Tuesday, January 11, 2005


One of my private, geeky holidays has just concluded; the MacWorld Keynote.

To those in the know, this is hardly private--every Apple geek on the planet knows that annually Steve does his Keynote, and from it comes all the goodness that Apple has been secretly preparing in their Willy Wonka-esque labs.

Today it was all about SMALL--the Macintosh Mini and the iPod Shuffle were the big newsmakers, with Apple's new word processor coming in close behind. Surprisingly the PowerBooks were not updated, even though at this point they are overdue...but maybe Apple's update will be lackluster, so they didn't want to waste time with it during the Keynote.

[Insert more commentary here on Apple, blah blah blah, progress, exciting, new crap, blah blah blah.]

I don't have time for that; I have a busy day--lunch meeting with PCS creative staff about ALL STORIES ARE FICTION and the new show I'm doing next month in NYC--a new monologue for which I'm all about the research, except this morning, when I'm all about Mac news. Then we're watching a runthrough of Things Of Dry Hours, an exciting play I just read the other night. In edgy, almost-poetic language Naomi Wallace shows three characters wrestling with one another in the landscape of 1930's Alabama, when the Communist party was a powerful force in the black community. It's a harrowing work, and I think Portland Center Stage is showing a lot of ferocious courage in mounting it...this ain't another Mamet revival.

Then a show tonight, and I'm back in the 8 shows a week grind. I must say that I like it, though--it's very good for me, and it's such a pleasure to know a piece right down to its bones, down on the blood and tissue level, to work it out until you can toss it off in your sleep if it came to that.

oh, if you haven't seen it, this is the poster for 21 DOG YEARS in Portland:



I'm inordinately fond of it--the composition is very nice, and it is such a refreshing change to look at the poster and not see my own face grinning back out at me.