Poems and Plays

We begin on Thursday evening, with two non-drinkers walking into a bar.



But Days Park Tavern isn't on a street called Days Park, it's just near an Allentown park called Days Park. We found it anyway, going in at a perfectly decent-for-us hour of 6:30 p.m. for our first in-person viewing of a poetry slam.

It's cozy. A narrow corridor runs to the main seating area between a full-length bar and a wall of vintage Buffalo area concert posters from the 50s to the 90s. This one stood out because of the opening act-



That event carbon-dated to April of 1977, years before I moved here. A few months after that in '77, my sister and I would see Tom on cello with his brother Harry in Binghamton, the only time I ever saw the Taxi man before his 1981 passing. Four decades later, I met Tom's niece Jen, who he still performs with. Musicians are cool that way.

In the back are a couple of four-tops, a padded booth, a pool table and a bigscreen TV showing some really trippy videos. On this night, with them, were the POEMS!



We knew some of the basics from the online slam we watched a few weeks ago. The friend who participated in that one, Layla, was not competing this night, but she did attend, along with others we know from the Caffe.  Four slammers joined Brandon the host. Top left, he's explainin' the ruulz to the three who were there at the time: three minutes timed, from the first audience engagement, half a point off for going long; like the online one, scores were 0.0 to 10, the top and bottom dropped and the other three (here) added. The poets' order was by number draw, then snaked through two rounds so fourth in the first round went first in the second.

Judges? Did someone say judges? That included us. We were given a flipbook with the 99 possible two-digit scores; and were instructed to be firm but kind, not to worry about the half point off for going over the time (Brandon did that), and to tolerate abuse from the poets and audience if we were going too Russian Judge on anybody. Just two rounds, no eliminations, winner gets a chance to join their national team going to Florida next year.

To calibrate us, Brandon started each round as a "sacrificial poet"- in character as Chester Somebody and Someone McSomething.  That's him doing that, upper right and bottom left.  The lower one of those also captures some of the moderner art on the walls.  Nico, last arriving and first slamming, is bottom middle; the corner is just a piece of the weirdass video display that ran the whole time.

We know, or had at least previously seen, all four of the competitors. At least two of them went with poems we've heard them read at noncompetitive open mic events: JB (between the lamp and pool table top left) doing one about pineapple pizza and politics, Ashley (blurry but in the black hat at the head of the pool table) re-knocking us to the floor with an ode to flatulence from a lobbying trip to Albany. That was our first perfect 10 of the event; there would be others.  In the end, Dallas Taylor came away the winner-



- but all four were loved and appreciated. The venue has a limited but funky menu, we tipped our bartender/ server/ alltradesjackster kindly, and it brought a delightful end to what had been a less than delightful day of automotive woe.

----

From the sonnets to the stage, of sorts, on Saturday. There's Shakespeare in the Park (been there), Shakespeare in the Parking Lot (done that), even Shakespeare in the Trailer Park (not yet), but yesterday brought us Shakespeare in the Diner and the Bard in the Brewery- both coincidentally arriving on the same day.

The first is the product of an online friend based in Austin named Patrice Sarath. She's common to a few others formerly in the LiveJournalverse, but I oddly met her through a shared memory of being scared to death in earlier years by a radio commercial for Adler's Shoes. I've seen her writings in the years since, but she recently posted about taking her talents to script and camera, doing a short-film adaptation of Mackers.

That's not it- that's the opening scene of Slings and Arrows introducing the Accursed One. No, the resulting short film- which I witnessed being cast, shot and post-produced in prior Faceposts- is at this link.

Get thee to Birnham Wood quickly, though, for it is not coming to thee, and in nine more days the link will be gone.  Other than the three witches ordering off the menu in the first few moments, neither Shakespeare nor Sarath have an out loud word in the film; you only hear Johnny Cash singing "Hurt," perfectly synchronized to the events of the plot.

It's worth every minute of your time, and then some to appreciate it.

----

Not to be ootdone, Eleanor had a rebounding morning of her own. She was up before me as usual (she does the morning hog-slopping, as a rule), but by the time I was getting going was back in bed. For the past week, she's had recurring headaches, hypersensitivity to light and a harder than usual time keeping things going. Several theories are in the works, but to the extent the eyes are involved, it happens that she's had a long-scheduled ophthalmologist appointment on Monday, so judgments are being reserved for the professionals on that.

By the time I returned from my own Saturday morning rounds, she was feeling better, out herself running errands including taking over some I'd planned, along with a library stop. Among the movies she came home with was one I know the characters in well but had somehow never seen:



I remember most of Bob and Doug's original bits from SCTV in the 70s, along with the record they made with help from Rush's Geddy Lee around 1981. It wound up being his highest-ever charting single, plus, as the intro told us, hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. Yet somehow this picture, which got loonie-lit solely on the basis of their unexpectedly actual hit record, escaped me until last night.

God is it dumb, and cheaply produced, and dumb, and with a series of battling plots that can't decide which wants to come out ahead, and dumb.  So naturally we both loved it.

What had somehow completely escaped me is the connection to the Bard.  In addition to the sets being littered with actual two-fours of Molson and Labatt's and OV, the boys wind up fixated on a brand of brew called Elsinore. That leads into a C-story of the plot (the Eh-story being just them being Bob and Doug, eh?, and the B-story being just beer), wherein the current head of the beer brand, Claude Elsinore, murders his brother, marries his widow named Gertrude and pisses off their surviving child who sees ghostlike visions of her father. Because she's a she, not a he, named Pam, not Ham, but you see where this is going.

No you don't. Turns out the original script was a much closer adaptation of the original Danish; Bob and Doug work much better with jelly donuts, and the whole thing turns into an indecipherable romp. The only actor in the thing we'd ever heard of from before or since was Max von Sydow, who Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis had in mind for the role but never expected to get. Max's son was a big SCTV fan, though, and talked his dad into Hamleting it up for 90 odd minutes. 

There are not only callbacks to Shakespeare but remarkably prescient callforwards in the film. Rick Moranis would go on to bust Ghosts and to wear a Dark Helmet in Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks spoof of Star Wars; both came after this low-budget filming but are eerily anticipated in plot and references in this one.

We flipped the book to a 10 for both of these performances.