The other day I had a mild headache and searched my house for Tylenol, the gentle analgesic that often can head off my headaches before they attain anything like migraine status. Every single bottle of the lovely stuff was empty or expired. This situation has not occured in years! Therefore, the next day, as I grocery-shopped, I bought a bottle full of generics, carefully comparing price (do you know the ‘gel-tabs’, covered in gel and shaped like a fat UFO, are roughly half the price of the same dosage of ‘gel caps’, covered in gel and shaped like a submarine? I do not understand your Earth Logic!) before buying.

Whilst carrying my grocery bags in in the customary overloaded, flustered manner of a woman in a comedic movie, the box of gel-tabs fell to the back seat of my car, where I left them, as I needed to top up my work supply, in any case. They were there a few days, before, preparatory to a little tour of wineries, my husband and I madly cleaned my pit of a car. Today was the first day I needed Tylenol, and I grabbed up the unopened box on my way to the car.

At work, provided with a cookie to push down the pills, I tore open the box, pulled off the lid, and spent five minutes teasing off the tamper-proof seal. Hmm, that’s funny, they save money by not putting in cotton-wool, I thought, never noticing the strangely incongruous lack of rattle as I made the observation. I upended the bottle into my hand. Still no rattle. No rain of tiny Tylenol lookalikes. I peered within. The bottle was full. I swished it experimentally. The pills budged not. I have melted a jar of painkillers together. I guess I better go back to the grocery store.

So I went up, as mentioned, to visit my sister in Seattle for Scrapstravaganza 2004. I left my cooking hometown with a tank of gas near-full, and labored through the sweltering heat to reach Seattle with a quarter of a tank remaining. I lent my car to my sister a couple of times, which no doubt left her with a strange feeling of disorientation, as my car is identical to hers save for its exterior color and current state of tidiness (I can’t take full credit for the tidiness. Or the color, really.)

So it was that when, laden with scrapped pages, extraneous kitchen tools, many candle holders and a white feather boa, I sought to coax the thread of my journey from the great knot of Seattle’s byways, I found the open road only to find also a sadly diminished gas tank. Having already passed out of Seattle’s tentacular mass and not yet entered the aroma of Tacoma, I worried for some time before finding an exit with two gas stations on the sign—an exit for ‘Kent’, Washington. Seeing no reason to clog further a right lane already full of vehicles, I took the left exit lane — only to discover the clogged lane, stretching from I-5 right up to the intersection, offered my only chance of turning towards the gas stations.

Faced with the option of either zigging across two lanes to try to cram into a bumper-to-bumper turn lane or sedately turning left and finding a place to turn around, I turned left. Immediately, a concrete bumper arose between me and the left. No left turns. No right turns, either. The road stretched out before me, bending coyly behind a hill, only to reveal more and more divided highway, without exit or turn.

I turned off my P.G. Wodehouse audiotape, and concentrated on the road. I turned off the A/C to save gas, and, incidentally, to increase the dramatic tension. The divided highway swooped triumphantly up to an intersection and there, sweetly glaring in the summer sun, was a sign: ‘← Arco, 1/2 mile.’ I sang out some ridiculous Wodehousian exclamation, and turned left. An idyllic green park and a small bridge later, I pulled into an Arco, cleverly remembering on which side the Japanese had placed the gas tank.

La dee da. I’ll be able to listen to my tape some more while I’m filling up! La dee da…where are the people? AND WHY IS THAT GUY FILLING UP HIS OWN—oh. Right. In Washington, you must pump your own gas.

Trying to recall the miserable day when I drove my muscle-cramped, norovirus-ridden body from Seattle last, and stopped somewhere to gas up my car while maintaining the body-optimum 90-degree waist bend, I failed to gain insight into the pump that confronted me. The reason was simple—that day, my only other experience with pumping my own gas, I had been at a large, modern gas station. This pump seemed to be a clean and shining antique. Gone were the LCD screen and buttons I remembered. Yet more ominously, gone was the friendly instruction sticker, though its absence as yet struck no chord in my brain.

I pay at the island and return to my pump. I pull the nozzle from its holder. I pull it towards my car. whhhhhhrrrrr says the little zip cord stretching to allow the nozzle to reach. I frown. If I remember correctly, you are supposed to be able to fix the nozzle into the tank opening and have it sit there securely. This rubber-band tension avails me not. So, I start up my car and back it up, closer to the nozzle. I get out and try it again. Now the nozzle fits without any extending clothesline, but there is a collapsing-accordion deal on the nozzle which ensures that I will be pushing very hard the entire time I fuel up to make sure the nozzle doesn’t fly out of the opening and fuel down the side of my car. I press it in, grit my teeth, and pull the trigger.

Nothing. I try again. Nothing. I pull harder. Nothing. I eye the pump curiously as I squeeze. The pump has a nice, static…$15.00???

Fuming at my own incompetence, I locked my car and walked timidly into the minimart. ‘Umm, could I get some help at pump #10," quoth I, "I’m from Oregon, and I’ve only done this once before…" To my relief, the forbidding man behind the counter summoned a female henchperson to help me, and this matter-of-fact woman walked right up, plunked the nozzle in the gas-port, twiddled the little switch in the nozzle-rest, and set the gas pumping. (In my defense, please recall there were no instructions! Anywhere! Just a tiny little metal switch, easy to forget!) Of course, the moment I touched the damnable thing, it stopped the flow of gas, so, whilst I stood around feeling like a backwards child, she good-naturedly filled the tank for me.

I drove away feeling a little humiliated, a little relieved, and a little confused. Are handicapped people supposed to somehow pump their own gas? Little old people with arthritis? Don’t idiots smoke while doing this and send the whole place up in a fireball? The whole thing confuses me mightily. Though not as much as the Oregon state senators who want to make our state a self-pumping state in the middle of an unemployment crisis…

Okay, I’m not entirely certain I’ve had five attempts at lucid dreaming before. But it’s as good a number as any. One of my English teachers in high school told me that his wife (another beloved English teacher) dreamt lucidly all the time. ‘You can train yourself to do it,’ said he, ‘Every time you realize you’re dreaming, you try to take control—trying to fly is a good way of doing it—and it gets easier over time.’ The possibilities bloomed before me. My own personal Holodeck, I thought! (Yes, I am a geek) Endless fun and risk-free adventure, I thought! So whenever I remember, I go to sleep thinking about remembering I’m dreaming…(I don’t remember to think this often) and whenever I realize I’m dreaming and don’t immediately wake up, I try to fly.

I’ve had severely limited success. Once, I felt I was flying, but I couldn’t both fly and open my eyes. Most times I have just hopped frustratedly about. Occasionally I think I’ve managed to fly a few feet, only to be grounded again as soon as I alight for any purpose.

Last night, I had a perfectly ridiculous dream. I was gaming with Matt, Wonko, Lissell, Bedrick, and Grizelda (as far as I can remember and as far as dreams have static cast.) I heard someone trying to get into the house (something I fear). I hoped it was just a noise, but I looked out the glass sliding door, and I saw a big brown bear! (Yes, griz, I dreamt about a bear. Your ursine nightmares are catching.) He was scratching the glass door, then trying to shoulder it open. He failed.

“You think you’re safe in there,” he said, or words to that effect, “but” (and this part I recall quite clearly) “I have a Potion of Enlargement!” (have I mentioned I’m a big geek?) The bear dug in a belt at his waist, and glugged down a vial. Immediately, he grew, his glossy brown coat expanding like a balloon, and his normal bear-face growing flatter and dome-browed. He looked a strange and mythic bear, his eyes in vast orbital ridges like the curves of paint in a Coastal Tribe painting…and he threw his great bulk against the door he almost blotted out.

“Call the people who deal with these things!” someone said.

“Who would that be?”

“The Monster Department?” I queried, and we set about calling the Monster Department. But lo! Halfway through our phonecall, the bear disappeared from our worries (and therefore the stage), as I looked out my window into the park (now separating my house from a large industrial building, not more houses) and saw a 12-foot tall Godzilla walk into it!

Godzilla was grey, and very old-school and rubber-suitly. He stamped on some toy cars left in the park, and waded out into the pond. We informed the Monster Department just as he grew to near-conventional sizes and began laying waste to the industrial building which was, of course, full of Japanese people. (I promise, I’ve never even seen an old-school Godzilla movie.)

We were very frightened, and whenever people left the industrial building they were crushed or eaten, so we were nervous about leaving our house. As we discussed this, Godzilla’s head loomed up behind the grey building, larger than a hill, and he said, “If you leave I’ll kill you!”, reinforcing the threat by stretching an arm across the lake to tap at the window. Suddenly my friend Kug (EAKugler hereabouts) was beside me and he smiled a smile of superior geek knowledge.

“He can kill us without even touching us,” he said importantly.

Suddenly, Wonko, Grizelda and I were outside, in the woods, observing the rather beat-up looking red Power-Armored soldiers and robots that had arrived from the Government to deal with Godzilla. They piled onto red Endor-style speeders that were attached to an amusement park ride and lifted off, breaking free of the arms of the ride.

“They don’t inspire much confidence,” said Grizelda.

“So, what should we do now?” said Wonko.

“We could go back to the — hey, wait, how did we get out of the house?” said I. My companions did not answer. We were certainly not slain by Godzilla’s might, and I certainly didn’t remember eluding him. The scales did the proverbial eye-thing, and I realized it was a dream. Abandoning my companions, I set about jumping off logs in order to fly. I think I managed to skim a little, and found myself in a hangar full of government types monitoring the Godzilla threat, with a Baskin Robbins team giving out samples in the corner. After eating some ice cream flavors I missed from my childhood but which never actually existed, I started attempting to fly again.

HOP. Hop-glide-land. Hop. HOP. Hop-glide-rise…it was working! I swooped among the rafters, tried to increase my speed with various superheroic poses, accidentally flew backwards, and generally had a lovely time.

“What I really should do,” I thought, emboldened by my power, “is go defeat Godzilla.” Having read a lot of X-Men recently, I started trying to throw lightning bolts. Lemme tell you, Storm makes that look easy. It isn’t.

Still trying to shoot lightning out of my hands, I decided to find Godzilla first, and perform better under pressure. Somehow I thought that doing optic blasts would be WAY easier. I tried to ignore niggling thoughts of Godzilla’s atomic breath.

I swooped outside, flying low to the ground. On some bleachers outside, a person in a suit with a clipboard was interrogating Spike. Apparently he hadn’t made his evil quota. Swooping around the corner, I was sure I would come across Godzilla! But instead, I found some more suits mediating a conflict between Angelus and Darla over who got to write a specific situation report. I pouted and woke up.

Who knows, maybe the suits were from the Government, and the Monster Department is well-named?

My sister, Queen of the Scrap, Empress of the Album, is having a scrapbooking weekend at her house. I am among the lucky invitees. At first, I blithely planned to get prints made from my wedding photo negatives and get that guilt off my back. However, my anniversary trip put the kibosh on that enterprise, so I fell back on my unfinished album of my trip to Ireland and Wales in 1998. Yes, you heard that. I have an unfinished album from 1998. Two, if you count the small album of the musical I was in that year.

So, last night, after ambushing dragonfly-riding barbarians in Matt’s Exalted game, I set about packing to drive from lunch-hour to Seattle, trying to avoid gigantic traffic snarls in between. The first thing I started to pack was my photos, et cetera. They were in a large box in my workroom labelled, PHOTOS AND SCRAPBOOKS! VERY PRECIOUS! NOT FOR STORAGE UNIT! There, as I remembered, were the bags of photos, the bag of postcards, brochures and tickets, and indeed my travel diary, which was hilarious (almost any given page more than halfway through included an inventive curse on yellowjackets and their progeny. This was the trip that heightened my hatred of the little things to near phobic levels.) and remarkably complete. I piled all this up, added the scrapbooking paper and punches I own (not many) and looked at it critically. Something was missing.

The album. The album I’d started in 1998, which I had blithely assumed was packed with this stuff. The album which extends only 2 days, if that, into the trip. Urrrrrgh! I ripped apart my workroom looking. I searched the closet of the guestroom. I searched the closet of the computer room. I delved into boxes in the garage, and found a few things I’d been missing, but no album. I looked under the stairs. No, no, not under the stairs! I tried to find somewhere else to search, but there was nowhere else. I had to accept my fate.

I searched the first, the only easy-to-reach box. No. I dragged two boxes out into the hall, negotiating past our wine rack delicately. I searched the next boxes. I manhandled a suitcase approximately my own size out into the hall. I got a flashlight. The next thing I know, I’m hunched over in the depths of the cubby under the stairs, sweating profusely and jumping everytime my clothes brush my skin like a spider. I unpiled and repiled, crouching in the hot, rebreathed air, until I’d looked in every eligible box, and then I lugged all the boxes and suitcases back in. All the time, the delicately cultured accents of my audiobook regaled me with a social call on a breezy terrace with cups of sherbet.

Sweaty, dusty, and full of subliminal impressions of brown recluses crawling in my clothing, I finished my packing and crawled into bed, abandoning the idea of running before work next morning. I’m just going to do album pages (which I have) without an album in which to put them. Who knows…in another 6 years, maybe it’ll turn up!

In the last issue of The Knights of the Dinner Table (a comic book/magazine about roleplaying geeks), a guest editorial was run saying that significant others shouldn’t run games for each other. I immediately (though I was but minutes from departing for my sister’s wedding) sat down and typed a scathing e-mail for the discussion/letters section of the magazine. This month, I was curious to see if I got my letter printed. My spirits fell when I saw this on the editor’s introduction page:

I could have filled the entirety of this issue’s Back Room at the Games Pit with a dozen rebuttals to Randall’s editorial. In the end I chose to run just one.

Nonetheless, I turned to the ‘Back Room’ section, to see the letter that was printed, and what should I see but my very own letter! With my very own name in print! It’s nothing like getting a story published, but it makes me feel good, especially knowing I had so much competition!

Here’s my letter, for the record. They published it in its entirety, only adding a few carriage returns.

I was shocked and annoyed by Randall Nelson’s Gamer’s Pulpit in Issue #92. Significant others shouldn’t GM for each other? That’s news to me and my husband, who have been running games for each other for at least four years. It’s also news to my friends whose relationships have been improved by introducing their non-gaming partners to their games, so they don’t feel left out or tired of the weekly six hour absences.<

I’m very sorry Mr. Nelson has had such bad experiences with this, but his experience is by no means universal, and he may scare off some couples who would genuinely benefit from playing together. The bottom line is, the behavior he’s describing is not limited to involved GMs and PCs. It’s bad GMing. If you don’t have the strength to resist favoring your SO, how did you resist favoring the person with the coolest character, or your best friend, or the person who brings the best snacks? If you can’t do that, you should work on your own GMing style and ethics, not remove the temptation.

And the problems on the PC end that were described? Passive-aggressiveness of the worst sort. That behavior will crop up whenever the person is peeved or slighted. If you can’t stand it from them over dice and character sheets, how can you ever hope to stand up to it when it’s over buying a new car, or a new couch, or going to whose parents for Thanksgiving? Passive-aggressiveness is a horrible thing in a relationship, stifling communication and honesty. If it’s there, it’s in your relationship, not your game, and the relationship is what needs the work.

I am not saying there aren’t couples who genuinely shouldn’t GM for each other. Of course there are, just as there are certainly friends and gaming buddies who shouldn’t GM for each other, whose personalities, gaming histories, and gaming styles completely clash. But generalizing that to all couples is foolish and presumptuous. It may take a little bit of work and laying of groundrules - my husband and I run different systems, so that our rules calls won’t clash, for instance - but running a game for your SO can be very rewarding.

The GM can benefit from the SO’s honest opinion of how the game is going and observations of other PCs, what those others really enjoyed, what they need—something you seldom get unless you are that close to one of your PCs. The PC can be given a little bit of responsibility to help the GM out, whether by trying to steer the tangent-happy PCs back onto the topic of the game or by teaching the system to the new player.

I’ve had a wonderful time GMing for my husband, and he for me. Heck, maybe I’ll write a Gamer Pulpit with tips on it sometime. But that’s just my experience. Mr. Nelson seems to think his experience is the only possible or valid one, and that’s just ludicrous.

Long may the grand family tradition of the acid pen live on!

As anyone who has enjoyed my previous favorite words might infer, this word applies most vigorously to my humble self:

sesquipedalian

How could any true sesquipedalian fail to savor the elegance, whimsy, expressiveness, or fascinating origin of a long, sumptuous word? To such a mind, an elegantly elongate word is a sparkling gem, an elegantly-suited tool, and a fascinating story all in one.

I love Much Ado About Nothing. It’s hilarious. Beatrice and Benedick are so exactly, entirely true, in their divine foolishness and their loving hatred. Dogbury’s bending, folding and mutilating of our mother tongue reduces me to helpless laughter, as does the humiliation and desperation of the villains caught in his less-than-cunning dragnet.

Of course, when I was younger, there was the Kenneth Branagh-directed version, which I whole-heartedly adored, willing to set aside the flat, unsophisticated delivery of Keanu Reeves as Don John, especially when weighed against Emma Thompson’s sparkling Beatrice. The bloom came a bit off the production when I later studied the play, and noticed how hard Branagh had worked to whitewash the ending — it’s a tribute to Kate Beckinsale that she managed to keep me from wondering, all those years, what the dickens “And when I lived, I was your other wife: /And when you loved, you were my other husband” could mean that would make it happy.

Now, why, you may ask, do I spend so much time talking about a movie version of the play, when I purport to treat of the Ashland production thereof? Simple enough; that movie was blasted popular. Every stage production of Much Ado I saw for years and years afterwards was laboring in its shadow, and knew it only too well. The Beatrices and Benedicks were cast as May-December, or unappealling, or twisted the lines out of their normal key, all to distance themselves from Kenneth and Emma warring and wooing in Tuscany. I saw productions that made Beatrice ridiculous, her passionate love and hatred the object of fun. I saw productions that made Benedick uncouth to the point where I wondered if they’d mistaken him for Sir Toby Belch. They were awful.

Not so, not so, was this one. The Ashland production went its own way, but did not seem to be analyzing the inflection of each line for traces of Ken & Em’s cadences. The director had reread the play, and decided that the farcical antics, the war of the sexes, the masked parties, would accord well with a 1930’s screwball romantic comedy. And so they did. The Prince and his men arrived in WWI-era uniforms, and doffed them joyfully for tuxedos. Beatrice prowled the garden in Katharine Hepburn-style swooshy pants. Don John wore spats, and his henchmen slunk around in the best gangster-underling fashion.

The best part was, naturally and joyfully, Beatrice and Benedick. They were fiery and quick, and had believable chemistry. Benedick seemed a believable soldier, a believable man’s man, while Beatrice had an absolutely delightful slapstick side I’ve never seen applied to the character before. The banter seemed natural and fun, and while the audience did laugh on “Kill Claudio” (the cardinal sin of the ‘Beatrice is silly’ production), it was because Benedick had so obviously committed himself to something he so obviously didn’t want to do. It wasn’t at Beatrice, it was at Benedick.

Another interesting choice was playing up the Prince’s marriage proposal to Beatrice. It gave his character a little more depth, and got some laughs (“how little he deserves so sweet a lady!” sob).

So, what was wrong? Well, the director had this quote in the program about how we are all clowns, and he decided, after trotting Beatrice and Hero out in some lovely ballgowns and the men in tuxes before the maskers’ ball, to have absolutely everyone inexplicably dressed in clown costumes during the actual maskers’ ball. They only wore masks with the clown outfits. Would it have hurt to just have them in masks and their own clothes? It certainly would have made more sense — and dressing women and men alike sort of broke the 1930’s illusion for me. They had some more clown-dressed Ensemble players sitting around in the background of the last scene, too, I believe. Whatever the clown thing was, he pushed it.

The other problem was also in the last scene — that selfsame pivotal moment where Claudio discovers Hero yet lives, and the imperfect terms on which their marriage will be predicated. While the lines, such as the “When I lived” line, were delivered properly (in an emotional tenor appropriate to their rather grave content), the moment was rushed — we didn’t really see Claudio react to that line, and the emotional impact, the painful truth that some scars don’t go away and some innocence does not return, was definitely lessened. It seemed they wanted to rush ahead to the happy, funny union of the B’s.

Bottom line: Excellently acted, well-staged and costumed production, bubbling with good spirits and comic touches. Go to it. 9 out of 10.

No doubt sowing deep discontent in the hearts of those who, like sister sledge, demand content ‘hot and now’, there will be little of interest today, due to the handwritten portion of the Ungainly Parody having been lost in an avalanche of stuff off my desk (not so much an Act of God as an Act of Excavating Spouse), and the rest of my day having been consumed by A) the new admin, B) the grant one of my bosses needs to get out, and C) the final conclusion of the neuroendopsych to English translation.

I am beater than a beatnik in an Osterizer.

Great was my consternation to learn that Matthew, not blessed as I have been with great family ties to the sunny climes of Grants Pass, had never seen the Oregon Caves. The Oregon Caves are a beautiful creation in karst, tucked away on a long winding road and maintained as a National Monument.

I must admit that, while the caves are beautiful and wondrous, I found myself strangely unmoved by them - the sad result of having been several times as a child! There were, however, some parts that did still amaze me. The ‘plunge pits’ or whatever they are called are gorgeous - long well-like shafts with a gaping black hole rimmed with long petals of growth, or the one you have to climb up some steepish steps to see—wider in circumference and blooming with great Gigeresque grotesqueries, deeply alien and almost menacingly beautiful. The water falls all around, touching you coldly as if inviting you to stay and become part of the formation, your white bones absorbed in the white of the slowly building rocks, both unseen in the utter, echoing black.

Our first play in Ashland was a matinee of The Comedy of Errors, presented in the large indoor auditorium-style theatre, the Bowmer.

We entered to discover the depths of the stage concealed by a purple wall with purple dots on it, obviously seamed to open, and a chair with a light over it. Due to our fondness for ghost lights, it did not even occur to me to find this set-up ominous, until the lights went down and the Godfather theme started up.

You see, Ephesus, the setting of the play, is supposed to be a city where anything can happen, where the idea of witches knowing where your moles are and claiming they’re married to you is feasible, where you can find a conjurer to exorcise your husband in under five minutes, where a merchant can be threatened with death for nothing more than coming from the wrong town.

And therefore, the production was set in Las Vegas.

No, really. And it worked. The purple doors opened in various conformations, revealing (besides strings of lights) various casinos (complete with extras dressed according to each theme) - so that all the action that takes place upon ‘the mart’ takes place along the Strip. The Syracusans - Antipholus #1, Dromio #1 and the father, Egeon - were from Texas, which definitely made them seem fish out of water in the fast-paced frenzy of Las Ephesus. It also gave a sort of foreignness to Antipholus #1’s lyric moments - as if those moments of poetry, which are the principal means of his endearment to Luciana, were something she had never seen before in the hard, commercial world of the town. In short, it contributed to the frenzy and pace of the world of the play, and provided a believable context for the unbelievable muddle. Not to mention making the Duke a Don.

The other major innovation was doubling Antipholus with Antipholus, and Dromio with Dromio. If that strange sentence isn’t clear enough - where two men usually play the two twins, one did in each case. This increased our belief in the confusion - for only the accent (which wasn’t OVERdone) differentiated the pairs. For the parts where both twins appear, they merely proffered an appropriately dressed body double facing the wrong way, and performed some expert sleight of hand to shuffle the ‘real’ Antipholus or Dromio between his colocations.

What was bad about the production? Well, they added some things to the script - I cannot even recall them all - little one-off pop culture references. Some of them got big laughs, and some of them fell rather flat. I thought it was unnecessary, and really, the pop cultural gestures made with the original script were far more clever—such as having Dromio appropriate a lounge singer’s mike and do his series of riffs on how much he is beaten as a stand-up routine.

Bottom Line:
In short, a well-acted and well-thought out production, frothy, frenetic and fun. If you’re in Ashland, it’s worth a look. 8.5 out of 10