Photos from Musical Mixer 160802

Pets, puppy mills, rescue animals, animal shelters

So I read that communities in Westchester County, NY are requiring people who want pets to take them from shelters rather than from breeders.  I am opposed to this legislation.

http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/westchester/2016/09/16/puppy-mill-laws-expand-across-county/90414656/

First, let me tell a story about a cat I had.

I got this cat through a rescue operation.  I had him for 8 years.  During this time, he vomited frequently, always on the best rugs.  I was not able to train him to go to the bare floor.  He also destroyed virtually all of my bed linens.  I had him declawed thinking that would help, but he was destroying the linens with his teeth.

I also tried all manner of cat foods, including special ones from the vet and various expensive brands, both dry and canned.  None of these seemed to help with the vomiting.

Ultimately, I decided that having to constantly replace all of my bed linens was too expensive, so I tried to get rid of him.

I learned that all the shelters in Westchester were no kill shelters.  Therefore, they were over-full and could not take animals that were not salable.  A middle aged cat with health and behavior problems was not considered salable.

I tried to take the cat to a kill shelter in the Bronx, but they said they would not take him, because I was not an NYC resident.

I learned that it was illegal to release a cat into the wild in Westchester, as well.  I doubt it would have worked, as the cat was micro-chipped.  It was also illegal to euthanize your own cat.  Only a vet could euthanize the cat.  It was not entirely clear whether vets would euthanize a cat that was not terminally ill.  Also, vets are expensive.

Personally, I consider this situation unconstitutional.  If you have a child that you can no longer take care of, you can put the child up for adoption, and the child will be taken off your hands.  If you have a pet that you can no longer take care of, there is no way of getting rid of it in Westchester.

In other words, my punishment for taking in a rescue cat, was that all my bed linens would have to be perpetually in rags -- and that there was no legal remedy at all for this.

The cat was also destroying pillows and footwear in a closet that it was creeping into.

During this process, I learned that many cats have digestive issues, because really they are supposed to be eating mice, and commercial cat food is not made from mice, because there is no supply chain for mice: no farms that raise them, no machines that could process them into cat food, etc.  One cat expert posited that the cat's chewing behavior was due to being ill from inappropriate food and trying to make himself vomit.

One friend recommended I try food made from bison meat.  I didn't get that far.  The friend found a family who wanted a middle aged cat and would be willing to deal with the issues that I was not willing to deal with any more.  That was a great relief to me.

However, I came to the conclusion that rescue cats may not be good house pets.  Perhaps they descend from pets who were put out, precisely because they had health or behavior problems that made them poor pets.

By contrast, pets that are bred by a breeder, were, presumably, conceived from animals who made good pets.

If we require people to own pets who came from rescue shelters, we may make pet ownership impossible.  These animals may not be suitable for living in homes at all.

Also, the law needs to changed so that people actually can get rid of unwanted pets.  Taking in a pet should not be slavery.  You should be able to get rid of it, without paying to get rid of it.

On recording a video of a sonnet

When you spend all morning recording videos of a monologue; deleting at least half of them, uploading 9 of them, and then deciding that maybe the first one was the best one after all.  This is Shakespeare's sonnet 18, btw.

v1 — from my right, very pleasant, but looking down at the camera 

v2- from my left, looking down at camera, too much neck

v 3 - from left, shoulders only, fairly pleasant — not as audible. I was trying different tables and decided that this one was too high, while the one for the first two was too low.

So for the rest of these I used the first table with the lid of a cardboard box under the ipad.

v4 - from left, more arms, getting poutier, less pleasant, mug bouncing 

v5 - starts pleasant, ends pretty angry looking — loud traffic noise near end 

v6 - no smiles, from left, still looking down — expressions perhaps a bit exaggerated 

v7 — a bit grouchy at the end 

v8 — no traffic noise — pounding looks a bit fake — too much neck 

v9 pounding on death looks fake — traffic noise at end 

If you've gotten this far and actually watched these videos, you're a saint.  Please let me know which you like best.

Then, of course, I find there's some incompatibility which prevents me from transferring these videos from my ipad to my computer. Why?  They're both Apple products.  Uggh.  I think I saw a software update coming through for the mac.  Maybe I need to do that.  In any case, the only way I can look at all of them is to upload them to YouTube, as unpublished videos -- but then, once I get them up there I think, I might as well share them all.

I could download them and enhance the audio on my computer. 

Anyway, the sonnet talks about summer days and it was lovely out on my balcony and I wanted to try out my new sun umbrella, which I think worked very nicely here...

In the mean time, I'm not cooking this huge pork shoulder I bought and not learning the lines I need to memorize by Monday.

*****

Addendum: 

Just a word of background. 

I attended SETC this past weekend.  The organizers suggested that we should have at least 3 contemporary monologues and at least 3 classical monologues ready.  I only had one classical monologue memorized here, so I learned 2 more.  This was one of them.

I shall do a YouTube video (or perhaps several) of the other shortly.

=====

Second addendum:

I started reading Shakespeare when I was about 10, when I found my mother's college Shakespeare book on a shelf.  I had no trouble with the language, because I was raised in the Episcopal church, where we were still using the Book of Common Prayer that had Elizabethan English in it, so that dialect was familiar to me.  

I'm sad they've let that book and the King James version of the Bible go.  I have heard that studying those versions encourages mysticism, which I happen to be very fond of.  

In any case, this sonnet was my favorite at that time.  I think I was mostly captivated by the first four lines.  I mostly ignored the later lines.

Now, when I read them, I'm thinking that Shakespeare was really not a humble man, being so certain of the immortality of his poetry.  He turned out to be right, but it was a bit of hubris to be thinking so at the time that he wrote it.

Randolph Mountain Club Presentation 8/13/16

I went to a presentation on August 13.  It was at the annual meeting of the Randolph Mountain Club. The presentation was about a hiker who died hiking in February of 2015 above tree line due to a blizzard with hurricane force winds and sub zero temperatures.  

The presentation was quite dramatic, following her course using records from her GPS and images from Google Earth.  It emphasized her last chance to save herself, by going down below tree line, before she was engulfed in the blizzard she could not see coming from the other side of the mountain ahead of her.  And it appeared she had not re-checked the forecast before taking off, not, perhaps, realizing how fast the forecasts can change in the mountains.

Afterwards I was thinking about her a lot.  I have a view from my cottage of the notch in the mountains where she died.  The whole area seemed permeated with a new aura of hostility that it hadn’t had before.

I had a discussion with my sons about how there weren’t any vehicles that could go into that blizzard when she activated her beacon.  We speculated about what such a vehicle would look like: a worm or  a spider, something low profile that could hug the ground and avoid the wind and reach a stranded hiker — though her rescue beacon didn’t function properly when it fell over and the searchers couldn’t even locate her properly.

Then we were talking about how maybe the trails should be closed in the winter, or maybe if the weather forecast is sufficiently bad — and no one should be allowed to go up there.

But as I was thinking about this, I was thinking really very few people die in hiking accidents.  If you know a lot of hikers, as you do if you’re a member of the Randolph Mountain Club, you’re more likely to know someone who died hiking, but still it’s not the typical thing. 

On the other hand, dying in auto accidents is much more common.  Yet, this type of high drama presentation is seldom made about individual auto accidents.  And we allow over 30k people to die every year in the USA alone due to auto accidents — not to mention hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed.  

Safety measures have reduced the numbers of deaths.  It used to be like 50k per year when I was younger.  But it’s still unacceptably high.  Any other technology that would be killing so many people would have been outlawed long ago.  

I’m getting my kids drivers licenses now. I feel like that’s necessary to live independently around here, but I may be leading them to their deaths.  Fortunately, they’re over 21, so they’re a bit more sensible than a teen, but still.  Plenty of older people die in accidents as well.

But we just accept the deaths from auto accidents.  We don’t just accept deaths from hiking.  

I feel that this perspective is skewed

Examples of me singing

Some YouTube Videos 

Evening Prayer duet

Beautiful World cover This is my most popular YouTube video

Sound of Music  This is my main music video

Audition for Furniture, The Musical (a cappella song at the end)

That's your funeral (Video Audition for Oliver, along with Spoken scene for Mrs Sowerberry audition)

Star Spangled Banner a cappella (this was also a video audition)

Villain Song a cappella This is an original song.  I've gotten it arranged and hope to have a music video soon

Mr Clean audition (comedic -- singing at end)

Chirbit

Another singing demo (no video)

Instagrams:

Mary Poppins Excerpt

Over the Rainbow Excerpt

updates 160807

I have a new reel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZCgCr7Gmww

My episode of Mysteries at the Museum is showing again on the Travel Channel on 9/4/16 at 9 am or can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCWC8GHVvLI

I performed with the improv team “Spooky Doings” 8/5/16 

I’ve been to several improv classes and quite a few improv mixers, including Camp Magnet in June.

Other Performances:

Vincent Price's rap from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" at The SetNYC, d Pim Shih Music & Film Show 160709

Beatrix, in "Amalgam II" film by Carlo Labrador

****

Naturally, my most exciting performances I'm not allowed to talk about.  But I hope to be on some more TV shows soon.

2015 Updates

I put my latest updates on this blog:

Latest Updates

The present writing is material deleted from the updates blog as relating to a prior year.  I'm doing this so that my updates blog will be decluttered.  If you've been keeping up with my updates blog, you won't need to read this stuff again.

News From 2015:

Performances:

• "Grandmother" in "The Visitor" d Katya O'Brien 12/10/15 stills from this movie are available on my blog at Stills from The Visitor  This movie involved acting in the Russian Language and with a Russian accent.
• "Steam Punk Murder Mystery" Suspect 11/20/15 -- fundraiser for http://www.bowery.org/
• "Fear," AA member, d. Devon Talbott 10/22/15
• "Banker Madness" Banker, d Rick Kariolic 10/14/15
• "Helena, Happy" Ghost d. Alejandro Cervantes 10/8/15
• "All the Wishes" Bar Patron d: Robbie Anderson 9/15-6/2015
• Randolph Mountain Club Charades 2015
• Played "Anne Isa Berg" in "A Sinking Ship," d Daniel Ahrens, The PIT Theater; 7/29, 8pm; sang my original song Villain Song; Photos from the show
• Team "Whatever You Want," Improv Comedy, UCB East 7/6/15 d Erik Tanouye
• Stepmother (Greta Snaggle-Bones) in Cinderella, AlphaNYC, 6/27-28/15  d Elizabeth Ann Figols Cinderella photos
• Scene #390 out of 1000 in Morgan Phillips 1000 Scenes project https://youtu.be/BzW78xn-eLM
• Viper St. Cloud in "Angel in the Woods" 8p.m. 6/24/15 d. Daniel Ahrens -- I also wrote part of the show
• Gallery Client, in short movie "Vandal" d Felipe Vara de Rey 6/23/15
• Improv: team "Beaker Boy" UCB East, d. Eric Tanouye 6/10/15
• Improv: team "This is the Way the Lady Rides" UCB East, d. Eric Tanouye 6/8/15
• Told a story in https://www.facebook.com/events/840674829302522/ 5/27/15 "The End," d. Daniel Ahrens
• Team "Krumpcakes" d. D. Siegel UCB East 5/17/15
• The Cabaret Showdown, "Rainbow Connection," d Mark McDaniels -- comedy singing contest
• Story Telling, "The Birth of my Second Child," The Magnet Theater Studio. Here is a link to a video of my performance The Birth of My Second Child.  This is not a professional video. It's a home video and from a not so flattering angle, but still conveys the story. Thanks to Brad Benson for providing it.
• Team, "The Zippers", QSIC, musical improv comedy
• The Cabaret Showdown, "Weird Science" d Mark McDaniels -- comedy singing contest
• Team "Expecto Patronum" d Ryan Dunkin, Frank Spitznagel, Jon Bander; The Magnet Theater Studio -- musical improv comedy
• Ongoing: appearing frequently at musical and regular improv comedy mixers/jams at The Magnet Theater, The PIT, QSIC, UCB -- trying to make sure I get on stage at least once a week at such shows.  A friend made a home video on his cell phone of one of my appearances at QSIC. This is not a professional video, but if you want to see it, click here. Thanks to Tim Layman for this video. On stage at the Magnet Theater 1/27/15 photos thanks to Pillow Talk. On stage at the Magnet Theater 4/16/15 photo again thanks to Tim Layman. Onstage 7/2/15 at Magnet Theater with Sean Taylor of Junior Varsity, again courtesy of Tim Layman. Another photo at the Magnet Theater still courtesy of Tim Layman

Performance related courses:

• Alba Technique, introductory sequence, Patricia Angelin http://www.albatechnique.com/
• Demo Reel, Actors' Access, Tony Nation and Michael Cerisano
• Special Effects with Peter McNerny at The Magnet Theater 10/29/15-11/19/15 class photo
• Musical improv practice group with Dan Reitz and Eric Gerson organized by Charone Frankel
• Auditioning for commercials with  Scott Wojcik at Paul Michael's The Network 10/20/15-11/3/15
• Musical Improv Workshop with Rebecca Vigil and Dan Reitz 11/7/15
• "Hip Hop Improv" with Doug Widick and Kaila Mullady at The Magnet Theater 10/18/15
• "Truth in Musical Improv" with Travis Charles Ploeger at The Magnet Theater 10/18/15
• participated in Post UCB 401 practice group with Chris Griswold
• "Indie Intensive" with Angela Mickey via Paul Michael's The Network 8/31/15
• "Embracing Musical Tropes," with Nikita Burdein at the Magnet Training Center 8/1/15
• Harley Kaplan, NYC Castings, 7/7-14/15
• Wynn Handman Studio April - June 2015; What I worked on in this class;'Wynn Handman class photo; Recent interview with Wynn Handman
• UCB 401 with Eric Tanouye
• Camp Magnet 2015 video of Camp Magnet 2015 (I'm at 0:39) Me onstage at Camp Magnet
• UCB 301, with David Siegel
• Ear Training II, WCC with Jeremy Goldsmith
• The Musicality of Musical Improv, with Rebecca Vigil & Dan Reitz;  class photo
• Scenework in Musical Improv with Woody Fu at The Magnet Theater
• Commercials with Rebecca Yarsin, Paul Michael's The Network/TVI
• "Facing Your Improv Fears" at The Magnet Theater with Caitlin Steitzer
• Story Telling with Adam Wade -- started in 2014 and ended in 2015
• retook Musical Improv Level II at The Magnet Theater with Ryan Dunkin, Frank Spitznagel and Jon Bander (started in 2014 & ended in 2015)

Legal Courses

• "Nuts and Bolts of Marketing Your Practice," NYIPLA 11/10/15
• ENYIPLA “Global Patent Licensing – Some Random Observations and Strange Business Concepts” Presentation by  Richard Ludwin, Esq 10/22/15
• Copyright Outside the Box 10/2/15 at Columbia Law School
• JPPCLE 5/12/15 Marriott Marquis, NYC
• CLE on copyright law in music with IIPS

Other:

• Attended Barschall/Haeberli Symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, commemorating my father.
• Calligraphy examples and more calligraphy examples (some from earlier)

Links to my various online profiles

ongoing updates blog