The Enchantment of The Nutcracker

“La Bataille” scene in The Nutcracker- photo by Anne Marie Bloodgood

    This is my third year in a row working as a stagehand/electric through IATSE Local 205 for Ballet Austin's The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. Before that first year, I had never seen the Nutcracker before. Over the years I became familiar with the basic plot and I had certainly heard 5 or 6 songs throughout my childhood Christmases, most notably “The March”. In the 3 years working on this ballet, I have come to appreciate Tchaikovsky's music immensely but what is most thrilling to me about working on this show is the excitement backstage, especially during Act 1, after the party scene where we’re introduced to Drosselmeyer and the Nutcracker. It’s quite inspiring actually to see everyone involved coming together and making theater magic.

Linen Postcards

The finished Parthenon photo

                                                        
                                         Check out more of my Linen Postcard work at flickr

   

     Recently I was editing some photos I had taken on my trip to Nashville. I came across a photo I took of the Parthenon. For those that don’t know, Nashville built a life size replica of the temple that sits in Athens, Greece in 1897 as part of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition. I thought the photo looked rather drab; the grass in the foreground was brown and the sky was overcast. I did like the framing however of the mostly grass and sky with this sliver of a building in the middle. Usually when editing photos of my trips, I don’t do anything more than color correct, adjusting the contrast here and bringing out more detail in the shadows there, those sorts of things. Unless I'm looking for some sort of mood whereupon I’ll add a filter or preset but that’s a whole different situation. With the Parthenon photo I adjusted a lot of the parameters to get that grass green and the sky blue. After experimenting for a bit however it looked less like a photo and more like an illustration. What it reminded me of was the linen postcards that were very popular between the 1930’s and 1950’s.

The Tiny Alcove

    

What could this be used for?

    When I moved back to Austin earlier this year to a groovy apartment, there was a tiny alcove in the hallway. My first thought was this tiny space was a little alter. It seemed perfect for some sort of saint of diminutive size to be perched there with plenty of room for offerings to be laid at its feet. Eventually though, I figured out that the space was designed for a telephone. It even had a little shelf underneath for a little phone directory or address book.

My Birthday

    Today is my birthday. As you get older, they’re not really a big deal anymore except maybe for those milestone birthdays. But what I'm reflecting on today is that I am now the same age as my mother was when she passed away 23 years ago at the age of 54. After a 6 year battle with cancer, she had finally succumbed to the disease. It was early Sunday morning on September 13th, 1998, I was working out in the Hamptons finishing up an event. It was my mother’s 54th birthday. My family and I had made plans to celebrate it with her later that day at the hospice care facility in Brooklyn where she had been a patient. My beeper went off at around 2 AM. It was my aunt’s number. I knew right then that my mother had passed away.

My mother in the 1950's

Following Sean

    

    The other evening while scrolling for movies to watch I came across Following Sean, a documentary about filmmaker Ralph Arlyck, reconnecting with Sean Farrell, his subject from a short documentary he had made thirty years before in 1969, when Sean was 4 years old. The premise of that documentary, called Sean, was following and interviewing Sean in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1969. In that documentary we see the camera following a barefoot Sean walking around the Haight with intercuts of an interview with Sean where he admits, among other things, to smoking and eating grass. Sean and his family had lived a few floors above Mr. Arlyck and he thought Sean would be a great subject for his film thesis at San Francisco State University. In Following Sean, released in 2005, we meet up with Sean in his early 30’s and get some background on his family's history and where they are today as well as Ralph’s family history and present day life. I did not expect that Following Sean would have had a very profound effect on me.