Im hangin out at my friend Darren’s house. Darren and I are squash buddies. We played yesterday in fact. Boy after a day of kayaking and then an intense game of squash, I can hardly move today. Darren is engaged and is from Dallas. We go to church together and can relate on a number of different levels. Turns out he’s a real big sports fan as well. I was planning on a nice quiet evening but that had gotten blown up. Had a long chat with Ms. So Ca. She’s a flight attendant so she usually calls on layovers at certain airports. Turns out she’s a film buff too. So we have lots to talk about with the film industry. I was about to blog and head to bed when I checked out ESPN. The U.S. was up 1-0 in the Confederations cup against Brazil. What???? Is this even possible. I didn’t want to miss anything historic, and I don’t know how to get some of the channels on my TV, so I rushed over to Darren’s house to watch it with him. We watched the Superbowl together, so perhaps we are starting a major sports even precedent. Its nice having a friend you can just drop in on.
I had an early morning shoot at St. Christopher school. St. Chris is one of the nicer international schools here in Bahrain. There is a real melting pot of nationalities that go to the school. With the schools and the number of ex-pats here, this is a great place to raise a young family. We are doing a lot of work with St. Chris as our acting classes were at the school too.
Khalifa’s father passed away yesterday. He had been sick for awhile now. He was 101. As a sign of mourning, we have to make the office appear as if it closed for a few days. I think this is an Arabic thing This is a real hassle because we need to be busy at this point. So for three days we have to lock the door to the office, keep the phones on voicemail, and not initiate or respond to emails. When someone dies in a Muslim culture they are buried the next day. Its very fast. The graves are all unmarked. They don’t want to create any type of memorial for religious purposes. In death the Muslims want to emphasize that all men are equal in the sight of Allah. Its like that in the Mosques too. Where they pride themselves that all men no matter what race nor socioeconomic status can stand side by side to pray with other men. This is in stark contrast with the most of Arabic culture where racism even amongst Arabs themselves is very prevalent. Women are not allowed to pray with the men, they have their own smaller mosques. The process for preparing for prayer for the Muslim is interesting. They wash before they enter the mosques. With the amount of heat in the Middle East, cleaning themselves that many times a day really helps. Arabs are generally very clean people. You would think that it would be the opposite, but its not.
I can hardly concentrate. Brazil just scored the tying goal. Crap…I really wanted to watch something historic tonight. Oh well. I got a really nice email from my dear friend Adam, my best friend from High School. He has a type of blog as well. Adam influenced me positively in so many ways. One of things I used to do in high school is rewrite pop music with Christian lyrics…a la…Weird Al. I rewrote “Like a Virgin” to “Like a Christian” I performed that a few times at various chapels in high school and college. It was kind of fun. For Adam’s 18th birthday, I rewrote “Careless Whisper” to “Painful Blister” since Adam and I were running buddies. I recorded it at a cheesy recording studio. It actually was pretty funny. Adam lost the original when a wayward housemate stole all of his stuff. I was a little sad, because I thought it was pretty good. I was actually thinking about that song last week when I heard Careless Whisper come on the radio. I was trying to remember the lyrics I rewrote. So imagine my surprise when I got this email. It really made me feel good:
"there was another flood last week. (the score is 5 floods, 3 fires) this time the waters came dangerously close to -among other things- a bag of cassette tapes of radio shows that i did with Jim, Roger and David which were given to me by Kerry and Jessica. for the best parts of two years they recorded our shows (direct from the radio to cassette) faithfully.
so... the possibility of losing these cassette tapes to the elements conspiring against me thrust me into a rather obsessive fit of digitizing these tapes. one audio gem discovered in this frenzy has been the long lost recording of Ricky Beeman singing 'Painful Blister'. he gave me the recording on my 18th birthday, i played it on WLUW four years later as part of the morning show i did with Jim Dommo. i 'lost' the cassette that Ricky originally gave me that first time i moved to New York.
about two months ago i was talking to someone in a coffee shop in Chicago when a woman recognized my voice and asked if i was the Adam Snow that used to be on the radio. this was Jessica. we talked awhile then she asked if she could bring me something a little later... when she returned she gave me a bag filled with tapes of shows recorded over two years that i was on the radio.
what a gift! i haven't laughed so hard in a long time. maybe you will too... the file size is big. it would be easier to upload it to my website and send you a URL so that you could stream it, i know... but i lost my website. my apologies.
a."
If you want me to email the mp3 to you, I’d be glad to do it. Just let me know.
Crap Brazil just scored again…Almost.
No comments:
Post a Comment