I officially OD’d on watching the Olympics last night. I think what put me over the top was the screaming hysterical voice used by the color commentator on the BMX final. For starters I’m still not really sure that BMX is really even a sport for anyone over the age of 13 (you know, like women’s gymnastics), and secondly that sort of feverish shrieking is better left for the genuine highlight moments which these games have actually had.

As a heterosexual male, I didn’t think I would ever get to this point, but, if I never see Kerri Walsh’s ass again, it will be too soon. Yes, those lingering closeups of her perfectly-toned, sun-bronzed buttocks, her body bent over in anticipation, her little white bikini bottom teasingly tucked into the sand-dusted cleft of her cheeks, and her fingerings flashing suggestively to her partner finally got me to the brink of not giving a good goddamn. Oh, and at the next Olympics I think it would only be fair if the MEN’s beach volleyball team played wearing only jockstraps while the women’s team get to wear muu-muus or burqas or moderately-priced casual wear from Sears.

NBC was so intent on showing every last second of women’s beach volleyball that somehow they missed THIS event. I’m not even sure what it is, but it looks like the Chinese team dominates it anyway. I’ll bet it would have scored BIG ratings, too.

The transformation of Beijing as seen in all the interstitial footage between women’s beach volleyball games is nothing less than astonishing. The most amazing part of China’s transformation is that all the electrical power consumed in China is generated from the supersonic speed at which the corpse of Mao Tse-Tung spins in his grave. Of course, in the process of making Beijing look like Los Angeles, the Chinese government has had to scrimp on a few road projects in the countryside, as evidenced by the photo above. I also found this photo fairly telling:

And in all those human-interest segments where the assorted NBC personnel were treated to the oddities of authentic Chinese cuisine, they managed to miss this trendy boite:

(I hasten to note that “cow something” was not included on that Foodie’s 100 List the other day, but if it had been I most certainly would have crossed it out)

Not to knock Usain Bolt’s amazing wins in the 100m and 200m sprints, but do you think NBC would have paid him nearly as much attention if Tyson Gay (oops, I mean Tyson Homosexual) hadn’t scratched? Of course, NBC doesn’t really need to promote Usain Bolt, because he seems to be doing a fine job of it himself (although the IOC isn’t too happy about that)

So I’m going to try to stay away from the TV tonight and tomorrow to save up whatever remaining enthusiasm I have for the Closing Ceremonies. The closing is never as big a deal as the opening, but even still they are going to be extremely hard pressed to do anything that will live up to the impossibly high standards set by the Opening Ceremonies. In fact, I hear that the London Olympic Organizing Committee has decided that they’re just going to show a videtape of the Beijing ceremonies and be done with it rather than try to come up with something on their own. Meanwhile, during the late night hours after the track and field competitions are over each day, they’ve been rehearsing the Closing Ceremonies in the Bird’s Nest:

Zhang Yimou wasn’t available to do both ceremonies, so Bill Gates volunteered to head up the show, which will culminate in Jerry Seinfeld extinguishing the Olympic Torch while a computer running Windows Vista blue-screens in front of 90,000 spectators.

Oh, and just for good measure, here’s one more picture of Kerri Walsh’s ass, Misty May-Treanor’s ass, and the Official Ass Of The United States of America.

A while back, I found the first two seasons of The Muppet Show on DVD on sale at a Borders, so I bought them. There were five seasons of the show in total. Season Three just came out on DVD (and I picked it up right away), but it will probably be another year or so before all five seasons make it to DVD.

Since Charlott’e summer vacation started, she and I have been watching one or two episodes almost every evening after dinner. These shows were made back when a season’s worth of episodes ran 26-30 programs, so Season One took quite a while to get through, and we are just getting warmed up on Season Two — last night it was Judy Collins. At the rate we’re going, we probably won’t get all the way through Season Three before school starts back up and her bedtime has to revert to 8:00.

Charlotte was not a big Sesame Street watcher as a toddler, so she’s not as thoroughly exposed to the Muppets as some kids might be. She did have an Elmo phase, and we did listen to some Sesame Street CDs in the car when she was a baby, so she wasn’t totally in the dark, but the Muppet Show characters are largely new discoveries for her. Being a Muppet myself, I am well-acquainted with all of them and their many and varied adventures, so I end up answering a lot of questions. You might enjoy this pair of posts at Mental Floss that explains the origins of many favorite Muppet characters from both Sesame Street and the Muppet Show.

The Muppet Show hit the airwaves when I was in eighth grade and ran through my senior year of high school, but I was a hopeless nerd, so rare was the Saturday night when I was not at home in front of the TV at 7:00 p.m. to watch that week’s episode. As we’ve been going through them, I find that I am often able to remember everything from an episode — the sketches, the running gags, the guest spots, all of it. I have to say that the two most important influences on my entire sense of humor are the Muppet Show and Looney Tunes (with Monty Python a close third). Anyone who knows me in real life will absolutely be able to confirm this for you.

What has been more interesting for me as we’ve watched the shows is to see the guest stars as they were 30 years ago. With every episode, I have to explain to Charlotte who the celebrity is. Many of them are long since dead and gone, and such is the nature of fame that names like Paul Williams, Kaye Ballard, and Avery Schreiber have not lasted into the 21st century with us. But even some of the eternally-famous people who guested on the Muppet Show (Milton Berle, Ethel Merman) are figures my child has never heard of at her tender age and require explanation. In fact, after we watched the Ethel Merman episode, I realized I myself knew nothing about her other than that she was a Broadway legend with a loud voice, and had to go read about her on Wikipedia to fill in my own knowledge gaps (BTW, this is the Ethel Merman Centennial Year).

When the celebrity is someone who still has fame and recognition today, seeing them 30 years younger is often a little bittersweet. For example, Twiggy was a first-season guest in 1976. Charlotte actually knows who Twiggy is because she and Bridget watch “America’s Next Top Model”, where until recently Twiggy had been one of the judges. So Charlotte thinks of Twiggy as a middle-aged woman, but in 1976 Twiggy was only 27 years old and was at a lull in her career. On the Muppet Show she was trying to remake herself as a singer and did an awful version of the Beatles’ “In My Life”, accompanied by a photo montage of her modeling heyday. Her singing career wasn’t terribly successful, and Charlotte couldn’t figure that out at all.

It’s also interesting to see the Muppet characters and the form and style of the show evolve. The early episodes almost don’t even seem like the same program, since many of the best characters, like Miss Piggy and Gonzo are still minor (in fact, right up until Season Two, Miss Piggy was sometimes performed by Frank Oz and sometimes by Richard Hunt, with very different characterizations). The Season One bonus disc includes the pilot for the series, which ran as a special on ABC in 1975 (and which I remembered clearly when I saw it again), and the concept was a bit different. Many of the elements of the pilot made it into the series, but then faded away as the series took on its own unique personality.

All in all, I am mightily pleased to be able to share such an important element of my later childhood in such a direct way with Charlotte. Telling her about things from the past, or taking her to places that have changed a lot since I was 13 is very different than watching these TV programs which are exactly as they were when Jimmy Carter was president. I hope she comes to treasure them as much.

I posted quite a few photos over on my Flickr account, so I won’t offer too much of a travelogue, just some assorted impressions and observations.

We stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which turned out to be remarkably well-located for us. It’s right on top of one of the malls of the Underground City, including a Metro station. We used the Metro extensively on Sunday, going all the way out to Olympic Park, then back into the city to go to Schwartz’s Deli for lunch and then out to Parc Jean-Drapeau to go to the Biosphere. By the end of the day, we were exhausted, but at least we knew that once we got off the subway we were basically at our hotel. It was also easy walking to the Basilica Notre Dame and from there to the rest of Old Montreal/Old Port. The downtown isn’t as compact as Boston (though much more accommodating for automobiles), but isn’t as far removed from other parts of the city as midtown Manhattan is from other parts of New York. The northern part of the island has very little of interest to tourists.

We had absolutely no problem being primarily English speakers. We did not encounter a single waiter, cashier, ticket taker, shopkeeper, or anyone else who did not speak and understand English easily (although some people had some pretty thick Quebec accents). The trick was to say “Hello” instead of “Bonjour” whenever greeted, and this is the cue for the other person to speak English. Clearly, though, this is limited to the city itself. On Monday we drove out towards Sherbrooke to a water park before heading home (about 45 minutes from the city), and the park employees spoke little to no English at all. Later, stopping for lunch at a restaurant near the park, we were once again faced with a waitress who spoke no English and whom I could not understand well enough in French to get a couple of service questions she asked. My comprehension of French is good enough to be able to handle most brief interactions like ordering from a menu or reading instructions, but I just could not make heads or tails of what the waitress was asking. I presume there was some degree of Quebecois idiom involved that was outside my limited knowledge. Overall, though, it was far less intimidating to be in Montreal as an English speaker than it was in Paris, and we did not encounter any of the “I speak English but won’t do it for you” bullshit that used to be the Francophone reaction to Americans in Montreal.

I sweated A LOT. Montreal has a reputation for humid summer weather, and Saturday was a prime example. It was in the low 80s, hazy with periods of overcast, but the dew point must have been 75 degrees. All day long I looked like I had just gotten out of the shower (or needed to get into one quick). We would go into some air-conditioned place and cool off, then go back out and get sweaty all over again. In this particular photo, I have just emerged from a 30-minute multimedia show in the Basilica Notre Dame, which is NOT air conditioned. The weather was better on Sunday, but several of the indoor attractions we visited were hot and humid — the Amazon Rainforest exhibit at the Biodome might as well have been a steam bath, and the aquatic center at the Olympic Stadium was also purposefully warm and humid, though not quite as intensely so.

Yes, Schwartz’s Deli is every bit as good as they say. We went in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, so we did not have to wait the customary hour for a table, even though the place was still full. We only waited maybe five minutes and shared a table with a young couple to fill it out. I ordered the small plate of the famed smoked meat and still could barely finish it. The smoked meat is beef brisket, but it’s not corned beef. It’s dry rubbed and cured like pastrami. It was simply delicious. Plus, the restaurant is air conditioned.

Bridget never did man up and order poutine, even though it is a routine menu item wherever french fries are served. She kept calling it “putain”, and I would have loved to have seen her ask some fast food worker for THAT.

The Bateau Mouche boat ride was probably the least scenic boat ride I have ever taken, but we really just needed to sit down someplace cool for an hour, and it fit the bill. If you are hot and your feet are tired, take the boat ride. Otherwise, it was the most skippable thing we did all weekend.

The tour of the Olympic Stadium was interesting, but the stadium itself is very depressing. It’s almost never used anymore because the roof collapsed from the weight of too much snow during an auto show a few years ago. It’s too expensive to maintain, impossible to insure, and too large for the lackluster professional sports teams in Montreal. So it sits empty most of the time, with only a small handful of expo shows during the good weather. I remember watching hour after hour of the 1976 Olympics and the crowds in the stadium for the track and field events and wishing so hard that I could be there. It was a weird and sad experience, but I’m very glad we took the tour.

On the tour of the tower, Charlotte and I were with a group of elderly New Zealanders. It must have been their first stop in Montreal, because they didn’t seem to know anything about the rest of the city. There were no tour guides on the observation deck, and I ended up fielding all sorts of questions from the Kiwis. “Where’s that American fella? Ask him what that building is!”

Necessary French vocabulary I picked up: at Starbucks all I needed to know was “venti glace”, though elsewhere it’s “cafe glace” or just “glace” (as long as you’re in a coffee shop). Lots of places serve “moka glace” or “cappucino glace”, but what you get is more like a milkshake than a coffee drink. At the water park we learned that “changing room” is “salle de deshabillage”. All sherbet and sorbet is just “sorbet”, but sherbet is “sorbet de laitier”. “Queue de Castor” is a unique Canadian confection which translates to “beaver tail” in English. It’s a big piece of fried dough topped with gooey sweet stuff like chocolate and bananas, fruit toppings, and so on. How this has not spread here to New England, where we get a ton of Quebec tourists in the summer, is a total mystery.

We really had a very good time. I think we managed to hit most of the family-friendly destinations, so we might until Charlotte’s a little older before we go back, but I’d love to go back for one of the bajillion festivals they have during the summer. Next time, though, I’m bringing an economy-pack of sweatbands and double the number of shirts.

Charlotte made her stage debut Saturday night as Pig Number Three in a play about the trial of the Big Bad Wolf. In this photo, she is delivering her big monologue about how the BBW tried to demean her and her sisters by calling them “pigs”.

The play came at the end of an excruciatingly long evening of plays presented by the local children’s theater group that Charlotte joined a couple of months ago. As an alumnus of children’s theater myself, I realize that small children are not usually all that comfortable on stage, but there was no excuse for the complete lack of preparation on the part of the adults running the program. You can see in the picture that Charlotte has her script with her on stage, but for the most part she knew all her lines cold and was hanging on to the script as a security blanket. Most of the other children, including the older children, who really had no excuse for not knowing their lines, read mechanically from their scripts all evening. It was as if the children had never rehearsed at all and were doing a table reading for the first time. Beyond that, the night of the performances was the first time any of the kids had been on the stage at the middle school, where the show was held, and nobody knew where to stand, where to move, or how to project their voices. On top of that, the people running the show had no idea how to use the lighting or sound systems in the auditorium. The performances began a little after 7:00 p.m. but did not finish until 10:00 p.m. because the plays moved so slowly. Ten o’clock may not be too late for a 12-year-old, but that was way too late for the younger kids like Charlotte.

As you can tell, neither Bridget nor I were terribly impressed with the efforts of the adults. There were a lot of other parents also openly wondering why they paid these people money for such a slipshod program. I don’t think they’ll be around very long.

My own experience on stage began the summer I was twelve going on thirteen (that would be 1976, for those of you trying to figure it out). One of the middle school teachers who was active in the local community theater had convinced the town’s recreation department to let her do a summer theater program for kids. A fair number of the kids who showed up that first summer were themselves the children of other community theater folks, but my brother Tim and I joined because we were looking for something to do for the summer and I had been writing plays to perform at school for several years at that point. We spent every morning for six weeks or so in the auditorium of the old high school, and the play we did that summer was “Snow White”. Like Charlotte’s group, the kids in our group ranged from as young as six or seven to as old as fifteen. Even though I was not the oldest kid, I looked older at 12 than most everyone else, so I played Snow White’s father, the king. In fact, I would be typecast in that part for most of my time as an actor, playing assorted kings in several different shows. The king is not a particularly significant role in “Snow White”, but all the younger kids got the roles of the dwarves, and, let’s face it, I am NO Prince Charming. More importantly, though, our director made us learn our lines, even the little kids, and everyone learned their blocking, learned how to stand on stage and project our voices out into the audience, learned our entrance and exit cues, and generally learned as much stagecraft as you could cram into the brains of a bunch of kids on summer vacation.

Some of us fell deeply in love with theater that summer, and for the next ten years of my life there was scarcely a time when I was not involved in performing or producing some sort of show. Those of us who stuck with the summer program eventually moved on together into the high school drama club and even into the community theater. A few even went on to become theater professionals of one sort or another. The kids I grew up with on stage became my best friends. It is no exaggeration to say that wandering into that auditorium one humid June morning in 1976 transformed my entire life.

I know I am not supposed to push my own passions and dreams onto my child, but I also know that Charlotte has the same little spark inside her that I had. She has been involved in several sport activities the last couple of years, and has fun, but clearly is not all that interested in being an athlete. She also just performed in her annual dance recital for the third year in a row, and likes the thrill of the recital but not the discipline of dancing (although this year she did hip-hop and liked it a lot better than the tap/ballet classes). When she stepped out on stage Saturday night, though, with her nerd glasses and big rubber pig snout, I knew that she was right where she belonged. Well, except that I don’t think she belongs with this particular group. We need to find a different place where she can go and not just have fun but really learn how to perform on stage. In the town where I grew up, there was no such thing as private programs for children’s theater when I was her age, but here there are lots of them.

I grew out of my theater phase when I got to college. I went to Northwestern, which has a huge reputation for its theater program and all the famous actors who came out of there, and my original intention was to study theater. But I was unprepared for the more competitive and unpleasant aspects of a theater program where everybody wanted to be a star (and some people would become stars) and turned my interests elsewhere. I only did one play in college, a horrible production of “Dracula”, though some friends and I had a musical comedy act that we performed all the way through my undergrad years. It’s okay with me if theater is just a childhood pasttime for Charlotte, too. It’s also okay if she decides she’d rather do some other activity, but I suspect that Pig Number Three will turn into quite the ham.