Last night the touring company of Man of La Mancha came to Athens, and PJ and I went to see it. Man of La Mancha is one of my favorite musicals, so I was excited to have the chance to see it. La Mancha doesn’t get the acclaim of such musicals as Gypsy, West Side Story, or My Fair Lady, especially among gay men. But I love it.
The touring company production was pretty good, but I’m not a fair critic — I’m as irrational in my love for Don Quixote de la Mancha, Aldonza, and Sancho Panza as I am in my love for Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader. Like Star Wars, La Mancha was one of my childhood obsessions.
In junior high, I was in drama — or “theater arts,” as it was called. In 9th grade, our teacher, Mrs. Stansbury, decided that a non-musical version of Man of La Mancha would be the one-act play we would perform for the spring season. I was assigned the part of Dr. Carrasco.
In order to get us ready for our parts, she lent some of us her soundtrack of the original cast recording, which not only had all of the songs but most of the dialogue too. I immediately fell in love with it, and so I taped it so that I could have my own copy, which I listened to practically non-stop for years. (Unfortunately, due to various issues concerning the annual junior high drama competition we participated in, we ended up not doing a play at all that year.)
I was particularly drawn to the play’s exploration — if that’s not too strong a word — of reality vs. idealism, of life as it is vs. life as it ought to be, of whether it’s madness to accept life as it is (a “dung heap,” as Aldonza calls it) or to make your own world through imagination. Now, I’m not saying that we should all go crazy and pretend to be Medieval knights, but clearly this is a musical about the theater — the role of theater in a society of gender and class inequity and oppression. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that this work participates in the same discussions of the role of theater in society raised by such scholars as Martin Esslin and W. B. Worthen.
And let’s face it: what budding 13-year-old homosexual wouldn’t fall in love with Aldonza, the hardened prostitute with a heart of gold?!
I chose him as my first hottie of the month for three reasons. First, just look at him in his portrait (by 
To help me with an article I’m writing, I spent part of yesterday reading two articles about John Dryden’s 1681 poem, Absalom and Achitophel, a satire written during the so-called exclusion crisis, an effort to exclude Catholics from the throne of England. In this poem, Dryden (pictured here) uses Biblical history — the story of David and his rebellious son Absalom — as a metaphor for the current English situation of Charles II and his rebellious son, James Scot, duke of Monmouth. While the particulars of this research probably aren’t of much interest to anyone but me, I soon became fascinated by the gender politics of the scholars themselves and what this politics means about the state of literary criticism.
Fun Home is, on one level, Bechdel’s effort to come to terms with her father, a high school English teacher/funeral home director in small town Pennsylvania who also restores old homes to museum-like quality on the side. Already strained, their relationship is made more complicated by the fact that Alison’s father is hiding a substantial secret, one that she only discovers after leaving home for college. Part homage to her father, part indictment of him, Fun Home is both the particular story of these two characters’ relationship and a universal story of the constant renegotiation of the parent-child relationship as the child grows into adulthood.
The movie is about a kid named Nick, played by Ruben Bansie-Snellman (pictured here), who is a homeless graffiti artist in Portland, Oregon. In the larger sense, the movie traces the effects of the city’s efforts to cut down on such graffiti by arresting the artists and charging them with a felony. Nick is arrested early in the film and decides to skip town in order to avoid the fine and community service. He goes to Seattle, where he runs into Jesse, played by Pepper Fajans, another artist who’s from a middle class family. Where Nick has made a life for himself by stealing food and sleeping in alleys, Jesse pays for everything he wants and has his own small apartment. Nick believes in graffiti art for graffiti art’s sake; Jesse sells pictures of his art to magazines.
I read the essay in part because I’m looking for an article to begin my eighteenth-century class with next quarter. My course is going to focus on “The Making of the Modern Self: Writing Identity in the Long Eighteenth century,” so I want to begin with an article about identity that is kind of fun too. What could be more fun than wigs? Maybe I can help bring back wigs as a male fashion necessity! Here’s a portrait of William Wycherley — wouldn’t I look great in big, curly wig like his?!
The first is Stephen Porter’s The Great Fire of London (Sutton Publishing, 1996). The Great Fire occured in 1666, “raged for our days and destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 of the City of London’s great livery halls.” It is one of the most important disasters in British history and had a profound effect on the subsequent development of London as a city. Most students of Restoration literature are familiar with Samuel Pepys’s narration of the fire in his Diary.
![IMG_8341[1]](https://live.staticflickr.com/8644/27753735444_2ca20d29d0_s.jpg "IMG_8341[1]")
This Gaudy Gilded Stage 