October 2002 Archives

I've been extremely, extremely lucky thus far; as a 22-year-old who's interviewed people from John Waters to John Travolta and covered such events as the MTV Video Music Awards and VH1 Vogue Fashion Awards, I've gotten over the nerves of the celebrity thing. I don't mean to be arrogant or stuck-up about that, I really don't - no one is as amazed as I am at the lucky interviews I've been able to get, or how certain things have changed. In the beginning, with my first "celeb" interview (Idina Menzel from Rent), I was a mess, an absolute mess, babbled on more on my end than she did on hers. But now, I don't get flushed and nervous and stuttery anymore, I don't bumble around the initial minutes while I worry about how bad I sound, I don't ask for autographs or pictures or for them to touch my hair. I've been cool and collected for a few years now, on a good streak of suave, acting (at least ostensibly) as if I've been an entertainment journalist for sixty instead of six years. It's all very blazé, you see.

And then I met Harry Potter, and he destroyed all of it.

It says in my about section that I love Harry Potter. I do, with a fierce passion that I know is not alien to those of you reading this, particularly those who came here from Melissa's site. You could say I have an obsessive personality - or you could say I am passionate about the things I love. You could say I absolutely refuse to become jaded - and you'd be right.

Whatever it is, I love Harry Potter, for the mystery and love with which the books are written, and how absolutely adorable the kids from the movie are. I've managed to fuse my love for the series with my love for digging for news by working on The Leaky Cauldron (the site from which I know a lot of you are coming). When I joined up at TLC, I just posted news bits we got in email, the occasional link I found on my own. Things started rolling into motion; the rest of the team started kicking major butt on scoops, and we got a tremendous boost when a reader sent us a link to the HP1 trailer a day early. Then rumors about the second movie started flying out of control, and I contacted a few people at Warner Bros to clear some things up - six months later, our site had rocketed to the top of the HP news Web heap and I found myself at the New York City press junket.

Again, I've done the junket thing - I'm just a regular, cool, professional, right? And these interviews are with kids who are about half my age.

Well, you would think I had never done an interview. I didn't stutter, or get embarrassed or any of that - I didn't do any of the obvious nervous things, except screw up my recording equipment. But the things I cannot control crept in anyhow - my neck and chest got hot, bright, splotchy red, and whenever I looked down my fingers were shaking. And I didn't feel nervous, but my body reacted that way anyway. It was just exciting, and for reasons I cannot fully explain - mostly because these little dudes who make my favorite books come so vibrantly alive were sitting right in front of us, normal as all-get-out. Kelsey Grammer, Calvin Klein, Judith Light, Michelle Branch, David Lee Roth - and I'm bested by a trio of 12-year-olds.

I love it.

And then, just to prove what a complete and utter fangirl I really am at heart, and how glad I am to be such, I also covered the event for my real job, at MTV Networks writing for The Pages Online - which meant I needed a picture of Daniel Radcliffe in the MTV building for his TRL appearance.

So, what this boils down to is, after this amazing day, talking to these amazing people about this amazing series, I found myself amazed, standing in the middle of the MTV studio - once again flushed and splotchy, and feeling twelve years old - as Harry Potter marched in with his entourage. I discovered that Daniel Radcliffe truly is the sweetheart he looks like he is on television, and I discovered you could be as cool and professional as you want to be and still let yourself be a kid.

And now I have this picture, and it makes me immeasurably happy. And maybe that's a childish thing to say - but thanks to Harry Potter I just don't care.

(Those of you who run fansites - please do not take this pic for your archives. I'm rather sentimental about it. There is plenty of other art out there, without me in it. And before you say it, yes, I really am that short. I'm crouching about an inch. And wearing three-inch boots. Daniel Radcliffe is either my height or taller than I am, and that is the one thing about all of this that is somewhat upsetting.)

I should explain, before I continue, that theater luck to me is probably theater bonanza to most people. I see so many shows that my co-workers often treat me as a one-stop Broadway information booth. I even have a catalogue of sorts, in the form of the Playbills that wallpaper my cube, which makes everything very convenient. (“Oh, don’t see that one with your relatives,” I say, pointing to the Urinetown Playbill. “See Oklahoma – see it there, on the top left? – instead. Great family fare.”)

So when I say theater luck, I don’t simply mean I’ve seen a good show, or have done well at the cheap ticket game recently. I mean that over the past few months I have seen a handful of shows and performances that I will be telling my grandchildren about when I’m 80.

First there was the Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. – which in all fairness I knew would be a seminal experience. A 22-year-old Sondheim fanatic is in a bit of a pickle if he or she wants to truly appreciate the songwriter/composer/wunderkind in his glory. I was too pubescent for Passion, too adolescent for Sunday in the Park with George and too embryonic for Sweeney Todd. In short, I missed the boat, and since discovering the man’s mad musical genius through a DVD of Sunday, I’ve been scrambling around trying to find good productions of his work. It’s not easy, as Sondheim’s work is infamously noncommercial, and boasts some famous turkeys. Frank Rich once said that “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals” — well, to be 22 and a Stephen Sondheim fan is not to have your heart broken at all.

And when it comes to theater, I know which I prefer.

So I traveled to the Washington, DC, celebration on two separate weekends just to see six shows. I spent two and a half paychecks, in all. But after having my heart ripped open by the desperate love in Judy Kuhn’s Passion performance, and my mind ripped apart by Merrily We Roll Along’s subversion of innocence and optimism, I can safely say if I had the chance to do it all, spend it all, again, I would. Tomorrow.

My theater experience has been chugging along like this for some time; in early September my friend Anthony took me to see Hairspray, the musical that kicks The Producers’ gauche white butt all the way down the Great White Way (and back). I saw one of my favorite actors, Raul Esparza, perform as the emcee in Cabaret, fully expecting another rethinking of the Alan Cumming incarnation – instead, I got a rounded, slightly awkward, vulgar-with-a-smile character I’ve never seen before, and it changed my perception of one of my favorite shows.

I’ve visited Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Virginia, Delaware and London expressly for theater (hey, I may be a geek, but at least I’m a well-traveled one). But when I decided to go to Toronto, I made the best decision of my theatergoing career. I have friends living outside Toronto who I’d been meaning to visit anyway, so when my chance to see Christopher Plummer as Lear in King Lear (in a town called Stratford, for Pete’s sake) came up, I snatched it. It was my first Lear and my first Plummer experience.

It’s a fair assumption at this point in the entry that you know I’ve seen a lot of theater, right? Perhaps I can best sum up the performance this way: I felt like I was watching an actor act for the first time.

I’ve read the text of Lear, I’ve written papers on it, I’ve watched taped performances. Plummer - this man, this master - so fully became the character that I forgot he was anyone else. There were shards of insanity in his kingliness and pathetic drabs of royalty in his madness; he raged and wheezed, coughed, spat, hobbled, whispered, even died with every ounce of him divvied up proportionally between king and lunatic. Lear the Madman thought love should be professed – Lear the King demanded his daughers profess it. Lear the Madman tried to take his shirt off – Lear the King, having never operated a button, failed.

I’ve never seen acting simply disappear that way. Plummer had Lear’s heart in a bottle, and let bits of it leak out of his grip each word he spoke. A drip here, a drip there, and all of a sudden there’s a brokenspirited pool of insanity in the middle of the theater. I’ve just never seen it happen, at least, not that way. Maybe it’s because acting quality just isn’t like that anymore; maybe it’s because I’ve been desensitized by endless streams of pseudointellectual, standoffish, scientific dismemberments people call plays, and have forgotten that real emotion does, occasionally, show up. Maybe it’s because I try so very hard to seek out these experiences.

Or, maybe it’s just luck.