Keep on Running

This is a big week in my running program. In the first four weeks of the Couch to 5K program, the pattern is to mix periods of jogging and walking, with the jogging periods increasing. Last week I ran the most I have so far, 5 minutes at a time, in a 3/5/3/5 pattern. This week it's:
5/5/5
8/8
20
The most I've ever run is 1.6 miles, during gym class in high school, and that was only a few times. Weekly mile runs were more common. Twenty minutes is about two miles, so this will be the longest I've jogged in my life.

Next week it will be a similar pattern, but ending at twenty-five minutes. After that, it cranks up a few minutes a week until I hit 30 minutes.

I think I've seen one benefit already: I was at the doctor last week, and found that my blood pressure was lower than it has been in quite a while.

Visiting the Temple

It's not often that I get to scratch an item off my list of "things to do before I die", but I got to do that today.

I visited a Mormon temple.

For those of you not familiar with the LDS faith, a temple is where Mormons perform certain secret religious rituals. Patterned after the ancient Jewish temples, Mormon temples allow access only to members of the church is good standing. But for a month or so after a temple finished but before a temple is dedicated, it is open to the general public.

The temple in question is the Sacramento Temple, in the city of Rancho Cordova, just outside of Sacramento off of US-50. Since I'm not nor ever will be a Mormon, visiting a temple's open house is the only way I'll ever see the inside of one. And since few temples are built (the last one to be built in Northern California was dedicated in 1965), I figured this was my only chance.

Why did I want ot visit a temple? I find the LDS faith interesting from a philosophical point of view. Also, I was raised in a form of Christianity that is light on ritual and has no secret stuff. I find intriguing any variant of Christianity that has lots of ritual and/or secret stuff (sort of the "forbidden knowledge" effect, I guess).

Anyway, I got in my car at about 11:15 for the two hour, fifteen minute drive to Rancho Cordova.


I expected the trip to take just under two hours, but I ran into several traffic jams. I got to the temple at 1:30, fifteen minutes before my tour started.



For some reason, the Mormon church tends to get a lot of grief from mainline Christians. There were a couple of protesters in front of the temple.



Before the tour people gathered in a visitor's center. We watched a short video that described the importance temples play in the Mormon faith. Then we walked to the front of the temple, put booties on our feet to keep dirt out of the new building, and entered the temple itself. We visited various rooms:

• A room where Mormons do proxy baptisms for their dead, non-Mormon ancestors.
  
• A movie theatre. A film that dramatizes various portions of Mormon beliefs is used as part of a temple ritual. The particulars of this ritual is very secret, however, so we were in the odd position of standing in a theatre that the guide never told us was a theatre.
  
• An "endowment" room.
  
• A "sealing" room.
  
• The Celestial Room. This is the holiest room in an LDS temple, and we were asked not to speak while inside it. It was the largest room, and sported a very large lead crystal chandelier.
  

Other than the theatre, which featured a mural of natural California landscape on three walls, the general decor was white and gold, with fancy overstuffed chairs, fine wood tables, and vases of flowers. The idea, apparently, is to model the rooms of the temple (especially the Celestial Room) so as to remind the believer of heaven. It was obviously a very holy place to our tour guide.

It was not to me.

I've been trying to figure out why all day, and I think I've worked it out (and no, it's not because I'm a jaded homo). For me, in order for a place to feel holy, it needs to be challenging in some way. Not easy to figure out. Chartes Cathedral, for example, is like this: old and imposing, a place of refuge but nevertheless bigger than you. What I saw at the Sacramento Temple felt more designed to comfort than to challenge. It felt to me like a very fancy version of my late grandparents' house.

The temple reminds one of heaven, but Chartres reminds one of God. Thinking about heaven is easy and comforting. Thinking about God is difficult and can even be frightening.

I prefer the difficult path.

After the Celestial Room, we retired to the visitors center for cookies and lemonade. After that, I headed to my car, got my camera (no cameras were allowed in the temple itself), and shot some pictures of the temple.

Pulling the Thread

This weekend I was pretty close to finishing another draft of Swimming the River. There was one comment I had gotten from CW, my playwriting instructor, that I didn't understand, so I emailed her. She clarified her comment, and I decided to try to incorporate it.

This was the writing equivalent of pulling on a loose thread.

In order to incorporate her comment, I need to strengthen the relationship between two of my characters. This led me to a great idea that will not only help with with CW's idea, but will also strengthen the story as a whole: the male protagonist will propose to his girlfriend on stage.

But in order for this to work, the proposal needs to come early in the play. But that means it will change the tone of the rest of the story. The problem is that the next twenty pages or so contain a series of events that are crucial to the rest of the play, but which are based on two premises that will no longer be true:

1. Nothing important has happened in the play, yet.
2. My protagonists' relationship is on the rocks.

Having pulled on the thread of their relationship, I need to figure how to keep the rest of the play from coming undone. I don't think working around #2 will be a problem, but #1 might be.

In order to keep the audience's interest, a playwright needs to place events in the story so that events become bigger with time. A marriage proposal is pretty big, and I'm concerned that the subsequent twenty pages will seem unimportant by comparision.

At the moment, I'm letting the play sit in the back of my head. I've got three rehearsals this week, plus I had gay volleyball last night and dinner with my parents on Friday. So it will be the weekend at least before I get a chance to work on this agian.

Driving Up Interstate

I was listening to the fourth episode of the Todd and Pony Show a couple of weeks ago when I heard Hot Toddy say something like "driving up interstate".

Now, as many Californians know, one of the two cultural differences between Northern and Southern California is that here in the Bay Area we say "I'm driving down 101" or "Take 280 to..." to refer to driving on highways. Whereas in L.A and points south, people put a the in front of the highway number: "I'm driving down the 101" or "Take the 405 to...".

So when Hot said he was "driving up interstate", rather than "driving up the interstate", I left a comment wondering if this was some Portland-specific way of referring to I-5, or just a Todd thing.

On the next show Pony informed us listeners that neither is true. There is an Interstate Avenue that runs parallel to I-5 for a few miles in Portland.

"How cute", I thought. "They named a surface street after I-5."

Then I looked at the map more closely.

Now the thing to keep in mind is that I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a long way away from any state border (a point emphasized in fourth-grade social studies classes). The nearest border is Nevada, four hours by car over 8000-foot high, blizzard-prone mountains. Or you can take a more southern route. Through Death Valley. Getting to Oregon involves hours of driving through remote forests. Getting to Arizona involves hours of driving through deserts (watch out for the Mexican migrants dying of thirst by the side of the road!).

In short, I was raised to believe that getting to another state by anything other than airplane is an obviously dangerous proposition. At best, it will be a long, arduous journey. At worst, it might end in cannibalism.

So when I go out of state I fly. The concept of hopping in my car, driving five minutes and ending up in another state is so foreign that the first time I visited South Lake Tahoe, I spent fifteen minutes walking back and forth across the state line with my GPS (until a security guard came out of a nearby casino and kicked me out of Nevada).

Portland, I discovered, sits on the Oregon/Washington border. Interstate Avenue takes you to Interstate Bridge, which is not named after I-5, but, in fact, takes you to another state. Immediately!

Amazing.

Whenever I get around to visiting Portland, be assured that I will bring my GPS.

Good Lord!

Or, for my international readers:

The A/C, which I run maybe 15 days out of the year, has been running continuously since 10:00 this morning.

Todd & Pony Show

For the last month, I've been listening to The Todd & Pony Show, the podcast by Hot Toddy's Toaster Oven and Ugly Pony. These guys have a great rapport, and it's a lot of fun listening to them banter. Go check them out!

The "Sacred" Text

One of the things actors are taught is that the text of a stage play is sacred. Actors are free to ignore stage directions (and often do), but neither the actors nor the director may change the spoken text of the play.

This is the ideal, of course. At the non-union level, where I work, actors often don't achieve the word-for-word accuracy I would expect at, say, a professional repertory house. But they're supposed to try.

And having the playwright there is one hell of a motivation to get it right.

Tuesday night was the first "off-book" rehearsal for Community Property, meaning actors didn't have the script in their hands. And, well, my actors were everywhere. Adding lines, deleting lines, changing lines. And by the looks of things, they were feeling really bad about having this happen in front of me.

Of course, this is exactly what I would expect at this point. And it was so silly that I couldn't help but laugh through the entire rehearsal.

One of the things I was taught by my playwriting instructor was to tell my actors that they're doing a good job. Actors cannot tell if they're doing well or not, so a reassuring word from the playwright about a performance goes a long way. So at the end of the evening I made sure to tell them that I was really happy with how rehearsals are going. I reminded them that I am an actor as well and that I understood where they were in the rehearsal process.

They looked visibly relieved.

Run, Dave, Run!

Recently I decided that my exercise regimen needed a change. So I started the Couch to 5K running program. I've never been much of a runner; I've had knee trouble for most of my life and running has never worked for me. But I found this program that gently, over the course of two months, gets one to the point where one can run 3 miles (5K). So I'm giving it a try.

And it's working! I just started the third week, and I've discovered that my knees are fine as long as I follow a few rules:
+ Include my hamstrings in my pre-run stretch
+ Wear a support on my right knee
+ Don't rollerblade within 24 hours of running.
+ Stretch my back out on a regular basis.

The last one is interesting. My back gets stiff and prone to injury if I don't stretch it on a regular basis. But I've found that stretching my back will tend to reduce stiffness in my knees. I think this is because everything is interconnected: a tight back pulls on the glutes, which pull on the hamstrings, which pull on the knees. Stretch the back (and hamstrings), and the knees loosen up as well.

If I stick with a program I will be jogging three miles three times a week by the time I go to Southern Decadence. Then, of course, I get the experience of jogging three miles in New Orleans. In August.

I'm Beginning To Dread July 15

One year ago this evening, Friday, July 15, 2005, I decided to go up to the Castro. I parked on Noe street, visited the Badlands and Midnight Sun and ended up running into a friend with whom I chatted for the rest of the evening. About 12:30 or so it's time to go. My friend is a little tipsy, so I offer him a ride home. He agrees, and we hop into my car and take off. I got about a block before I realized something was wrong.

It turns out that my front two tires had been slashed.

Fortunately, I have AAA. Unfortunately, the level of service I had provided free towing for only a few miles (my home in Mountain View is about 30 miles from the Castro). So they towed my car to Ted & Al's Service on Fell St., and my friend let me crash at his place.

The next morning, I got a call from the shop with the estimate for new tires. It turns out that all four tires were pretty worn, so I needed to get them all replaced. I knew, when I sold my Honda Civic and bought my Audi, that I would pay more for service. But even so, the price of the new tires were still twice as expensive as I would have thought.

Still, what are you going to do^*?

So I said yes, replace the tires. I hung out with my friend for most of the morning, then picked up my car in the early afternoon. I have tried to baby the tires: I check the pressure every month and get the tires rotated every 5,000 miles (though I sometimes have to argue with the Jiffy Lube people who think every 10,000 miles is adequate).

Fast forward to this morning, exactly one year and 15,000 miles later. I've had a rhythmic thumping coming from one of my tires for a couple of weeks, so I take it to the local Wheel Works. Guess what? The tires I got a year ago are worn out! Even better, the tires were manufactured in 1999 and not appropriate for the car! Even better yet, they'll put new tires with a 40K warranty on my car for $100 less than Ted & Al's did!

[Fume]

So I say okay. They'll be done before noon.

^*Two things, actually: 1) I upgraded my AAA membership to "AAA Plus". That extends the free towing range to 100 miles. 2) When go to the Castro, I now park my car on a side street north of Market, outside the normal "flow" of foot traffic.

Strong Choices

I had rehearsal for my show Tuesday night and last night, and I've come to the conclusion that I have a kick-ass director and cast.

After only a couple of days of rehearsal, it feels like everyone "gets it". Everything is coming together faster and a lot more easily than at the New Works festival last year. Aside from good casting, I credit this to one major thing: both the cast and the director are not afraid to make strong choices.

One thing that acting students learn is that acting is about choices. The actual choice you make is often less important than making a strong choice and sticking to it. And all of my actors are making strong choices from day 1.

But what I am learning is that directors need to make strong choices as well. Unfortunately, many new directors (and this is a community college, so the new works festivals tend to be directed by student directors), are afraid to make strong choices. Sometimes they're even reluctant to give the actors a deadline by when they are expected to have their lines memorized. But I'm fortunate to have a director who knows what he wants and isn't afraid to tell you (and yet who is open the writer's suggestions).

Smile

I was walking home from work today, feeling pretty depressed about...I'm not sure what. Work. Life. Things feel a little out-of-kilter in my life right now, and I make sure to obsess about these feelings until they grow like the Bougainvillea outside my front door.

So I'm crossing the street, black cap pulled low over my head, listening to some Deepsky that I downloaded from ETN onto my iPod, and all of a sudden a handsome young man comes jogging by.

Usually when this happens my first instinct is not to look the guy in the face. Social anxiety and all that. But I know this is not a good thing, so I braced myself, and looked up. His eyes met mine and he gave me a friendly little smile as he jogged past.

And I instantly felt better.

It was nothing. I'm sure he's not gay. I'm sure he was just being polite. Still, it was enough.

Wow

NASA has videos from the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery here. They had cameras all over the shuttle for this launch. I would strongly recommend you check them out, especially the "Solid Rocket Booster Separation" (which is short but extremely cool) and the "Right Forward Solid Rocket Booster Video" (which is long, but worth it).

New Photo

Time for a new photo, shamelessly lifted from Rey's San Francisco pictures. In case you're wondering, that's D.A.R.Y.L.'s hand by my head. Thanks for the picture, Rey.

You know, that whole "lift the camera up high" thing does work well...

First Rehearsal

On Wednesday we had the first rehearsal for the New Works festival. Like most first rehearsals, it consisted of administrative stuff and a read-through of the script. In this case, "the script" is actually the six 15 to 20 page scripts that make up the show.

Presumably because one of my actors is out of town this week, there are no rehearsals for my play this week, but three next week: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

My role at rehearsals will be, mostly, to sit back and watch the process, and then give the director any notes I may have at the end. It's very important that an author not try to direct a play, so unless someone asks me a question or things go seriously off the rails, I'll just sit in the back quietly (and in the case of something going "seriously off the rails", figure out how to change the script so that it wouldn't happen if I was not there).

Of course, as a playwright, I do have one important power: the power to change the script at any time. The director and actors are then obligated to use my changes, whatever they may be.

This is a power best used sparingly.

At the reading, I noticed three spots where the dialog didn't work, so I made some minor changes and sent the new scripts off to everyone. At this point, I would envision making additional changes only if the actor and director ask, or if I notice the actor stumbling multiple times over a cumbersomly-worded line. The rule of thumb is: if an actor stumbles over a line once, it's his fault. If he stumbles over the same line again, it's my fault, and I should fix it.

Full of Meat

[Because this can't be a gay blog unless I occasionally use a title with misleading innnuendo]

I hosted a BBQ at my place for the Fourth this year. I've got a nice little backyard at my condo, and I've hosted BBQs many times before, though this is the first time I've hosted one on the Fourth. I had about eight friends over, which was just the right size.

The Fred's Steak went over very well. For those of you not familiar with Fred's Steak, it's a legendary cut of sirloin, sold by Schaub's Meat & Poultry at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. It's some of the best steak I've ever had, and while I've eaten it several times before, this was the first time I tried cooking it. It turned out perfect (and made everyone lose interest in the Costco burgers for some reason...).

We finished the evening by watching Napoleon Dynamite. It's a movie I meant to see in the theatres. Then I meant to see it in the discount theatre. Then I meant to catch it on pay-per-view. Then I meant to rent it at Blockbuster, which I finally did Tuesday, though it no longer on the new releases shelf. But I've finally seen it, which means I (and my 30- and 40-something friends) are now finally in tune with high school culture. Well, with a part of high school culture. Part of 2005 high school culture. That's probably way out of date now.

Um, vote for Pedro!

I skipped fireworks this year. Because while some people can see fireworks from their rooftop, I would had to have spent about two hours in congested traffic to see a fifteen minute show. I settled for watching a replay of the shuttle liftoff on NASA TV while listening to other folks in the neighborhood set off illegal firecrackers.

Flying the Flag

Cement Brunette posted a great article about his history as a gay man and his reaction to the above image. One part stood out:

The basic problem for me is that I find the American flag embarrassing and to see it flying in the same picture as the Pride flag really nauseates me.

I used to feel the same way. But, a year ago, I decided to start flying the American flag on certain holidays: Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day. I don't go overboard. One is supposed to fly the flag every day between Flag Day and Independence Day, but that feels more like a liturgical calendar ("The Third Sunday after Flag Day") than healthy patriotism, so I don't bother.

But I do fly it for those three holidays. The reason I do so is that I want to fight back against those on the right that have made the flag a symbol of right-wing values.

I'm trying to take the flag back.

I'm a Democrat. Definitely center-left (more left than I used to be before six years of George W. Bush and twelve years of a Republican Congress). But this is my country. And it's my flag. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let people like President Bush, Tom DeLay, or even brownshirts like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin try to claim the flag as their exclusive symbol.



That's my flag. Happy Fourth of July Everyone.

Ethan Green

I just got back from seeing The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green (thank God for copy-and-paste) at the Lumiere theatre in San Francisco. I would write a review, except that the review would be pretty much the same as my review last April of Adam and Steve.

Unfortunately, the only place where it was playing was in San Francisco, so some friends of mine drove up to see it and have dinner afterwards at Home. It wasn't really worth it to drive to the City just to see the movie, but making an evening of it with friends made it worth it.

We used to get more gay movies down here in the South Bay. There was a theatre called the Towne that gay movies would always show up at. I saw Jeffery, Beautiful Thing, The Broken Hearts Club and a whole host of other gay movies there over the years. Unfortunately (for me), three years ago it was sold and now shows Bollywood movies exclusively.