Best Overall, So Suck It!
Category: Parties and Nightlife

Proving definitively that there's no accounting for taste, Molotov Theatre Group's thrill-kill sexual bloodplay comedy "The Sticking Place" jumped right over all the sub-categories to win the audience Pick of the Fringe award for Best Overall.

This is a particularly sweet F.U. to pin-headed critics and dusty old-school theatre geeks who shat all over the show for being gratuitous, sophomoric and disappointing. Those three words are in our mission statement, and tattoed on our ass cheeks.

We'll shed a few tears about failing to impress the increasingly irrelevant pilot fish on our particular brand of shark while we're polishing up our BEST OVERALL AWARD -- which, by the way, we're going to keep right next to last year's award for BEST COMEDY.

Don't forget to come to Playbill later this year (November-ish) to see Molotov's full-length production, "ClosetLand." For those among you who absolutely need to have some deeper meaning, there might be some in there if you squint a little.

10:15 AM - 5 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Vote for The Sticking Place

You know you want to.

Cast your vote for The Sticking Place for Best Comedy and Best Overall show in the Capital Fringe Festival. Register and vote through Theatremania:

Voting:
http://www.theatermania.com/content/festival_voting.cfm?festival=14

If you haven't been to the show yet, don't let that stop you from voting, because it's that damned good. But do see it, and while you're there, don't forget to pick up a FREE Molotov Theatre button and save it for
$3 off our next show, "Closet Land", opening at the Playbill in November.

For more information on The Sticking Place, visit www.molotovtheatre.org

5:59 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The Sticking Place - Comic and Spectular - All Hail the Cheese!

All hail the cheese!

The first review of The Sticking Place is out, and it's a good one.

Read what dcthreatrescene.com has to say about the "comic" and "spectacular" blood and gore drenching this 40 minute romp into disturbia:

http://dctheatrescene.com/2008/07/11/the-sticking-place/more-1617

Last night's show was sold out, and there are only five performances left. Don't be a dweeb, a nerdy, a dweeby nerd or a nerdy dweeb.

See The Sticking Place while you still can.

For more information, go to www.molotovtheatre.org

7:51 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Molotov’s Fringe Entry "The Sticking Place" Picks Up Where 2007 Comedy Winner Leaves Off

"The Scottish Play" Meets "American Psycho"
in Molotov's Latest Comedic Insult to the Senses

Washington, DC (June 19, 2008) Molotov Theatre Group, America's second-oldest Grand Guignol theatre, will unleash its latest disturbing comedy, "The Sticking Place," on unsuspecting victims during the Capital Fringe Festival, in six performances from July 10 to July 26 at the Fringe Festival Home. Molotov won recognition as "Best Comedy" in the 2007 Capital Fringe Festival for its debut original production, "For Boston."

Billed as a cross between "The Scottish Play" and "American Psycho", "The Sticking Place" will be hosted at The Shop in the Capital Fringe Festival Home, 607 New York Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20001. Performance dates and times are as follows:

• Thursday, July 10, 8PM
• Saturday, July 12, 9 PM
• Sunday, July 13, 6:30 PM
• Saturday, July 19, 8 PM
• Thursday, July 24, 8 PM
• Saturday, July 26, 3 PM

Tickets will be available at the Fringe Home venue, or through the Fringe web site: www.capfringe.org.

"'The Sticking Place' tells the story of young adults getting sucked into the seedy underbelly of sexual bloodplay right here in stodgy old Washington, DC," according to Lucas Maloney, Molotov's Producing Artistic Director. Maloney co-wrote the script with Michael McMahon – the same team that authored "For Boston" for the 2007 Capital Fringe. On stage, "The Sticking Place" is brought to creepy life by the acting talents of Laura Bloechl, Praem Phulwani, Pamela Sabella, and Karthik Srinivasan.

Maloney said, "'The Sticking Place' has all the elements of a great Molotov comedy: Lust, jealousy, violence, revenge, gore, sexual ambiguity, and blood. It's about as far over the line as you can get. This one gets under your skin – literally. In fact, if 'The Sticking Place' doesn't offend you, it's not because we didn't try."

"Did I mention blood?" Maloney said. "Because there will be blood. Oh, yes, there will be blood."

Later this year, Molotov will present its second full-length theatre event, "Closet Land," at the Playbill Café, 1409 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC.

About Molotov Theatre Group

Founded in 2007, The Molotov Theatre Group is dedicated to preserving and exploring the aesthetic of the Grand Guignol, or French Theater of Horror. The Group will strive to accomplish this in two ways:

1) Through its ongoing project, "Grand Guignol DC," to produce English translations of original Grand Guignol scripts to preserve and draw attention to this important, and essentially forgotten genre; and

2) To apply ideal from the Grand Guignol to contemporary and classic works.

The Molotov Theater Group will pursue these goals following the Grand Guignol models of employing a resident company of artists and working towards building a true rotating repertoire of plays. To our knowledge, no other company in the world is working to maintain this genre in such a traditional way. For more information, visit www.molotovtheatre.org or www.myspace.com/molotovtheatre.

11:58 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Women’s Feet on TV -- What the Hell?

All right, this has finally made me nuts enough to say something about it.

What the hell is going on with the advertising industry's fetishistic fascination with women's bare feet? I am not kidding here. Every other commercial that has a woman in it, the woman's without shoes. Overstock.com, Restylane, Swiffer, Leapfrog – the list is crazy long.

And it's not like these things are even ABOUT feet, or have anything to do WITH feet. I mean, Restylane gets rid of face wrinkles. FACE wrinkles, for Pete's sake. Or vitamins – I mean really, what the fuck?

I can understand a commercial like Requip, the stuff that cures the jimmy-leg. That's when a bare-foot woman makes sense (although check out the man-feet on the woman in the Requip commercial – yikes!).

Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of copywriting, I gotta say that you have to go way the hell out of your goddamn way to create a situation in which it makes even the most remote sense to sell something with a bare-foot woman in it. Was there some study I missed that proved that men and women find a bare-foot woman more trustworthy? Do women really sit around the house in their bare feet, talking about a Web site where they can get a vacuum cleaner at a great price?

And believe me, this is not me being kinky. Come on. There is no male equivalent. You don't see men hanging out on the couch in their bare feet, talking about jock itch cream or whatever. Maybe if they're coming out of a shower, like for Axe gel, or sitting on the beach, like for Dos Equis, but never just kicking it by themselves or with friends, talking about erectile dysfunction. You just don't see men rocking the bare foot look. Why would you even want to? I just caught a look at my own feet just now, and beiieve me, it was NOT the highlight of my day -- or even the past hour.

So please, what the hell? It's not like feet are even that interesting or pleasing a part of the anatomy to look at. They're like weird gorilla hands, but skinnier. With nail polish yet. And then toe rings. It's kind of freaking me out thinking about it.

Is it just advertising kinkiness? Are there a bunch of sweaty middle-aged ad guys (because you know it's gotta be guys) sitting in a room, saying, "Look, we gotta move more weed killer. People are just not buying enough lawn care shit. What if we had a woman walking through a really thick lawn in her bare feet? Men would think it was sexy, and women would think it was safe. Perfect. I want feet. Lots of feet." I mean, how skeevy is that?

Anyway, I feel a little bit better now. But I think I'm going to leave the TV off for a while.

12:08 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

My Goddamn Face Hurts Again, and Now There’s a Hole in It
Current mood: hairless

Today I'm dealing with the aftermath of having some "oral surgery" to extract that molar I wrote about back in December.

The final tab will be somewhere in the $1900 range. Who knows how much of that will be covered by insurance (remind me again why socialized medicine is a bad thing), but I had to get it yanked.

Man, I need less stress in my life. Between dealing with my mom, other personal stuff, and this whole tooth thing, now I'm getting alopecia. What the fuck? My beard is falling out, my chest hair is falling out. I'm a wreck. For a hairy dude, nothing's more obvious than a patch of skin that's smoother than a baby's nutsack. Thanks for all the attention, God. Maybe you could focus on somebody else for a while.

So I go to the oral surgeon, who lays out a tray of medieval instruments that look like they were designed first to be terrifying, second to be painful, and somewhere at the bottom of the list, useful. Poking and jabbing seem to be their only uses.

Doesn't matter, anyway, because the actual list of medical implements used in the procedure was pretty brief: 1) Novocaine and 2) Pliers.

I was jabbed in the jaw about 20 times with a Novocaine syringe equipped with a pointlessly long needle, including FOUR TIMES in the ABSCESS – and if you think you've had tooth pain before, just let somebody jab a crochet hook into an infection in the root of a tooth that's already broken in half.

The "surgeon" (you have to call him that, it's on his business cards) says, "if you feel any discomfort, just raise your left hand." Which is probably the most comical thing anyone has ever said, because I've been feeling discomfort ever since he jabbed me in the abscess.

Then the delicate medical procedure began. As far as I can tell, it involved one technique: Yanking.

Come on, for Christ's sake. I've got three roots to one of my biggest molars all terminating IN MY SINUSES, and a guy with forearms like Popeye's (it takes some grip strength to pull a tooth out by the roots) latched onto the one part of my skull that actually hurts. He's pulling on it like he's trying to stop a runaway wagon train, and telling me to keep my head still.

So I remember his kindly advice about raising my left hand if I'm feeling discomfort. I raise my hand, then I start waving my hand around. Then I'm thrusting the whole arm through the air, because if I could have dragged myself into another dimension I would have by now. What the hell good is it to have a motion that means "ouch that hurts" if nobody pays attention to it?

Anyway, I could write about it more, but what would be the point? Maybe this is the first step in turning myself back around again. Maybe my chest hair will grow back.

Yeah, right.

Dammit.

7:54 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

My Goddamn Face Hurts
Current mood: chipper
Category: Life

Is it too much to ask to have just a crappy little break from the metaphysical beat-downs I've been getting lately?

So I think I'm getting sick, so no problem. A little zinc, a little echinacea, some vitamins. Golden. Then over the weekend my teeth start to hurt so bad I think I'm going to puke. If I hadn't found some painkillers from a back problem I'd had a year back or so I'd have ripped the suckers out of my head with pliers.

Needless to say, there isn't a flipping dentist anywhere around with office hours on weekends -- certainly not around Christmas time, and not on my insurance plan. So I make arrangements for Tuesday morning with a dentist I haven't seen in ten years.

He looks in my head and says I have a vertical crack in a molar that's separating the three main nerve endings in my head -- nerve endings that terminate in the sinus cavity. So the congestion from my little sickness is pressing down on my tooth nerves and causing me some crazy-ass tooth pain. The dentist says it can go two ways. The first way, the break levels off kind of horizontally -- in which case no problem, yank the tooth, stick in an implant, a crown and ba-zing, you're golden.

The second way is the break goes straight down, which means you pull the whole tooth, and you may be looking at pulling the teeth next to it, to implant three posts and do a partial bridge. Of course, there might not be enough bone to do an implant, so you may need to graft bone, whatever the fuck THAT means. Or, you go in through the sinuses (the sinuses, The Sinuses, you GO IN THROUGH THE SINUSES FOR CHRISSAKES) and do some bizarre inside-out, upside-down shit that I couldn't even understand with pictures.

So, being that it's me, of course I'm dealing with SITUATION B. So now I've got a hole in my molar (which is really just the outside shell of a tooth being held together by the pressure of my gums) and some temporary filling that's mostly pain-killer jammed up in there, and I have to find an oral surgeon to yank out the bad tooth and do some consultation on what level of Inquisition-style knife-work I'll need wielded on me.

But I gotta do it quick, the doctor says. You don't want to have a nasal infection that could transfer to the tooth, or have an infection in the tooth itself, because you've got the back of your eyeball on one side of your sinuses and the front part of your FUCKING BRAIN on the other side, and let's face it, you don't want too much crap pressing on THOSE things because they're not real sturdy, so you don't want to go blind or end up wearing a helmet on a short-bus to your job as a men's room attendant at the local McDonalds. And don't forget that the pain-killing filling is only temporary so THAT's going to wear off soon (which will hurt), and don't do anything with your teeth that could mess up the filling -- you know, anything like, oh, say eating, or drinking anything that's either hot or cold or warm or has too much acid in it or a lot of sugar. Or any sugar, really.

But here's some Vicodin for the pain, which probably will just make you sleepy, so don't really take it until you're ready to go to bed, and try to tough it out as long as you can without it. And here's the name of an oral surgeon who can take you now, but he's not on the FUCKING INSURANCE PLAN, so make sure you have $1900 in cash, check or credit card because even if he was on your insurance it probably wouldn't be covered anyway.

And in the meantime, we really had to do a lot of work to your tooth, so you're going to notice a considerable amount of swelling. So it may look like you've just packed an entire pouch of Redman chewing tobacco up in there, but again keep in mind that's perfectly ordinary and to be expected. And there may be some tenderness and some sensitivity, what with all the drilling and the fact that you've still got some kind of infection, but really unless you experience some double-vision or the pain causes you nausea, it's all pretty much normal.

My goddamn face hurts, and it's Christmas time, and I can't find an oral surgeon to yank this fucking tooth out of my head for a week, and I've got painkillers I'm not supposed to take, and this is supposed to be the PREFERRED insurance plan, so thank God my wife's company didn't take the one where the deductible includes being smashed over the head with a liquor bottle while a rabid dog gnaws on your ankles.

Dammit.

11:04 AM - 5 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Lean & Hungry Performs Twelfth Night as Radio Drama: January 5, 2008

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Alex Zavistovich
Lean & Hungry Theater
301-292-7538


Lean & Hungry Theater Performs Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Radio Drama on January 5, 2008
Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night at Twelve Noon for Twelve Dollars

Washington, DC (December 5, 2007) Lean & Hungry Theater, where readers' theater meets radio drama, will perform William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at noon on Saturday, January 5, 2008.

The staged reading, performed as a radio drama with live sound effects and musical underscore, will be held at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, 1525 Newton Street, NW, Washington, DC 20010. Tickets are available at the door only, at $12 per person. Doors open at 11:30 AM, and the performance begins at noon, with one intermission.

"It's Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night at twelve noon for twelve dollars. We like to keep things easy to remember for our audiences," joked the company's Artistic Director, Jessica Hansen. Hansen is working closely with the Director Janey Richards and Musical Director James Watson to create a soundscape that will support the actors' vocal interpretations of the characters.

The resident theatre company of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Lean & Hungry Theater is the only theater company in the Washington, DC metropolitan area dedicated to adapting works of Shakespeare and other classic playwrights as radio dramas. This performance of Twelfth Night will be recorded live, with sound effects and musical underscore, to re-create the experience of vintage, old-time radio broadcasts.

The cast of Twelfth Night features actors who have taught and appeared with some of the best-known classical theaters in Baltimore and Washington, including The Shakespeare Theatre, the Washington Shakespeare Company, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, The Maryland Shakespeare Festival, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, and many more.

About Lean & Hungry Theater:

Conceived in 2006, Lean & Hungry Theater (Lean & Hungry) is a non-profit theater company that bridges the gap between readers' theater and radio drama. Drawing primarily on the comedies and tragedies of William Shakespeare, Lean & Hungry provides professional readers' theater to underserved areas, in established or improvised venues (both live and electronic), for the educational benefit and cultural enrichment of students, families, seniors and other interested groups in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and beyond. The Lean & Hungry performance model is to have classics of English-language theater read and recorded before a live audience, complete with live sound effects and live original musical underscore. The recorded performances ultimately will be made available as a podcast, Webcast, broadcast or audio CD.

11:13 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Technological Advances and Good Grooming
Current mood: thoughtful

As an alternative to burial, cremation is no longer green enough, say environmentalists, because it releases smoke and mercury. The industry is considering "promession," in which the body is frozen in liquid nitrogen to minus-320 degrees (F) and then shaken until it disintegrates into powder.

The prominent Rotterdam Natural History Museum in the Netherlands, which houses over 300,000 species, announced in October that it was missing a particular one that it fears is dying out: crab lice (pubic hair lice). In a June science journal article, researchers had hypothesized that the "Brazilian bikini wax" was in part responsible for the scarcity; said the museum's curator, "Pubic lice can't live without pubic hair." [Newsday-AP, 10-19-07]

12:49 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Me Before and After
Current mood: accomplished

Well, I'm dubiously well known now for having been a fat shit that lost a bunch of weight.

I admit the After photos are cool, if only I didn't have to see the Before every time, too:

http://www.trimformbody.com/success-stories/alex-zavistovich.shtml

6:13 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment