It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

Over the weekend, we saw Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy at The Bunbury Theatre. While the actors were delightfully skilled, and the set design was lovely, the pacing of the play did not live up to the farce it is required to be.

The Bunbury crew have setup a permanent new home in an old YMCA building. The stage, I’m told, used to be a basketball court. I’d never been in a brand, spanking new theatre. There was a lot of excitement in the audience over the theatre. It was beautiful, comfortable, and, well, smelled really nice. 150 seats. Bunbury folks did an outstanding job on the gym’s transformation.

The next play up is Juergen K. Tossman’s AUTOCARE. Mr. Tossmann is also Bunbury’s Artistic Director. (Maybe I should start a theatre?) I always look forward to seeing new work, so of course, I’m signing up for this one.

Bunbury has a cool alternative to subscriptions. You can purchase a "Season Passport" which allows you to see all six shows as a single person, or multiple tickets for some combination of shows. Uh…like if you and yer girlfriend wanna take two people to one show, that configuration uses up four tickets. And then you have two tickets left over for one more show if yer girlfriend goes with you. Or you can take yourself by yourself to two shows. Something like that. I like it.

You’re To Kill a Mockingbird!
by Harper Lee

Perceived as a revolutionary and groundbreaking person, you have changed the minds of many people. While questioning the authority around you, you’ve also taken a significant amount of flack. But you’ve had the admirable guts to persevere. There’s a weird guy in the neighborhood using dubious means to protect you, but you’re pretty sure it’s worth it in the end. In the end, it remains unclear to you whether finches and mockingbirds get along in real life.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

The link I took to the book quiz came from Matthew Freeman.

If I were a play, I think I’d be Tales of the Lost Formicans.

Last month, we saw Take Me Out put up by Pandora Productions, at the Thrust Theatre/University of Louisville, Pandora’s last stop before they open in their new home at the Bunbury Theatre.

My expectations were low, being new to town, and having seen the original Broadway production a couple of times.  J. Daniel Herring was the best Mason I’ve seen yet. How could that be? Imagine my ignorant surprise. I’ll watching for him again. Tim Kitchen was a wonderful Kippy, and Joseph Hatfield quite a believable Shane. Brett Gettefield’s performance as Darren was softer, not as arrogant as I expect Darren to be, and I was ambivalent about his performance. The house on a thursday night was full. Maybe the naked men had something to do with that. I like to think it was also Richard Greenberg’s fine writing. Pandora certainly did justice to it.

I have been largely disappointed by gay theatre companies in the West. The performances are often substandard, and the plays catering to men. (An exception to this is Diversionary Theatre in San Diego where the production values are outstanding, and they are trying to broaden their audience.) Pandora clearly sets a high standard for its company, and it is a welcome relief to be so pleased with a gay theatre.

Pandora’s upcoming season includes Jane Chambers’ Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. I’ve read every Chambers play I could get my hands on, and never seen a production of her plays. I’m looking forward to this particular production. (I did see an outstanding reading of this same play, last year in Chicago, by the wonderful About Face theatre company.)

Pandora is my new favorite theatre company. I can’t wait to see what they do in their new home.

I added two other software programs to the last post:

DocumentWallet (’cause I forgot the first time around)

and

Journler (thank you to the reader who turned me on to it)

For those of you who care about such things.

Please, I’m not advocating any products, and I didn’t write a software review. I wrote a list of software, with a Mac bias, for note storage and retrieval. I know there are other writers out there who are looking for tools, just as I am. And I like to talk about tools.

Friends of theatre, writers, and assorted not-nots are always welcome to email.

However, I ain’t gonna hawk anyone’s products. I did see The Devil Wears Prada, after all.

One of my ongoing projects is an historical play I plan to write. The subject requires a lot of research. I do so love to induldge myself with research. The story involves some complicated and little known material from San Francisco, circa 1830-1860. I’ve been reading and collecting material for several years.Quite a bit of material I’ve transfered to PDF files. Some of the material, however, remains in books. Some of the materials are JPEGs, a few RTF and Word documents, and even an Excel spreadsheet or two.

I have struggled with a convenient way to catalog my research. More accurately,  even with OS X’s Spotlight feature, I have not been able to easily call up a given computer document on command. Even with organizing them into digital folders. The books and paper are easy. They’re sitting on a bookshelf or in a file folder. The computer documents are numerous, and, in and of themselves, useful. However, I end up scouring through several before I find the one I’m looking for, wasting a lot of time.

I’ve tried on many software solutions. One that has worked, for a handful of years, has been StickyBrain, now known as SOHO Notes (Commercial, $39.95). I’ve used this program as a dumping ground for free form notes, and it’s easy to find those notes when I need them. I wish the “Get Info” button did not produce a pop-up screen. I’d like this info to be displayed along the side of the browser. Particularly when I’m looking at images or PDFs. Such is my major complaint about SOHO Notes. And that I prefer the old name, StickyBrain. Nothing has come close to replacing it for me, until…

I came across Papers. I love the interface, which allows me to see entire lists of PDF, as well as other files, by title. Papers is for people, uh, scientists, working with scientific papers.It’s a Mac only product and costs $39. As I’m a scientist only in my imagination, Papers may not survive it’s 30 day trial on my laptop. And as for free form notes, SOHO is still my baby.

I’ve tried out a lot of progams, many of which are perfectly good note organizers.  Some even use “mind maps.” As visual as I am in my thinking, the mind maps just overwhelm me. Many programs remind me too much of SOHO Notes to replace it. Below, you’ll find the short list of what I’ve tried. All of the software works on OS X. Note that I don’t care about WinDoze. All of them have demo or trial versions available. The list is in no particular order.  Check ‘em out and decide for yourself, because my idiosyncrasies, surely, are not yours. I’ll be sticking (*ahem*) with SOHO Notes for now.

• DevonThink Pro – allows PDFs, image files, Word and RTF files. Everything I needed. Just didn’t like the “look” of it. Commercial,$79.95. $39.95 for Devonthink Personal..
• NoteList – Basic notetaking app. Text files, images, free form. Shareware, $20.
• NoteMind - PDFs, Images, other files. Could only add one file at
  a time, as far as I could tell, which I found annoyiing. All notes defaulted to “untitled” and required hand editing. Mind maps I could actually understand. Shareware, $20.
• KIT (Keep It Together) – Nice product, handles all types of files. Reminded me a lot of SOHO Notes, which if I didn’t already have, I might have stuck with KIT. I used the company’s RSS Feeder software for a long time, which I liked, too. Shareware, $24.95.
• CopyWrite- Nice interface. Too basic for my needs; text files only. Considers itself a tool for writers.Exports to RTF. Shareware, $24.99.
• Mori – Basic. Easy to use. A lot of people I know swear by this program. Shareware, $39.95.
• Yep – I really wanted Yep to save me. Sadly, tracks PDF only. Indexes all the PDFs it can find. Be prepared to have it take over, while it indexes, the very first time you run the app. Shareware, $34.
• Yojimbo - Imports text files, and PDFs. Does not import image files, although allows drag and drop of images into notes. Solid product, by the company that brought us one of my favorite apps, Too much like SOHO Notes. BBEdit. (I use that for html editing.) Commercial, $39.
• MyNotes - Basic notetaking. Text files. Allows drag and drop image files, although the user is cautioned these will impede performance. Not very robust. Shareware, $19.95.
• NovaMind- Mind mapping software. Commercial, lots of different options, starting at $49 for the Express version. There’s a NovaMind Screenwriter for $119.
• DocumentWallet – This is a nifty note organizer I nearly forgot about. Shareware, $29.95. Jeez, for ten bucks more, you can buy SOHO Notes.
• Journier – Excellent! Donation-ware for personal use.

Shareware has gone up a lot in price! I don’t know why some of these aren’t classified as commercial packages, (according to listings on VersionTracker), except perhaps they are one person shops?

For more a more notebook type interface, I still use Aquaminds Notetaker (Commercial, $69.95). While Notetaker will hold all kinds of files (images, webpages, pdfs, on and on), I don’t use all that power. I use it for each project to keep a random notes about the play, detailed information on each play act as I write along, character biographies, and the play outlines. For these specific kinds of notes, the notebook interface delights me. For intense research on a play topic, I always go back to SOHO Notes. Go figure.

A good alternative to Notetaker are Circus Ponies’ NoteBook (Commercial,$49.95).

I gotta say, neither SOHO Notes or Notetaker cost me a lot when I initially signed on for them.

I’ve played a little with reference/bibliographic software. such as BibDesk (freeware), BookEnds ($99), and EndNote ($299), Sente ($89.95).  I don’t need such specialized software. I just can’t help looking. Although RefSaver (Shareware $20) would suit my tiny need for a reference formatting program. Reference Miner (freeware), which searches the Library of Congress, PubMed, and Amazon, has made its way to my dock.

Once you’re done with all the demos and trials you can stand, a great way to get rid of these applications, once and for all, is AppZapper. It’s $12.95 with free updates for life. Can’t beat that. I found this at MacWorld a couple of years ago, and Appzapper‘s power and ease of use keep my laptop free of the ghosts many applications leave behind.

I have resisted writing about what the move to Louisville has done to my writer’s routine. It should be obvious that any routine has long such been vanquished since we made the decision to pick up and leave San Francisco. I had a rarely unvaried routine there, writing every weekday morning. The only variance was which coffee shop I made my way to. Part of the joy of San Francisco is a coffee shop every four blocks.

I have resisted writing about routine because I was pondering whether everyday rituals are creative killjoys or necessary components to my creativity. After pondering for a couple of weeks, I realized the lack of coffee houses I could walk to was the source of said ponderance. The furthest is a Starbucks (a little over a mile), and a Highlands Coffee. Closer finds two Heine Brothers, and Day’s Espresso and Coffee. These add up to a mere five coffee hangouts. Well, jeez, my friends, in my last neighborhood I could walk to at least eleven. Okay, it’s not a real problem, and I’m over it. I will say I like the idea of Heine Brothers, as they serve organic, fair trade coffee. I just haven’t enjoyed writing in one yet. I will confess I am in love with Day’s Espresso shop so much that I don’t even mind when the woman behind the counter makes fun of my ordering an iced green tea. She thinks they taste bad. Go figure.

Having embraced that a routine is a necessary component to my creativity, I find my new routine is not much different than my old San Francisco one. Except it’s in Louisville. At fewer coffee houses. I get up, shower, dress, and get coffee’d up over some newspapers, because I don’t actually drink coffee in a coffee house. Then I take my backpack down the street to write at Day’s.

I love the mornings. The play is finding its way to the end.

My writer’s room at home is evolving. I’ve stopped moving the desk around, and I’m likin’ the space more. I made myself a new marker board thingie. Puzzling through the lack of wall space, and, friends, I need to scribble on the wall like I need my morning coffee, I realized I could use the closet door to hang something.  I found a plastics place that would cut a piece of white acrylic to the dimensions I needed. A few mirror mounts, some wet-erase pens, and I’m all set to scribble. (If you use acrylic, dry-erase pens will “ghost” the board. Wet-erase pens fare better. Use a microfiber cloth to clean so that you don’t scratch the plastic. There’s a bit of a glare, as you can see in the photo. It’s workin’ for moi.)

Scribbling is another necessary component of my writing.

Comments are open for anyone with leads on coffee houses in Louisville.

CommentsI’ve gone to Louisville once a year for the Humana Festival for about a decade. I swear by Days Coffee shop, on Bardstown road. I’ve also heard that the Third Street Cafe (I think that’s what it’s called) is good. There’s also a place called Karma Cafe on Bardstown that isn’t a coffee shop, but is open late, has decent food, and free internet access.
Good luck.
Posted by: Slay July 16, 2007 at 11:55 AM