here be the Boston Orpheum

Here's my report on my visit to the Boston Orpheum on Friday. I loved the place. It's heartbreaking to see it in its current condition, all run-down and stuff, and I know that it's definitely renovatable if one had the money and time, but for now, it has the appearance of a grande dame who's seen much better days. A lot of people still love this house, however, and would do whatever they could to fix it up... if they could.

I took a lot of pictures. However, I am still trying to figure out how I can get good pictures off my new cameraphone, which unfortunately is not as Charmed as the first one was. The first one you could just hold up, take a picture, and whoa hey it turned out awesome. This new one requires a little bit of fudging and I think it has to do with the fact that it doesn't have a goddamn auto iris. You have to say NO NO NO DON'T TAKE IN SO MUCH LIGHT YOU IDJIT and unfortunately you have to manually adjust the brightness with every picture you take. This is the only reason I can explain why A. the lights in many of these shots are big blobs of luminescene and B. the camera was all "OH GOD I NEED TO DITHER THESE COLORS INSTEAD OF JUST SHOWING THEM NICELY." Grr. The Boston Orpheum deserves much better shots than this. The backlit stained glass proscenium is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in a theater auditorium.

Anyway, here is my set of the Orpheum when I visited on Friday, being the first time I put this new cameraphone through its paces. Here are a small portion of some of my favorites:





Yes, this is the theater we'll be performing in on New Year's Eve. It's astonishing.

( And here's a larger writeup on the whole experience: )

FUN FACTS! The Orpheum was built in 1852, making it one of the oldest theater treasures in America. It was renovated in 1900 by famed theater architect Thomas Lamb, who actually turned the auditorium around 180 degrees during his redesign. Thus, the entrance you use today off Hamilton Place actually used to be the back entrance for load-ins. The original entrance off Washington Street no longer exists, and is used for retail space. So when you're sitting up in the balcony of this place, just imagine that a little over a hundred years ago, you'd be floating up in the backstage flies somewhere.

I just want my hand back.

I'm going through the second season of Arrested Development again, and am amazed at the sheer amount of foreshadowing thrown in the episodes leading up to Buster's seal attack. (That's where he goes swimming in the ocean to spite his mother Lucille, and a loose seal with a taste for blood attacks him and bites off his hand.) The references start in the first episode, for crying out loud.

And the best part is, it's all so wonderfully subtle. The FOX anchorman gives a "next, a seal attack scares local swimmer" teaser after reporting on another Bluth disaster, for instance. And he says it way too early in the season for anybody to have realized it was important. When Buster finds his old big red hand chair in Lupe's house (the maid had always been taking stuff from Lucille on the sly) he marvels "Gee, I never thought I'd ever miss a hand so much!" Both those lines sound like throwaway gags on first viewing. But no.

At the same time, the show intentionally overplays the "Could Oscar be Buster's father?" foreshadowing to the point of ludicrousness. It's all a brilliant mix. We won't even begin to get into the "loose seal" pun, either.

I do consider AD to have been one of the best written television shows ever but the more I watch, the more I really believe it.