Pictures of October

October and November (so far) have ended up being such hectic months that I just realized this morning that I never did my monthly photo roundup for October. There aren't many pictures that I didn't post during the month, but here are the ones that are left.

The Apple Barn

My friend Justin, from high school (and, I guess, junior high, too, now that I think of it) came to visit my neck of the woods for a wedding, and we thought it would be nice to meet up and be in the same room together for the first time since 1998. I suggested The Apple Barn, because we all know that I love the apple fritters and will make any excuse to eat them.

Despite the fact that we talked out this whole dinner in exacting detail on Facebook, Jud and I somehow got confused on which week dinner was actually taking place in, so I went to the Apple Barn two weeks in a row (a tragedy that I somehow endured), and we had a fantastic time together with his wife, catching up on old friends and acquaintances in between stories of my work with college students. (This was a sometimes inappropriate for dinner discussion, as in early October butt chugging was still in the news around here.)

While I was waiting for Jud the second time, I walked around and took a few photos:





and then we had a really good dinner.

The UT Arboretum

Kristin and I ran up the road to the UT Arboretum and tree collection because I had heard it was really nice, and it was, but it's also a bunch of trees. We had planned to have a nice picnic lunch, but when we got there we found out that you weren't allowed to picnic, so we just walked around for a while and I took some photos:



I tried to take a photo of a spiderweb, but I guess you're supposed to do that early in the morning when they are covered in dew and show up better:



The leaves were just starting to turn, though, so I did get one nice photo of that:



Gabby's Nasty Ass Soap

Somehow this didn't make it into my entry about visiting Albuqurque:



I didn't buy any.

Halloween Pumpkins

I saw these on campus on my way to rehearsal for my play:



And that was it for October.

Acting Lessons

On Monday, I had a small part in our campus production of "8", the play by Dustin Lance Black about the Proposition 8 trial for California marriage equality. I played Jeff Zarrillo, one of four plaintiffs, a role originated by Matt Bomer.

Matt Bomer and I, as I'm sure you are aware, are very similar. Go google him, then come back and compare.

The resemblance is uncanny, right?

This production marked my return to the stage after a long absence, my first work since playing "guy violating noise policy" and "rowdy drunk student who talks too much" in the Summer 1996 Orientation Skits at SUNY Cortland, so I was a little worried that my acting chops might be rusty. In order to combat that, I watched a lot of movies while rehearsing my lines, and spent the final weekend before the play watching movies in which someone put on a stage production. (I was going to watch movies about making movies, but decided that I should focus on the stage, which is a totally different animal.) It turns out that I only own eleven movies where a stage production is mounted (not counting movies where the production in question was a pageant, cookoff, fashion show, or cheerleading competition; doing so would have swollen the movie total to somewhere around twenty), but I learned something from each one of them.

Here are the valuable lessons that I gleaned from my viewing:

1) The Little Mermaid: The lesson here is that you should be sure to show up to your part and do your best. Your fellow performers, whether they are fish musicians, your father's crab, or your mersisters, have all worked really hard, and you will let them down and bring shame upon the kingdom if you miss your debut for any reason.

Especially if that reason is that you're off searching shipwrecks for a fork to comb your hair with.

2) Mean Girls: This quote sums up the lesson best:

"But I'm always on your left!"

Hitting your mark and following your blocking exactly as you rehearsed it is incredibly important. If you don't do it just like you did during rehearsal then someone is going to screw up and kick a radio into Jason's head, and Miss Norberry might not be there to jump onto the piano and haul your cookies out of the fire.

3) Moulin Rouge: Your production won't really come together unless everyone believes in the underlying message, whether it's "freedom, beauty, truth, and love" or it's the idea that all people should be equal under the law and that families with same-sex parents are just as valid as more traditional family models.

Also, you should make sure that none of your leads have consumption if you want to run for more than one night.

4) Valley of the Dolls: Again, I offer a quote:

"The only star that comes out of a Helen Lawson play is Helen Lawson, and that's me, baby!"

Every cast has a star, and if that's not you then you should be super nice to everybody, so that when the star demands that the director cut out all of your lines your agent will feel bad for you and get you onto a telethon singing a song that's just an endless bridge continuously building to nowhere, which you'll then parlay into a nightclub act and then stardom of your own.

Barring that, you should just be the star. Look out at the world defiantly while you stand inside a giant plastic mobile and loudly sing, "I'll plant my own tree, and I'll make it grow!" and let everyone know that you'll get to the top even if you have to do it all yourself.

5) All About Eve: Make sure you have no understudy. That way she can't manipulate your friend into draining the gas from the car, making you miss your train and giving her the chance to call all of the press to watch while she steps into your role and usurps your spotlight.

Also, Butler can be both someone's name and someone's job. It's a valid point; an inane one, but still a point.

6) Black Swan: Be perfect, even if that means stabbing Winona Ryder in the face with a nail file or slowly going insane and losing touch with reality to the point that you can't be sure if you stabbed Winona Ryder in the face with a nail file, if your evil double stabbed Winona Ryder in the face with a nail file, if Winona Ryder stabbed herself in the face with a nail file, or if Winona Ryder never got stabbed in the face with a nail file at all.

7) Scream 2: If you have personal pain, draw on it to bring realism to your role, whether your pain is the discrimination and casual oppression that you have faced as a gay man in America, or the pain of having a copycat serial killer stalk you while murdering all of your friends in college just like a serial killer stalked you and murdered all of your friends in high school.

8) Stage Fright: One of your costars may or may not be a murderer, but you shouldn't let that hinder your craft. If anything, it should drive you to take on a second role so that you're playing a character playing another character, but you should also try not to become the murderer's next victim.

9) Torch Song: Don't try to sing if you're not really that good a singer. Especially don't try to sing in blackface.

10) The Big Cube: Once an actor, always an actor. The theater will always call you back, no matter how long you've been away or if you've been given LSD by your stepdaughter's boyfriend.

11) A Mighty Wind: If your show is going to be for one night only, make sure it's the best one night only that it could possibly be, even if it means you have to kiss your now-insane ex-boyfriend.

I think that on Monday night we definitely made the best of our one night, and I didn't have to kiss anybody or stab Winona Ryder in the face with a nail file to do it.

The KFC Museum

Last week, when I was in Albuquerque, Kristin sent me a text that we needed to get out of town and go on a road trip. I agreed, because it seems like forever since we went somewhere fun. I didn't really have any ideas (Santa's Land, one of my perpetual "We have to go there!" places, has once again closed for the season without a visit from us), so Kristin suggested The Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum, or, as it is known colloquially, the KFC Museum.

"Do you want to go to the KFC Museum?"

OF COURSE.

Yesterday morning I got up early, got ready to go, and waited for Kristin to come pick me up, and then we were on the road, to a strange and distant land known as Kentucky, our neighbor to the north:



After only two hours in the car, we neared our destination, and Kristin tried to put a damper on my excitement.

"Now, I don't want you to get your hopes up, but it's not that great."

Not that great? How could a museum dedicated to a uniquely American facet of our cuisine, Kentucky Fried Chicken, made with Colonel Sanders' secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices, possibly be "not that great"? People in 105 countries known that "Kentucky" means "chicken" because of Colonel Sanders, and I refused to believe that the museum dedicated to this pioneer of business and Southern culture could possibly be anything less than a shrine.

And, of course, I was right. It is a shrine. A tiny shrine that takes up a small part of a regular, plain old KFC restaurant:



Everything on the right side of the picture, from the "Pure Oil" sign over, is the museum. Everything on the left is a KFC.

I should have listened to Kristin.

Really, my first indication should have been in the parking lot. They don't even have a sign that says "Museum". The sign looks like this:



The building itself looks somewhat historical, and still has a vintage sign:



but you can see right there from the rounded addition that they've added a modern KFC restaurant to the place despite the historical status:



The state of Kentucky does have a historical sign out front:





but again, this isn't really a museum. It's a KFC with some display cases:











a somewhat dirty statue of Harland Sanders on a bench that you're supposed to have your picture made with:





and a dark, windowless wood-panelled dining room that, I suppose, may or may not be historically accurate but is also a weird mix of styles from different decades:



There are a couple of displays in the dining room: a model of the motel rooms that used to be attached to the cafe, a model of Harland Sanders' kitchen that had vintage Borax boxes on the counter but modern faucet hardware in the sink, and a model of Col. Sanders' office:



I guess if you're hungry and on the way to somewhere else the museum is a good place to stop, but it was almost as disappointing as the National Knife Museum. Arguably, it may even be worse than the National Knife Museum, because that at least had a gift shop and some hideous animatronic animals. This seemed kind of like they couldn't tear the building down because it was on the historical register, so they pulled out a bunch of old KFC stuff, nailed it to the walls, and called it a day.

Kristin and I weren't ready to call it a day, though, and instead decided to press on to Lexington and visit Joseph-Betth Booksellers, which Kristin remembered as a huge independent bookstore with lots of obscure, hard to find titles but which has instead given over more than half of their floorspace to food, clothing, trinkets, toys, home decor, candles, and what is apparently the kind of business model that killed Borders. Still, I did find a book that I didn't know I wanted because I didn't know it existed, and we had a nice late lunch/early dinner at the Bronte Bistro inside the store.

The mini creme brulee is an excellent use of two dollars:



On the way home, Kristin had to stop for gas, so we also stopped for a minute at the slightly decrepit fireworks store next to the gas station:



and marvelled at the collection of weird statues:





and broken down amusement park rides (seriously, they had not one but two rusting inoperative ferris wheels):









on their front lawn.

We didn't buy anything, since neither one of us is allowed to have fireworks in our apartment complexes and both of us are liable to blow off a finger by accident, but it was a nice end to a fun road trip day.

I can only hope that the museum and shrine to Long John Silver or Chef Boyardee is more exciting and befitting of their stature as pillars of American culture.

Halloween Horror: Silver Age DC Strikes Again

In honor of last night's holiday, Halloween, I thought I would dig out some spooky comics and share a tale of nightmarish terror as only Silver Age DC Comics could deliver them, a disturbing blend of horror and wacky insanity marketed to children.

I'll let Ferro Lad and Invisible Kid take it from here:









Of course it is. This is, after all, a story of terror and insanity.







Our story opens with Lana Lang's dream come true:



Lois is dead. And sure, Lana looks sort of sad about it as she stands by Lois' flaming funeral bier on Rajah Satdev's lush estate, but I bet there was a scene they didn't show where Lana knelt by the corpse like Heather Duke in "Heathers" at Heather Chandler's funeral, thinking, "I prayed for the death of Lois Lane many times, and I felt bad every time I did it, but I kept doing it anyway. Now I know that you understood. Amen and hallelujah!"

But wait, it gets better:



Not only is Lois dead, but Superman killed her. Did I mention that this story takes place on Lana's birthday? I'm not kidding. It says so on page 7.

Superman barely acknowledges Lana, because he's deranged with grief and guilty remorse. So much grief and guilty remorse, in fact, that he starts talking to Lois' corpse, and then...





Then comes the necrophilia. Happy Halloween, everybody!

No, actually, we're spared the necrophilia. Instead, Superman flies off in another fit of grief, leaving Lana alone to wonder how long the mourning period should be before she calls Superman for a date. While she's thinking, Rajah Satdev, the owner of the estate, appears:



He waves a hand and says some magic words, and Lana's day gets even worse:



Lois is married to Superman, and she's alive again, but she's hideously disfigured. I guess Lana sees that as enough of a silver lining to ask what's going on, and Lois explains that this all started when the Daily Planet sent her to cover the Metropolis Exotic Animal Show:



Intrigued, Lois hops in the Rajah's limo for an interview, but something may or may not be amiss:





The collapsing skyscraper turns out to be a huge scoop for Lois, but even though she's the kind of woman who accidentally breaks cursed mirrors and is regularly abducted by aliens on a daily basis Lois never stops to think, "Hey, did I actually just sell my soul to Satan?"

There is something odd about that Rajah, though:





He also spends a lot of time drinking a secret elixir that Lois is gravely forbidden to taste, which is pretty much the same as handing Lois the bottle and screaming, "Chug!"

As soon as he falls asleep:



But it's not from the Fountain of Youth, and instead burns Lois' mouth. Wondering how the Rajah could possibly drink it, Lois grabs his turban:





Lois and the Rajah immediately start fighting about her betraying his trust and him not being up-front with her about maybe being Satan, attracting the attention of Superman, who happens to be carrying Lana, because it's her birthday. When Superman tries to intervene, though, disaster strikes:



Which brings us back to where we left off before Lois' multi-page flashback:



The Rajah's tigers attack Lana, who tries to fight them off with one of the torches around the bier. Lana's wild flailing with the torch accidentally lights the bier on fire, and Lois and the Rajah stand unharmed in the flames as nearby villagers cower in fear. (They might also be cowering because the tigers that attacked Lana, never mentioned again in the story, flee the flames by running straight toward the village.) In the middle of all of this furor, it suddenly dawns on Lois that hey, she's a demon now.



The Rajah spirits the unconscious Lois home, where it turns out that he's not the devil after all:



His people are aliens who just happen to look like Satan, like the aliens in Childhood's End.

Resigning herself to life on Satdev's world, Lois makes plans to marry him:



but harbors a secret in her heart:



When the big day finally comes, trouble rears its head yet again:



Lois never took off the ring that Superman gave her when she was dead and he was deranged with grief.





Lois realizes that she can't marry a man she doesn't love as much as she loves the man who accidentally killed her and continuously strings her along because he has a second girl on the side, and begs Satdev to send her home:







Happy Halloween, everybody.