Being affiliated with a major university -- and knowing the right people who point you to cool events -- has its advantages. Yesterday I attended the Ohio State Theatre Research Institute lecture featuring Pamela Howard. This woman -- a "director, scenographer, visual theatre artist and educator" -- was amazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, generous, intelligent, talented. What can I say -- I was honored to be in her presence. Many people were there to find out about her current work-in-progress, a production based on Charlotte Salomon's graphic memoirs Life? or Theatre? If you haven't heard of her, Charlotte Salomon was a 23-year-old Jewish refugee sheltering with her grandparents in Vichy France in 1940 when she learned of a strange fate that surely awaited her -- she learned that eight members of her family in the matrilineal line had committed suicide, a fact that had been hidden from her when her mother threw herself out a window in 1926 and only came to ligh...
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.