Barry's Life in Napa Blog

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...

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 "...

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...

To paraphrase some comedian I once heard: "There comes an age when a person should stop making a big deal about their birthday, and that age is 12." It came as some surprise, then, to have a couple of Facebook friends suggest I should blog about my birthday, because out of all the topics I might think to write about, my birthday would rank about 1,327. I had a birthday. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo. Slap me silly and call me morose, but it's just a reminder that I'm a year closer to being dead than I was a year ago. "I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker" and it's not pretty. Simultaneously, since I'm really good at holding completely contradictory thoughts in my head side-by-side and seeing them both as honest and true because, after all, they are MY thoughts and all my thoughts are honest and true and even admirable (ahem) I still secretly wish for someone to surprise me, make a big deal of my birthday, and make me feel loved. (This hap...

Jean-Paul Sarte, the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, literary critic, and atheist, who was also known to make a crazy good stuffing, wrote the famous words "l'enfer, c'est les autres." This phrase seems unintelligible until one realizes it was written in the language called "French." It has been variously translated as "Your gravy, she is lumpy," or "Grandfather, lie on the floor until the feeling passes," but most commonly is said to mean "Hell is other people." And so, happy Thanksgiving! A survey on ivillage the other day revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that about two-thirds of people think someone will get on their nerves during Thanksgiving family gatherings. The other third of people are either (a) staying home alone, or (b) doubling up on their meds, or (c) both. Even now, as millions of Americans are eviscerating small animals, peelin...

My uncle Rodney, the last of the three Martin brothers, died two days ago at 94. He was married for 72 years. It's hard to know if all those years were happy years because he was prototypically the man who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful, but I think he was happy. I cite this as a pre-counterpoint - a preterpoint, if you will - to what follows. I will now wage war with the concept of happy endings. (No, not that kind, you pervert.) From toddler-hood we are marinated in happy endings. Wicked queens (no, not that kind, you pervert) and ugly stepsisters and predatory wolves in the woods always get what's coming to them. Handsome princes and damsels in distress find true love and always live happily ever after. We learn fast. At about age 5, my daughter whispered to her grandma during a stressful moment in a Disney movie, "Don't worry, they get married in the end." This was a movie this child had never seen before. She was already primed to believe in happy...

If you're young, smart, have a little money and don't believe in God, chances are you're looking forward to the start of your weekend and knocking back a few. In fact, chances are you don't wait for the weekend - according to the latest Gallup survey on drinking habits . Now, you could just follow that link and read the thing for yourself, but I recommend you pour yourself a fresh one and let me lay it all out for you, along with my sparkling observations of the meaning behind the data. Unlike Gallup, I have no science to back up my claims, but that's never stopped me before. First, let's qualify that first sentence: "Young" in this case means 54 or less (I like that definition of young) because the numbers are the same 18 to 54. In the 55+ range there are fewer drinkers, and I take that to mean at a certain age you either (a) lose your taste for the stuff, or (b) lose you ability to find your car keys so you can't get to the liquor store, or (c) l...

Imagine you are rich. Imagine you are rich enough to hire people to do just about anything you want. Imagine you are rich and also stupid and perhaps loathsome. Imagine your stupidity and loathsomeness keeps getting you into trouble. Imagine you are rich and quasi-powerful and your loathsome stupidity gets you into the kind of trouble that may endanger your capacity to continue being rich and quasi-powerful. Wouldn't you hire someone to protect you from yourself? Enter Mel Gibson. Imagine if charming Mel had had the sort of bodyguard who had the big guy's best interests at heart. Assigned not to keep fans and paparazzi away but to stop charming Mel from (a) driving drunk, leading to verbally abusing cops with anti-Semitic tirades, or (b) conducting repeated go-nuts-and-dial phone conversations with his ex, or (c) punching aforementioned ex, the mother of his child, in the mouth, or (d) making a film version of "Hamlet." Mel's life (and in the case of (d), my life)...

Yesterday I heard myself use the phrase "at the end of the day." It's a pretentious phrase that tells the person you're talking to "I have now summed this up for you and there's nothing else to be said+" and one of those verbal crutches that props up the vocabulary in a moment of weakness. "At the end of the day" went rapidly from clever new expression to cliche - an overused, a ready-made set of words that takes the place of meaningful expression. You have to be careful when you start paying attention to cliches. You will hear yourself oozing them out, and hear them spurting from the mouths of your friends, and if you care about words you won't like yourself and you won't like your friends. That said, (there's one) I've got my diminished mind focused on them right now, so maybe I can get it out of my system (there's another one) if I make a list of the cliches that are annoying me the most right now. Zero sum game: every t...

"Warm bodies, I sense, are not machines that can only make money." - Ed Kowalczyk In one of the legendary wild west towns - Deadwood or Dodge City or Tombstone - they had a sign at the city limits that said something like "Now entering (legendary wild west town.) Leave your guns with the Sheriff." Having just returned from Las Vegas, I am thinking there should be a sign there offering a place to deposit your soul during your visit. Las Vegas can be blamed on Herbert Hoover. It was the building of the dam nearby that created a huge mass of restless, horny men with cash, and wherever such a huge mass is found prostitution and gambling and other vices will grow. Unlike other western towns where cattle, ore and other fast-money propositions led to rampant growth and manly indulgence (like Deadwood, Dodge and Tombstone, and even my hometown of Joplin, Missouri, which was a lead and zinc mining mecca and noted for it's wide-open nature in those days) Las Vegas did no...

It's 4:30 in the morning and outside the air smells like summer for the first time, and I am wondering about things. Things like why every apple has to have a sticker on it that delays my first bite, and why some people are trying to provoke a(nother) war in the Middle East, and why the auto-correction logarithm in my iPhone thinks it's more likely that I'm trying to write the word "lice" than "love." And I'm thinking about the unperfect game. Every blogger and pundit worth his or her salt has long ago weighed in on this topic, I know. My turn now. Quick primer for those who don't follow baseball: a perfect game is when a pitcher gets the other team out for all nine innings and no batter reaches base. No hits, no walks, no batters hit by a pitch, no errors that allow a base runner, nothing. Nine innings of three-up-and-three-down. 27 batters come to the plate, 27 batters walk back to the dugout. It's only happened in the big leagues 18 times ...

My mother used to call out in the morning from the kitchen, "Rise and shine!" It came in a sing-songy voice that was intended to make me jump out of bed smiling, I suppose, but being an angsty teen (what other kind of teen is there?) it made me want to strangle her. When I look back on it now, it's easy to see how forced was her early-morning cheer. Up every day at 5 a.m. to make breakfast and pack a lunch for my dad, looking ahead to a day full of laborious repetition to make a home and feed the family - I wonder about the origin and the sincerity of the expression. But I know now that the presentation of a sunny demeanor to her piece of the world was as crucial in her daily agenda as the frying of eggs and the sweeping of floors - no matter what quiet despair she might indulge in after the school bus had come and gone. There is no shortage of persistently pleasant people in the world. You meet them in coffee shops and auto shops and they sell you long distance packages...

I've never studied philosophy but I always thought I should. For someone who paid tuition to make smoke powder blow up in flashpots and learn how ladies' gloves were made from the skins of mice in the Elizabethan age, philosophy seemed like the natural next step in a progression toward an all-encompassing knowledge that was simultaneously quite useless. But just because I never studied it doesn't mean I don't consider myself something of an expert on the topic. After all, I have access to Wikipedia. Duh. Philosophy, then is: the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism, myth, or the arts) by its critical, generally systematic approach...The word "Philosophy" comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία [philosophia], which literally means "love of wisdom." I do love that wisdom. Watching Jeo...

Every four years I am reminded of how little I care about sports that take place on snow and ice. Believe me, I WANT to care about Amund Nordlinngsen and his quest for gold in the ski-awhile-and-shoot-a-gun-awhile event, especially in light of him losing 4 toes and the tip of his penis to frostbite during training. I WANT to care about Wang and Chen and their pursuit of the hexagonal obtuse throw in the ice dancing, especially in light of the fact that Chen's father was persecuted in Tianamen Square and lost the tip of his penis when a tank ran over it. And I especially WANT to hear more about all these people from Bob Costas or Jim Nance or whoever is talking, especially in light of the fact that Bob/Jim/Whoever has lost, or is soon to lose, the tip of his penis to something, based on the theme of this first paragraph. I WANT to care, but alas, I don't. There was a time when I really cared about the winter Olympics. I remember reverence for some Norwegian speed skater who was ...

Wow, it's been almost six weeks since I've posted here - but I have a good reason, and I'll write about that another time. Right now, I'm thinking about (as I put one of them into the DVD player) 10 movies I have watched so many times I begin to think I am demented. What is it about certain movies that makes you want to watch them over and over - when there are surely plenty of other movies you've never seen once that are worth seeing? Why would I invest yet another 2 hours in watching one I've already seen when there are both well-known and undiscovered masterpieces unviewed? I will ponder these questions as I make this list of ten (representative but not comprehensive) and maybe an answer will define itself. 1. O Brother Where Art Thou? Coen Brothers. George Clooney's funniest role ever. Kickass soundtrack. Who wouldn't want to watch it 17 times? Or 117 times? Enough said. 2. The Wizard of Oz OK so sure, I watched it a dozen times before I was 18 but ...

AVOID SWINE FLU! DO NOT LICK PIGS!! Being the kind of guy who needs to feel plugged in all the time, I use Google Alerts to send me news stories about Napa. Back when I was on the radio every day, it seemed essential to have a fairly good idea of what the heck was going on around town, and ever since I started trying to know what's going on, people started expecting me to know what's going on, so now I actually need to know what's going on, or else I will let everyone down and I can't have that on my conscience. Expectation created, expectation pending, expectation must be fulfilled, or else I lose face. Tools like Google Alerts make it a lot easier to stay informed than it used to be (and a lot cheaper than using a clip service.) In my job with the City of Napa, then, I continue to try and have a clue most days. So my Google Alerts generate these emails that have headlines and a few sentences from online news stories. All of these stories have the word "Napa"...

This just in: TLC drops Jon and keeps Kate: TLC says the new show, which debuts November 2, will be "Kate Plus 8." Let me be frank here - I have never grasped the pleasure of watching these people try to manage their lives with 8 freaking kids running around. And the few times I accidentally glimpsed some of this "reality" show, it always seemed like mom and dad were barely tolerating each other. So it came as no surprise that this guy was getting some side action. I mean, even the most devout husband would be looking for any excuse to get out of the house that had 8 freaking kids running around with poopy diapers and snotty noses. Granted, he should have joined a fantasy football league or taken some night classes or something rather than go on the make, but there you go. Men are scum, we all know that. So now TLC can spin the whole thing into much more of a soap opera that it was before. I bet the ratings go through the roof if we have scenes of them yelling at ea...

"'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." -Benjamin Franklin, 1789 Death and taxes. Inevitable. (How about death BY taxes? Some would say that's about to happen, too, but that sounds like the start of a political rant and I've lost all enthusiasm for those.) Funny that these two things we all know are so certain are the things we are so poorly prepared for most of the time. I mean, after all, you know you have to file by April 15 every year, and yet we still file extensions and fuss over it another six months. Human nature, I guess. And no surprise that so many of us shuffle off the mortal coil and leave it to others to pick up the pieces. When the eternal footman holds your coat, by the way, no extensions can be filed. Unless you have a really, really good CPA. I had my little glance at mortality a few months ago when I joined the melanoma club. Made me take notice of things left undone. And lately it seems like people are just g...

There's something really "special" about putting yourself out there for scrutiny in a public way. I do it in my job, I do it in this blog, I do it on Facebook, I do it as a performer - and in all those formats I am completely comfortable. Online dating, on the other hand, is different. You present yourself - not a character, not the "you" of your job, but your very own real self - and implicitly ask "Do you like me?" It is appallingly direct. When you pursue dates in more traditional ways, like hanging out in bars or clubs, you can always pretend you're not there for that reason, if you need to. "I'm just here with my friends, and I am not interested in dancing with you, thanks" - that's plausible in a bar. But once you show your face on a dating website, you're undeniably in the game, and you are undeniably seeking approval. I hate it. But crap, how the hell do you meet people otherwise? It seems like the thing to do these da...