randomWalks

Just 13 days ago, the starriest L.A. reading was announced. Julie Christie, Alfre Woodard, Christine Lahti, Mary McDonnell, Barbara Williams, Eric Stoltz, Roscoe Lee Browne and Jose Zuniga are on the list of participants in a reading at the LAFCO (Los Angeles Filmmaker Cooperative) Powerhouse Cultural Space in Venice. Tom Hayden will introduce the event, and John Densmore of the Doors will provide music.

I saw this Lysistrata and it was fantastic. THe cast was great, the evening was magical, and even the too crowded theater was terrific. All told one of the great evenings. Afterwards I had the pleasure of talking to Roscoe Brown and Eric Stoltz and they couldn't have been nicer men. A wonderful evening.

I went to see Lysistrate in Berlin! Yes, I did! I understood most of it, too. The men became gay at the end -- which was illustrated by the male actors blowing up long balloons in their laps, and jerking each other off. The dramaturge's point was that achieving peace is more difficult than just organizing 10 percent of the population to march in the street.

(I experienced NO anti-American sentiment, by the way -- the Berlin Blockade is too powerful a memory for a couple of Bushes to ruin everything. The basic attitude toward me was, like, "We're really sorry you nice people are being overrun by a gangster . . . we know what it's like. Of course, things aren't *that* bad . . . yet . . . ")

How to account for the project's triumphant popularity? As Bower put it at BAM, "Nobody can resist an ancient Greek dick joke." (Katha Pollitt)

Wasn't Aristophanes making fun of the women in the original play?