High Hopes and Lowered Expectations

During their youth, many people bursting with optimism and ambition find their professional hopes and romantic dreams shot down by cynical adults whose disillusioned souls have been consumed with negativity. Back in its heyday, MADtv was able to mine comedic gold from caricatures of people whose aspirations lacked any sense of what they would encounter in the dating market.










My friend, Arthur Lazere, once told me about his experience when he joined a group of seniors on an Alaskan cruise arranged through the California Academy of Sciences. As introductions were being made during their first dinner at sea, it became obvious that two of the men were in an intergenerational relationship. One of the older men at the table cluelessly asked the younger half of the gay couple "What's a handsome, athletic guy like you doing on a cruise with a bunch of alter kockers like us?" With a very sweet smile on his face, the man replied "Having a fabulous time!"

Does youthful optimism have the power to bridge any cultural divide? In a curious twist of fate, three films from three of San Francisco's most popular film festivals depicted vastly different ways in which men and boys react to cultural challenges. Ironically, each film reaffirmed the sentiments expressed in Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics to a pivotal song from 1949's South Pacific.

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Screened during the 2019 Frameline Film Festival, Hugo Kenzo's 15-minute short entitled Delivery Boy focuses on the interaction between an eager East Asian delivery boy and a British expat who, in the brief time he has been working in Hong Kong, has found himself becoming more and more like the kind of privileged wanker he used to despise.

Cheuk Piu Champi Lo (Chunho) stars as a young East Asian
with a crush on a British Expat in Delivery Boy

Several times a week, Chunho (Cheuk Piu Champi Lo) delivers an order of mushroom and leek dumplings to Eric (Philip Smith), who is usually on the phone troubleshooting one of his employer's problems. One day, after Eric finishes an angry conversation, he offers the delivery boy a weak apology for the tenseness of the situation. Hoping to start a conversation, Chunho suggests they both quit their jobs the following Monday.

Momentarily intrigued, Eric asks what they would do after quitting. Chunho excitedly suggests forming a band, after which the two men discover they share a passion for disco music. But when Chunho returns to Eric's apartment that night, he sees a sign on the door with an arrow pointing to the stairs that says "You're almost there." Following the arrow, Chunho enters another apartment where Eric's obnoxious boss, George (Mike Leeder), is hosting a cocktail party. Totally misreading the situation, George bullies Eric into giving Chunho money to go out and purchase cigarettes and vodka for the guests at his party.

The hurt look on Chunho's face sends a clear message to Eric. The next time he orders dumplings, Chunho's friend Jasper (Thisby Cheng) delivers the order. With Eric desperate to patch things up, Jasper drives a hard bargain before sharing Chunho's address. As the expat and delivery boy attempt to start over, the camera pans to Jasper, who is seen strutting down a street wearing Eric's leather jacket.

Thisby Cheng (Jasper) and Cheuk Piu Champi Lo
(Chunho) in a scene from Delivery Boy

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Accompanied by the Club Foot Gamelan ensemble, the 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival offered a rare screening of 1932's Goona Goona: An Authentic Melodrama of the Isle of Bali. Filmed by André Roosevelt and his son-in-law Armand Denis, the film seems like an exotic travelogue until the melodrama kicks in. In his program essay, Michael Atkinson writes:

“Goona Goona reveals in graphic terms certain details of two separate cultures. The first, right on the surface, is Bali’s society of the 1920s and early 1930s, weathering but seemingly unfazed by Dutch colonization, and still in a state largely uncorrupted by the tourism that arrived (thanks to popular reports by visiting anthropologists like Margaret Mead). Since Balinese daily life entailed ubiquitous female nudity (bare breasts), we also get a taste of a second culture, America in the early ’30s, a naïve but restless middle-class heartland of narrow-minded churchgoers and (publicly) monogamous small-towners, modest immigrants, and buttoned-down Everymen to whom a stag reel would be a freakish object, and for whom a film filled with casual tropical nudity represents a tantalizing demi-pornographic itch that they could not scratch in any other way. That might be the most educational aspect of a film like Goona Goona, that reveals an America so sheltered and limited in its experience that the film’s utterly chaste visions of lovely Balinese flesh exploded in their heads as if a gloriously taboo gift from Satan.”

Poster art for 1932's Goona Goona

“The male and female pulchritude on view is uniformly toned and young and unabashed (except when it is, on occasion, flabby and aged and unabashed). But the difference between 1932 and 2019, in terms of semi-illicit sex media, is like the difference between the telegraph and FaceTime. It’s a truism we know in our bones, even if perhaps we weren’t aware of it back then: the less we had at our disposal, the more electrifyingly delicious it seemed. The film is boldly exoticist, no-frills, quasi-informational, clumsily melodramatic, and most of all wide awake to naked womanhood (and girlhood, actually). Roosevelt and Denis, on the other hand, were expressly taking advantage of censorship laws stating, for anthropological reasons, that ‘native’ nudity would not be outlawed, and thus helping to establish a disreputable subgenre of sexploitation that sold so many tickets in the 1930s that the Hollywood industry and press gave the films the moniker ‘goona-goona epics.'”

Poster art for 1932's Goona Goona

Though it takes a long time getting there, Goona Goona revolves around a melodramatic love triangle in which a slave girl named Dasnee is betrothed to a coolie in her village. When the kingdom's prince returns from studying abroad, he marries a woman from his own caste but develops the hots for Dasnee. The prince's sister feeds Dasnee a goona-goona drink (made from a narcotic plant), allowing the prince to rape the slave girl while she is under its influence. The prince carelessly leaves his sacred sword (or Kris) in Dasnee's bed. When her husband returns home, he figures out what happened while he was gone, becomes overwhelmed with jealousy, and murders the prince. You can watch the entire film in this video clip on YouTube.

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There are many moments during Fernando Grostein Andrade's family drama, Abe (meticulously written by Lameece Isaaq and Jacob Kader) when the first word that comes to the viewer's mind will be "formulaic." In this story of a precocious adolescent whose passion and talent is not taken seriously by his parents (and frequently drowned out by the constant arguments amongst his relatives), the glue that holds the film together is food. And not just any food.

Noah Schnapp stars in Abe

As he nears the age when a young Jewish boy might start preparing for his bar mitzvah, Abe (Noah Schnapp) finds himself in a curious situation. His mother, Rebecca (Dagmara Dominczyk), is Jewish. His father, Amir (Arian Moayed), is of Palestinian descent. Though Abe's parents are trying to raise him as an atheist, any family gathering at their home in Brooklyn soon deteriorates into age-old accusations and recriminations regarding Israel and Palestine that make it nearly impossible to enjoy a meal. Despite the fact that each side of the child's family has so much to be thankful for, the older generations are bitterly wrapped up in their emotional wounds and political agendas. As a result, they barely pay any attention to Abe.


Abe's maternal grandmother died two years ago but, when he visits his paternal grandmother, Aida (Salem Murphy), she tenderly explains the ritual of fasting to him and helps her grandson understand that the word "semitic" refers to a group of languages, not any specific people.

Unlike many kids his age, Abe approaches the challenge of educating his taste buds as a marvelous adventure that allows him to be much more focused than his peers. One afternoon, while walking through an outdoor street food fair overlooking the East River, he is fascinated by a pop-up stand serving Bahia cuisine. After the chef, Chico (Seu Jorge), takes a few minutes to tell the boy about Brazilian cuisine, Abe starts to realize the potential for expanding his awareness of fusion food.

Noah Schnapp stars in Abe

When Rebecca decides to enroll her son in a summer day camp, Abe hints that a cooking camp might be a good idea. However, on his first day of "camp," he realizes that (a) his cooking skills and knowledge of food are much further advanced than the younger children in the program, and (b) his mother has no idea who he is or what interests him. As a 12-year-old child of the Internet, Abe already knows how to use a search engine, find cooking videos on YouTube, participate in discussion groups about food, feed himself when left to his own devices, and use his phone to photograph dishes he has created so that he can quickly post them to his Instagram account.

Poster art for Abe

Having quickly deduced that he could learn a lot more from Chico than from day camp, Abe lets his mother keep dropping him off at camp but, as soon as she leaves, turns around and heads to Chico's industrial kitchen to learn about food work from the bottom up. When Rebecca learns about his deception from the day camp instructor (Debargo Sanyal), Abe gets grounded by his parents: no more time spent working with Chico, no phone or computer privileges until school resumes.

Noah Schnapp and Seu Jorge in a scene from Abe

After several weeks of being isolated (and with fusion food still on his mind), Abe asks his mother to let him do all the cooking for the family's upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. Researching dishes that are popular with Semitic peoples, he plans a dinner menu that will reflect both Palestinian and Israeli cuisine, and begins the meal with a multilingual prayer in Hebrew and Arabic. But when everyone at the dinner table starts arguing before they've even gotten to the main course (and all of his hard work is ignored), Abe literally throws in the towel and disappears. Only when people smell smoke and discover that the turkey is burnt to a crisp does anyone realize that he is nowhere to be seen.

A frantic search through the neighborhood proves futile until Chico shows up to work early the next morning and finds Abe sleeping atop several cartons in the chef's kitchen. After his parents take their son home, Amir and Rebecca realize that they need to take a good hard look at their marriage and the effect all of their relatives' vitriol has been having on their son.

The film's cast is clearly broken into Abe's biological family and his newfound cooking family. Mark Margolis shines as an elderly Jewish relative with Daniel Oreskes offering a more cynical view of life as Ari, the family's resident wise-ass. Tom Mardirosian has some tender moments as an elderly Palestinian while Chico's kitchen crew includes Alexander Hodge as Roy Wang, Teddy Coluca as Donny the Thief, Gero Camilo as Mandioca, and Victor Mendes as Cadu.

Chico (Seu Jorge ) and Abe (Noah Schnapp) in a scene from Abe

Despite many moments when viewers may be itching to cue the next plot development, Abe does a solid job of depicting how parents who are deeply involved in their own problems can become oblivious to a child whose curiosity and talent they should be nurturing. Andrade's film achieves something quite intriguing by taking the standard formula for a coming-of-age story and making it both gender-specific and genre-specific while highlighting the value of a lonely child having the good fortune to stumble upon a mentor who understands him better than his parents. Here's the trailer:

What A Difference A Word Makes!

During the years when I worked as a medical transcriptionist, I was part of a vocabulary-focused profession that served as a linguistic safety net between physicians and the medical records they created for their patients. Despite the insistence by practice managers and loyal staff that doctors never make mistakes, it’s no secret among nurses and transcriptionists that doctors make plenty of mistakes, especially when they're tired. That’s one reason why patients undergoing surgery are now asked multiple times prior to the administration of anesthesia to identify which side of their body is to be the operative site.

Another false assumption is that only doctors who speak English as a second language make mistakes while dictating reports. Any veteran transcriptionist can tell you that doctors frequently use a wrong word (which usually results in a grammatically incorrect statement or a raging Malapropism). Back when I was writing my online text entitled Dictation Therapy for Doctors, I commissioned some cartoons from the talented Gerard Donelan to demonstrate the ridiculousness of some errors caused by physicians with impaired language skills.

Each cartoon depicts a false statement dictated by a licensed physician. First, consider some ludicrous examples of what can happen as a result of a physician's poor grammar.

Now consider what happens when the wrong word is used in a sentence.

In 1972, the United Negro College Fund adopted the statement "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" as its motto. Since then, electronic spell checkers and autocomplete apps (combined with cutbacks in professional editors and proofreaders) have led to higher levels of functional illiteracy wherein a wealthy, complicit, self-important person such as Ivanka Trump (America's poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect) can cluelessly write “Congratulations @BorisJohnson on becoming the next Prime Minister of the United Kingston” simply because she didn't bother to read her text before tweeting it.

Though I cannot blame it on dyslexia, Tourette syndrome, or the bossa nova, over the past few years I've noticed a strange phenomenon that I happily attribute to the aging process. In moments when my eyes are tired, my vision is blurred (due to dry eye syndrome), or I simply have not had enough coffee, I tend to make curious word substitutions as I'm reading. Rather than panic at the thought of my possible mental deterioration, I've come to revel in some of the crude and hilarious results.

Professors C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams recently published a fascinating OpEd piece in The New York Times entitled "Why We Call Things 'Porn.'" For escapist reading and bedtime stories, I often turn to one-handed gay fiction which, on occasion, contains such purple prose as “The gunsel’s Tommy gun burped and two of Risotto’s boys collapsed in a heap of human marinara sauce. The door had developed lead measles and was wet with blood.”

Even more delightful is reading a story (which has obviously not been proofread) and coming across a scene in which a man wakes up not knowing how he got home from the previous night's visit to a gay bar, turns to look at the body lying beside him and then, upon looking in the mirror, wonders how he got "massacre" all over his face. The correct word, of course, should have been "mascara."

When reading the work of authors who give their characters sentiments like "It was great to have his Redwood thumping inside me," Strunk & White's popular guidebook, The Elements of Style (which will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year) no longer applies. Nevertheless, some mistakes can lead to shocking reactions. In today's overly sensitized world, when a word intentionally used as a joke turns out to be less than funny, the results can be disastrous.

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As we adjust to a world in which a single word can trigger a traumatic reaction in an unsuspecting and highly vulnerable person, I would be remiss in failing to mention a dramedy screened during the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Written by Claudius Pläging, Matthieu Delaporte, and Alexandre de La Patellière (and sensitively directed by Sönke Wortmann), this intricately-plotted family drama based on a popular stage play entitled Der Vorname wins top prize for a clueless character's insistence on using a powerfully triggering word.

The setting is fairly simple: a middle-aged German couple has invited friends and family over for what should be a relaxed, easygoing dinner at their home in Bonn. But a surprise announcement from one of their dinner guests triggers a series of revelations that could easily destroy several relationships in the room. To understand the forces at play (and how a well-intentioned evening might end up resembling the power games in Edward Albee's 1962 drama, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), it's wise to take a good hard look at the film's principal characters.

Christoph Maria Herbst as the intellectual snob,
Stephan, in a scene from How About Adolf?

Stephan (Christoph Maria Herbst) and Elisabeth (Caroline Peters) are a married couple who have spent much of their professional lives in academic circles (they even named their children Cajus and Antigone). An insufferable intellectual snob with a stick up his ass, Stephan is the kind of scholar who always needs to be right and is easily provoked into an argument, whether it be with the pizza delivery boy or an old family friend. Throughout much of their marriage Elisabeth has sacrificed her ambitions in order to support Stephan in his research. To suggest that he doesn't appreciate what his wife gave up in order to help advance his career would be a huge understatement.

Caroline Peters as Stephan's wife, Elisabeth,
in a scene from How About Adolf?

René (Justus von Dohnányi) has been a close family friend -- perhaps Elisabeth's closest friend ever -- since he was orphaned at the age of seven. At that time, Elisabeth's free-spirited mother, Dorothea (Iris Berben), took René under her wing and made him feel like an integral part of the Böttcher family. She also instilled a love of music in the young boy who, as an adult, became a professional clarinetist who has performed with several symphony orchestras. René is now considering a prestigious job offer from the Bavarian State Orchestra which would require him to relocate to Munich.

Justus von Dohnányi (René) and Christoph Maria Herbst
(Stephan) in a scene from How About Adolf?

The other guests include Elisabeth's brother, Thomas (Florian David Fitz), who is the first to arrive. Although he dropped out of high school and never made it to college, Thomas has become a successful stockbroker who relishes the high life and thinks he has a great sense of humor. His pregnant wife, Anna (Janina Uhse), is a former actress who is delayed in traffic. Unable to keep a secret until Anna arrives, Thomas blurts out that they've decided on a name for their baby. After everyone present tries unsuccessfully to guess the name, Thomas proudly reveals it to be Adolf. When the others recoil in horror at what that name would do to a young German child, Thomas smugly starts mansplaining all the reasons a name like Adolf could make the young boy stand out in a crowd.

As more alcohol gets consumed, Thomas starts picking on René, who he has always assumed to be gay and has criticized for a seeming inability to have a serious relationship. Despite his sister's request to stop being so obnoxious, Thomas keeps needling René until the musician decides to push back with a revelation of his own. It turns out that René is already in a relationship with a woman who lives in Munich. In fact, it's someone they all know: Thomas and Elisabeth's mother, Dorothea.

Florian David Fitz (Thomas) and Justus von Dohnányi
(René) in a scene from How About Adolf?

It quickly becomes obvious that while Thomas can dish it out in spades, his fragile macho ego can't handle the idea of a man he always assumed to be gay fucking his mother. The situation is hardly helped by Anna who, upon arriving, reveals that she's known about René and Dorothea being an item for several months after seeing them walking together while on a trip to Munich.

The fact that Der Vorname (also known as "How About Adolf?") was a successful stage play probably accounts for the tightness of the film's script and the solid acting of its ensemble. Here's the trailer:

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When Mel Brooks wrote and directed 1967's sleeper hit, The Producers, many Jews were horrified that he would use Adolf Hitler for the sake of a joke. However, Brooks has frequently stated his purpose in doing so:

"It is impossible to take revenge for six million murdered Jews but, by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. In doing so, we should remember that Hitler did have some talents. He was able to fool an entire population into letting him be their leader."

When it comes to spoofing the darkest and most grotesque parts of our culture, many look to Trey Parker and Matt Stone as the anti-heroes of a younger generation who picked up the torch of rude, crude, and refreshingly blunt comedy from Mel Brooks and ran with it through a career that includes 1997's Orgazmo and South Park, 1999's South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, 2001's That's My Bush!, 2004's Team America: World Police, and 2007's The Book of Mormon.

The two men met while attending the University of Colorado at Boulder where, in 1993, Parker co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Stone, co-wrote the songs with Rich Sanders, and directed Cannibal! The Musical. Parker also starred in the film as Alferd Packer (whose real-life misadventures during the winter of 1874 provided the inspiration for the project) even though he is listed in the credits as "Juan Schwartz." The screen-to-stage adaptation of Cannibal! The Musical premiered off-Broadway in 2001 and a full-blown stage production was performed at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival.


Cannibal! The Musical is currently receiving its Bay area premiere in four sold-out performances thanks to the efforts of Joel Roster and his friends at The Other Other Theatre Company, who have included a thoughtful warning to audiences in their program which states "Please be aware that this production contains offensive language, violence, adult situations, and all-around debauchery."

Poster art for Cannibal! The Musical

With costumes by Jennifer Brookman, choreograph by Brittney Monroe, and musical direction by Joel Roster (TOOTCo's artistic director), the story takes place in various locations in Utah and the Colorado Territory between 1873 and 1883. True to the rowdy, goofy kind of comedy that has made Trey Parker and Matt Stone extremely rich, this production stars Kevin Thomas Singer (looking like a bewitched, bothered, and boisterously bewildered Hugh Jackman at the end of an international tour of Oklahoma!) as the not-very-bright Alferd Packer.

Kevin Thomas Singer stars as Alferd Packer in
TOOTCo's production of Cannibal! The Musical

Lending solid support in smaller roles are Benjamin Rafael Garcia as George Noon, Darrien Cabreana as James Humphrey, Ben Knoll as Israel Swan, Caroline Schneider as Polly Pry, Henry Perkins as Frank Miller, and Alexander Gomez as a wily Ute Indian chief. Joining in the fun are Alan Coyne as the preacher, Shannon Wilson Bell and LaMont Ridgell as the boisterous trapper, Frenchy Cabazon (with Jennifer Brookman, Jeanine Perasso-Kaczmarcyzk, and Chris Totah handling multiple roles). Ryan Meulpolder earns a special shout-out for his appearance as a confrontational Coloradan cyclops.

The show's score contains a series of slyly exuberant musical numbers including "It's A Shpadoinkle Day," "That's All I'm Asking For," Packer's "Ode To Liane," "Let's Build A Snowman," and Frenchy's "The Trapper Song." As Danny Cozart writes:

"When Joel first asked for a Director’s Note, I obviously said D natural -- a whole step above middle C. You know the one. After a tense debate, I was brought to the realization that Joel was looking for me to pontificate on the show, as opposed to providing him a preferred pitch. Where to begin. Cannibal! The Musical, as you well know, originally premiered in Brooklyn on December 5, 1876 but closed that same night after the famed ‘Brooklyn Theatre Fire’ was allegedly started from an accident during production. Only one man from the theatre company survived and he alone kept the story alive by telling it as a bedtime story to his children."

Alan Coyne, Darrien Cabreana, Kevin Thomas Singer, and
Benjamin Rafael Garcia in a scene from Cannibal! The Musical
(Photo by: Erin Gould)

"His children continued to pass their father’s story along to their children until that man’s great-grandson, Trey Parker, decided it was time to bring this epic tale of loss, love, betrayal, and snowmen back to the world at large. Parker and Matt Stone created a film version of this story. It premiered in Colorado in 1993, but only played one night as another tragic blaze known as ‘The Sunbeam Fire’ engulfed the theatre in a 12,000-acre blaze. The original print of the film was lost in the fire, but an original copy of the screenplay survived. After years of searching in Colorado, Joel Roster found the manuscript under lock and key in the basement of the Denver Public Library and, upon its discovery, he lovingly and painstakingly transcribed the entire volume. Upon returning to California, Joel asked if I had any interest in telling this tale and I said ‘OK.’ I could elaborate on my feelings about the piece, but I seem to have run out of room.”

Kevin Thomas Singer places a loving hand on Alferd
Packer's beloved horse, Liane, in Cannibal! The Musical

Though TOOTCo's performances of Cannibal! The Musical quickly sold out, Jason McHugh's 2011 e-book entitled Shpadoinkle: The Making of Cannibal! The Musical is available on Amazon (along with ceramic mugs bearing the message "It's A Shpadoinkle Day"). And be honest: How can you not love a musical in which, when a group of freezing men stop to take a break as they hike through the snow en route to Breckenridge, Colorado, after munching on some candy, Humphrey turns to the group's fearless leader and innocently asks "Fudge, Packer?" Thankfully, the original 1993 film is available on You Tube for your delectation and delight.

Big Brother And Big Tech Are Watching You

One of the key tools in detective fiction is trying to establish a pattern of clues, behavior, or mistakes regarding someone suspected of committing a crime. The computing power of today's technology has grown so fast (and so fiercely) that as ordinary people try to determine whether they have lost their jobs to an old-fashioned robot apocalypse or insidious types of data mining (such as facial recognition) made possible by artificial intelligence, it's best to follow the instruction we learned from The Sound of Music: "Let's start at the very beginning -- a very good place to start!"

• The word "robot" entered the lexicon in the script of a 1920 science fiction drama by Karel Čapek, whose title (R.U.R.) stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots." When R.U.R. premiered in Prague on January 25, 1921, Čapek's new word opened up a Pandora's box of possibilities for scientists and science fiction writers.
• During the 1930s, mathematicians Kurt Gödel, Jacques Herbrand, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing worked on theories and definitions that led to what we now call artificial intelligence.
• In June 1949, George Orwell published his frighteningly prescient novel entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four which, according to Wikipedia, "is set in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Its themes center on the risks of government overreach, totalitarianism, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviors within society."
• On Friday, February 13, 2004, I attended a program of short films at the SFIndie Film Festival entitled "Your Warped Mind." One extremely disturbing film stood out from all the others: a 2002 documentary by David Korn-Brzoza that had been made for French television entitled "Echelon: The Secret Power."

• In 2010, intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning leaked a treasure trove of highly sensitive American military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks -- a move which kept them in jail from 2010 until January 17, 2017, when President Obama commuted all but the last four months of Manning's 35-year sentence.
• In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and subcontractor for the National Security Administration (NSA) leaked top-secret documents which detailed ways in which the United States government, in cooperation with foreign governments and giants in the telecommunications industry, conducted global surveillance that severely compromised the privacy of its citizens. In 2013 Snowden was granted temporary residence by the Russian government. In 2017 his attorney, Anatoly Kucherena, announced that Snowden's temporary residence permit had been extended until 2020.

Meanwhile, the practice of data mining grew by leaps and bounds as data gathered by hackers, cookies, fingerprinting algorithms, web browsers, and newly-created tracking technologies were increasingly sold to third parties. Recent articles in The Washington Post have included "The Unnerving Tale of Having My Social Security Hacked" by Robert J. Samuelson and "I Found Your Data -- It’s For Sale" by Geoffrey A. Fowler.


Earlier this year The New York Times embarked on a major journalistic initiative entitled "The Privacy Project" which has included such articles as "I’m a Judge -- Here’s How Surveillance Is Challenging Our Legal System" by James Orenstein, "Facebook and Google Trackers Are Showing Up on Porn Sites" by Charlie Warzel, "I Used to Work for Google -- I Am a Conscientious Objector" by Jack Poulson, and "I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering -- It Worked" by Patrick Berlinquette.

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Over in Berkeley, Central Works is presenting a "shared" world premiere (with Luna Stage in West Orange, New Jersey) of a political thriller that has essentially been "ripped from the headlines" and is being promoted with the hashtag #MyWifeIsAWhistleBlower. Dramatist Christina Gorman makes no bones about who, why, and what inspired her to write Roan @ The Gates:

“Edward Snowden seemed to know nothing would be the same and I was fascinated by the idea of being 29 years old and blowing up your life. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so strongly about anything in my life that I’d walk away from everyone and everything for it. But if your government can access information from your present or your past, they can use it to get you to do what they want. They can get to a CEO. They can get to a Presidential candidate. What’s being collected and stored is not information, it’s leverage.”

Lauren Hayes (Roan) and Jeunée Simon (Nat) co-star in
Roan @ The Gates (Photo by: Jim Norrena)

As Gorman's play begins, the audience encounters a married lesbian couple having a difficult time communicating. Roan (Lauren Hayes) seems to be experiencing nausea and stomach pain, but is reluctant to say whether her symptoms could be due to food poisoning or work-related stress. Her wife, Nat (Jeunée Simon), is an African American attorney with a razor sharp mind who is trying not to turn her concern about her wife's health into a professional interrogation.

Jeunée Simon (Nat) and Lauren Hayes (Roan) co-star in
Roan @ The Gates (Photo by: Jim Norrena)

When Nat suggests that Roan postpone or cancel her business trip scheduled for the following morning, she finds her questions being stonewalled in a strange manner. Without being evasive, her wife's answers range from a solid "no" to suggestions that a change of plans is impossible for reasons Nat could not possibly understand. It's obvious that, although these two women have been married for several years and sincerely want to have a child together, communication is not always their strong point.

From Nat's point of view, the basic questions are: Does Roan need to go to the Emergency Room? Is she sulking over some perceived insult that Nat does not know about? What Nat doesn't understand is that her wife is about to take a giant leap of faith that could destroy their relationship. The real challenge awaiting Nat is whether she could still love Roan if her wife followed her conscience but kept Nat in the dark.

Lauren Hayes (Roan) and Jeunée Simon (Nat) co-star in
Roan @ The Gates (Photo by: Jim Norrena)

A sharply-written, taut and fraught two-hander under the careful direction of M. Graham Smith, Roan @ The Gates manages to keep ratcheting up the dramatic tension without ever losing sight of the grave risks being undertaken by an intelligence analyst working for the NSA who has chosen to go rogue without telling her wife. In her program note, dramaturg Molly Conway writes:

"The Internet has long occupied a strange liminality between public and private life. We post and tag pictures and stories online, we stream media, make purchases, subscribe not just to goods and services, but ideas and influencers as well. Our digital presence is a portrait more intimate than any we could generate intentionally, painted in thousands of points of data that we generate every day. It shows who we are and what we value, and often the distances between. Roan @ The Gates asks us to consider not a statistic, but a story. The story of what one person sacrifices to truly live her values. It's never been easier to become educated about injustice, but arguably it's never been easier to ignore it either."

Poster art for Roan @ The Gates

"There are 50 seats in this theater. Assuming that everyone in them as a cell phone on their person, there could be at least as many devices present during a performance which are hackable by the National Security Administration (even if they're turned off). This fact should be shocking. But is it? Or have we already resigned ourselves to complacency as the price of convenience? The story of Roan is not one that comforts, but one that confronts. One that asks us to consider how committed we truly are to what we claim to value. If you take no other lessons from this play, at least do this much: tell your people you love them and then change your passwords."

Jeunée Simon (Nat) and Lauren Hayes (Roan) co-star in
Roan @ The Gates (Photo by: Jim Norrena)

With costumes by Tammy Berlin, lighting by Gary Graves, and sound design by Gregory Scharpen, Smith has skillfully overcome two site specific challenges in mounting Gorman's thriller. The first (and most obvious) is the fact that the seating configuration places the two actors in a tiny playing space surrounded by the audience on three sides of the room. The second is that, with Roan having been isolated in Russia and normal communication seemingly impossible, the audience must suspend any sense of disbelief in the scene where Nat manages to visit Roan in Russia (as well as subsequent scenes in which the two women must communicate by a secure Skype-like videochat program which is vulnerable to static, dropped connections, and one participant's agitated pacing moving her in and out of the camera's view).

Lauren Hayes (Roan) and Jeunée Simon (Nat) co-star in
Roan @ The Gates (Photo by: Jim Norrena)

In no way do those challenges prevent Smith and his two actors from making the government's threat to Roan's health and welfare seem desperately real. As the less histrionic partner in the marriage, Lauren Hayes gives a convincing portrayal of a computer programmer who is an expert at working with code yet understands when it is best to clam up and keep her mouth shut. The fact that Roan has so critically jeopardized her citizenship, her relationship, and her hopes of raising a child leaves her wife (an aggressive attorney eager to marshal the friends and resources at her fingertips) fighting a seemingly unwinnable struggle in which silence may be the safest strategy. An extremely versatile artist familiar to Bay area audiences, Jeunée Simon brings impressive levels of passion, anger, aggression, and disbelief to her portrayal of Roan's wife, Nat.

Performances of Roan @ The Gates continue through August 18 at the Berkeley City Club (click here for tickets).

Living In Limbo

With so much anxious talk about pre-existing conditions, I'm surprised no one has pointed out that once a person is born, they have a pre-existing condition. It's called life. Or, in its later stages, death. As with many other parts of life, timing is everything. But in most situations, having a good location won't help avoid the obvious.

Case in point: On February 9, 1988, Terence A. McEwen gathered the press together to announce the shocking news that he was stepping down immediately from his position as General Director of the San Francisco Opera. The reason? His physician had insisted that, with any more stress, his diabetes could prove fatal. What McEwen could never have imagined was that, earlier that afternoon, his predecessor would die and completely steal McEwen's thunder. Having led the company and been a major cultural figure in the Bay area for 28 years (compared to McEwen's six-year tenure with the company), Kurt Herbert Adler's story was a much bigger news item.

Though the Grim Reaper may enjoy such moments of schadenfreude, in some instances souls are forced to spend unexpected periods of time in limbo.

• In Greek mythology, Orpheus traveled to the underworld in an attempt to rescue his wife, Eurydice, and bring her back to life.
• Dante Alighieri depicted a state of limbo as the first circle of hell in his Divine Comedy.
• DC Comics describes limbo as "a dimension inhabited by old characters who have been removed from continuity or seemingly abandoned or forgotten."
• In cultures that embrace the concept of reincarnation, the time between one's death and rebirth is often regarded as a period when the soul is trapped in something resembling limbo.

If reincarnation is real, then the the popular adage that "You Only Live Once!" (YOLO) must be false. Two recent dramas raise surprising questions about the finality of death. In a documentary being screened during the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a widow living in Israel receives shocking news. In a provocative drama being staged by the Shotgun Players, four African American men find themselves stuck in a mysterious kind of limbo until they can move on to the next phase of their lives (or deaths).

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On June 12, 1967, a thriller based on one of Ian Fleming's spy novels had its world premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square in London. You Only Live Twice made history as the first premiere of a James Bond film to be attended by a reigning monarch (Queen Elizabeth II). As noted on Wikipedia, in the film:

"American NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 is hijacked from orbit by an unidentified spaceship. The United States suspects it to be the work of the Soviets, but the British suspect Japanese involvement since the spacecraft, after having 'swallowed' Jupiter 16, landed in the Sea of Japan. To investigate, MI6 operative James Bond is sent to Tokyo after faking his own death in Hong Kong and being buried at sea from HMS Tenby."

Poster art for You Only Die Twice

Fifty years after the release of You Only Live Twice, Yair Lev's mindfucking documentary entitled You Only Die Twice is making the rounds of the film festival circuit. With a story that includes some incredible burial plot twists, red herrings, and jaw-dropping discoveries, You Only Die Twice is the kind of film that could cause such famous mystery writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and John Grisham to roll over in their graves and ask "Why didn't I think of that?"

Filmmaker Yair Lev with his grandmother,
Chava, in a scene from You Only Die Twice

The story revolves around Ernst Beschinsky, who died in 1969 in Israel but apparently died again in 1987 in Innsbruck. The enigma of how one man could die twice went unnoticed until 2010, when a relative living in London passed away, leaving behind a house as part of his estate. When the filmmaker's grandmother (Chava) learns that she has inherited the property, she is justifiably confused by the news but happy to hear of the good fortune it brings. The inheritance becomes a legal challenge when her grandson discovers that Ernst Beschinsky may have been a victim of identity theft. The news sends Yair Lev on what feels like a wild goose chase in an effort to determine who could have stolen his grandfather's identity and, more importantly, why.

Two photographs identify the men who claimed to be Ernst Beschinsky

Lev travels to Austria, where very little seems to make sense. His research leads him to investigate the history of several Tyrolean families whose members belonged to the Nazi party. He soon discovers that, although an Ernst Beschinsky was the head of Innsbruck's Jewish community, none of the people on the board of directors of the organization he led knew anything about his private life.

Filmmaker Yair Lev tries to solve the mystery of who
stole his grandfather's identity in You Only Die Twice

After much digging through media and municipal archives, the missing link turns out to be a romantic relationship between a woman named Ilse and a young man who lived across the hall from the filmmaker's grandfather when they were children. Nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, the mystery is finally solved. In a surprising turn of events, the filmmaker uncovers a mind-boggling truth about his grandfather while his newfound friend, Andreas Focke, learns that, in a previous generation, one of his relatives was a member of the Gestapo.

Yair Lev and Andreas Focke visit the grave of the "other"
Ernst Beschinsky in a scene from You Only Die Twice

You Only Die Twice is one of those fascinating stories that reaffirms Mark Twain's claim that "Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t." It also underscores the importance of how, in today's heavily digitized information age, few employees remain on the job who retain sufficient knowledge of their institution's history and culture to be able to help people find the answers to seemingly unsolvable questions. Here's the trailer:

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According to the World Health Organization, as of December 31, 2018, 37.9 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS. Another 35 million have died since the disease was first identified in 1982 (that's five times the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust). For many people, the 1980s was a decade of grieving for [primarily] gay men who succumbed to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. So many lives (and so much talent) were lost that it still seems like an entire generation of the world's LGBT community was cheated out of its future, its potential, its health, and its happiness.

In the earliest days of the epidemic, one might encounter a friend at the gym who would laugh and say "Hey, with a body like this, how could I be sick?" and then learn, two weeks later, that he had died. Many of us lost hundreds (some lost thousands) of friends for what seemed like no good reason. Scant medical information was available as people struggled to understand how such a deadly plague could occur in modern times.

Today, America is fighting a plague of targeted hate crimes propelled by a rising tide of racism, xenophobia, and domestic terrorism. Among the many who have been shot, stabbed, choked, and beaten to death is a subgroup of young black and brown men whose only crime has been being born. To make matters worse, many of their killers have been Caucasian police officers with itchy fingers who have shot innocent children like 12-year-old Tamir Rice and incredulously tried to justify their actions with claims as ridiculous as the infamous "Twinkie Defense" employed by Dan White's lawyers during his trial for the November 27, 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

The Shotgun Players is currently presenting the Bay area premiere of Kill Move Paradise, a drama by James IJames (whose play, White, caused quite a sensation last year). The production's most visible asset is a pearly white unit set designed by Celeste Martore which permits a series of startling entrances by its four characters: Isa (Edward Ewell), Grif (Lenard Jackson), Daz (Tre'Vonne Bell), and Tiny (Dwayne Clay). Its most visible prop is an old dot-matrix printer whose tractor-fed supply of computer paper contains a sobering message.

Edward Ewell is Isa in Kill Move Paradise (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

As the play begins Isa addresses the audience directly, asking why they're sitting there, if he scares them, and establishing their relationship as something resembling a group of voyeurs looking at a diorama or watching the inhabitants of a human zoo. The difference here is that the four men are acutely aware of the audience and, rather than a zoo or diorama, they seem to have landed in something resembling a bardo or way station to the afterlife. By the end of the 70-minute play, it's no longer a secret that each of them was killed by a law officer or overzealous vigilante and that each name on the seemingly endless computer printout belongs to a young black man whose life was stolen from him by an act of racist violence.

Of the four men, Isa is a poet who, by the age of eight, realized that white people found him "scary." Though not sure how, he senses that he may have been in this strange place before. A simple gesture toward his neck suggests that perhaps he was lynched in a previous life. Grif is biracial, well-educated, and fashion conscious. At one point, referring to the kind of subcultural shorthand that exists between many black men, the older, wiser, and more introspective Isa states that, though he may not be Grif's biological brother, he most definitely is his brother in a spiritual and psychic sense (a similar kind of kind of shorthand has long shared between many gay men).

Lenard Jackson is Grif in Kill Move Paradise
(Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

Daz (short for "Dazzle") is obviously more streetwise, has a more labile personality, and possesses a shorter emotional trigger. He also seems to have memorized a surprising inventory of items from black history and black culture that are stored in another room. Tiny (who is only 15 years old) is treated with kid gloves by the three other men who, having already grasped their predicament, are protective of his innocence in a very brotherly way (Tiny makes his entrance toting a plastic toy gun and is eager to engage the others in his favorite game: Cowboys and Aliens).

Dwayne Clay is Tiny in Kill Move Paradise (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

Upon arriving in this sterile environment, these men are unaware of what happened to them or how they got there. But as they start to remember things, it becomes evident that each was shot to death when they were doing nothing more exciting than going about their everyday lives. "Kill Move Paradise takes the Elysium of Greek antiquity and flips the script. Set in a netherworld prepared for its newly deceased inhabitants, we follow Isa, Daz, Grif and Tiny as they try to make sense of the world they have been 'untimely ripped from' and this new paradise they find themselves in," explains the playwright. "Inspired by recent events, Kill Move Paradise is a expressionistic buzz saw through the contemporary myth that 'all lives matter' and a portrait of the slain, not as degenerates who deserved death, but as heroes who demand that we see them for the splendid beings they are."

Kill Move Paradise is being staged by Shotgun Players as a co-production with The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Though his play received its world premiere from the National Black Theatre in Harlem in 2017, Ijames wishes it could become obsolete (despite knowing full well that the constant wave of murders in America makes that highly unlikely).


In his program note, director and co-choreographer Darryl V. Jones explains that:

“During Reconstruction, the free black man became a challenge to the political system and a threat to the status quo. In retaliation, the most insidious and lingering minstrel caricature was created: the ‘Vicious Black Brute.’ This stereotype was presented as large, menacing, violent, and on the prowl for white women. The ‘Vicious Black Brute’ caricature incited fear and gave people the justification they were looking for to kill black men. The lynching of black males became a popular blood sport. They were carried out in public and often times people would set up picnics and bring their entire families. Between 1882 and 1930, the American South experienced an epidemic of fatal mob violence against blacks producing over 3,000 victims. Therefore, it became commonplace to kill and to witness the killing of black men who had not committed any particular offense other than being black. Americans became both fearful of black males and desensitized to their random murders.”

The cast of Kill Move Paradise (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

“The lynching of African American men that began during Reconstruction and continued well into the 20th century has left a trail of blood that continues to be spilled today in the gunning down of unarmed African American males by police officers. This fear and desensitization continues today in the gunning down of unarmed African American boys and men by law enforcement and rogue vigilantes. Unarmed black men are five times more likely to be gunned down by police than whites. In Kill Move Paradise, James Ijames boldly exposes the fear, stereotypes, and death threat facing black males in America today. In Kill Move Paradise, we see not just dreams, but life itself deferred, cut short for being black in a society that has been conditioned to view black as fearsome.”

Dwayne Clay (Tiny) and Tre'Vonne Bell (Daz) in a scene
from Kill Move Paradise (Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

With costumes by Courtney Flores, lighting by Stephanie Johnson, sound by Elton Bradman, and video designed by Theodore J.H. Hulsker, Jones has directed Kill Move Paradise so that the mysterious messages that arrive written on paper airplanes are every bit as cryptic as the contents of a Chinese fortune cookie. While the four men obviously come from different age brackets and different backgrounds (one describes them as being "different flavors of black"), each has a solid sense of who he is and what makes (or made) him happy. By working together, the four men come to understand how they will be able to leave the bardo and move on to the next step in their stories.

Dwayne Clay is Tiny in Kill Move Paradise
(Photo by: Robbie Sweeny)

Performances of Kill Move Paradise continue through August 4 at the Shotgun Players (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer.