Barry's Life in Napa Blog

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...