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interviews again
these questions from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darththalia (and in deference to thalia, i'll go ahead and use capital letters in this entry [g]):
1. How many languages do you speak?
Yeah, you think you're so cute. :-)
1. Did you get along with your parents when you were in high school?
For the most part, I did, yes.
My freshman year of high school was a particularly unpleasant one, for a variety of reasons including (and causing) the fact that my relationship with my mother was not what it had been before and has been since. I was in the worst throes of teen angst, and she was right on the cusp of menopause, and you put those two things in the same house and unhappiness ensues. Looking back, I can only imagine what my dad and my brother went through at the time.
After that -- when she went on the hormones and I pulled myself together -- things were a lot better. I didn't start not getting along with my father until I'd left the house, really, and even now, it's not that I don't get along with him so much as that we're so alike that I can't spend more than about a long weekend with him before he's gotten on every nerve I have. That varies, though -- but it's not the subject of this question. :-)
2. Where would you like to visit that you haven't been before?
That's easy: Australia. I've heard nothing but good things about the place, from residents and visitors alike.
3. What's your favorite non-fiction book?
[looks at shelves] I don't think there's just one answer to that question. At least you limited it to non-fiction, for which much thanks -- but, hmm.
The thing is, just as with fiction, there are different books that I'd choose for completely different reasons. In general, I've been very pleased with Mr. Bill Bryson; less impressed with his Mother Tongue and Made in America than I think he'd like us to be (which is my own fault for being a linguist and reading popularly accessible distillations of linguistic topics -- he reports things that I think are complete bunk, but it's true that there are linguists maintaining those theories, which is really all he says; it's probably like being a geologist or some such thing and reading Ranger Rick), but not unimpressed, really ... but his travel books make me laugh and laugh and laugh, and convey the appropriate sense of awe when he visits places that are awe-inspiring, and so forth. His writing style quite agrees with me. Lately, I'm in the middle of his recent A Short History of Nearly Everything, which aims to encapsulate cosmology and paleontology (and whatnot) in much the same manner as the earlier stuff aimed to encapsulate linguistics -- the difference being, I don't know anything about those subjects, and can't imagine I ever will (if my high school science grades were anything to go by). So I'll pick that one. The prose is engaging, and there's a lot I still don't get, but at least I seem to have some idea of what it is I'm not getting. If that makes sense.
4. What's the best production of a play that you've ever seen?
Another toughie. The three finalists, thinking about it right now -- argh, see, now that I think about it, I have four finalists. All from the Stratford Festival, oddly enough, which just means I don't see enough live theatre elsewhere; they're good, but they're not the only ones who are any good.
Okay, the non-winners, in no particular order:
-- Romeo and Juliet, 1992. There was a more recent production that wasn't nearly as good (but which did have a really startling moment at the end, which was excellent: Romeo swallows the poison, kisses Juliet, and starts to slide to the floor as the poison takes effect, and just before he can't hold his head up any more, she stirs and starts to wake; she's looking the other way, so she doesn't see him, but he sees her move, and a look of absolute horror crosses his face -- the actor playing Romeo was the guy from the Anne of Green Gables movies, if you've seen them, and he's really very good, and expressive, so when I say "a look of absolute horror," I mean we the audience believed he was horrified -- and then he dies, knowing he did the wrong thing. God, I loved that. You should have heard the audience gasp.).
Anyway. The 1992 production (starring, funnily enough, the girl from the Anne of Green Gables movies as Juliet) was beautiful to look at, set in the 20's in Italy, with gorgeous costumes -- lots of white silk -- and added drama from the presence of Blackshirts and so forth. Also, the performances were uniformly superb. The parents, in particular -- those are some thankless roles, but I remember them being excellent. And Ms. Barbara Bryne as the nurse ... god. she. was. brilliant. It's been ten years and gone, and I can still hear her. "Scurvy knave!"
-- Macbeth, 1995. Again, thorougly solid performances, and the most alarming, terrifying, heartbreaking murder of Macduff's family I've ever seen or imagined.
-- Camelot, 1997. I think I make this a finalist really because I saw it the first afternoon after Princess Diana was killed, which I became aware of only when the lead made a curtain speech before the show. So it resonated quite differently than it would have if I'd just been there to see a musical. Still, it was well done, and everyone was just beautifully dressed, in real storybook style -- perfect, perfect, for what it was. In particular, the guys playing Arthur and Lancelot were excellent (which, of course, is exactly what you need here). Lancelot -- and I love that this show calls him "Lance" [g] -- was this big solid blond guy with a smile you almost expected to gleam like a toothpaste commercial, and they dressed him in tunics that fit perfectly across the chest, and hung perfectly to mid-thigh length, if not in fact a little snugger and a little shorter. Arthur, meanwhile (for the small-world-oriented, Mr. Tom McCamus, who played Jimmy Donnolly in the "Gift of the Wheelman" episode of DS), was this smaller, slighter, sort of wiry dark-haired dude dressed in tunics that were just a little too long, and just a little too big in the shoulder. The cumulative effect was freakin' brilliant. Additionally, he's quite an excellent actor, Mr. Tom McCamus; his Arthur was one who happened to be able to sing, but he's really very good at the emotionally wrenching stuff Camelot has at the end -- which, in fairness, I'd always liked a great deal even before it had a particular real-world resonance on the day I saw it live.
And the winner:
-- Waiting for Godot, 1996. (Actually, the program I have is from the 1998 remount of the same production. This surprises me; I really thought I saw it the first time. But I guess the evidence doesn't lie.) The above-mentioned Mr. Tom McCamus as Vladimir (I believe; it doesn't really matter) and Mr. Stephen Ouimette as Estragon, and the two of them together are about as excellent a team as I think I've ever seen on a stage. And I don't even mean this with the nudge-nudge happy slasher vibe; I mean that they play opposite each other so blindingly well it's really something beautiful to watch. And Beckett is tough stuff to make sense of, never mind to stage in an engaging manner. This was ... just one of those productions where you leave the theatre thinking, "If I can't do that, and do it that well, I might as well just give up." It was that good.
5. How did you get into slash? (I just realized, I have no idea.)
It's all because ofmaliwane and her friend Whatshername, actually. Whatshername and I hang out on a general-purpose Star Wars board together (actually, she's one of the Special Admin People; I hang out there, though not nearly as much as I used to, more's the pity), and mali popped by at one point also. They mentioned in passing that they had this slash habit; I checked out their site, and then MA; and the rest is, you know, revisionist history. [g]
darththalia (and in deference to thalia, i'll go ahead and use capital letters in this entry [g]):Yeah, you think you're so cute. :-)
1. Did you get along with your parents when you were in high school?
For the most part, I did, yes.
My freshman year of high school was a particularly unpleasant one, for a variety of reasons including (and causing) the fact that my relationship with my mother was not what it had been before and has been since. I was in the worst throes of teen angst, and she was right on the cusp of menopause, and you put those two things in the same house and unhappiness ensues. Looking back, I can only imagine what my dad and my brother went through at the time.
After that -- when she went on the hormones and I pulled myself together -- things were a lot better. I didn't start not getting along with my father until I'd left the house, really, and even now, it's not that I don't get along with him so much as that we're so alike that I can't spend more than about a long weekend with him before he's gotten on every nerve I have. That varies, though -- but it's not the subject of this question. :-)
2. Where would you like to visit that you haven't been before?
That's easy: Australia. I've heard nothing but good things about the place, from residents and visitors alike.
3. What's your favorite non-fiction book?
[looks at shelves] I don't think there's just one answer to that question. At least you limited it to non-fiction, for which much thanks -- but, hmm.
The thing is, just as with fiction, there are different books that I'd choose for completely different reasons. In general, I've been very pleased with Mr. Bill Bryson; less impressed with his Mother Tongue and Made in America than I think he'd like us to be (which is my own fault for being a linguist and reading popularly accessible distillations of linguistic topics -- he reports things that I think are complete bunk, but it's true that there are linguists maintaining those theories, which is really all he says; it's probably like being a geologist or some such thing and reading Ranger Rick), but not unimpressed, really ... but his travel books make me laugh and laugh and laugh, and convey the appropriate sense of awe when he visits places that are awe-inspiring, and so forth. His writing style quite agrees with me. Lately, I'm in the middle of his recent A Short History of Nearly Everything, which aims to encapsulate cosmology and paleontology (and whatnot) in much the same manner as the earlier stuff aimed to encapsulate linguistics -- the difference being, I don't know anything about those subjects, and can't imagine I ever will (if my high school science grades were anything to go by). So I'll pick that one. The prose is engaging, and there's a lot I still don't get, but at least I seem to have some idea of what it is I'm not getting. If that makes sense.
4. What's the best production of a play that you've ever seen?
Another toughie. The three finalists, thinking about it right now -- argh, see, now that I think about it, I have four finalists. All from the Stratford Festival, oddly enough, which just means I don't see enough live theatre elsewhere; they're good, but they're not the only ones who are any good.
Okay, the non-winners, in no particular order:
-- Romeo and Juliet, 1992. There was a more recent production that wasn't nearly as good (but which did have a really startling moment at the end, which was excellent: Romeo swallows the poison, kisses Juliet, and starts to slide to the floor as the poison takes effect, and just before he can't hold his head up any more, she stirs and starts to wake; she's looking the other way, so she doesn't see him, but he sees her move, and a look of absolute horror crosses his face -- the actor playing Romeo was the guy from the Anne of Green Gables movies, if you've seen them, and he's really very good, and expressive, so when I say "a look of absolute horror," I mean we the audience believed he was horrified -- and then he dies, knowing he did the wrong thing. God, I loved that. You should have heard the audience gasp.).
Anyway. The 1992 production (starring, funnily enough, the girl from the Anne of Green Gables movies as Juliet) was beautiful to look at, set in the 20's in Italy, with gorgeous costumes -- lots of white silk -- and added drama from the presence of Blackshirts and so forth. Also, the performances were uniformly superb. The parents, in particular -- those are some thankless roles, but I remember them being excellent. And Ms. Barbara Bryne as the nurse ... god. she. was. brilliant. It's been ten years and gone, and I can still hear her. "Scurvy knave!"
-- Macbeth, 1995. Again, thorougly solid performances, and the most alarming, terrifying, heartbreaking murder of Macduff's family I've ever seen or imagined.
-- Camelot, 1997. I think I make this a finalist really because I saw it the first afternoon after Princess Diana was killed, which I became aware of only when the lead made a curtain speech before the show. So it resonated quite differently than it would have if I'd just been there to see a musical. Still, it was well done, and everyone was just beautifully dressed, in real storybook style -- perfect, perfect, for what it was. In particular, the guys playing Arthur and Lancelot were excellent (which, of course, is exactly what you need here). Lancelot -- and I love that this show calls him "Lance" [g] -- was this big solid blond guy with a smile you almost expected to gleam like a toothpaste commercial, and they dressed him in tunics that fit perfectly across the chest, and hung perfectly to mid-thigh length, if not in fact a little snugger and a little shorter. Arthur, meanwhile (for the small-world-oriented, Mr. Tom McCamus, who played Jimmy Donnolly in the "Gift of the Wheelman" episode of DS), was this smaller, slighter, sort of wiry dark-haired dude dressed in tunics that were just a little too long, and just a little too big in the shoulder. The cumulative effect was freakin' brilliant. Additionally, he's quite an excellent actor, Mr. Tom McCamus; his Arthur was one who happened to be able to sing, but he's really very good at the emotionally wrenching stuff Camelot has at the end -- which, in fairness, I'd always liked a great deal even before it had a particular real-world resonance on the day I saw it live.
And the winner:
-- Waiting for Godot, 1996. (Actually, the program I have is from the 1998 remount of the same production. This surprises me; I really thought I saw it the first time. But I guess the evidence doesn't lie.) The above-mentioned Mr. Tom McCamus as Vladimir (I believe; it doesn't really matter) and Mr. Stephen Ouimette as Estragon, and the two of them together are about as excellent a team as I think I've ever seen on a stage. And I don't even mean this with the nudge-nudge happy slasher vibe; I mean that they play opposite each other so blindingly well it's really something beautiful to watch. And Beckett is tough stuff to make sense of, never mind to stage in an engaging manner. This was ... just one of those productions where you leave the theatre thinking, "If I can't do that, and do it that well, I might as well just give up." It was that good.
5. How did you get into slash? (I just realized, I have no idea.)
It's all because of
maliwane and her friend Whatshername, actually. Whatshername and I hang out on a general-purpose Star Wars board together (actually, she's one of the Special Admin People; I hang out there, though not nearly as much as I used to, more's the pity), and mali popped by at one point also. They mentioned in passing that they had this slash habit; I checked out their site, and then MA; and the rest is, you know, revisionist history. [g]
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