Posted 1:16 PM by Blah blah

Impact Theatre.

Last Friday night I went to Berkeley and met Cheshire Dave and his girlfriend Sarah for the first time! He works on the side with a very cool drama group called the Impact Theatre, designing their posters. They are a group of about five or so people who work hard to put on good original drama. Every year they create something called the Impact Briefs festival, a collection of one-act plays that each last about 10 minutes only. Cheshire wrote one of the seven plays performed that night, "The Finest Poet." They try to make them funny, fast, inexpensive, and accessible to the average person. They usually perform at La Val's Subterranean Theater up on the north side of UC Berkeley. I used to eat at La Val's pizza when I was a student, and I loved hanging around the cramped sidewalks of N. Berkeley, but I never went to any concert or performance in the basement before last week. It does look somewhat like a basement. It's dark and sparse, with no stage and surrounded by black painted walls. After filling up two sides of the room with folding chairs, the group had only the space of a living room in which to perform!

While standing in line for tickets, I started chatting with this nice lady behind me (a typical Raymond thing to do) and found out she was Cheshire's mom! She told me how he had gotten to be a playwright. Since he was their graphic artist, he got to know the cast and enjoyed their work a great deal. When it came time to create the Impact Briefs, the group began accepting submissions from anyone. They held a writing contest. One day Cheshire had attended this poetry slam in San Francisco and gotten mixed feelings about it. He started to write about it in his journal, when he thought: "HEY! This would make a funny play!" He set off reshaping his journal entry into a play mocking and appreciating poetry slams. Since he worked with the Impact Theatre but not as a writer, he didn't want to be in the awkward position where his friends might say: "Well, Cheshire, you're our friend, so we'll be honest with you. We thought you wrote a...uh...niiiice play. But it's...it's TOO good for us, yeah...um...why don't you talk to the Tibetan Monk Players across the street? I'm sure they could use a serious religious play like yours."

Instead, he submitted his play anonymously, and he got picked! Yay!

Read what the critics said about Impact Briefs. They explain what the plays are about and why they were so funny better than I can. My favorites were "The Bacchae" and "The Last Hit." In "The Bacchae," the cast performs a 10 minute version of the ancient Greek drama with sock puppets. I laughed so hard I will never look at my socks the same way again. "The Last Hit" is about a Berkeley guy, tired after a long day, who wants to kick back and smoke some pot. He's on the sofa relaxing with a bong that looks like Cartman from South Park. Then CNN comes on with this report: "Osama Bin Laden is reported to have poisoned the nation's supply of marijuana in New York, ..., and [as he's about to inhale] Berkeley, California." The guy goes crazy with fear, yelling later: "If we let them keep us from our American way of life---from smoking pot, then the terrorists will have WON!"

I wish I had more time to gush about the Impact Theatre. I am not doing justice here to the talent and creativity those amazing people have. Well if you see me, ask me about them! Cheshire's play give me my first ever impression of a poetry slam. It's something in which people get up in a room of others and "perform" their own poetry. I've wanted to see a slam for a while, but Cheshire's play gave me the experience gift-wrapped with a funny bone. Thanks again for a wonderful evening, man!



Dr. Lisa. Straight Talk TV show.

Last Sunday, Easter, I went to a church BBQ led by my pastor friend Marcus. Also met Lisa, this surgeon friend of mine, and we couldn't wait to catch up. Hadn't seen both of them for ages. Dr. Lisa just set up a private medical practice in Palo Alto, plus she does house calls! Both of them are really thoughtful, cheerful, very kind, and up for all kinds of talk. We also got to eat some fantastic salmon and chicken at the potluck. Mmmmm.... Lisa is active in public health, having been a fellow at Harvard in Minority Health Policy. Here's an article about some of her work. When I told her about the little volunteer TV show I help produce, she blazed with ideas for me. "Oh, I know this journalist...hey..you need a cameraman? You could do these little man-on-the-street reports. You need someone to come talk health policy? Yeah...I've been doing this research project on breast cancer and..." Oh, I wish I had TIME to plan this show more carefully!



Here I am at the TV studio for my political talk show. This is not during an actual taping.



We tape two shows every other month, and our next taping is April 13. Our last show taped in mid-February. I got to interview this woman who heads the non-profit group, The Role Model Program. They send working professionals into classrooms to speak to and inspire kids to shoot for higher goals. With her was her friend and board member of the program, Dolly Sandoval, just elected to the Cupertino City Council last November. Next, I interviewed Dennis Kennedy, mayor of Morgan Hill. He was running for Board of Supervisors for my county---Santa Clara County. (Unfortunately, he lost in the March election.) It was my first time meeting a mayor, and he was really cool. He even had worked many years for IBM.

Most interesting for me, he talked about what it will take to bring BART to San Jose. BART is our San Francisco Bay Area (so-called "high-speed") train system, like the Metro in Washington, D.C. BART is deeply integrated into the life of San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and the East Bay. But when it was built 30 years ago, political and financial barriers prevented California from extending their rail lines down here to San Jose or to the San Francisco Airport (SFO). 30 years later, our traffic here is sometimes worse than Los Angeles, and still we have no BART to either San Jose or SFO. In 2000, our county's voters passed Measure A, increasing our sales tax to help raise money for BART to San Jose, but it still will take many years to achieve, if ever. Kennedy had been on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and strongly supports BART to San Jose. He explained that the government plans, not to build new railroad tracks, but to buy the existing rail used by companies like Union Pacific, which goes through Fremont and still is used. Preparing to buy up all the land and tracks is the main delay for bringing BART to San Jose.

Anyhow, in our show, I basically threw Kennedy softball questions and let him present himself in his best light. We are, after all, a Democratic show and do not pretend to be objective, though I have asked if we could bring on Republicans too. Afterwards, Kennedy's rival Don Gage heard about my interview and asked to be on our show too! Wow. People actually watch this, I thought. The election was too near by then and we couldn't talk to him. He ended up winning anyway!

Indian King of Comedy

In mid-February, the same day I taped the TV show, I also picked up Ginny from SFO and took her to dinner at Zax, this charming Mediterranean restaurant in North Beach! Later that night in San Francisco, I hammed it up with Ginny and her friend Erica and her friends at Erica's karaoke party, just near Golden Gate Park. Filled with wine and song and touched by some delicious company, I left around 2 am. The next night I went to a comedy club in Sunnyvale with my friends June and Tony, called Rooster T. Feathers. June has a coworker at Oracle named Phil Puthumana, this Indian guy who's Asian American. Besides doing the typical Indian thing around here (business/technology) by day, Phil has an alter-ego at night...Let me present Pooth, the Curry Comic---the Indian King of Comedy! As Phil tells it, his friend Linda had just signed up for classes at the San Francisco Comedy College and he tried it with her, on a whim. (SF Comedy College? If only school were always that fun!) Well he found out not only did he love comedy, but he had a rich lode of material from his Indian heritage to mine.



So that night I went to see the "final project" of the comedy class. All the students had a big night reserved at professional clubs in both San Francisco and down here in Sunnyvale, and all of them had to perform! June, Tony, a couple of their friends, and I went to cheer on Phil. And this guy was INCREDIBLE! Out of the 20-something performers that night, only a few were intelligent, witty, hip, surprising, and consistently, genuinely FUNNY. Phil was one of them. The host was a lady student who wore a hearing aid for her partial deafness. She turned up the volume on her receiver for the club microphone and joked about her disability. I thought it was both poignant and kinda in bad taste. After the third person had made a joke about the trying to find love over the Internet and using Craigslist, I was clapping only half-heartedly. But then came Phil and he just lit up with room with his charisma and enthusiasm. His most memorable jokes are the ones where he contrasts his view, growing up an ABCD, with his traditional, PhD nuclear physicist father's view. (Indians here call their kids, who grow up in the U.S., ABCD: "American Born Confused Desi"---desi is a person.) He says his dad came to the Southern U.S. for his post-doc studies. When his dad met some racists who wanted to "kick his ass," his dad would say [Phil mimicking a thick Indian accent] "I am GET-ting my P. H. D. in NU-clear phy-sics and will BLOW up your ass with a hydrogen BOMB!" (Something like that.) Go see Phil at his next performance in SF! He's a rare voice---Asian, Indian, and really funny.

More pix!

Finally, some more pix of me and the streets close to my house. Here's me playing with the camera after coming back from Berkeley:



Here's lookin' at YOU, kid!

Coming home from the Easter BBQ on Sunday, I noticed the sky was a warm red-orange---my favorite color. Lots of Indian parents were out walking with their kids. I've always enjoyed the beauty of where I live and decided I had to stop my car and record them. Here are some of my neighbors just before a lovely sunset near our house:




See all my new photos here!