Short-a-Day: Oscar Colchado Lucio's "The House on El Pino Hill"

Originally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 77.

Here's something I've never seen before: a story hidden within a description of a house: "The curtains are half closed over the small, barred window. A thin beam of light illuminates one side of the room and casts the rest in shadow. It's two o'clock in the afternoon." There are no characters, there is no narrator; everything is meant to be inferred from the significant objects--including the empty house. It's Peru, 1986, and the pamphlets and philosophy strewn around the room reveal this to be the home of several Shining Path members. Only in footnotes do we learn their names: "Underneath a large poster of Mao is an old photo, yellow with age but carefully framed. A couple is posing with their children, who are standing in front, two boys and a girl. They appear to be between six and nine years old.[6] [6]Hugo, Nancy, and Pedro with their parents. Pedro died in a traffic accident when he was an adolescent."

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Short-a-Day: Andre Dubus's "Blessings"

Originally published in Dancing After Hours, 1997. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 98.

Deliberately slow, but with a delicate and earned pacing, this is a terrific story about survival: what that means. He hints at it from the very first line--"Early in the morning on the first anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke"--then spends the next several pages establishing what their life is like. Rusty (so called by her husband Cal, "because of her hair, because he was in love with her") is a practical woman, who acknowledges nature and the good intentions of people who do not: "Why didn't they know that, having killed or run off for buildings and asphalt the deer's natural predators, people had to perform the functions of coyotes and wolves?" She is not a woman whose heart is "accustomed to a soft cushion of quotidian calm," and we'll learn why, as we flash back not only to the previous year--a shark attack--but all the way to Vietnam, a time when her baby daughter almost died of pneumonia. Likewise, we'll see the funeral for the captain and his first mate before we see the actual accident--we'll see what it is like not to survive, but to be survived.

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Short-a-Day: Martha Cooley's "The Month Girls"

Originally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 26.

Four vaguely themed vignettes that explore a typist's insecurities about "femaleness": "Why, I wondered, did being female seem to depend so heavily on reception, as if the radios (so to speak) of other people were always threatening to distort the the female signal or lose it altogether?" Though the stories were written years apart, the voice of this sounds like Yiyun Li's recently published "The Science of Flight," in that there's some tight summaries of life, but beyond that, too much ambling and stretching for meaning. However, at least the voices of Cooley's piece give the story some legs:

May was petite and voluptuous.... May, claimed April, was saucy--and she was, in her way. Saucy and well-organized. For her part, April was cool and aloof.... According to May, April looked like Faye Dunaway, and this was accurate: April did possess that same sexy haughtiness. June was very tall--easily six-two--and big-boned. Her appearance was relaxed, even a bit droopy; she reminded me of a contented female cow, thinking her bovine thoughts and paying little attention to other people.

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FRINGE: Garage

[Reviewed for Time Out New York's Fringe Binge]

FRINGE: The Princes of Persuasion

The Princes of Persuasion: Recipes for Romance makes for an oddly entertaining concert, not a satisfying work of theater. Ithai Benjamin's music is catchy, Rebeca Raney's lyrics are delightfully twisted (think Roald Dahl), and the automated puppets are novel and neatly designed. But the show is mostly prerecorded, and the puppets, not Benjamin, are the characters: airy and deranged Linda, sensible Destiny, boyish but occasionally demonic Lil' Bo-tique, and the goofy Domingo (whose eyes and nose face a different direction from his mouth). Wouldn't this work just as well or better as an installation at a kooky tourist trap like Jekyll and Hyde Cafe (the new "Muppets Family") or as a series of high-grade YouTube clips (ala Henson Studios)? This is even truer considering that The Princes of Persuasion has no plot, no momentum: it's just a loose series of conversations that serve only to segue into songs like "Long Legs," which features this goofy verse: "Mustache, mustache/ I never grew one/ tiny hairs above my lip/ it would tickle your face/ with our noses tip to tip." But though it can't compete with the far more complete Jollyship the Whiz-Bang and Avenue Q, it's whimsically winning enough to persuade Fringe audiences to love it. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "The audience revolts against false royalty" and 5 being "All hail the king," The Princes of Persuasion gets a 4.