Crying

I was just watching my favourite movie, Rang de Basanti on DVD. Each time I watch it, I notice something new that I like. For instance, this time I noticed how Aamir Khan performs in scenes where he has to act like he's crying.

From some personal experience, I see it more or less like this : when you cry, it's not just loud noise and moist eyes. There's an emotion that surges up from deep inside, gradually taking over you. In a few seconds, you're completely overwhelmed, and you have no idea how to deal with the swell of feelings inside you. Before you know it, you are completely in its grip, and your face grimaces and feels like it's going to explode. Finally you give in and shut your eyes, and that's when you feel the warm trickles of your tears on your face. And it comes in surges. Every time you vent out a little, you relax a little till the next wave takes you down again. Once you've let out enough steam, you're feeling much better. It's awesome how he pulls it off; I'm always wondering if he's not really crying.

There's acting for you.

The Blue Man Group (or "I don't get American Humo[u]r")

They had reviews in the New York Times and pretty much every other magazine you could think of, which said things like "I laughed so much I had to go to the doctor" or "Rip-roaring hilarious", "Funniest 100 minutes ever". My poor, gullible better half fell for it, and paid (through the nose) for tickets to see them perform at the Birar Street Theatre in downtown Chicago.

After a day full of staring up at T-Rex skeletons, peering at mummified mummies and daddies, looking at exhibits on Indians who aren't really Indians, and then watching Spiderman 3 (which has more animation than "Toy Story", and by no means more impressive), we left for the Blue Man Group show. A short walk, a taxicab ride, and two bean burritos later, we arrived at the Briar Street Theatre, in time for our show.

The decor is impressive. You have this pseudo-industrial-look paraphernalia everywhere. Everywhere you see, there's dim lighting, neon pipes, hoses and wires, and water-filled tubes. Essentially, you see a lot of things that set your expectations high.

Everything's dark. There are a set of red LED panels near the stage which prompt the audience to do things such as "sound like a cowboy", "make like that guy on some XYZ show" , "say happy birthday to Marge in the audience", or "say hello to Adam because he's just a normal guy so he'd like you to say something like that". The audience _loves_ this. There's a small room above the stage where you see a small band, dressed in fluorescent skeleton outfits to contrast with the dark background. Then three guys show up on a dark stage. They're dressed completely in black, except for their heads and hands, which are a bright shade of blue. Two of them start playing on drums, while one of them splashes neon paint on the drums. The drumming is nothing impressive - I've played with better.

Then comes the humour. They leave their drums, and then toss marshmallows into each other's mouths - no mean feat given that they're nearly 30 feet away from each other. Then one of them rubs corn flakes all over his face, and another tells him how to get them off his face. Throughout the show, every now and then, they just stand still, staring at each other's faces with blank expressions. At this point, the audience is laughing, and laughing hard. Ramya and I are also staring at each other with blank expressions, wondering what the hell the lady in our row found so funny that she was practically choking with laughter.

The humour continued, in the form of a long-drawn serenade of a random (pretty) girl chosen from the audience to have a rather awkward simulation of dinner on the stage. It's supposed to be funny, because there are squirts of neon paint shooting out of small nozzles on the Blue Men's chests. At this point, Ramya starts apologizing for buying the tickets for this show.

Then comes out a huge instrument made out of pipes, that the Blue Men bang on to play music. It's like a xylophone, except that it sounds very different. They play some music for a little while with minimal nonsense, and it pretty much peaks there.

The finale is something that my particularly eco-sensitive better half and I found ridiculous. The Blue Men run to the back of the stage, and open up some panels on the rear walls of the hall. There are tens of toilet paper rolls inside. They pull out several streams of this paper, and push it over the audience, all the way to the front. Then they turn on black lights, and the white paper shines up. Yay, yippee. At the end of the show, we see huge 4-feet piles of toilet paper on the front of the stage. I'd say it was about a sixty or seventy kilos of paper at least. That's quite some, given that they do a show every day.

100 minutes of extreme neon-paint-slapstick-humour gimmickery were finally over, and we happily concluded that we just don't understand American humo[u]r - neither the concept, nor the way they spell it. :-)

Great Expectations

I am trying to hail a cab from Fermilab. I pick up a phone, call the toll-free number for the taxi service. A very sweet sounding lady picks up, and asks for the address. I half-jokingly imagine the lady on the other side of the phone as an accent-trained Indian lady somewhere in Pune or Bangalore. "Fermilab", I say to her. "F-E-R-M-I-L-A-B as in Enrico Fermi, the scientist"?