GayEasterParade.COM GayNewOrleans.COM SouthernDecadence.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 11

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1 GayEasterParade.COM GayNewOrleans.COM SouthernDecadence.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 11

2 ambush paparazzi Spotlight ~ New Orleans ~ Photos by Tony Leggio, Paul Melancon, Patrick Michael, Rip Naquin 12 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 Official ficial Gay Mardi di Gras Guide GayMardiGras.COM

3 GayEasterParade.COM GayNewOrleans.COM SouthernDecadence.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 13

4 a community within communities by The Rev. Bill Terry, Rector St. Anna s Episcopal Church fr.bill@stannanola.org For wherever your treasure is, there shall your heart be also. For wherever your treasure is, there shall your heart be also is a statement for the current times hurled forth from the fist century by the Evangelist Saint Luke. The young rabbi from Galilee also said, But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal essentially, you can t take it with you! Christmas is both a time of abundance, giving, sorrow, loss, a merchant s kingdom come. We are sold into believe that Bing Crosby is still at a fireside mantle with pipe in hand. Gene Kelly is dancing his way through the snow and claymation is touting Frosty the Snowman all in southern Louisiana. But we are not persuaded with visions of snow are we? A local author has renamed and reworked the Christmas myth with alligators named Gaston, Tiboy, Pierre, Alceé, Ninette, Suzette, Celeste and Reneé! Our proper English-German Christmas dinner is renamed and reworked as Reveillon Dinners. How much is myth? How much one forgets why we celebrate this season? It is, by the way, a natural time of year when humanity has always done something because it is in the midst of winter and such something s always look forward to something new. It is a time of hunkering down and getting ready for SPRING! It is the season of the longest night December 22 nd. The Christian tradition of Christmas co-opted the pagan feast of Saturnalia- a time of unrestrained revelry. For all of this confusion and history and remarketing there is still a compelling sense of giving not to mention tax write offs as a seasonal thought. If all of this sounds muddled and a bit on the caustic side it should and it is because frankly this is a muddled season that means many things to many people. We are not on the same page. It is a season of buy, buy, buy, it is a season of Chanukah Trees, Christmas Lights, dreidels and stocking. Oy, such confusion! But it s simple really, three religious groups have made it what it is today and in so doing we have lost our roots of holiness and joy. For the Jewish tradition it is a minor feast where a present is given on each of 8 days honoring the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean Revolt. For pagans it is the season of the longest night evoking the depth of winter looking forward to the coming of new light in Spring thus Yule logs, holly, and mistletoe; and for Christians it is the Feast of the Incarnation; that is the birth of Jesus: Three tradition threads interwoven and over-marketed into a polyglot season that is confused and redolent with anxiety not to mention some pretty good parties warming up for New Year s celebrations. But it is simple really or it can be. is a place to spend your money and you know you are going to do it. Put it to purpose. If you designate St. Anna s as your charity we will get a percentage of your purchase. It will help Anna s Arts for Kids, the Medical Mission, and Adult Learning Academy all of which are supported one or another by the LGBT community. You know you are going to buy stuff. Buy it here. Yep, the list of stores is glorious better than any Mall in the USA! Stores include Bed, Bath, and Beyond; Target; Brookstone; WalMart; Bloomingdale s and so on. You know that you are going to buy. After you register go to GoodShop. Yes, this pitch is tawdry and lacks any sentimental value. The question is simple to give for the good or to feel good? Maybe both and that is OK. Make this a giving season and perhaps just perhaps try to simplify it a bit. We d like to finish the Dodwell House a community project for ALL OF THE COMMUNITY make a Christmas donation and if you wish we ll send a card to a friend that said you made a donation in their name to Dodwell House just drop a note or line to us. Send your gift to St. Anna s Church, 1313 Esplanade, NOLA Yep we are right in there with the hustle aren t we? Nope not really! We will hold a glorious celebratory mass on Christmas Eve starting at 11pm. You will hear the word Emmanuel said a lot that is, God is with us. At St. Anna s we celebrate the incarnation because we believe in that each human created has something of God within them. We believe that all creation is a temple of hope and dignity and just so God became one of us. Presents can become holy instruments of good will rather than re-gifted dross that you really didn t want. God is with us not against us. I know that most of you will spend some money on presents and gift giving; on parties and gatherings; on Reveillon Dinners and bar parties. Set aside a moment for yourselves and contemplate the grandeur that can be worked out in this season not by the mercantile machine but by the heart that beats for giving because in giving we receive. Settle down, untangle the mess, find yourself in the simple place. And then, if you must give think about a GoodShop gift or even a donation in the name of one you love. Do we really need more stuff? Think about our Community and our Community within the larger Community: For wherever your treasure is, there shall your heart be also Jesus. trodding the boards...from The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 Official ficial Gay Mardi di Gras Guide GayMardiGras.COM able to fit in during five exciting and exhausting days. Most memorable was The Mudlark Public Theatre s The Mysterious Axeman s Jazz, a retelling of gruesome events that took place in New Orleans and Gretna during World War I and shortly afterward. Using amazingly expressive puppets and projected shadow images, writer/director Pandora Andrea Gastelum employed vast inventiveness in the telling of this bloody tale while honoring the dignity of the actual participants, many of them immigrants who got caught up in the biased and unfair legal system of the day. In this age of multimillion dollar overblown cinematic mishaps, there was an ineffable charm to Mudlark s use of simple, age-old devices including a wonderfully evocative musical score. Gastelum and her entire krewe of puppeteers, whose quick-changing voices brought to individualistic life all of the characters, are to be saluted for bringing back from the dead this enduring mystery and all its interwoven reflections on a particular time in our society. And as lagniappe, it turned out that one of the puppets represented the late grandfather of friends of mine! Another highlight was the return of Desiree Burch whose 52 Man Pick Up was a treat two years ago. Written with Dan Kitrosser, her Tar Baby was billed as a Fun-Filled Carnival of Race & Capitalism, and that it was as a series of sideshow acts led to a finale underneath an inventively devised big top. Burch seemed even more assured than in 2010 as she dissected black stereotypes old and new. Amid discourses on the discontents black people have with their hair and what it s like to audition for a room full of NYU film school hipsters, Burch made the personal, including baggage she still carries around from 12th grade, universal. Bravely relying on the wit of the assembled spectators to buoy her along, Burch and Director Isaac Byrne included snarkily playful viewer participation in which members of the mostly all white audience became slaves to a catchy beat of Sold, sold, sold ; this segment offered up the evening s best line, Watching white people work is exhausting. As Tar Baby led to an explosive anger you don t often hear verbalized, it was by turns intelligent, thoughtful, funny and even moving. Its casual presentation belied a highly structured show and made one wonder how much of the Desiree we re seeing is real and how much is a heightened stage version of her. Tar Baby could be somewhat shorter as it continues for about 10 minutes past its seeming finale with diminishing results. At the same time, while consistently fascinating, the script conflates a number of topics race, body shape, socioeconomics that overlap, but which deserve explication on their own. And there is a certain self-indulgency to the show as Burch admits that, despite her justifiable complaints, she has it pretty good compared to many other people in the world. But if Tar Baby becomes a bit polemical towards its end, its ideas, arguments and challenges are ones that can t be brought up too often, leaving you, as any great theater should do, with a whole circus of stuff going on in your head. No matter how much is going on in your head, it likely pales in comparison to Hamlet s in The Rub where the words incestuous sheets echo in his brain. The Tremor Theater Collective s adaptation of Hamlet fused old and new to create a melancholy Dane for our time. Ophelia sings What the World Needs Now. Polonius advice to Laertes gets updated with commercial taglines. With her boy toy Claudius in tow, Gertrude, the real power, speaks political double-talk as she s interviewed on TV. Amidst the outrageously un-p.c. floats in the Den of Muses, it all registered as deliciously surreal. While none of this was revolutionary Hamlet s been done a zillion ways the Tremors gave a freshness and an urgency to the Bard s words, occasionally re-written with current allusions to produce a tantalizing neo-shakespearean lingua franca, reflecting our own times of powergrabbing politicians and the family members who come along for the ride. I especially liked Jordan Barbour s Polonius, a typically wheedling party apparatchik as well as the regally supercilious Gertrude of Marguerite Van Cook, but the entire cast, outfitted in Shamon Cassette s eclectic costumes, was fine. With no Rosencrantz, Guildenstern or Horatio and an abrupt ending that felt calculated to fit a prescribed time frame, this was a less layered Hamlet. But with flashes of brilliant insight, this bracing reinterpretation, under Nessa Norich s sharp direction, was a worthy one for the Fringe. In contrast to the pageantry of The Rub, Melanie Gall presented a simple, but no less effective show at Byrdie s. More Power to Your Knitting, Nell! gave us the tale of a young gal from the Lower East Side who winds up on the radio during World War II encouraging women to take up needles, and make scarves, sweaters and other goodies for their soldier guys. The Cast of The Rub The story was simple but, outfitted by actual knitting-themed songs from the era performed by Gall with her gorgeous soprano voice (while knitting no less!), an absolutely winning one. And Gall s in-character interactions with the audience, some of whom were also knitting, was an especial treat. While Gall knitted, artist Sarah David drew a portrait of model Audra Rouse in one of the upstairs rooms at John Paul s Fringe s planners can be justifiably proud of their choices. While productions fell all along the quality spectrum, I suspect if I had seen them all, I d rank them onto a bell-shaped curve. And yet, as often happens when dealing with opinions of artistic matters, things that I wasn t crazy about were enjoyed by others and vice versa. Here s a round-up of the shows I was [continued on 17]

5 GayEasterParade.COM GayNewOrleans.COM SouthernDecadence.COM Dec. 4-17, 2012 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 15