Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Early March, 2020... For me, it doesn't get any busier than it was the first 10 days of March one year ago. On top of prepping and hosting the morning drive radio show on KVON, I anchored our election night coverage, sat in as a "guest teacher" on a friend's acting class in Santa Rosa, had a couple of fund development meetings for the Lucky Penny, rehearsed Sweeney Todd, and prepped the theatre for "Local Bands Night" on Friday (always a money maker at the bar). Plus two teaching sessions for the elementary school theatre project that would culminate on Tuesday, March 10th. There wasn't enough time to worry about having too many things on my plate because I had too many things on my plate. Navigated that week, gave the best I had to each chunk of it, and steeled myself for the week ahead which would lead into tech week for Sweeney.  One year later I am home before dark every night and sleep a glorious number of hours each night, sleeping so indulgently t...

It's mid February, 2020. I have a business meeting over a drink at nice Napa Valley bar and grill. There's no way of knowing that such simple pleasures will soon become off limits for more than a year.   At the theatre my biggest worry is the new law, AB5, that is going to turn community theatre financials upside down. But our rehearsal room is busy with dance classes and vocal lessons, and two new projects are underway - rehearsal for Sweeney Todd, and a theatre arts unit for a local elementary school that will wrap up in three weeks, on March 10th. That turns out to be a significant date.   On the weekend, I catch a show in Rohnert Park and see my granddaughter perform in Sacramento. We sit shoulder to shoulder and there's lots of hugging like always around theatres. We go out for food, naturally. There are no hand sanitizer stations, no markings on the floor six feet apart, no one wears a mask because it still seems the thing can be contained. Or it's like earlier...

The first two weeks... One year ago today the calendar was chock-a-block with things to do and places to go. It was Saturday, February 1st, 2020, and over at Lucky Penny we had some classes for kids going and a rehearsal for our upcoming musical. I was set to work a half day in a local tasting room, and the Kiwanis Club of Napa crab feed was a highlight on the social scene that evening (which tells you a lot about Napa). Roddy Ricch had the number one song that week but I don't think the DJ played it at the crab feed.  One day earlier, on January 31st, 2020, the first positive coronavirus test in the Bay Area had been recorded in Santa Clara County.   One year ago this week we were meeting with potential donors for our biggest fund development project in Lucky Penny's 11-year history, and we hosted the Boys and Girls Club and Poetry Out Loud at the Community Arts Center. Most of the morning radio shows were kind of B- that week even though the California primary was only ...

About five years ago, this blog vaulted out of the water, flopped around on the shore a little, and then stopped breathing. It wasn't that the water was too hot, or too cold, or too filled with plastic trash. Time, or the lack of it, conspired against me. But lo and behold, this blog survives! And it's time to jump back into the deep end. To prepare yourself properly, I encourage you to review and read my brilliant and insightful blog posts from the past. There are about five of those. You might also want to read the hundreds of others that are dumb and petty. That's up to you. In days to come I will be writing about the Napa-Focused Play Cycle Project, about news of the day, about things that strike me as funny/stupid/intriguing. I hope you will read and respond. More to come.

Yesterday a Starbucks opened at First and Main in downtown Napa. It is across the street from the long-time popular Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company. Reaction to the event falls into one of three categories: 1.  Cool, that's convenient. 2. There was a corner somewhere that didn't already have a Starbucks? 3. APOCALYPSE!! GO TO YOUR BUNKERS!! THE CORPORATIONS HAVE EATEN YOUR BRAIN!! Having shed most all vestiges of brand loyalty long ago, I mercilessly vote with my feet and dollars in the most selfish ways; meaning, I buy stuff wherever it makes sense to me at the moment. My decision might be based on price once in awhile, but more often it's just convenience. To wit, this morning I wanted a coffee. I proceeded to the ground zero of Napa's new worldview-meets-retail thrill ride, First and Main. Finding that I was on the Coffee Roasting Company side of Main Street and Starbucks was 100 feet further to go, I opted for the immediate solution - but the line insi...

Ever have a burr under your saddle about something and no one to complain to? Feel like you could Tweet it till Christmas but no one would notice? I did - a complaint about an annoying trend in live theatre. I decided to open my big fat mouth and say something about it, and wrote this piece for Howlround , which is a website for theatre nerds like me. http://www.howlround.com/here%E2%80%99s-your-hat-what%E2%80%99s-your-hurry-by-barry-martin/

This was NOT the "Greek" topic I was thinking of. I was sitting around looking for an excuse for not memorizing the lines I need to memorize, and I started thinking about how I am part of a fairly small subset of American men today - those who were excited about both European Cup soccer and the Tony Awards in the same day - and naturally that led me to furrowing my brow over the prospect of the Greeks voting this week on whether to stick with the euro or not. My life is complicated and I'm sure you feel sorry for me. In any case, it seemed like the only option was to pour another large glass of cheap red wine and give this whole mess some thought. Strap in, here we go. We owe the Greeks a lot. They gave us the foundation for western civilization as we know it, developing essential concepts like democracy, geometry, and theatre, and useful things like maps, plumbing and baklava. Without the Greeks, we might not have the Olympics, and we might have never discove...

As an old, white, hetero male ("Four strikes and you're still not out, cracker?") I have no place taking part in any discussion about bias. But I will anyway, because, as history shows, the world needs old, white, hetero males to wander into problematic situations and quickly assemble solutions before toddling off to the club for a tot of gin. The problematic topic is gender bias in the theatre. Yesterday I attended a breakout session on this topic at the Theatre Bay Area annual conference. The very engaging moderator, Valerie Weak , is an actor who has started keeping track of who has a penis and who has a vagina in various productions, from the author to all the production staff to the actors on stage. She does this tracking on her blog here , and while the stats don't paint a picture of complete insanity, it shines a light on some odd things that are going on. In general, women have less opportunity to take part in theatre than men, and that seems to apply at a...

From "News of the Weird": ... in Tacoma, Wash., in March, corrections officer Alan O'Neill, 41, was charged with bigamy after his long-estranged first wife found out about the second one when Facebook suggested the two be "friends." - KOMO News (Seattle), 3-9-2012 From The Telegraph: Forced to choose between her man and her scaly reptile's health, Lizzie Griffiths chose the latter. The 25-year-old schoolteacher from the London area paid approximately $4,700 so George, her bearded dragon, could get chemotherapy for tumors in his face. "George will always come first." Griffiths told the Sun. "I fell in love with George the minute I saw him and knew I'd do anything to look after him properly." Chris Fisher, who's been in a relationship with Griffiths for 10 years, understood the warm affection that Griffiths has for a cold-blooded creature."They have a special bond."  From USA Today: A Denver woman has been charg...

If you'd like people to actually pay attention to your blog, and possibly even read it, I suggest the gratuitous use of this type of photo.  I was in the radio business for a long time. I usually say I was in commercial radio, to distinguish that form from public broadcasting. "Commercial" was the key word. Back then, public stations didn't air advertising like they do now - they just mentioned grants and foundations now and then in thankful, well-modulated tones. Over in commercial radio, we were all about the advertising. Ads paid our tiny salaries, and if you had good ratings and people liked you, maybe you could make a few bucks on the side endorsing someone's pizza place or auto shop. Commercials were important. We debated the proper length of commercial breaks for different programming formats, how the breaks should begin and end, whether we could make more selling two 30-second ads or one 60-second ad. We set rules for the maximum number of commercia...

Based on the recent alignment of Mars, Venus and the crescent moon, a series of revelatory dreams I have experienced, and the news that Adam Sandler has a net worth of $300 million , it is apparent that the long-awaited and overdue end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it is about to commence in the form of a chaotic zombiepocalypse. Evidence abounds that the brain-devouring undead are increasingly emboldened and unafraid to walk among us in the light of day. The most recent examples include the brazenly destructive and pathological behavior exhibited by Courtney of the current season of The Bachelor ; the inexplicable rise to fame of singer Lana del Ray ; and, of course, Mitt Romney. Further evidence of the aggressive new zombie behavior and invasion into the world of the living came to me during the writing of this essay, in the form of an email that reads: "I'm walking around wi t h a hu ge ;hear!t that won't stop beating wildly. That's because y.ou're with me. I h...

It's a play on words, see? I am pondering the condition known as "too much time on my hands." I am pondering this sitting in a room next to at least 75 books I have not read. A few feet away is a guitar that I play so rarely I have no calluses. I have an infinite number of browser tabs at my disposal to explore this new internet thing, a couple hundred satellite channels. And I haven't even opened my "Paparazzi" action figures playset that I got for Christmas. How is it, then, that there's a voice in my head - the voice of a whiny 12 year-old, it sounds like - that's saying "I have nothing to do." This fits into the category of First World Problems - a category of conundrums we all "suffer" with - and by "all" I mean people like me, of course. Examples from this perspective-correcting site include: “I’ve run out of obscure ethnic cuisines to impress my friends with.” “My internet-capable fridge only connects ...

A big, strong man dissolved in tears of joy...the climax of an aria...someone you love in a cap and gown...a new high score in Angry Birds - all of these things are just like the others. I speak of the moment of catharsis. Warning: Pedantry follows. Catharsis derives from the Greek word kathairein, meaning to purge, purify or clean. Aristotle used it first in a clinical sense, to describe effects of certain actions on the human body, and then later applied it metaphorically to drama and poetry. Being a $64 word, chances are more people have experienced it than have accessed the word to define the experience. Warning: Tortured metaphor follows. Catharsis is like a cheeseburger - it comes in many varieties, and you can have it your way. It's found in your direct, personal experience - when you are the one touching something universal - and vicariously, even in seeing that moment re-enacted in fiction -  and your heart leaps up. We seek it out on stages, on playing fields...

When things go wrong, there is only one thing on my mind - find someone to blame. Being the self-centered yet sensitive sociopath that I am, I rarely find my satisfactory scapegoat to be (a) me, or (b) another specific person So I am happy to report that the deficiency of blog posts on my part of late is not the fault of (a) me, or (b) another specific person But my good friend blame can be placed squarely on a faceless, heartless, brainless Corporation. (A timely scapegoat indeed, given the tenor of the times. All you one-percenter-shareholders-in-faceless-heartless-brainless corporations, take heed. I'm watching you.) The FHB Corporation in question is an alleged supplier of bandwidth, a commodity of importance to He Who Blogs - particularly he who blogs only in privacy and mostly late at night when the hour and the wine facilitates. There is a certain solitude required - a solitude the FHB Corp has refused to provide me for most of the last six months. I m...

Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked. It has been almost six months since my last post. I'm not Catholic but I heard those lines in a movie or something. This blog has lain fallow for awhile. I've had no internet since I moved from Cozy Cottage to Rancho de le Dorma  back around the 4th of July, but today I achieved connectivity with the interwebs again so, good God, let me blog! For the world has been deprived of my bloviations, and how has it survived, anyway? There's been a lot of spilt milk under the bridge in the half-a-year of my bloglessness, lots of events worthy of insightful commentary. Like the Arab Spring, for example, and also the....um...the Occupy stuff movement.. and...did you hear we got Bin Laden? Some old dude predicted the rapture twice. Sarah Palin passed the Torch of Inarticulateness to Rick Perry. And my beloved Cardinals won the World Series. And so here we are. Throughout this blog famine of mine, twos and threes of people have asked "...

A third of my hometown was blasted to splinters. In real life, tornadoes don't give you a bump on the head and send you off to Oz. They drive you to hide and cower and scream, and you hear the sounds of things flying that aren't meant to fly, and your ears pop and your skin crawls and sky is the deepest bruised black and the house blows out from around you. If you're lucky the tornado passes near you but not through you. It runs through farmland and not through the town. If you're unlucky the tornado sucks down to the ground and chews its way through your house, your neighborhood, or, in the case of Joplin, a third of the city. A day later they had counted more than a hundred dead. Tornadoes are to May in Missouri as wildfires are to California in October. In May in Missouri, any evening the thunderheads may build up and the air begins to change and you glance at the sky and wonder. Thirty years removed, I still feel the thunder and the unexpected hanging in the air...

The evangelist on TV was working up a lather, all about the book of Revelation. Smoothly building with interpretations, suspending the climactic resolution. I watched his gestures and his face, and listened to his rhythm. For the last couple of months, I had spent time watching those evangelists on TV, seeking others out on YouTube. A good actor works at his craft, and I am about to play Jim Jones, one of the most charismatic evangelists known. I'm doing my homework. Suddenly he says something that makes me want to listen more than examine. "Adam and Eve," he says, "were failures. So we are the descendants of failures." He leaves this tangent and resumes his Revelation sermon. Failures, I thought. The pulpit vernacular would call for "fall from grace" or "original sin" - not "failure." It's all about the choice of words, I thought. It's always about choices. A certain friend, if present, would remind me that actors a...

I know there are millions of people suffering somewhere, and I'm sorry about that, but look, I have problems of my own, ok? For example, basic cable. Basic cable is my lack of clean water. Basic cable is my cholera. It oppresses me. Recent attempts at viewing basic cable led me to this list of THINGS I DON'T WATCH TO WATCH 1. Any show with an acronym in the title. 2. Any show with Gary Busey in it, unless it's "The Buddy Holly Story" because that one was ok. 3. Country Music awards shows 4. Any show with an autopsy in it. (See number one above.) 5. Ads for remedies for toenail fungus. Is the need for relief from radical toenail fungus such a widespread problem it requires a comprehensive national ad campaign? Never mind, don't answer that. 6. News stories about airplane fuselages that just pop open all of a sudden. 7.Any show that displays a dead body within the first two minutes. (See numbers 4 and 1 above.) 8. Telenovelas on the Mexican channel....

In the beginning, God was mean. Right from the get go it was all about punishment. Adam and Eve, evicted, with shame as their lovely parting gift. Frogs and boils and rivers of blood were doled out to the Pharoah. And let's not forget that petulant moment when God drowned just about everyone in the world. Man, was he pissed that time. Then there's Job, and Abraham, and others who weren't so much punished as they were "tested" - if "tested" and "tortured" have the same meaning. Early God would have used waterboarding and never engaged in a morality debate. Just plain mean, that Guy. Probably was the first to say "I brought you into this world, I can take you out," and Cosby was just plagiarizing. But God mellowed with age, his heart softened by bouncing the baby Jesus on his knee, and a new paradigm of love and forgiveness was developed and announced through a series of press releases and sophisticated manipulation of social media. Jes...

There was a revolution while I was on vacation. The protests in Cairo started January 25. I was in London, five days into my ramble and paying not much attention to the news. Won't last long, I thought, when I heard about it. Mubarak won't let it last long. While I went here and there amusing myself, frustrated Egyptians held out for change and 18 days later the strongman was gone. It was February 11 and I was making the return loop. It all looked the same in London, but the world had changed. Unlike the Irish girl who quizzed me on Obama's re-election chances or the Belgian man who couldn't really believe we don't have a national heath care system, Americans don't give two shits about international news unless it affects their business interests or their family - with the exception of American Jews, who pay close attention to goings on in Israel. But word of people in the streets in middle eastern countries is a different animal. We see ghosts of Tehran 1979 an...