March 2021 Reading Review

The reads for March 2021 included:

• India Calling – Anand Giridharadas (NF)
• The Sytteford Mystery – Agatha Christie (F)
• The Commitments – Roddy Doyle (F) – Reading Ireland Month
• The Snapper – Roddy Doyle (F) – Reading Ireland Month
• The Van – Roddy Doyle (F) – Reading Ireland Month
• Germinal – Emile Zola (F)
• Heroes and Monsters of Greek Myths – Evslin, Evslin and Hoopes (F)
• Queenie – Candace Carty-Williams (F)
• The Feast of Lupercal – Brian Moore (F) – Reading Ireland Month
• Mythology DK Eyewitness book – Neil Philip (F)
• The Long March – Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick (NF) – Reading Ireland Month
• The War Bride’s Scrapbook – Carolyn Preston (F)
• The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (F)
• Londoners – Craig Taylor (NF)
• The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde (play)
• Humans – Brandon Stanton (NF/photo/soc sci)

So to the (rather obsessive!) numbers:

• Total number of books read in February 2021: 16.
• Total number of pages read:  3,266 pages (av. 266). 
• Fiction/Non-Fiction: 10 fiction / 5 non-fiction. 1 play.
• Diversity:  3 BIPOC. 5 books by women.
• Library books vs. books I owned (and thus removed from the home abode): 8 library books, 7 owned books (whee!) and 2 e-books.

So I had a productive reading month which was really fun. Plus, I also pulled out some cross-stitch and finally finished up a project that I’ve working on for quite a while. Just need to get it framed and then it’s done. 🙂

Review Roundup: London, Humans, Life After Life…

I’ve been reading quite a lot lately. It’s so interesting to see that I have a tendency to fluctuate in my reading levels. Looking back at trends over the past several years, I see that my reading levels falter in January and February and then pick up the pace once it gets into the Spring months. Is it to do with the amount of sun? Is it something to do with the moon? 😉 

I’m not sure but I’m glad I’m back into one of my most important hobbies. So – what have I actually been reading? Let me do a quick round-up for you.

Londoners – Craig Taylor (2011). A nonfiction collection of conversations, really, that Taylor has gathered from a wide range of people who live in, love, hate, or perhaps left London. This was one of those perfect reads at the perfect time for me and I loved it. It was fit in with my temporary Monkey Mind and I could really hear what his interviewees said. This was such a fascinating read and I highly recommend it if you’re searching for a good book to pick up and put down. Loved it.

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde (1895). The play itself. I have been wanting to go to a live play or other cultural event, but the pandemic has put the kibosh on that option right now so I picked up this Wilde read. I haven’t seen or read this one and it was full of Wilde’s sly witticisms and sense of humor. Good. 

Then, still with a bit of a Monkey Mind (and thus lower levels of concentration), I was at the library (shocker!) and saw the most recent edition of the photo collection by Brandon Stanton called Humans. (He did the photo books called “Humans of New York” and has a really good blog, which I reviewed here and this was just as stellar). Stanton takes extremely good photos and allows his interviewees to really talk. Just fascinating if you like that kind of thing. (This is one of the projects that I wish I had done.) 

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson (2014). Looking for a solid good read and wanting to pull a title from my homegrown TBR (as opposed to the library), this was quite a chunky read (and yet I wasn’t scared off by it) – 536 pages. (Normally, I would run screaming from such a high page count but it was ok.) This was such a good read but it definitely plays with time and structure so you need to concentrate. The protagonist, Ursula, reincarnates over and over throughout this story but what is truth? Anyway, a very clever novel and easy to read at the same time. I’m definitely going to pick up more Atkinson at some point. 

So that’s me all caught up re: recent reads. Tell me about yours. 

Oh, and I bought a new rug for my office at home. It makes me very happy! 🙂

Nonfiction November Week 3: Expertise

Three ways to join in this week! You can either share three or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).

This prompt took me down a few rabbit holes (in a good way) and forced me to take a good objective look at what I’ve been reading in terms of POC-related authors, topics and titles. To that end, I’ve collected many of the POC titles that I’ve read and reviewed on my blog over the past few years, certainly not as a method of boasting or as positioning me as any sort of expert, but more as a reference for others who may also be interested in digging a little deeper into this subject. 

I’m also rather hoping that others may also have lists of related titles that they might want to share… There’s always room for more books on the TBR, don’t you agree? 

Enjoy!

COMPLETED AFRICAN-AMERICAN RELATED NF TITLES (from last couple of years): 

• Africa – DK EyeWitness Books
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” – Zora Neale Hurston
• Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History – Vashti Harrison. (Also where I heard mention of Rebecca Crumpler [see below for details].) 
• Shade: Pete Souza on Obama – Pete Souza
• Black is the Body – Emily Barnard (essays)
• A Book on Medical Discourses in Two Parts – Rebecca Lee Crumpler. (Crumpler was one of the first female AfAm physicians in the country. Fascinating.)
• Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? – Beverly Daniel Tatum (post possibly to come)
• Becoming – Michelle Obama
• At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England – Walter Dean Myers
• Negroland: A Memoir – Margo Jefferson
• Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness – Tracy Kidder
• Obama: The Historic Journey – NYT
• Born a Crime – Trevor Noah
• Mixed: Anthology – Chandra Prassad (ed.) – short stories about being mixed-race
• The Harlem Hellfighters – Max Brooks (graphic novel)
• Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High – Melba Padillo Beals
• Roots – Alex Haley 
• Great Speeches by African-Americans – James Daley (ed.) 
• Dreams from my Father – Barack Obama
• Black Women of the Old West – William Loren Katz
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present – Harriet Washington
• We Should all Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Going Home to Nicodermus – Daniel Chu and Bill Shaw
• March Volumes 1-3 – John Lewis (graphic novel)
• Men of Niagara – W.E.B. Du Bois
• Malcom X: A Graphic Biography – Andrew Heifer and DuBurker
• 12 Years a Slave – Solomon Northrup
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves – Adam Hochschild
• The Negro Motorist Green Book – Victor Hugo Green
• Pandora’s Daughters: The Secret History of Independent Women – Jane Robinson (includes quite a few African-American women role models)
• Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times – Glen Jeansomme, David Luhrssen and Dan Sololivic. (Elvis was very influenced by African-American music and culture.) 
• Black Like Me – John Howard Griffin (1960)
• Celia, a Slave – Melton McLaurin
• The Education of a WASP – Lois Mark Stalvey (post to come)
• BlacKKKlansman – Ron Stallworth

AFRICAN NF:

• Kaffir Boy – Mark Mathabane (about one man who escapes South Africa’s apartheid)
• The Bite of the Mango – Mariato Karama/Susan McClelland
• The Boy who Harnessed the Wind – William Kambwanba        
• Saturday is for Funerals – Unity Dow and Max Essex
• Monique and the Mango Rains – Kris Holloway

(Now, I know this is NF November, but sometimes I think that fiction reads can really complement some NF reading so here are some recommendations that you might try…) 

COMPLETED AFRICAN-AMERICAN FICTION:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin 
• Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
• The Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
• What Looks like Crazy on an Ordinary Day – Pearl Cleage
• A Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry (play)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• Lucy – Jamaica Kinkaid
• Annie Dunn – Jamaica Kinkaid
• See, Now, Then – Jamaica Kinkaid
• Passing – Nella Last
• Praisesong for the Widow – Paule Marshall
• Merle and Other Stories – Paule Marshall
• Brown Girl, Brownstones – Paule Marshall
• Daughters – Paule Marshall
• The Chosen Place, the Chosen People – Paule Marshall 
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – Z.Z. Packer (short stories)
• Beloved – Toni Morrison
• Sula – Toni Morrison
• Jazz – Toni Morrison
• The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison 
• Bailey’s Café – Gloria Naylor
• Mama Day – Gloria Naylor 
• The Women of Brewster Place – Gloria Naylor
• The Hate U Give – Angela Thomas (YA)
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker 
• Brown Girl Dreaming – Jacqueline Woodson (YA)
• Native Son – Richard Wright          
• Like One of the Family – Alice Childress
• The New Moon’s Arms – Nalo Hopkinson (spec fiction)
• Mojo: Conjure Stories – Nalo Hopkinson (ed.)
• Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience – Chandra Prasad (ed.)
• Friday Black: Short Stories – Nana Kwame Adjej-Brenyah
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo
• Mr. Loverman – Bernadine Evaristo

COMPLETED AFRICA FICTION:

• Aya Volumes 1-3 – Marguerit Abouet and Clementin Oubrerie
• Blackass – A. Igoni Barrett 
• Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga          
• Homecoming – Yaa Gyazi 
• Americanah– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• So Long a Letter – Mariama Ba
• Sozaboy – Ken Saro-Wiwa
• Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese
• Little Bee – Chris Cleave (concerns Africa)
• The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears – Dinaw Megestu (Ethiopian immigrants in US)

TBR AFRICAN-AMERICAN NON-FICTION:

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander
• Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the new First Lady – Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram (eds)
• The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium – Kathy Russell-Cole
• Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America  – Charisse Jones
• The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America – Nicholas Lemann
• Human Cargo – Matthew Crampton
• Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press – James McGrath Morris
• We Gon Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation – Jeff Chang
• In the Land of Jim Crow – Ray Sprigle (1949 – earlier version of “Black Like Me”)
• Writing from the Underground Railway – William Still (ed.) 

TBR AFRICAN (AND OTHER COUNTRIES’) NON-FICTION:

• They Poured Fire on Us: The Story of Three Lost Boys from the Sudan – Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak (with Judy A. Bernstein)
• Mother Country: Britain’s Black Community on the Home Front 1939-1945 – Stephen Bourne
• My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face his Country, his Tribe and his Conscience – Rian Malan
• A Walk around the West Indies – Hunter Davies 
• Mr. Loverman – Bernardine Evaristo
• White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism – Robin DiAngelo

FOR FUTURE READING:

• From my blog: Summer Reading List: The African-American Experience.
• I also feature Black History Month on the blog each year in February (if you’re looking for more ideas). Here’s the 2020 kickoff post for Black History Month.
• LitHub has a great list of more African titles here.
• A really good article on reparations in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• A thoughtful article on white privilege: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
• Ten Books to Read About Race instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You – Sadia Trombetter (Bustle – 03/20/18). 

For the other nonfiction November posts, check out these:

• NF November Week 1: The NF Reading so far…
• NF November Week 2: NF/F Pairing
• NF November Week 3: Expertise
• NF November Week 4: NF Favorites

Many thanks to the hosts:

• Katie at Doing Dewey
• Julz at JulzReads
• Rennie at What’s Nonfiction
• Sarah at Sarah’s Book Shelves
• Leann of Shelf Aware

October 2019 Reading Review

That was a pretty fun month, reading- and life-wise. Outstanding was the play that we saw at the university (Black Girl, Interrupted) and watching the BBC-TV series, “The Durrells in Corfu.” 

• Total books read: 12 (including 1 DNF)
• Total pages read:   2664 pp. (av. 242 pp.)
• NF: 4 (36% of total)      
• F: 7 (64% of total)
• TBR: 6 (50% of total read). 
• Total % TBR for year to date: 55%.
• Library: 5 (including 1 ILL).  
• POC author/topic(s): 7 (58% of total).
• Male to Female: 5 males + 6 females + 0 of mixed genders.
• DNFs: 1 (but probably going to pick it up again after a space of time)
• Oldest title: 1883 (A Book on Medical Discourses…) . 
• Longest title (re: page count): 344 pp. 
• Shortest title (re: page count) (excluding DNFs): 132 pp.

Here’s what I read in October:

• Mama Day – Gloria Naylor (1988) F
• A Book on Medical Discourses in Two Parts – Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1883) NF
• The Jaguar’s Children – John Vaillant (2015) F
• The October Country – Ray Bradbury (1955) F/Short Stories
• Aya: The Secrets Come Out – Marguerite Abouet and Clement Ouberie (2009)
• Dracula – Bram Stoker (1889) F 
• The Well-Dressed Lady’s Pocket Guide – Karen Homer (2013) NF 
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie (2007) F 
• And the Band Played On – Randy Schiltz (1987) NF – DNF, but on hold for a later date.
• Hostages to Fortune – Elizabeth Cambridge (1933) F
• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? – Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D. (2003) NF

Plus (because I am a complete nerd) this jigsaw puzzle:

November plans? Not really. I am very open to whatever comes my way and I’m happy to keep jogging along in this particular lane. I might need to rein in the book purchases though. (With the caveat that there is a December book and jigsaw puzzle sale on the cards…) :-}

Oh, and join in a bit for NonFiction November...!

General Catch-Up – October 2019

Autumn has finally arrived here in my region of the world. The temps have been cooling down significantly – even enough for us to put the flannel sheets on the bed. (I’d forgotten how delicious these feel to sleep between: it’s like sleeping in clouds. Sigh. Bliss.) I’m wearing socks more regularly during the day and even had to pull on a coat last week. I’m loving it all.

There are some Octobers when I’m just pulled back into one more read of “Dracula,” the 1897 classic by Irish writer Bram Stoker. (For a previous review, see here and here.) My typical experience is that I really enjoy the whole experience, even if it’s not the first time of reading it – I’m up to about five times now… And now I think it’s time to give it a break.

It’s got all the same great ingredients: epistolary, scary-but-not-too-scary, familiar storyline but, for some reason, this year’s read dragged for me which signals that perhaps I need a break. It’s been fun, Bram, but I’m gonna to put you aside for a while so I can get your “special” back. No hard feelings. You’re still awesome. I’ll still come back to you. Just not for a while. (And if you’d like to see a review of an earlier version of Dracula-like creatures, try The Vampire by John Polidori (1819).)

In other news: we went to a really good play over the weekend. Called “Black Girl, Interrupted”, it was written by Iyanisha Gonzalez, a Ph.D. student at our university here, and was stupendous. Seriously. It was an excellent play-going experience and was completely professionally run. The play is based on the real-life rape and murder of a black female soldier in the Iraq conflict and how the U.S. Army covered it up as a suicide. (The drama is fictionalized from there, but the actual basis of the plot is true.) So – phew. Hard topic but again, an excellent experience. If this play comes to your area, I highly recommend it.

I’ve been reading but have had some titles recently which have been good, but for some reason, haven’t had a blog post about them. One, especially, deserves its own post but for time reasons, this mention will have to do. “The Absolutely True Dairy of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie (F) was a fast and thoughtful YA read, epistolary (as the title implies) and about a young teenager who goes against the cultural mores of his tribe when he decides to go to a high school “off rez”. A sensitive and provocative read about the importance of fitting in balanced with being true to yourself. I bet high schoolers love this read. (Maybe not. They might be more enamored of “Twilight” or playing on TikTok or similar…:-} )

Another read (although this was not half as good) was a quick peruse through “The Well-Dressed Lady’s Pocket Guide” by Karen Homer (2013), who has written for Vogue and other fashion mags. Fairly ok, but didn’t really have that much helpful information in terms of wardrobe, but a pretty ok foundation overall. I’m trying to make more use of my current clothes, especially with our cooler temperatures, and was rather hoping that this guide would help with that. It was actually more of a brief historical overlook of fashion, which was ok – just not what I had been looking for/hoping for.

In the in-between times, I’ve been sucked into the flow of doing another jigsaw puzzle – I’m addicted to these things and time just disappears when I’m doing them sometimes. This one (on the right) is a redo of one my mum and I attempted a couple of years ago on one of her visits, but we had run out of time to finish it. I’m determined to finish this sucker now. 🙂

And now it’s almost November. Thanksgiving is around the corner (wow) and then, I saw Christmas stuff in Target yesterday…

And I found a big stash of Twiglets half-price (below) whilst I visited World Market. (They are typically very hard to find, locally, so this stash will need to last quite some time. In theory.) Life is good.

Playing around…

Source: Shutterstock

Summer is here in every way, shape and form now we are in June. It’s fairly common to have multiple days of more than a hundred degrees as the high temperature, and I’m hoping that the oncoming weeks will bring us some more rain. (We live in a semi-arid desert region and most of the rain tends to fall around now. However, climate change (even the one invented by China 🙂 ) seems to be impacting that, so we’ll see. ETA: We had rain!!

The laid-back summer vibe continues apace, and it’s a very nice pace indeed. What have I been up to? Well, frankly, not much, and that’s fine with me.

Reading, naturally, has been happenin’ but since I’m spending a lot of time away from the computer screen, I think I’m just going to do some briefer round-up summary reviews instead of the in-depth ones. You won’t mind, will you? 🙂

I have been focusing more on the TBR pile, trying to make some inroads on that (**dry cough**), and I had a fun read of Famous American Plays of the ’40s (Henry Hewes, ed.). I’m not a drama expert in any way but I do rather like reading (and seeing plays) and I’ve had pretty good luck with this series (Famous American Plays of NAME the DECADE). Admittedly, the selections do tend to be very white and male, but you need to start somewhere, right? (Another good collection of plays (this time the 1950s/early 60s) is Six American Plays for Today edited by Bennet Cerf, in case you’re looking for something with variety.)

So this anthology of plays from the 1940s contained the following titles:

• Home of the Brave – Arthur Laurents (1945)
• All My Sons – Arthur Miller (1947)
• Lost in the Stars – Maxwell Anderson (1949)
• The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCuller (1950).

Three out of four were memorable, so that’s not too bad considering that I was familiar with approximately zero of these works of drama, and I enjoyed the read for the most part. Good find at the old FoL sale one year. I think I have a couple more of these titles (Famous Plays of the DECADE), so will pull them off the shelf at some point. I’m trying to make them last though. 🙂

(Linked with plays and drama, we also went to a showing of Ripcord (by David Lindsay-Abaire) at our local am-dram community theater. I love going to these things…Incredibly unlikely that I will ever get up on stage, but I have a good time from the audience seats watching others who are braver than I go up on stage.)

I also hit up a YA poetry book, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson (2014) which was great. If you have any younger readers who quake at the thought of poetry, this would be a good introduction as the poetry is approachable and in free verse. It describes the childhood and adolescence of a young girl growing up in the north and with family in the south. Excellent read. Woodson has written quite a bit of YA stuff, so more to chase down at some point.

Picked up a more light-hearted title called The Diary of Hendrick Groen Aged 83 3/4 by an anonymous author. This is rather like an OAP version of Bridget Jones’ Diary – epistolary, funny, dry sense of humor. It tracks a year of OAP Groen as he moves into an old people’s home and makes friends and has adventures. Pretty funny. (It’s a Dutch book, I believe. Same sort of vein as A Man Called Ove, if you’ve read that one.)

Read a rather oblique and graduate-school-mill book by Amit Chaudhuri (2000), Freedom Song. Actually, this title (Freedom Song) contains three different novels inside its pages, but I only read one. As I didn’t really connect with the characters in this first story, I’ve ripped off the bandage and moved the book to the donate pile without reading the other two selections. (Woo hoo. Another off the TBR pile and out of the house!)

I think that those are most of the titles I’ve read since last I reviewed a book on this here ol’ blog, so I think that brings us up to speed now. More reading to come, no doubt…

And remember that jigsaw puzzle that I was working on a few days ago? Here is its most recent progress photograph:

DH describes me as a crackhead in terms of just how addicting these puzzles can be. Oh my….

 

General Catch-Up…

It’s been a busy few days which has included several new lesson plans, two batches of grading, and the normal day-to-day stuff, which helps to explain the silence in this space.

Actually, it also included one of the houses on our street exploding (!) just before we went to bed and so that took a few days before life resumed its normalcy for us. Quite a week. (And honestly – one of the houses five houses away from us literally exploded. You don’t forget that in a hurry.)

However, despite this, I have been reading and writing (although more slowly than usual) and that’s what I thought we’d catch up with today.

I happened to come across Angela Thomas’ debut YA novel called ‘The Hate U Give” whose plot revolves around a young African-American teenager who is in the same car as her (also AfAm) friend when they get stopped for a perceived infraction by a white police officer and the young man gets shot and killed. The novel moves forward in time as the young woman and her community try to deal with this situation with its murky causes.

Although a heavy (and timely) topic, this novel moves along at a fast pace as it deals with the issue of police-related shooting, morality, race, and modern life in a city, and it’s probably going to make one of my Top Ten Fiction Reads this year. For once, the hype is worth it and I recommend that you pick this up at some point soon and then you can judge for yourself. Thomas does a great job of covering the multiple perspectives in such an incident without resorting to usual state of black-and-white thinking, and whether you agree with how the characters act or not, it’s probably going to leave you thinking once you’re turned that last page.

I also learned the acronym behind Tupac’s phrase, Thug Life which (according to the author) means The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everyone (or maybe Everything?), meaning that it’s important to look after every person in your community whoever they may be. True that.

Moving on and to give myself a change in pace, I picked up a psychological mystery story, “The Girl Next Door” by Ruth Rendell, which was good fun to read (although oh-so-confusing at first due to playing with time and a lot of characters). I sorted it out in the end and I haven’t read just a mystery for ages, so this was rather fun and read like a hot knife through butter. Now I’m reading through one of America’s Best… series, this one a collection of science and nature from 2011 and edited by the wonderful Mary Roach. Just right for a Monkey Mind…

And then, thinking about a non-complicated plot and also filling in a slot in the Century of Books project that I have going on, I’m also reading the children’s classic, “Swallows and Amazons” by Arthur Ransome (1930). I haven’t read any of this series before, and although I’m not a sailor and have next-to-no-familiarity with sailing terms, I’m enjoying this quick read of two families of children enjoying their island adventures up in the Lake District of England. (Lots of ginger beer et al.)

With the semester fully underway, there have also been loads of events at the university including an entertaining talk by visiting Ruth Reichl, NYT best-selling non-fiction author and restaurant critic, which was really enjoyable. Plus, it’s play season on campus and we went to watch the one-act plays that students both write and perform. Good stuff.

So, it’s been a busy few weeks, but now we’re in the home stretch of the university term, and then I’m looking forward to some time off from work. What to do, where to go… Those are the questions…

Friday is more fun with puns…

 

 

Getting some culture: two plays…

Since we’re lucky enough to live in a town with a big university presence, this means that we are also able to take advantage of some of the cultural offerings that come our way, and we recently went to two plays, both about some under-appreciated women which was a good touch as it’s Women’s History Month.

The first one was a one-woman play called “The Other Mozart” (written and performed by Sylvia Milo), and focused on the true story of Nannerl Mozart, Mozart’s older sister who was also a prodigy with music, but due to her gender and the times, didn’t receive all the attention that her younger brother did.

The solo actor was the sister in question, and so the play was presented through her eyes and thus the audience could track her musical life as she is recognized for her musical talents, but then slowly overtaken and eclipsed by the younger Mozart. I think this is probably a really good play, but the university sound system was very muffled and so it was pretty hard to keep up with what was going on.

That, and I had the ill-fortune to have a tall guy with a big bobble-head sit right in front, and it was uncanny how his head movements would match mine at almost every turn. So – good play. Bad venue. I’d still go and see this play, but only in a smaller theater with a good non-karaoke-based sound system.

The other play was a completely different experience (thankfully). This was also a one-woman play, but in a much more intimate setting which made it easy to hear what the actor was saying and thus keep up with the action.

Called “If a door opens: a journey with Francis Perkins”, it was written and performed by a regional actor called Charlotte Keefe and focused on the life and times of said Francis Perkins, who was one of the earliest female Secretary of Labors in the twentieth century. She worked with presidents and others to help secure the 40-hour work week, social security benefits, and generally looked out for child and female workers at a time when they were over-used and under-paid.

Perkins also played a sentinel role in improving workplace safety standards as she was in NYC at the same time of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and knew how to effectively work with politicians, unions, and others to pass new laws improving working conditions for everyone who was not a rich white man. 🙂

I was not familiar with Perkins (or the actress who played her), but by the time we came to the end of the play, I was astonished at just how much Perkins achieved at a time in the twentieth century when women were not encouraged or supported in their working lives if they upset the status quo.

I really enjoyed this experience, and recommend that if you see this play coming anywhere near you (whether with this actor or another), you take the hour or so to see it. Perkins was a firebrand whose mark still remains on the twenty-first century workforce.

And then later on this week, we’ve got tickets to listen to Ruth Reichl, former NYT food critic and best-selling author… Riches abound right now.

Fridays are more fun with puns…