It's easy to take for granted that Fela! would be a smash Broadway musical -- that it would make its big-stage debut to critical acclaim ("music that gets into your bloodstream," said the New York Times), that it would garner a slew of 2010 Tony nominations, and that it would revive interest in the music of the late Nigerian singer Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Let's get serious, though.
The Fela! that's touring and on view at San Francisco's Curran Theatre was, says director and choreographer Bill T. Jones, the product of many months of "trial and error." It was also many years in the making. Jones first took in Fela's songs during college in the early 1970s -- a time when Fela's liberation music was more associated with black nationalism than Broadway possibilities. Almost four decades ago, no one serious about Fela's Afrobeat -- not Jones, not other fans, not Fela himself -- could have foreseen the popular appeal of Fela in a theater setting.
I usually write in all my books, but couldn't bring myself to do so in Peter Orner's Love and Shame and Love. It seemed wrong somehow, like taking a Sharpie to someone's family photo album.
Tightly crafted in language and structure, Orner's chapters don't speak so much as sting. Even when the narrative slaloms back and forth through time and point of view, the shotgun pace keeps you deeply wedded to the characters, their struggles, their almost triumphs. His lyrical, melancholic descriptions of Chicago also echoed the stolid prose of Stuart Dybek's Coast of Chicago, and after reading it, I almost wished I still lived there. LASAL made me want to have a love affair once more with the Second City, which is no easy feat, even if one is prone to masochism, which I am.
Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from Golden State basements, thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets.
The Gift of Life
Author: None listed, although the publishers thank a reverend, a minister, and a rabbi.
Date: 1951
Publisher: Planned Parenthood and New York state's Health Education Service
Discovered at: Berkeley estate sale
The Cover Promises: A trip to Planned Parenthood is the happiest family time of all.
Representative Quote:
"If one of the new male sperm meets and unites with an egg cell, a new life begins." (page 21 - 22)
