Tiger Woods is finally living up to his name. Okay, so the guy gets a woody with some other lady. He and his wife alledgedly get into a spat. He tries to leave in his car. She chases after him with a golf club and starts swinging. Did she bash him with an iron or, ironically, with a wood? In any…
It’s Black Friday. Merchants are seeing Green as consumers continue to dream of a White Christmas in a Red economy. The English language is nothing if not colorful, and the word “black” is the one which evokes the greatest range of polarities and emotions. On the one hand, we blackball or blacklist people for being blackguards who…
Thanksgiving is not one of the holidays I grew up with in the Philippines—and so, although I have much to be thankful for, every year on this special day I find myself wishing that I had written a seasonal theatre piece to be performed entirely by actors dressed as turkeys, a spoof of Ibsen’s HEDDA…
This past weekend, after 21 years of mostly good and wonderful memories, English Alternative Theatre presented its final production of an original script by one of my playwriting students at the University of Kansas. But, thanks to the awful temper tantrums of one of the actors, who had earlier asked me if he could also…
One of my favorite novels is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die (1958), a compelling portrait of Theseus, the mythical Greek hero and King of Athens who danced with bulls and slew the dreaded Minotaur. For me, the title says it all. Don’t ask me why, but people in America all seem to have a need to create…
When 9/11 struck, a collective sigh of relief was heard from among the Filipinos I knew in the United States. “Thank God the perpetrators were not brown,” they cried, although I’m not sure what skin pigmentation they would assign to Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East. If not also brown, then what? Tan?…
Ex-Miss California Carrie Prejean was hawking her autobiography on Fox News last night. During the cheery interview with Hannity, she coyly revealed that there is a solo sex video of her floating around, the result of a youthful indiscretion, something she made for her boyfriend at the time. It isn’t clear whether this was before or…
In Billy Wilder’s wonderfully wacky 1961 political satire One, Two, Three, there is a hilarious scene which shows the young East Berlin communist spy (Horst Buchholz) being “tortured” by American CIA interrogators. Their secret method is to play a hit song from the period, “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie, Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” over and over, until…
It has been a while since I’ve updated this section of the website. The plan, originally, was to pay tribute properly to friends and colleagues who have contributed to my own personal growth, not only as a writer but also as a human being. The list seems to grow longer every time I wake up in the…