Green Water? Yes!

When you walk into a bathroom at a highway rest stop, you expect to see long rows of marginally clean stalls with doors made out of an awkward green-gray plastic, a floor made out of those tiny little 1-inch-by-1-inch tiles that always seem to be light tan, and a wall of dirty mirrors and sinks littered with sopping wet paper towels all lit by those extremely unflattering fluorescent lights that make everyone look like aliens.

What you don't expect to see is this:

... and stalls containing toilets with green water, on purpose!

I won't lie; the first stall I looked into grossed me out a little bit, for I thought that the water was green for... other... reasons. Imagine my surprise when I saw the sign saying that the water is green because the entire rest stop is powered by a greenhouse full of plants whose energy has been harnessed and used to run indoor plumbing.

It was pretty awesome.

On Bipolar Weather.

At the risk of sounding terribly mundane and boring, I am going to write a blog post on the weather. However, the weather sometimes merits attention - especially when it steals the personality of a cat lady. I swear to all things that taste like chocolate that the weather here has not been taking its medication lately. Take today for example: this morning it was cool and foggy, at lunchtime it was extremely sunny and on the borderline of being hot, at 3 o'clock it was breezy but still sunny and warm, and now, at 4 o'clock, it has decided to rain.

Really? Make up your mind!

Maybe I'll write a more substantial post tomorrow, but I am currently in the process of creating a documentary film about how post-WWII American musical theatre has trended towards the prophetic in its ability to produce shows that seem better suited to the social climate of ten years in the future and how the rise of television and movie special effects and the computer age have created a society of Americans with attention spans shorter than the time it takes to tie a shoelace who are unable to create anything original, which in turn has led to the rise of the derivative spectacle musical with extremely high production costs and therefore high ticket prices which have made theatre a weathly, elite form of entertainment.

And, you know, other stuff... Like random clips of Bernadette and Mandy and Patti...

The Elusiveness of Talent

What is talent?

Mr. Webster defines it as the natural endowments of a person; a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude.

But who, or what, decides if we have talent? And what is the measure of that talent? But at all of this is the fundamental question:

What is talent?

There are some kinds of talent that are obvious, like singing or dancing or painting. When a person has that spark, that natural gift and sense that he or she was born to sing or dance or paint, we call it talent. But talent is not something that one can measure, rather it is something that is intuitive and based on perception. People are not talented in the same way that they are short or blond. Talent is just a human construct, impossible to measure, so can it be real? How can we judge someone based on a scale that is, at its heart, our own imperfect creation?

I think that at the core of this issue is the same fundamental urge of people to be special. Talented people are special; they are a different breed. Fans wait hours at stage doors for the change to catch even the shortest glimpse of a star, and for what? These people aren't gods. They are mortal, as the tabloids love to remind us. Maybe that's why the world devours celebrity gossip magazine. We have idolized these "talented" people to the point where they exist as a greater species, lording above the rest of us just because they were born with talent.

I'd love to believe that the Great White Way is different and that Broadway stars are wonderful, kind people that do not believe the rest of us not blessed with golden vocal cords to be lesser. However, from the (many) hours of interviews that I have watched with The Greats (you know who I mean) I can assume that they are as affected by this God complex as the rest of us.

So what is talent?

On Broadway it means "star quality," that inherent, God-given ability to act, dance, and sing better than the rest of the world. It means having those famed golden vocal cords and being able to belt a tear-jerking ballad while jazz-squaring your heart out. It is still not measurable. And I guess that's what makes talent so elusive and so, so desirable. When someone important says that you're talented, no one can dispute that claim because talent is not something that can be weighed or have volume. Maybe that's why people spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours at the piano or in the dance studio; trying to achieve talent, because we are taught that nothing good comes without hard work. And God only knows, talent is good. But there comes a point when lessons can only take you so far, and the last few inches to greatness can only be accomplished with something more than practice.

And that's when you need talent.