I am in a oddly silent mood today. I didn't feel like posting last night either, but here's a recap. Tom Stoppard was great. He sat on stage with Carey Perloff, the ACT head chick, for about an hour and talked about his play. The last 15 minutes was devoted to questions from the audience. Tom Stoppard has delicious english accent. I think my dialect acting teacher would have called it a "regimental accent". He rolled his r's, he said "um" and paused before every sentence, as if every word and thought mattered to him. He used big words, which is rare in celebrity type interviews.

Other things of note. He spend three years researching before he writes a play on a subject that he knows nothing about. He said that "narrative structure or the architecture" of his plays, is the most important thing to him and allows him to create stories. Perloff said he was the one of the few writers, who neatly and seemlessly ties up all the details and loose ends in his plays.

I ran into two people I know, but decided not to speak to them. On the way to the theatre, I saw this guy whom I met in acting class. I had to do a scene with him, and he flaked out on me. He's a nice, and has even been in a few plays, but he's very strange, and I didn't want to deal with him.

At the Tom Stoppard event, I saw this woman who I used to work with at my last job. She used to always put on airs about how rich she was, and how she and her husband went to symphony and just did all these great things. No one in my group could stand her. She was also a serious food nazi, as she seemed to be allergic to every food on the planet, so eating out with her was so unpleasant to say the least. I spent to many lunch hours hearing her torture waiters, and then complain endlessly about the food when she got it. A friend in the office told me that she was spreading vicious rumors about me in the office. I didn't want to speak to her either, even though she was sitting two rows from me. She's the type of person I don't feel guilty about ignoring. She kept looking at me, but I just looked the other way. It's mean I know, but I don't see why I should be civil to someone who was spreading a vicious rumors about me in our former place of employment.

The Tom Stoppard event was kind of like a who's who in SF Bay Area theatre. There were many actors there I recognized from plays, who were part of the audeince. I think that the man who played King Lear in a production last year, was sitting in my row. This man is a great actor, and always gets cast in a major role every year.

Then I watched the Civil War series. The Battle of Gettsburg was so interesting. If Robert E. Lee hadn't miscalculated the strength of the confederate army, I wonder if the civil war would have gone on longer. Gettysburg was such a turning point in the war. I sat watching the events unfold on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and said "God, the Union army was so lucky!"

Shelby Foote mentioned that Willaim Faulkner wrote in his novel "Intruder in the Dust", that every southern boy could envision himself at Gettyburg on the morning of the third day feeling that the South still had a chance to win. Pickett's Charge was a tragic disaster, and I cannot imagine what the common confederate soldier must have thought as he marched into what he knew was his certain death. The confederate army was slaughtered, literally and emotionally. The narrator said that whole regiments were wiped out during Pickett's Charge.

I would like to watch that movie "Gettysburg", but the Blockbuster I rent movies from has the box for it but not the videos. I should probably ask one of the clerks where the movie is.

I saw a blue bird on the way to the work. Whenver I see a blue bird, I always say to myself "it's the blue bird of happiness and it's a good sign". Blue birds are so rare here.