OK New Orleans, it's time to go see a play

My great friend Kevin Smith is returning to the stage this weekend after a 20-year absence and New Orleans you're the lucky host.

On Friday night the Crescent Theater Collective is staging Parallel Lives at the Shadowbox Theater. Parallel Lives was written by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy in 1989. Here's an excerpt from the Crescent Theater Collective:

In the beginning, when the earth is without form, and void, two Supreme Beings meet to plan the creation of the world with the relish of two slightly acerbic interior designers decorating a split-level on the Upper East Side. Once they've decided on the color scheme of the races (a little concerned that white people will feel slighted being such a boring color) they create sex and the sexes. Afraid women will have too many advantages, the Beings decide to make childbirth painful and to give men enormous ... egos ... as compensation.

From this moment on, writers Kathy and Mo whisk the audience through an outrageous universe of gender-benders struggling through the common rituals of modern life: dating, mating, coping with guilt, bar life, curb life, sex, sex, sex. With boundless humor, Parallel Lives examines the ongoing quest to find parity and love (yes, love) in a contest handicapped by capricious Supreme Beings.

Parallel Lives will have its Gulf Coast premiere on April 1st (no kidding) at The Shadowbox Theatre and run for three weekends. Local actors C. Patrick Gendusa and Kevin Smith share an engaging sense of creativity as they switch roles and, occasionally, sexes. Glenn Meche artfully directs this series of satirical sketches that will leave you giddy  with laughter all the way home.

You can buy tickets prior to the show from Eventbrite. It's killing me that I can't be at Kevin's premiere tomorrow night but hopefully some of you out there can be. The show will play tomorrow, 4/1 and then continues on 4/2, 4/7, 4/8, 4/9, 4/14, 4/15, and 4/16. All performances start at 8pm and the show runs for two hours.

I've seen Parallel Lives performed before, though regretfully never with Mr. Smith in a lead role. It's hilarious and well worth a night out. So come on New Orleans, go out and support The Arts in the Crescent City.

The Shadowbox Theater is at 2400 St Claude Ave  New Orleans, LA  and here's a map:



View Larger Map

Go and tell Kevin I said hello. Again, buy tickets here.

What do you carry: a Blog Off post

Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What are you carrying?"

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I fancy myself to be a bit of a traveler and the many places life's brought me so far have left an indelible mark on me. I'm a better man for having seen some places most people only read about and it's not something I take lightly. So whether it was trekking through a Panamanian rain forest or having the Spanish steps all to myself on a rainy Sunday morning, places and experiences stay with me.

I like to travel lightly and I'm not much of a shopper, but something I've been doing for the last 20 years or so is accumulating odds and ends from the places where I've been. These stones and sticks, bones and feathers end up in a jar on my dresser. That jar is my world in miniature it reminds me how fortunate I am every morning. The theme this week is What do You Carry? And my answer is that I carry with me every experience I've ever had. Some highlights:

This is an ancient Roman bell, it's one of the three ancient Roman artifacts I own. That this bronze bell was once sewn into the hem of someone's clothes thrills me to my core.

This is a small piece of brick from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The ruins in Rome are crumbling and this small piece of brick ended up getting washed off the building that once held the grandest baths the world has ever seen and it landed on a path I was walking on. Holding a piece of Roman engineering is almost as thrilling as holding a piece of Roman ornament.

These are shells from a beach in Honduras. If you ever want a get away for some solitude,  Honduras fits that bill nicely. The Honduran people are amazing and they need your money. Go.

This is a piece of pumice I fished out of a hillside in Pompeii. This piece of pumice is one of the billions of pieces of pumice spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 and buried Pompeii.

This is pumice I pried out of the cliffs in Herculaneum. This stuff looks so harmless now. 

This is a piece of granite from the summit of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California.  Mount Tam was the backdrop to an important period in my life and when I hold onto that rock it's like I'm there all over again.

This is a feather I found on Cat Island in The Bahamas. It once belonged to a common ground dove, which are the most comical birds I've ever had the pleasure to interact with.

This is a piece of quartz from Guanajuato, Mexico. Mexico is a beleaguered country and good news from there is hard to come by in the US press. Mexico is a wonder and it has a history that predates anything on this side of the border by centuries.

My great friends Bob and Rick live just outside of Philadelphia and this is a piece of mica  I retrieved from their woods.

This is a shell from the beach in Positano. I've written about the wonder that is Positano here before and this misshapen shell is a perfect metaphor for the place.

This desiccated tree frog once stowed away in my luggage when I was in Panama. I never knew he was there and by the time I got home he hadn't survived the ordeal.

This is a shell from a beach in Mayreau in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The extreme southern Caribbean is littered with unpopulated islands, many of which are only accessible by sailboat, which is how I got there. Why anyone would set foot on a cruise ship is beyond me.

I bought this ring from an old woman in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica for around 75 cents. It's silver and I wore it for nearly ten years.

This is a piece of lavender I picked from a roadside in France in what seems like a lifetime ago. It's at least 16 years old and it still smells like lavender.

This is a piece of stainless steel I retrieved from a factory parking lot in Germany last winter.

So what do I carry? My history and the stories I've accumulated.

As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's postss. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here.

Sherwin-Williams knocks another one out of the park

Sherwin-Williams just rolled out their third in a series of paint swatch TV spots and so far as I'm concerned, this is the best of the bunch.




The spot is called Daybreak and it joins Bees and Paint Chips in what I say are the best TV and video spots in the home/design space. The agency behind it is Buck. They have offices in New York and LA and I am in awe of their work.

As a reminder, here's Paint Chips, the first in the series.




Here's Bees, the second.




Bravo Sherwin-Williams. And many, many thanks to David Nolan whose e-mailed links never fail to give me pause.

The Triangle Waist Company fire

A mural by Ernest Fiene representing the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, at the High School of Fashion Industries NYC (courtesy Triangle Fire open archive).

4:45pm eastern time today marks the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Waist Company in a building now called the Brown building at 29 Washington Place in Manhattan. The fire's been passed on and remembered as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, so named for the shirtwaists they made there. Shirtwaist was the term people used 100 years ago for a blouse.

The fire broke out near the end of the workday on a Saturday. The factory occupied three floors of what was then called the Asche Building in Greenwich Village. It's thought that a careless cigarette or match started a conflagration that swept through the three floors of the factory in minutes.

146 people died in that fire and most of them were immigrant women between the ages of 15 and 24. They died from a lack of a fire code, a lack of regulation regarding working conditions and from the fact that the owners of the factory kept the doors locked to guard against internal theft.

Many of the people who died that day died because they jumped from the 8th, 9th and 10th floors to escape the flames.

The people who died that day died horrifically but they didn't die in vain. The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union and a host of building codes were born of that fire. If you work in an office, the sprinkler system in your building is there because those people died to get it for you.

That 15-year-old kids no longer work in factories in the west is the result of the labor movement and as of last week, a legislator in Missouri introduced legislation to eliminate many child labor laws. I don't need to tell you her party affiliation.

Revisionists seem to believe that "market forces" would have made all of the advances of the Labor Movement and the New Deal on their own but they fail to see that those same "market forces" brought about such things as child labor in the first place.

So as union busting becomes the new fad in state capitols all across the land, take a moment to remember those 146 souls who died behind locked doors in an unsafe building 100 years ago. Take a moment too, to learn about the Triangle Waist Company fire. It's an important part of US history and one that can never get enough attention.

Here's my February webinar

On February 15th I gave a social media webinar on my experiences with social media, Twitter and Blogger in particular. That webinar was a joint venture between BuilderLink.com and Daily5 Remodel. This webinar's formal recording is in Daily5Remodel's archives and now it's here too.

I've been speaking and leading seminars on this topic for about a year and this was the first time I'd ever taken it to the web in this manner.

I view most seminars and webinars on this and just about any other business topic as torture.

They seem to be long on bumper sticker jargon and short on concrete ideas and when I first started speaking I was determined to provide something other than torture and impractical suggestions. The feedback I've received so far tell me that I'm on the right track. If you have about an hour to kill, give it a listen. If not now, then bookmark it and come back to it later.

This webinar is essentially the intro to the two-day seminar I teach. I'm still working out the details for the next one but I know this much, it will take place at some point in the next few months and it will be held in Chicago's Merchandise Mart. I'll keep you posted as I get more details finalized.

How I Mastered Social Media to Build My Business, and How You Can Too



Many thanks to Leah Thayer from Daily5Remodel and to Ray Bangs from BuilderLink, without whom this webinar and recording could never have happened. I don't have a transcript but I will sell you my PowerPoint...