She is playing Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard in the Springfield College production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.
Under Milk Wood details the inner and outer lives of the inhabitants of the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub. It is in turns funny, wistful, bawdy, dramatic, eerie, painful, playful, and hopeful. Last night I went to the final dress rehearsal for the show and it was very well done. The script is wonderfully poetic (it was originally a radio play), and the Springfield College folks have done a great job of realizing it.
Becky’s character is the twice-widowed Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, who runs a clean and tidy boarding house but won’t accept boarders for fear they will make it less clean and tidy. She continues to cow her husbands into submission even though they are dead.
Martin Shell, director of the play and head of the theater department, often invites faculty to participate in the productions with small roles, and Becky decided what the hell, she’d give it a try! She’s done a really good job with it! The play opens tonight, and I’ll be seeing the real deal tomorrow night when there’s also a big dinner beforehand.
If you’re in the Springfield area and want to get you some culture, why not check out the play for yourself? It’s being performed at 8pm tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday, and 2pm on Sunday in the Black Box Theater (Woods Hall), at Springfield College. Admission is a mere five bucks.
You’ll see blind old Captain Cat there, but he won’t see you!
My computer is not what you would call a “gaming machine”. Whatever the current hot PC game is, I guarantee I can’t run it. I probably can’t run the hot game before that one or maybe even the one before that one. There are a few reasons for this. First, my hardware isn’t really top of the line, and second, the PC game offerings haven’t inspired me to make my hardware top of the line.
Lately, though, I have been playing some games on the PC, and I don’t just mean Diablo 2. Dan turned me on to Puzzle Quest, which is actually for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS but has a PC demo version of it available. Here’s an idea of what it’s about:
It’s an RPG, but the “combat” is fought through a puzzle game like Bejeweled, where you swap two items on a grid to make lines of three or more like items. Doing so either harms your opponent or generates mana you can use to cast spells. I had no idea that the “item-swapping puzzle game” genre had become so huge and elaborate!
Unfortunately I finished the PC demo (downloadable here) and the real deal PC version is, at the moment, a pleasant idea that may or may not ever become reality.
However, all is not lost, because I have a second avenue for getting my item-swapping ya-yas out: Cradle of Rome.
The idea here is that you’re building Rome. Once again, this involves rearranging items on a grid, just like in real life Rome. In this case the items represent things you need to build with: food, money, and supplies. You can also, if you accomplish seemingly random tasks, add little citizens to your growing empire that will help you acquire goods faster. I got a couple of these helpful people but I have no idea what I did to earn them.
It’s not all just moving tiles. Another game I’ve been having fun with is Peggle, a game of a completely different type. In this game, you shoot balls into fields of pegs in the hopes of clearing out all the orange pegs. The balls ricochet all over the place. It’s fun and addictive, and what’s especially cool is that the game itself is like two rabid anime munchkins after a pixie stix binge: everything you do seems to freak it out and cause wild cheers and applause and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. I’m almost anxious about what kind of orgasmic paroxysms this game will launch into if I beat all the levels.
And finally I’ve also been enjoying the PC port of the boardgame Settlers of Catan. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available.
So that’s my PC gaming these days. Addictive little puzzle games and ports of boardgames. Mind you, if someone would release a Baldur’s Gate or Fallout, I’d play it, but that doesn’t seem to be anyone’s priority.
Antony Johnston, whose work I like on Wasteland (as well as his adaptation of Julius Caesar, Julius) was kind enough to send me a sneak preview of a new book he’s working on called Texas Strangers, published by Image Comics. It will be appearing in your favorite comics shop tomorrow! (Or today, if you’re reading this on Wednesday.)
Johnston’s co-writer on the book is Dan Evans, and the art is Mario Boon’s drawings colored by Traci Hui.
Texas Strangers is an all-ages book about two kids, Wyatt and Madara, who are on a quest in the Texas of the Wild West. Except it’s not Texas as we know it. This is the Weird Wild West, in which there are fantastic creatures, unusual races, and magic.
The writing is fun and fast paced, and I really like the artwork, which has a chunky, dynamic, feel to it. Although Johnston and Evans have an entire alternate world to introduce the reader to, the action starts off immediately — the setting is filled in through the plot and dialogue instead of clumsy, first-issue exposition.
Unfortunately for me, the book is some of what I’d love to read — a fun, action-packed all-ages western — with a lot of what I could not be more tired of: fantasy. The elements which define the book are something I just have no more interest in. (I’m reminded of the role-playing game Shadowrun: all the science fiction you love, with all of the elves and magic you quit playing Dungeons and Dragons to get away from.) Texas Rangers in this world use magic. There is an ogre that speaks with a Scottish accent. Native Americans, not having gotten short enough shrift in American pop culture, have been replaced by elves. And there’s orcs, which are the equivalent of…well, orcs. There’s always orcs, and they’re always orcs.
If you aren’t tired of fantasy and in fact love it, though, Texas Strangers looks like a fun book. When there wasn’t magic going on and I just ignored the fact that there were Orcs and Ogres and Elves, I was having a good time reading it. My own personal issues don’t take away from the fun here.
If you’d like to check out Texas Strangers for yourself, you have many options!
I am not a Colonial lawyer but you know, Badger, instead of trying to help out your client by playing games with his pen, maybe you should look into some other things first, like if there’s a way to get an obviously biased juror like William Adama off the tribunal.
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