Arkansas, ho

With some assistance from vond and jedibfa, and moral support from nixve and uilos, I pulled the files I desperately needed to back up onto my backup hard drive and reinstalled Win2K this morning. Seems to have taken okay, although I may be on a quest for an ethernet card driver on floppy disk [or CD] when I get back in town next weekend.

I'm on the road to Arkansas right now, travelling to visit extended family. This'll be my first visit in about five years, so normally I'd expect to be under some heavy scrutiny from elder relatives. Luckily Jamie has saved me from all this by the simple expedient of giving birth late last month. Kylie Adell Welch [her middle name was my grandmother's; you can mock her first name all you want, though] will be the main focus of attention, and I couldn't be happier.

For once we're not making the eighteen-hour trip in a single day. Instead we've stopped for the night in Cookeville, which is [says Dad] about in the middle of Tennessee. All I know is they've got free wireless in the Holiday Inn (and it's got its own website, too!), so they get a big thumbs up from me. Dad's also rented a gigantic van in which to travel. This is a big step up from my memory of Christmas travel, being packed into the middle seat of a minivan with Jamie because the entire back of said minivan was filled with suitcases and Xmas loot. It's very strange to have leg room.

Hm. I thought I had more to say. Oh well. Unless they have wireless in either Hoxie or Helena I'll probably be offline for real 'til Satyrday. Don't burn the place down while I'm away.

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Illegal Tender / a lot of plays

David Tripp, Illegal Tender

In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the US government stopped issuing gold coins. All gold was recalled and melted down, to be stored in Fort Knox. This included the 1933 "double eagle" $20 gold coins, which were minted but never officially issued. A handful of the coins managed to escape the furnace, however, and (due to never having been legally removed from the Mint) the coin wound up on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Most of the fugitive coins were retrieved within a decade or so. One, though had been sold (given?) to King Farouk of Egypt, and was out of the reach of the federal government. It turned up at the close of the twentieth century in the US, was confiscated, and then officially issued by the Mint and auctioned for a staggering sum. The end.

Really, this story was far better when I read it as a magazine article a couple of yearas ago. There's just not enough material to fill a book. Tripp tries, and we get bits about the history of the double-eagle, and the gold recall of 1933. Ultimately it just feels like padding, and not even [to me] very interesting padding at that.

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Eric Lane and Nena Shengold (eds.), Take Ten: New Ten-minute Plays (selections)

Exactly what it sounds like: a collection of plays that can be performed in about ten minutes. More are funny than serious; in ten minutes it's harder to work up a good drama than to toss out a couple jokes. Still, some do manage to touch nerves. I really like the form. But then, I'm usually a fan of stripping things down to the essentials, and it doesn't get much more essential than ten minutes.

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Erik Ehn, The Saint Plays (selections)

Short plays inspired by various Roman Catholic saints: Joan, Christopher, George, etc. Ehn uses some powerful imagery in these plays, and a great deal of poetic language. They're not really traditional 'plays' at all; they're more akin to poetry on stage. I used one as my scene for directing class; that was probably a mistake. Walk before you fly, handle realism before imagery. Oh well. It was still a good scene.

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Daniel Halpern (ed), Plays in One Act (selections)

Everything I said about Take Ten also applies here. The Stopppard piece in thei volume [about three lexicographers] gave rise to my idea of Art as that which makes you see things in a different, often surprising, way. ["Where's Brenda?" "Bracelet to Brilliance." "No, no-- your wife."]

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Karen Hartman, Gum

This seems like it ought to have the same kind of dialogue problems that Abingdon Square did: it's got choppy sentences that switch topic from moment to moment. I found Gum a lot more believable than Abingdon, though. That may have to do with general character issues, or maybe with a more sympathetic plot [women trapped in a fictitious Muslim country]. Regardless, I found Gum to be a genuinely moving experience, and Abingdon Square a merely puzzling one.

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