Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Life after the Desert Peach Musical

Tripping The Light Fantastic - a new musical by the authors of The Desert Peach Musical: http://ping.fm/GHQuB

We really learned our lesson on this one. The actors, male and female, can wear their street clothes. Except for the crazy spiritual lady, but the costumer can trot down to the local rummage sale or a couple garage sales and put together a sparkly version of a hippie costume.

The props people can get the furniture from St. Vinnie's and pick up the scrap lumber while they're there.

Any budget can be blown on cool glittery light effects -- and if all you want to do is get a mirror ball and some lasers, you can do that, too.

This one's about the music and the lyrics and the singers. All stuff that's going to sound really good on itunes!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Art of Advertising

Beautiful sea-glass for jewelry: http://ping.fm/zQvbQ

And people wonder what flogging drawn books taught me. For one thing, we have to get over the idea of "humility" when pushing our own stuff. Us girls of the boomer generation especially. Our parents and teachers would have had us wearing burnooses if they could have.

And this is nice glass!

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Jobs For The LAD

I can't take a lot of credit for being much of an activist. I clean the beach, I re-use bath-water to flush toilets (1 bath = 1 day's full flushes), I strung solar Christmas lights all over the house and USE them at night (we're always festive). I don't fish unless I really, really want some fish. I forward petitions (slacktivism).

But occasionally I do something I'm proud of. Not always the first time; in junior high, when presented with a preserved frog, my lab partner and I dutifully picked it apart. The lab teacher forgot to crack the windows and we ended up so high on the fumes we took up the empty skin in the clamps and waved it around like a flag, giggling like idiots, until the teacher put us outside in the hall and told us to breathe and calm down.

In high school, I was offered a live frog to kill and dissect. That was different. I couldn't do anything for the preserved frog, but I also couldn't see the point of killing ostensibly to teach brainless children what insides look like, a goal as easily fulfilled by a diagram as the death of an animal, and probably a wild-caught one at that. I wasn't that bright, but I'd figured that out.

I stared at the frog, and when my lab teacher asked me why I hadn't begun the killing process, out of my mouth came the voice of the Little Activist Demon who lives inside me (somewhere in the greater intestine, I fear): "Why don't we kill and dissect you?"

The LAD has no sense of context or decorum. Once again, I was in the principal's office. Once again, my mother got a phone call about her troubled and troublesome offspring.

I should point out that I was raised by an Irish/German grizzly bear. I do remember the principal's tone of stern righteousness turning to confusion. I didn't hear what Mom said, but I imagine it was something like: "Well, she's right. Why would you make her kill something for a lesson?"

That's it. It's my MOTHER's fault. I wonder if they're still using nature as a resource industry to teach kids that animals are objects. Somebody's always announcing that Our Schools Are Failing Our Children. If the job of the schools was to teach disinterested sadism, they were doing their job.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

The 26-Year Comic

I did 6 x about 1600 panels like this before I ever published. OCD? http://ping.fm/jcuo6

24-hour comics are fun, but 26-year 1-author comics are an exercise in adrenalin, caffeine, ink fumes and too many hours on a laptop.

It's like comparing going into the woods for three hours to get a vision -- to the Sun Dance

(With the understanding this is strictly a figurative comparison and no attempt to equate the severe vision quest of the Sun Dance ceremony to making drawn books. Or should we? Spirituality comes in many different forms, and the high priests have all got to be a bit nuts).

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The very last Hader & The Colonel. AT: <a href="http://ping.fm/vouV4">http://ping.fm/vouV4</a>

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

"I thought it was legal, officer."

Okay, I have another question for my readers and colleagues. So we don't end up using the title, there.

What is the CHEAPEST, EASIEST LEGAL way to get rid of a body in Washington State?

Breathe....

We're just putting together plans for life, like ALL of us should. My preference would be to chained down on the reef on the beach and let the hermit crabs have a party -- and then allow the remaining bony bits to be used for Hallowe'en decorations (give kids a legend -- and possible psychosis -- for life). But the Sheriff's Department probably wouldn't appreciate that (spoilsports).

Cheapest cremation? Hospital school donation? Commercial body donation? (Yes, those companies are growing -- but don't go with the people who answer you from Baltimore with Russian accents in their email, especially when they say, "We legimatate buziness! You check on internets! We not gots time -- we gots bodees to processing!").

Everybody our age should be thinking about this. These meat wagons don't last forever.