The Cornell Big Red

I've come to regard seeing a live college football game as a pleasing annual autumn ritual, as inevitable as the holidays that come before and after it. Note that I said "game". More than one would probably try my patience, but the once is enough to remind me of certain nostalgic sights and sounds going all the way back to my childhood. I like the biting cold, the marching bands, the cheerleaders, stuffing my face with food, drinking things from thermoses....and occasionally checking in on the game. My kids live in Ithaca with their mom, so for the past several seasons, I have gone with them to see the Cornell Big Red play. Last weekend we were there to watch them get trounced by Dartmouth. I left my memory stick at home, so here are a couple of shots by photographer Cashel.

Cornell reportedly has the last remaining marching band in the Ivy League. I can't say they're always in tune, but they do seem to have a great deal of infectious fun.

Oh, yes, and some football players

A Halloween Odyssey

For whatever reason, I resolved to suck the marrow out of this Halloween season, spending the entire month of October engrossed in horror-themed activities. As research for my upcoming opera Curse of the Rat-Man (co-written with composer David Mallamud) I watched dozens of gothic horror films from the 1920s through the 1940s -- essentially all of them. I went to see several Halloween themed shows, including Short Attention Span Theatre's Horror Fest (reviewed by me in the Villager this week), two spooky plays by Conor McPherson (concerning ghosts and vampires), and Company XIV and Brave New World's The Halloween Plays. I also made a pilgrammage to Sleepy Hollow, taking in the Horseman's Hollow haunted attraction, and checked out Creepshow at the Freak Show.

This past weekend represented the pinnacle of this month of unholy excess.  On Friday night, the Countess and I started our weekend junket at the Mount Vernon Hotel, one of New York's best kept secrets, in the former Abigail Adams house, run for many years as a museum by the Colonial Dames of America. Perhaps that doesn't sound spooky to you. (And perhaps it does). Be that as it may, we were drawn there by the special Halloween program put on by the American Magic Lantern Theatre . This was one of the most charming spectacles I have ever seen. The presenter, Terry Borton is a fourth generation magic-lanternist. In the days before film, people would project still, color slides and narrate them, making entertaining shows.The images range from gorgeous, like the one below, to rather crude ones that entertained but don't merit reproduction.

Of course, contemporary New Yorkers find natural-sized bed bugs perfectly scary already; we don't require them to be as big as that 'un. Most the slides come with an amusing follow up slide, with a before and after quality, so the presentation organizes itself easily into a series of stories. Most of them were of the "bad little boy" variety. In one slide, the bad little boy is playing with firecrackers. In the second slide, his head is flying off its shoulders with the unexpected force of the explosion. Charming stuff for kids! (Maybe it's why the 50 some odd children in the auditorium were so very well behaved! Fear!) And the slides are accompanied by Borton's charming narration, and songs and musical accompaniment and sound effects by Nancy Stewart. And there's lots of audience participation. Have you ever sung "The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out" while looking at a picture of a skeleton full of creepy, crawly death worms? It's the best! Or simply heard a version of Poe's The Raven with gorgeous Victorian prints accompanying? A perfect combination of innocence and dark, existential terror. My idea of a good time.

From here, the pendulum swung away from innocence -- and it was still my idea of a good time. The Slipper Room in exile held their Halloween ball at the Players Club. Gothic horror and burlesque are to my mind a winning combination (as those who saw my co-production of Orgy of the Dead a few years back undoubtedly know).  The excess began at the door, where we were met by The Ghost of Fat, Pill-Popping Elvis:

Host and impresario James Habacker has  rapidly acquired a major new fan in ME. He hosted Friday's show as GoGoat Boy, a stand-up satyr. The concept is completely brilliant -- even more so because he happens to be freaking hilarious in the role. His performance struck me as kind of how Jim Carey would play Bacchus. He wears these big, comical teeth and uses them as shameless punctuation marks to his jokes. The jokes are always funny. But if they weren't, the teeth are excellent insurance.

At any rate, the bartender was cruelly generous with the gin in our gin and tonics, so I didn't take many notes about who was whom in the show. Old friend Bunny Love had a funny bit where she was an innocent little girl in the forest who gets so frightened by a giant spider or bat that all her clothes fall off. Little person Nick Sin played one of the Flying Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Gal Friday, Veronika Varlowe and Rosabelle Selavy did various other turns (and again I forget which did which) but I remember there was a zombie number, a vampira number, and my favorite stroke of genius, a mummy strip to the tune of Lieber & Stoller's classic "Little Egypt".

From here, it's a festive blur. We headed back to Brooklyn, where we checked in to the Halloween party of playwright Crystal Skillman and her husband, graphic novelist/comic book writer Fred Van Lente, where we watched a bit of The Nightmare Before Christmas, before stumbling back out into the night.

Skillman on Lap of Van Lente

From here, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to Charred Oak Films's double secret Speakeasy at an undisclosed location. It's really just a regular party where you pay for the drinks (with the money going to a good cause, their movies). But the ritual of secrecy and a password and so forth, make it much funner for some reason. And the concept draws such excellent patrons. Why look, here are Shelly Ray (angel), Stephanie Willing (bat-winged devil), and New York Press's "Queen of Gore" Stephanie Cox-Williams:

And here, too, the Countess:

The cocktails are whipped up by their expert mixologist, pictured here disguised as a cowboy:

Unfortunately, the last thing we needed at that juncture was more of what he was pouring. Shortly thereafter we wove our way homeward, to rest a day before our last frolic of the weekend, DM Theatrics' Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Producer/ designer/ director Frank Cwilik always puts 1000% into everything he does, and I think I can safely say that I have never seen anything as over-the top as this take off inspired by the classic Ed Wood "worst film of all time". In reality, the Wood film is just a jumping-off point in this production. Cwiklik loves to assault the eyes and ears (an atomic bomb goes off in the first three minutes), with a perpetual bombardment of sound cues, video segments, and human beings directed to move and act like cartoon characters. In this show, it is as though the entire cast is either one of theRitz Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Lou Costello, or Bugs Bunny. Several performances in particular struck my funny bone: Douglas Mackrell as the Criswellian narrator, Bob Laine as the Tor Johnson zombie (complete with spooky contact lenses), Tom Reid as the Dead Old Man, Peter Schuyler as that cop who's always hiking up his pants, and Justin Plowman as the highly illogical Colonel Edwards.  The high point of the night for me was a zombie dance by the entire cast that made me deliriously happy. A great way to end the month long Halloween saturation.

At any rate, at this point I feel exactly like I've been eating too much candy. I am very much looking forward to spending November obsessing about the Pilgrims and Massasoit.