You want me to...what?

I received a unique piece of direction last night while we were staging the opening number.

"Be a rock star."

If you were in my six-inch platform boots, bowler hat, and sequined pants, and someone told you to "be a rock star" how would you interpret that direction?

Lover Who?

‘Lover Bois’ Causes no Stir
by Forky Fourchette

The film version of Lucifer P. Snarewell's blasphemous shock-play Lover Bois, in which Jesus and his disciples are portrayed as promiscuous homosexuals, hasn’t even caused Betty Graham, an active church-goer from Valdosta, GA, to bat an eye.

“I’m worn out,” said Graham, 36 year old mother of three. “Right after tee-ball, I've got to run pick Jenny up from ballet rehearsal and then fix dinner. If people want to see that movie, whatever. Besides, everyone knows it’s just a bunch of falderal anyway.”

The film, which Tinseltown experts predicted would face the largest protests Hollywood has ever seen and therefore rocket to the number one spot on opening weekend, has been met with nary a picketer or protest placard. It opened last weekend to modest box-office and even more lukewarm reviews, as critics called it “intriguing, yet emotionally hollow”, “controversial”, and “feather boa”.

“I didn’t even hear about this movie until two days before it came out,” said Pastor Clarence Whittiker of Saddlebags Community Bible Believing Church. “When I heard the premise I thought, ‘Hmm. That’s an interesting take on the Gospel story.’ I might even try to go see it. But not this weekend. Our church is so busy with the canned food drive, the silent auction to raise money for home-building projects for lower-income families, and the literacy outreach program to prison inmates that we don't have a lot of time to go to the movies.”

Lover Bois tells the story of the last days of Jesus Christ, which would normally mean boffo box-office from the crowds that made the Passion such a surprise hit. However, in this version, Jesus is portrayed as a pimp and his disciples are his binge drinking, dope dealing homosexual hookers. While in the Bible, Jesus is crucified for the sins of the world, in Lover Bois, Jesus is executed for owing money to a rival pimp, Barabbas, and is unable to pay up, even after betraying Peter, his hottest ho, for thirty pieces of silver.

"What movie?" said Father O'Flannery of St. Patrick's Parish. "Oh yes. The Lover Dudes. Isn't that the one where Martha and Mary Magdelene...you know? The congregation and I had a good laugh over that. It's like the Biblical Girls Gone Wild. What will Hollywood come up with next? They're so inventive."

It's just this sort of "who-cares" attitude from the Christian community that has Hollywood execs down on their knees.

"This is unreal. We've never seen Christians react this way," said producer Chuck Stogie of Monotone Studios. "Everyone knows when you put Jesus in a movie and call it 'controversial' you have a hit on your hands. It's the old Hollywood formula. It never fails."

"We haven't done any publicity for this picture," said Wanda Billfold, marketing exec for Monotone. "We were counting on the religious right to do all our publicity for us by having rallies, marches, and picket lines in front of movie theatres. This behavior is so uncharacteristic of them. If they don't get riled up, we're screwed."

There have been rumors of desperate publicity attempts by key players in Hollywood to jolt religious conservatives into action. Monotone is said to have sponsored several outdoor screenings of Lover Bois in parking lots next door to evangelical churches in the tri-state area.

"It didn't work," said Stogie. "Instead of showing up with placards, people stayed at home watching wholesome black and white movies from the 30s and 40s. Those movies feature well-developed characters who are almost always patriotic, upstanding members of a moral society. The dialogue is usually clever and intelligently written. And they go against everything people really want in their movies today. People don't want Capra. They want 'stupid'."

"Not even the Christian nutjobs care about Lover Bois," continued Billfold. "We've haven't seen hide nor hair of Fred Phelps and his cronies, even after we told him about the Last Supper scene. Instead, he called and said he had a slight headache and 'just wasn't feeling up to it this time.' We were really counting on him to come through.

"It's killing us."

In a last-ditch effort to keep Lover Bois from joining the likes of studio-killing bombs such as Dune and Waterworld, Monotone has begun pushing an emergency ad campaign marketing Lover Bois as the true story of Jesus that church officials have kept under wraps for centuries.

"But it's not," retorted Scott Billingsly, a 43 year old member of First Avenue Presbyterian Church. "You'd have to be an idiot to believe a bunch of movie trailers that claim to be the final authority on centuries-old Christian theology."

"I know I'll never go to church again," said Lula Mae Beulah Burton, 17 year old mother of six. "After seeing those posters that said Lover Bois was historically accurate, I know now that all Christians are liars and hypocrites and they just want my money. I've always been looking for a reason to say that and now I've finally got one.

"Lover Bois changed my life."

Burton and her children have yet to actually see the film.

More on the Lover Bois controversy as it develops.

Table Work

Rehearsals for Sidmummer's are going along just swimmingly. The director has a clear vision for the show, the choreographer is totally organized, the musical director, while a little addled at times, is doing a fine job...yes, everything's just ducky!

Of course, we had to get through the table work first.

New Age Shakespeare Scholar Moonbeam Lagoon taught us that just about everything in Shakespeare has some kind of phallic connection and is related in some way to the worship of the Earth Mother, LeGaia.

It was a real eye-opener!

Then there's Michael McGillicuddy who plays Snuteling, one of the tiniest roles in the show. Thanks to his insistence that we really examine his character thoroughly, the rest of the cast now has a full and vivid picture of Snuteling and his relationship to the rest of the characters, what drives him, what frightens him, heck, we even got a full-blown backstory that McGillicuddy made up all by himself. Meanwhile, we spent considerably less time glossing over the more insignificant characters like Oberon, Puck, and Titania.

Ms. Lagoon also taught us that all of Shakespeare's writing (with the exception of prose and a fair share of verse) always follows the beat of the human heart. Always. To demonstrate this, she had us all take off our shoes and socks so we could really FEEL LeGaia beneath our feet. We then jogged a lap around the room, one at a time, speaking a Shakespeare monologue, one syllable for every step, like so:

"The - King - doth - keep - his - rev - els - here - to - night.
Take - heed - the - Queen - not - come - with - in - his -sight..."

I noted silently that healthy heartbeats typically go "BUH-bum, BUH-bum, BUH-bum," not "buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh" and that Shakespeare's verse USUALLY goes "buh-BUM, buh-BUM, buh-BUM."

Still, it was good to know who has stinky feet in the cast this early in the game. And hopefully the smokers, who were COMPLETELY winded from that little exercise, will take a hint and lay off the 'baccy for the next couple of months.

No, I take that back. It really was funny to run a single lap around the not-that-big rehearsal room, then look at my fellow actors doubled over, gasping in pain like patients in the emphysema ward, sweat fairly pouring down their contorted faces and pink bits of lung fluttering out of their mouths with each hack and cough.

Our table work is finished. Two of our female leads still don't really know what they're saying, we now know that McGillicuddy must have sheet music for everything, even though he declared very loudly that he cannot read music anyway, and Titania, not Diana, was the moon goddess and Elizabethan Midsummer celebrations were pagan orgies for her worship, performed around phallic maypoles in the phallic forest (the trees suggest phalluses).

I'd say it was a success.

Best Ever - Week 19

We all know blogs are a fun place to voice opinions, be they about politics, the absurdity of DeathUVs and their female drivers, looming hurricanes and how to stop them, the Antichrist, Cartoon Riots, Pagan Holidays, and Tom Cruise.

But sometimes all this spouting can make us forget what's really important.

That's why we on the 42nd Floor have decided to usher in the weekend by making all Friday posts chock-full of sunshine and optimism, focusing on what we consider to be...

THE BEST EVER

week 19

There are a few things in life I'd really rather not have. Bad acne. Seven fingers as opposed to the traditionally conservative ten. Male pattern baldness. A job at a paper mill. A forked tongue. Kidney stones.

But if there's one thing that would make me genuinely depressed to have, it'd be peanut allergies.

If I came down with peanut allergies, I know I'd cry real salt tears. Into my pillow. Every night. I might even decide to end it all by drowning myself in the one thing I love more than my nine toenails:

Peanut butter. Rich, creamy, Someone-help-I-can't-stop-eating-this PEANUT BUTTER.

Since the trans-fat scare of '05, my journey to peanut butter, like my journey to abs, has been a long, treacherous one. I weaned myself off the processed stuff and made the switch to organic. I taught myself to stir thoroughly before going to town with a spoon and a glass of milk. I found a brand I love. And I'm never going back.

What joy is mine.

The mere thought of globbing a heaping spoonful of this...this manna into my drooling mouth makes me smile a little bit.

And that's why Creamy Organic Peanut Butter is this week's Best Ever.

A Child's Bedtime Prayer

Thank you for this day and please

Don't give me food allergies

Inherited from dad or mudder

So I can still eat peanut butter.

D'urbious

You wake up at 7:00am, do crunches, brush your teeth, wash your face, pet the cat, feed the cat, feed yourself, pack enough food for lunch and dinner, depart for the office, get there, spend the rest of the day dealing with Yasriel, Mr. Archibald, Candie, Ginjur, Jerrie and Co., then run to the gym (sneaking out of work at 4:45), work out as hard as you can for an intense 45 minutes, drive as fast as you can to rehearsal, snarf down a protein bar, get to the rehearsal hall (three minutes late! For shame!), stay there until 10:30pm, and finally get home somewhere around 11:00.

You'd think a person would be worn out by the time they finished feeding the cat again, playing "catch the shiny Christmas ribbon", brushing and flossing, and then collapsing into bed.

But not me! No sir! I'm as wound up as a top! a dreidel! an ambitious wind-up robot with high hopes of having all his robo dreams come true!

It's times like these, when slumberland seems such a distant goal, that I always depend on my secret sleep-aide:

Classic literature.

There's nothing like a half a glass of protein shake and a little Tale of Two Cities to get the Sandman a-tugging at your eyelids.

I opted to forgo Dickens this time around and decided it was high time to give Queen III's favorite semi-biographical novel of her life, Tess of the D'urbervilles another go. I remember the last time I tried to read Tesszzzzzzzzzz... ZZZzzz... ZZZzzz...

Ominous

This morning as I was slurping down my usual strawberry-banana protein smoothee, I got caught up on upcoming movies, thanks to the apple.com/trailers website. One, in particular, stood out; the upcoming remake of "The Omen" (to be released appropriately/cheesily enough on 6/6/06).

It looked a whole lot like the original classic of terror and suspense. Personally, I had mixed feelings about the original. I mean, sure, the kid was creepy. Sure, we all love the scene where the housekeeper says "Damien, I did it for you!" and hangs herself at the kid's sixth (sixth, SIXTH) birthday party. But despite those things, the movie felt a little...oh...I dunno...cornball.

In a desperate attempt to keep things interesting, the director of the original film version, who thinks the whole Revelation/Antichrist thing is all hogwash anyway, refused to say one way or another if the kid in the film REALLY WAS supposed to be the Antichrist. In an interview, he said he wanted to show what happens when two nice, normal parents get swept up by a bunch of crazies who THINK their kid is hellspawn.

And all those other things--the creepy nanny with the eerie voice, the demon rottweilers, the monkeys in the zoo going bananas when they see the kid, the 666 birthmark, the thunderstorms that come from out of nowhere, the scary demon choir, the fact that the kid can't get near a church without going completely bonkers, and everyone who comes in contact with him meeting grisly deaths by getting stabbed with falling church steeples, being knocked over by the devil's tricycle, or having their heads cut off--all those things were just wacky coincidences.

So let's settle this once and for all.

OMINOUS!

**An Official 42nd Floor Poll**

Is this kid the Antichrist?

Travel

Mr. Archibald is traveling today.

And Yasriel has already made all his travel plans for the next three months.

And I'm all caught up with the filing.

And there's really nothing else to do. And it's not even 10:00 yet.

So you know what this means?

PIZZA PARTY!

I think it's finally time to get started on writing my second theatrical masterwork. Yes...that's it.

Have you heard that we're in for another huge hurricane season?! Craziness! Could Fats Domino's sudden illness at the New Orleans Jazz Fest be an omen? The omen? (storm clouds gather)

Seriously, if Everycity gets even ONE DROP of rain on the nights we perform Midsummer, I'm going to drink some poison and have it out face-to-face with the Almighty.

Me: Hey! Why'd you have to let it rain! We had to cancel the show! This production is the biggest event of my life thus far!

God: Was.

Me: Huh?

God: Was. You're dead. You drank poison, remember?

Me: I--(considers...lightbulb...well, crap!)--oh. Well...crap!