5. “Lil’ Bass Boi,” B-Fast and G-Slow (of the 69 Boyz):

“One time for the boyz in the hole, parumpumpumpum…”

6. “Peaceful Christmas,” Danny Boy

“Bells don’t jingle no more. White snow don’t fall in the ghetto.”

7. “Jingle Bells,” Booker T & the MGs.

8. “Purple Snowflakes,” Marvin Gaye:

“They seem to say that our love is here to stay. We’ll be cosy and warm until the flowers bloom.”

9. “Christmas Celebration,” B.B. King:

“Let Christmas bring you happiness. Well, I want you to have a good time like we did on all the rest.”

10. “Feliz Navidad,” El Vez.

11. “Run Rudolph Run,” The Archies.

12. “Oh Holy Night,” The Temptations.

13. “Winter Wonderland,” The Funk Brothers.

14. “Xmas Twist,” Twistin’ Kings.

15. “The Christmas Song,” Etta James.

16. “Santa Baby,” Faith Evans.

17. “Christmas Time is Here,” Dianne Reeves.

18. “(Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without the One You Love,” The Ebonys.

19. “Soul Santa,” Brook Benton:

“Wouldn’t it be so revealing if Santa had black kinky hair?”

20. “Hang Up Your Stocking,” The Chipmunks.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE: Have to acknowledge some extraordinary Christmas compilation compilers here. Wish I could be cool enough to have discovered on old 45s or urban radio…

Numbers 1, 2 & 3 are all from A John Waters Christmas, which is right up there with his Hairspray and Cry Baby soundtracks in the themed comp hall of fame. (It also features Tiny Tim, The Coctails and the anti-consumerist warcry “Here Comes Fatty Claus” by Rudolph and Gang.)

#4: From The Fleshtones’ Stocking Stuffer, probably the most recent disk on this list.

#5: From Quad City All-Star Christmas.

#6: From Christmas on Death Row.

#7: From the Rhino promo gift Music to Stuff Any Stocking—Christmas Sampler 1996.

#8 and #9: From Blue Christmas, free CD with MOJO Magazine’s January 2005 issue. (MOJO has another Christmas CD in its current issue.)

#10: From Elton John’s Christmas Party, a comp prepared for Starbucks’ Hear Music label.

#11: From The Archies’ Christmas Album featuring Betty & Veronica.

#12: Bonus “previously unreleased” track on The Best of The Temptations Christmas CD.

#13 & #14: From A Motown Christmas Volume 2.

#15: From Etta James, 12 Songs of Christmas.

#16 & 17: From Slow Jams for Christmas (Capitol Records, 2007).

#18 and #19: From Slow Jams Christmas Volume 2 (unrelated to the above; this one’s on The Right Stuff, label, from 1997).

#20: From Christmas With The Chipmunks—Alvin, Simon & Theodore with David Seville. Always thought it was nice of this album to spell out all the participants’ names in the title. The Supremes never experienced that sort of democracy.

Scanning the Bullfinch Bar & Grill midweek, like that ancient kids’ TV show our parents told us about where a woman held a mirror and called roll…

Smallest first. There’s little Millie. Her cute crushes on scenesters are legendary. So is what she does for the scene as a promoter, radio DJ, zine editor, band leader and foremost fan. Her heart’s really in this. Look, she’s glowing.

Next, the oldest: Eustace, aka Useless (a self-deprecation he himself coined for one of his albums), aka Yoost, a guy who had records out when records were records, when labels were labels, when the drinking age was three years lower. Important because he not only continues to make money off of music, he still goes out to see other people make it.

There’s Sonny Blitt of the blats. Bad business decisions (and weak bass playing) have shaken a good band—and we’re talking stuff that would be nickel and dime in another industry but can cause chaos and starvation in thus one. (Did we just call this scene an industry? Shoot us)

Now we spot three former bandmates, in separate corners of the room, eying each other warily. All have new acts debuting as soon add they can find drummers. Amusing, since two of these folks used to be drummers.

There’s W.G. Harvest, the acoustic folksinger. He’ll tell people he’s here to scout talent for his Open Mic, but he’s really hanging around waiting for a bus, like he does every Wednesday night after choir practice at his church.

Look, there’s an entire band sitting together. That’s a rarer phenomenon than you think. For a lot of locals, rehearsing is all the socializing they need.

Us, we’re just watching. Any minute now, an awkward moment or a fight will break out.

Stay tuned. Off each other.

Brady Brady Brady—The Complete Story of The Brady Bunch as Told by the Father/Son Team Who Really Know

By Sherwood Schwartz and Lloyd Schwartz. Foreword by Monty Hall (Seriously. Monty Hall. Like that’s going to sell book in 2010.) Running Press, 2010. $24.95.

Sherwood Schwartz, creator of The Brady Bunch and hands-on producer of nearly all its manifestations save for the Variety Hour series and the Very Brady Sequel feature film, credits his wife with coming up with the title of this book.

Well, the title Here’s the Story was already taken. So was Growing Up Brady, The Brady Bunch Book, The Brady Bunch Files, Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, Beyond the Brady Bunch, The Brady Bunch Guide to Life, Life Lessons from the Bradys, Bradymania!, Bradypalooza, Love to Love You Bradys and (boooring) The Brady Bunch.

The best titles are all taken, which may be why this book conserves its one by having two separate books by two separate authors under the same Brady Brady Brady cover. The more thorough one, by Lloyd J. Schwartz comes second. The first one, by his dad Sherwood, comes first and is superficial and grudge-filled; it reads like a long introduction to Lloyd’s.

Any revelations? Hardly, after Barry “Johnny Bravo” Williams’ book, which came out over a decade ago and has since earned an “updated special edition.” There are a lot of intriguing tangents, like how Lloyd’s rebellious phase as a 1960s student liberal lasted a nanosecond before he joined the family business and rose in the ranks from dialogue coach to associate producer to producer. It’s clear that both father and son feel they have to defend charges of nepotism, and the way they mention awards and ratings shows how thin-skinned they are about those who would dismiss or diss the Bradys.

Sherwood Schwartz goes so far as to say that the reason The Brady Bunch and his earlier hit series Gilligan’s Island worked so well is because they were “socially significant.” He makes Gilligan’s Island sound like Sartre’s No Exit and the Bradys like a precursor to August: Osage County. Sherwood Schwartz is very big on social significance. He tells a story about an idea he had (which he does not expand upon) that would have saved and redeemed a show by other producers, a show that was sadly axed before its full potential could be realized. That sadly aborted program? Me and the Chimp.

All this second-guessing, reprioritizing, hindsight and nostalgia begs the question: Why was this book not called Much More Than a Hunch?

Got assigned a magazine story on a fading pop starlet who’s made some interesting career choices of late. Don’t want to poison the well by giving away details, but the only reason this mag wanted to cover her was because she’d hooked up with a hot indie producer and an up-and-coming college band, eschewing the flourish and drama of her teen years—which were, like, last Tuesday.

Got an earful, more than the mag could handle, so we’re sharing it below the radar with you. The local connection is that the last time this young woman graced our fair city with her presence it was at the Ampitheater, on one of those day-long AM rock showcases. If she ever tours through here again, the most appropriate venue may well be the Bullfinch.

Even before our interview properly began, she was lambasting the very idea of it. “You’re only talking to me because you can.” Which means? “A rag like this couldn’t have gotten within a mile of me when my first album blew up.”

We figured that if she was taking it, we probably had license to antagonize too, so suggested that the very high level of fame she achieved so quickly might well have made her unattractive to the alternative press, which prefers to build up its own pantheon.

“What you guys don’t understand,” she railed, “is that I was always interesting to you. I had all the fans. I had the radio fans, and I always had that pocket of fans at college radio. All us pop stars, we have those; deep-thinkers who defend us like we’re artists. They know the names of our producers and the guys who play on our songs, and the songwriters we’re working with, even when we don’t put it in the liner notes. Seriously. There’s always that fringe, and you guys could always have done an article and pleased that fringe.”

A few more statements along these lines, then Ms Pop of Last Week suddenly appeared to break down. We’d be more sympathetic if she weren’t still being so hostile. “Now these shitty magazines are all I’ve got, til I’m  back on radio,” she cried. “You think my fans READ? My fans DANCE!”

The chat kind of danced downhill from there, She wasn’t too articulate about how she’d met her new collaborators (“My manager said it was good idea,” though it appears he’s not her manager anymore) or how she got her ideas or (admittedly, our ultimate last-ditch question) how that little puppy dog of hers is doing.

Some folks, we wager, can only handle power when it’s remote. This is not about getting burned by the sun—we have far better examples of that. This is about getting skinned knees at ground level.

Hope you feel better and the little people flock back, darling. We’d still rather hear your shitty pop  while riding mall escalators than just about anybody else’s.

Duly noted: The Daily Ink says their Friday gig with The Cagles will feature an interband jam or two. Go Comics rounds out the Bullfinch bill. … You don’t think you’ve heard of Black Jack and the Dent Teens but it’s really just the Hubba Bubbles in disguise, gigging with a new singer next Tuesday at Hamilton’s back room while Chu is at a a family reunion in Ohio. …

(Forgot to do one of these items last week, so consider this a twofer.)

I love scripts. At my acting debut, at the age of 3 in a production of The Miracle Worker at the Ledges Playhouse in Grand Ledge, Michigan, I had no lines yet I demanded a script. My father mollified me by scrawling on a single piece of paper “Christopher runs onstage. Christopher stands onstage. Christopher runs offstage.”

Forty-seven years later I am still an avid consumer of scripts. I

On a trip to England in the late 1990s, I attended five separate Royal Shakespeare Company productions in a single week. A couple of these were new works, and I was  impressed, pleased beyond measure, when my press packet included a paperback copy of the play I was about to see. These weren’t photocopies but edited, published editions.

In the U.S., it took years of browbeating theaters until they realized I was serious about wanting copies of new works. Burned by too many insufficient summaries and misleading interviews, I began to insist that I wouldn’t write preview articles of new plays unless I had access to the scripts.

I’ve heard all the caveats and hesitations, and understand them—up to a point. Scripts only give you one dimension of what a full production will reveal. A reader’s imagination can lead to unfair expectations when the reader becomes a viewer of someone else’s interpretation. Scripts are subject to immense changes. They can be guides and should not be taken as the ultimate documentation of the theater process.

Yes, but they help much more than they hinder—for critics and arts writers as much as for actors and directors. Basically, I d0n’t like being ignorant, and it just makes good journalistic sense to make sure you have access to a text version of what you’re writing about, in the same way that political reporters have access to texts of speeches.

One of the best reasons to collect scripts as I do is that a lot of new plays are scuttled by hands other than the author’s. Or they are too expensive to produce as written. Or they have fleeting flaws which make them unproduceable yet otherwise enjoyable to read.

When the Yale Drama Series was created a few years ago (with monies from the David Charles Horn Foundation), its greatness was not just that the prize would be judged by some of the world’s greatest living playwrights. Nor was the prize of a reading in a Yale theater performed by professional actors the main excitement. To me, the wonder of the award is that the Yale School of Drama conspired with the Yale University Press to get the winning plays published.

I have two of these published scripts on my desk as I write this: The 2008 winner, Grenadine by Neil Wechsler; and the 2009 one, Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. Somehow I still haven’t picked up the published version of the inaugural winner in the series, John Austin Connelly’s The Boys of Siam (though I saw the reading). The 2010 winner, which had its reading a few months ago, is still months away from the release of its print edition. I’d prefer the immediacy with which new scripts are published in England, but you can’t have everything.

Both Grenadine and Lidless have introductions by the judges who picked them out of hundreds of submissions. Both judges—no less than Edward Albee (who did the honors for the prize’s first two years) and David Hare (who’s did the next two) take time to explain the selection process, which for both of them involved appointed surrogate readers to sift through the mountain of submission and winnow it down to a few dozen. Both Albee and Hare sought to use the Drama Series to further the art of playwriting rather than merely validate traditional forms. Both chose works notable for their contemporary resonance, topicality and unorthodox characters.

The judge for the 2011 edition (for which the submission deadline was back in August) will be John Guare, so we can assume similarly high and self-conscious standards.

I’m not going to review the plays here. I saw the live Yale reading of Lidless, which concerns Guatanamo Bay tortures, PTSD and family strife, and will withhold judgement until I’ve seen a full production. (The play’s had several since it won the Drama Series crown—at the University of Texas at Austin, at the HighTide Festival in Suffolk, England, and at the Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.) I missed the reading of Grenadine, a great regret since it involves four main characters with the other 26 being played by two performers.

My admiration here is not (yet) for the plays, which will hopefully grow in stature. It’s for the exercise of choosing, reading aloud and especially publishing the plays for a general audience. It’s for the opportunity to keep these beautiful volumes with their colorful covers on my bookshelves while so many cool yet unwieldy photocopied scripts I’ve been given have to settle for an unsorted stack in the basement. It’s for the ruminations of Albee and Hare on what makes a good new play. It’s for the valuable cross-fertilization of Yale School of Drama and Yale Press in discovering new writers and proclaiming what might be breakthrough works. It’s for fond memories of theatergoing in Europe, where they’ve long been better at this (though wait and see what happens when the austerity cuts kick in). And it’s for two fields considered on their deathbeds—playwrighting and print publishing—banding together and doubling their strength and influence.

Smallest stage ever!

Last night the finch had some kind of college sorority fundraiser. Yes, there are still college sororities, though apparently shone of them haven’t been able to hold onto their sorority houses so they have to hold their suave fundraising functions at places like the Bullfinch.

Yet they’re still thinking old school, and wide open ballroom spaces. The party, to which we were not invited but stumbled upon when an “interview” in the Bullfinch basement ran a few drinks overlong, featured:

• A table of volunteers filling out nametags.

• Three tables filled with items for a silent auction.

• A couple tables reserved for wealthy alumnae in case any happened to show up.

• A merch table for those who read Greek (or at least three particular letters of Greek).

How many tables does the Bullfinch have, anyway? Seems like more when you’re crashing into a couple, but the correct answer is seven. So this shindig was standing room only from the get-go.

Oh, and did we mention the R&B band? Well, that’ s what the club’s corner stage is supposed to for, though it wasn’t really built for swinging septets. Yep, seven on a stage where folk duos often awkwardly elbow each other.

And then there was the matter of the podium. The lovely ladies of Gumma Felta Cramma or whatever (it’s all Greek to us) had speeches to make, and needed the speechmakers to be seen. (They get their hair done specially for these things, you know). S0 they stuck their pedestal right in front of the band, which we can only hope was getting added combat pay for the number of jabbing elbows it had to dodge (on top of continually ducking each other’s instruments).

A real stateroom scene, to be sure. And unlikely to be repeated. Enough alumni are already complaining that the university will be designating a banquet hall on campus for future gatherings, and perhaps building a whole new building if the complaints turn into cash contributions.

Pity. Those sisters really showed the Finch that all those shoulder-to-shoulder shows of years past were actually roomy. New boundaries, people—fill it up!

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Tonight at the Bullfinch: The Chetniks and The Fall of the City … Big local Europop/punk festival of sorts at Campbell’s Saturday from 4-8 p.m., clearing out before the dance party: The Bishop, The Trial, Cosette, The Grave and The Barricade. It’s a CD release for The Bishop’s Between Americans, which is getting national distro on the Gulf Screen label …

I’m a walker, which means I have something major in common with Superman. It’s been rainy or snowy or cold these days, but I still prefer walking to riding when I need to be at, say, my kids’ school four miles away, or need to clear my head before or after a show at the Long Wharf Theater, or just need to return library books or buy milk.

Often I can take literature along. Audiobooks on the iPod (odyssey stories work well—Homer himself, or Jim Harrison’s The English Major, or Stephen King’s Cell), paperbacks or magazines I can nimbly peruse on the quieter sidewalks…

All the sidewalks tend to be quiet. Pedestrianism has been out of fashion for decades. Yet some of the most popular writers and thinkers of the 20th century were voracious walkers: Dickens, Thoreau, silent filmmakers D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and, ironically enough, Henry Ford.

Now add Superman. I’ve been staying home and putting my feet up so I can follow the coverage of the Man of Steel’s year-long constitutional alongside browses through Aaron Sussman & Ruth Goode’s 400-page 1967 monument to foot-movement The Magic of Walking (Simon & Schuster, and available here in New Haven at the Institute Library on Chapel Street—once I walk up those stairs and return it, that is.)

The book is a litany of leg-stretching insights, including this one from Robert Louis Stevenson:

In the course of a day’s walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhiliration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A man doesn not make so many articles towards the end, not does he laugh aloud; but the purelyu animal pleasures, the sense of physical well-being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still content.

Superman’s decision to take a year off from interplanetary battle and other supersonic tasks and simply stroll across his adopted USA homeland has been met with confusion, derision and incredulity. Yet this is just a slight extension of the sort of restraint Superman has offered to America all along. He could do everything he does at super speed, all the time. He has no real need to slow down to the point where he can interact with humans, let alone cobblestones. Yet he’s always chosen to, explaining his actions and debating morality when he could easily frame his exploits as forces of nature or inexplicable miracles without need for discussion at all. He could work in mysterious ways, yet he walks among us.

Amazing, considering that he’s an extraterrestrial who is literally tireless, Superman has developed an innate understanding of the human need for contemplation, downtime and “getting away from it all.” It’s long been rumored that he has a “secret identity” through which he communes with mortals on our own terms. Another longstanding rumor concerns his Fortress of Solitude, a sort of vacation home for harried superhumans.

Whether or not it’s true that Superman disguises himself as a “regular” person (but what happens when he shakes hands?), or takes the occasional weekend to recharge (though what exactly in his literally indefatigable body or spirit he needs  recharging is beyond our understanding) doesn’t matter as much as the existence of the rumors themselves. Why on Earth would we expect someone from not on Earth to take an interest in commonplace activities like work, leisure activities or long-distance walking?

Yet Superman plays readily into these imaginings. He walks. He talks. He flies mostly out of convenience, not to distance himself from real-world relationships. A real stand-up guy. His current wanderings (chronicled monthly in the pages of the graphic magazine bearing his name, starting with issue #701 and expected to continue at least through #712) evoke some of the greatest walkers of all time: Johnny Appleseed, Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, Art Garfunkel and the countless folks who’ve trod countless miles for charitable causes. Superman’s walk is equally reflective, rejuvenating, resonant. Yet his is profoundly at odds with those other willing walkers because he’s not gaining fame or fundraising ability or even that much greater a consciousness of his surroundings through his journey. He’s exercising restraint with this exercising. He’s even predetermined that he’ll need a year to get the most out of it.

If folks didn’t grasp the power of walking before, that Stevensonian contentment outlined above, will this super example help or hinder?