Pretty cunning, don't you think?

This is my friend Liz.

Liz's apartment is often filled with balloons.

Liz makes movies. Last year, she learned all sorts of useful things, like how to cook and how to play tag. She's gearing up to teach other people things this year, so we'll see how that goes for her.

Real Liz (as opposed to HowToLiz, a distinction that can be wonderfully blurry some days) and I get together most weeks to watch TV, eat snacks, pray, and talk. I taught her to crochet not long ago, so now we are crafty together, too.

I made her a hat* for Christmas. It is featured about 3 minutes into her latest episode:

 

*The hat is Jayne's hat from Firefly. He receives it about 5:50 into this clip.

Aw, Miracle Cat ...

Back in November, Stradivarius and the Other Kinds* recorded a Bat as a Christmas present for our friend Duke, whom we miss. The only advertising we did was through a Facebook event, which told us to expect 12 people including the performers. By the time the show started, we had 70 or 80 people in the audience. Maybe more. Such a fun surprise.

The recording arrived in Laos via Thailand last week. Now that Duke's had first dibs, I can post the show online. Download it here: Daylight Savings Bat (aka "Miracle Cat") -- 11/6/2010

I listened to a piece of it for the first time the other day. It's always awkward to watch or listen to shows you performed. Besides the "does my voice really sound like that?" feeling, my main reaction is to be overwhelmed that people seem to enjoy when my friends and I sit around for half an hour and say strange things into the dark.

My favorite element of the show is how many of the later scenes grew out of a mistake in the beginning. In the third scene of the first beat, Marty asks Meredith why he would even bring up the cat --- now that I hear it, he clearly intended to convey that the cat had died. However, Kevin and I didn't pick up on that nuance at the moment, and we mewed as though the cat were on the porch.

At this point, Marty and Meredith had several options for dealing with our mistake:

1. Ignore us and move on like they never heard the mewing.
2. Call us out as a new cat or a stray.
3. Acknowledge us as the same cat and
    a) ignore/deny Marty's earlier implication about the cat being dead.
    b) kill the evil zombie cat.
    c) treat cat resurrection as a normal occurance.
    d) get excited about a miracle.

I am so pleased they chose to be excited rather than force everything into making real-world sense or killing off what didn't fit into their preconception. Miracle Cat mistakes are my favorite kind of mistakes.




*Stradivarius and the Other Kinds is**: Josh Blaney, Skizz Cheney, Meredith Malony, Kevin McLenithan, Marty Jones, and me, with generous assistance from Brendon Culhane and Blade Barringer.

**Or at least, it was for that show. We may grow and rearrange soon.