This is a space where I babble about Glee and other fandom stuff, with interjections of science and botany and complaints about grad school, and much less often than I should, pics of my critters (Bean Sprout and Gingersnap, rabbits, and Rosemary, a beagle).
Scrolling my dash reminding myself why I liked, well, my dash, and was struck by two thoughts:
1. Fuck, I need to see The Force Awakens.
2. The reason I didn’t is because it came out right after I got my tonsils out, and then I got busy and haven’t gotten around to it. But that reminded me of how much potentially glorious painkiller blogging that could have happened after I got my tonsils out. Alas, opportunity lost.
Amber Riley, who played soul diva Mercedes Jones on Glee, auditioned for — and won — the central role of Effie in Dreamgirls, which will start previews at the Savoy Theatre, London, in November.
Amber Riley, a powerhouse talent on Glee, will make her stage debut in the West End premiere of Dreamgirls, the dazzling musical loosely based on the rise of the Supremes.
The actress, who played soul diva Mercedes Jones on six seasons of Glee, auditioned for — and won — the central role of Effie in the show, which producer Sonia Friedman confirmed would start previews at the Savoy Theatre in November, with an official first night in December. (Precise dates will be determined by mid-March, when tickets go on sale.)
The original opened on Broadway more than 30 years ago, when Frank Rich of the New York Times likened its effect on the audience to a ‘seismic emotional jolt’. Friedman acquired the rights a year ago.
The producer revealed that Amber flew from her home in Los Angeles late last year to meet Dreamgirls’ director, Casey Nicholaw, in New York. He’s the man who directed the smash hit success The Book Of Mormon and the West End-bound Disney musical Aladdin.
And, after New York, she met Friedman in London. One of the numbers she sang for both of them was And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going, the soaring, soulful siren showstopper in which Effie tells Curtis, her Lothario lover (and manager of the Dreams, the group in which Effie is the lead singer), that she wants to stay with the girl trio.
I saw the first Effie, Jennifer Holliday, sing that song on Broadway three decades ago, and the audience rose as one and raised the roof. I watched Amber sing it in Glee’s first season, and she seemed as possessed as Holliday was.
Friedman said she felt the same tingling feeling when Amber sang it for her in London.
‘I was crying, because I was overwhelmed by the emotion and passion she put into the number,’ she told me.
‘And also crying with utter excitement and pure joy, relief and happiness that this girl was going to be able to give this performance in the UK. Her voice is a gift from God!’
One of the reasons Dreamgirls has not been seen on stage in London is because of the difficulty in finding an extraordinary artist to play Effie. Hundreds of young women auditioned for the part last year in the capital, but only a handful came close to showing they had what it takes to play the part.
But Amber’s arrival has given Dreamgirls the green light. Last night Amber, who wasn’t available to speak to me directly, issued a statement saying how honoured and excited she was to be playing the ‘iconic’ role, and working with Friedman and Nicholaw. She added that working in the West End is now 'a dream realised’.
'I just feel like this is going to be something special!’ she added. With book and lyrics by Tom Eyen and music by Henry Krieger, the musical opens in Sixties Detroit.
It charts the rise to the top of the Dreams, from amateur schoolgirls to international stardom; mirroring, to an extent, the success of The Supremes, and Diana Ross’s affair with Motown chieftain Berry Gordy.
By strange coincidence, the musical Motown — about the real-life Supremes and others in the Tamla Motown stable — begins performances at the Shaftesbury Theatre next week.
By no means can they be called competitors — they’re very different shows.
Dreamgirls will arrive at the Savoy with a reputation as one of the best musicals of the past half-century.
Nicholaw will choreograph as well as direct, with Tim Hatley creating sets; while Gregg Barnes is in negotiations to design costumes.
This new Dreamgirls won’t be a replica of what I saw at the Imperial Theatre, but a complete re-imagining of a rare classic.
Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar when she played Effie in the 2006 movie based on the show. The song Listen, from the film, will be interpolated into the London stage show’s second act.
Casting on key roles continues and it’s likely that many parts will be played by British talent. Rehearsals will begin in October. Visit: http://www.dreamgirlswestend.com/
Hiya, assorted followers who haven’t disappeared. It’s been a stupid long time since I’ve tumblred - I’ve had too much real stuff on my plate, and I wandered over to reddit as a content platform for a while. I’m not really sure what I’m doing here again, but if you’re still following me even after this ridiculous hiatus, hi!
(Mostly I realized how much I missed glee fandom - how are y’all?)
Always always always taper your meds. Leave some out so you have a buffer if you can’t make a refill on time. Even if you think it’ll be fine. Don’t just stop.
(This message brought to you by “I haven’t been able to go to the pharmacy in a week what is this horrible dizzy tingling thing in my skin oh fuck meds”)
(With the of course caveat that if your meds cause some horrible side effect or a doctor is watching you when you’re stopping/switching, do what your doctor says.)
Ahh is my first day teaching! Am excited and nervous and mostly not scared of my students, I think. I hope they’re reasonably good kids - 6 hours a week of lab section together is going to suck if they’re assholes.
Dozens of African American women worked for NASA as expert mathematicians from the 1940s to the 1960s and almost no one knows about it. Segregated within NASA facilities in Hampton, Va., well-educated Black women used slide rules and pencils to do the calculations for flights by astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepherd.
Image: Melba Roy, NASA Mathematician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Credit: NASA/Corbis
That this history is little known makes it ripe for research by collaborators Lucy Short ’15 (St. Louis) and American studies professor Duchess Harris, whose grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was one of these extraordinary women.
Their collaboration began when Professor Harris invited Short, an American studies major, to join her in researching the human “computers,” as these women and their White women counterparts were known.
Professor Harris found this project compelling not solely because of her grandmother’s work, but because, “I am the descendant of enslaved Africans who became the first free Blacks in America. Because of them, I am here.”
They applied for and received a student-faculty research grant that supported travel to Hampton, home of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, now known as NASA’s Langley Research Center. There they met with local collaborator Margot Lee Shetterly (a Black descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and daughter of retired NASA engineer Robert B. Lee) as well as historians at the Hampton History Museum and at NASA. They also visited the archaeological site of the Great Contraband Camp, a community of freed Blacks.
In 1831, Virginia enacted anti-literacy legislation to prevent the education of slaves and freedmen. But in the 1860s, thanks to the efforts of educator Mary Smith Peake and sympathetic generals at nearby Fort Monroe, former slaves had their first opportunities to obtain an education, culminating in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University), which became the alma mater of Booker T. Washington and scores of other Black educators and leaders. The Black women who became the computers at NASA were required to first take a course at Hampton.
“While we were touring NASA, Mary Gainer, the center’s historic preservation officer, pointed out a building used by the computers,” says Short. Professor Harris asked, ‘Is that where my grandmother would have worked?’
“‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s where the White women worked. The Black women were in another building about a mile away, on the other side of the gate.’” These were women calculating the trajectories for America’s first manned space flights—segregated in a building with few amenities at a research center built on the site of the former Chesterville plantation.
The interconnections of the computers, the plantation, pioneering educational efforts, and a community of freedmen interested the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which provided a grant for Shetterly, Short, and Harris to expand their study. This grant was followed by a sustainability grant from Macalester, which allows further exploration of this unsustainable, segregated way of life.
Short is continuing the research as part of her senior honors project, which focuses on Black feminism. Another product of this work is a digital archive, Human Computers at NASA, developed in collaboration with the Macalester Library.
“The project has been a wonderful culmination of my American studies major,” says Short. “After being onsite at [the former] Chesterville Plantation, now part of NASA, the honors thesis chapter essentially wrote itself with the emergence of uncanny connections to slavery. I feel so lucky to have support from Macalester to pursue research on a microcosm of the invisibility of Black women’s bodies.”
If you read the “Add a child account” section - you have to approve the invite sent from your parents, and it can only track what you do when logged into that Microsoft account. I’m not 100% sure how Microsoft accounts work (you don’t need one just to use Windows 10), but if your parents want/insist on tracking you, make a decoy account and only use it for safe browsing (school, games, etc). Make a private one not linked to your family for anything you’re scared about getting outed, or don’t use anything linked to a Microsoft account.
Ah yes, the point in the day when I realize I don't actually know how to initiate interaction with other people. Like, I can be a totally normal-seeming human of you come up to me, and also of there is a reasonable way for our interaction to end. But as usual, if left to my own devices, I'm in a comfy chair on Tumblr.
Soup tureen in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
I have never seen a more terrifying piece of fine china than this thing. It looks like it’s going to start malevolently hopping around spitting scalding split-pea soup at everyone. I hate split-pea soup.
I’m not quite sure, but I’m almost positive Mulder/Scully was the first ship I ever shipped. I would have been like 10 or 11. Just did a whole rewatch and it reminded my just how much I love them. These are all great.
“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”
“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”
“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”
“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”
“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”
“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. "there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”
"chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”
“sphinxes? what the hell.”
“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”
“that sounds exciting,” she said.
“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”
“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”
“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.
have you ever seen the little leaf sheep nudibranch?,, it literally looks like an artichoke with a marshmallow in the front
OHHH NO, OHHHHOHOH NO i cant BELIEVE this is a real animal and not a cartoon character from some pixar short
its real name is the costasiella kuroshimae, and theyre actually not nudibranches, but closely related sacoglossan sea slugs that feed on algea .… .. .. . . like … .. sheep
they were discovered off the coast of the yaeyama islands in japan, and theres not actually a lot known about em - a few members of the sacoglossa branch have the ability to steal chloroplasts from algea the eat and add it to their own bodies in a Really Unusual process called kleptoplasty, which might account for their vivid green color ?
either way theyre only 4.5 mm long and all they want to do is move super slowly and eat. a true hero among us
Jeffrey Spender has been lying to you this entire episode. You have spent the last 16 episodes protecting this baby from super soldiers and a UFO cult. And now you think the only choice you have is to give him up in a closed adoption to strangers? Really Scully? Really?
(Apparently Duchovny and Anderson were pissed about this plot decision, but Chris Carter insisted on it.)
I, uh, incinerated my toaster oven a couple nights ago. I was tipsy, and wanted pita chips, and also needed to use the bathroom. But I guess it’s just a good excuse for …
Super Exciting Kitchen Appliance Fire Safety Tips!
Basics:
CLEAN YOUR GODDAMN STUFF.
When toaster ovens & similar closed appliances catch fire, UNPLUG it and CLOSE the door/lid.
NEVER PUT WATER ON AN ELECTRICAL FIRE, even if it’s unplugged.
Go into your kitchen right now and look around. Get cereal boxes, curtains, cookbooks, and anything else easily flammable off of & away from your electrical appliances and stovetop.
Get rid of stuff that gives you a shock or has frayed cords. I don’t care how broke you are, it’s not worth it.
Advanced Tips!
Unplug stuff when you go away for a while - there’s been cases of microwaves turning themselves on and catching fire.
Check whether your kitchen has the right kind of grounded plugs (google it). Look up the tenant-protection laws in your area, and if you have a halfway-responsive landlord (I crack myself up), get them to install safety stuff. Otherwise, report them right before you move out.
Putting a sticky note with the word “NO.” on the appliance, closing the door, and ignoring it will not magically solve the problem that your toaster oven smells like a bachelor dragon’s man cave.
