(VIDEO) JOHN CULLUM'S ONE-MAN SHOW

Working on his "JACK TALE" show, a musical for which he's writing music and lyrics, John Cullum is inspired by what he learned from playing a transvestite in Harvey Fierstein's "Casa Valentina."

Using wigs, scarves, jewelry, eye makeup, rouge, and lipstick, he's playing the five male roles as well as four females. (Photo of some of the characters)

Because he can video a lady talking, and splice it into a scene with a another male or female. talking, John tells Emily, "Maybe we've got a one-man musical I can publish on our You Tube Airbroadcasting channel."

HOME SWEET HOME

Do we want "smarter homes?" It's big news. I've read various articles. I've seen some amazing photos.   

Cell phone manufacturers are all lathered up, excitedly selling us, telling us that we can run our lives marvelously, easily, efficiently, and much more safely, with our smartphones.

Google, Apple, Samsung. Microsoft, and dozens of other up-and-comers like them, are bubbling over, swollen fat with fantastic new apps. They're partnering with tech companies who create gadgets that you can connect to your home internet and access on your phone. GE, Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, and all the other providers, are involving themselves in the smarter home concept.

Already, you can control your lights, door locks, heat, air conditioning, monitor yard, and garage, and now there's more -- you can monitor the pool, fences, gates, the mail in your mail box, and feed pets -- there's even a gadget that automatically generates your grocery shopping list.

Picture life in a smarter home: You rise from your bed, lights flicker on, air temperature is already adjusting to the outdoor temperature; while flushing your toilet you could be reminded, "Brush your teeth." As you move to the kitchen, a voice greets you from your sound system, and gives you today’s forecast. Reaching for your coffee that began brewing automatically, there's a broadcast with today's news on the radio or on your television.

When I read about a limbless veteran's customized smart home, I was very impressed. The  apps were significant; the fact that walls, appliances, small and large objects can be moved, and controlled, enabled him to cook and care for himself.  

Smart home companies list all kinds of gadgets that can be connected to your home's Intermet, via a hub. You can even synchronize what you've got in your home right now with a starter kit from Home Depot that costs around $300.

Of course, with high-tech features -- things like an automated shower, wifi tooth brushes, touch screen toilets, a home theater with bed chairs -- it can cost a lot -- $10,000 to $250,000 -- depending on what you want.

It would be -- wow, terrifically nice if I could finger touch a screen, and my boring, everyday chores were taken care of, but ... well, when I, brew coffee for my husband and serve it in one of his favorite mugs -- he's got mugs with show titles shows he's starred in -- that's special; that's fun. And when I mop the floor, or adjust the thermostat ... well, it's like watering my house plants -- I'm proud of myself -- it's enjoyable in the way that ordinary accomplishments are pleasurable.

No doubt about it, a smarter home with everything automated might be flabbergastingly wonderful, but I like being proud of myself for all sorts of not very important little things that make me ME.

Hey,  the Time Magazine that featured smarter homes said, "The dwellings of the future can make you calmer, safer, richer and healthier." I'm saying don't jump on the smart home bandwagon without thinking very carefully about what makes your home, a home sweet home.   

UNLEARNING ADS

Doesn't everyone know what Viagra is?  A kid knows it's a medicine for grownups. An old person thinks it's one of those modern popular things that doesn't concern me. Foreigners know it's a sex pill because it's advertized all over the world.

Em, the Town Crier, says beware of :
constipation-fix foods, energy-boosters, lose weight pills -- along with exercise machines, exercise routines, offers to fix your debts, and vacations in paradises -- along with 2 pills versus 6, anti depressant boosters -- along with helpful health businesses like AARP,  interest free furniture chains, and all those promises and pats on their own back that BP, the guys who caused the Deepwater Oil spill disaster, are giving themselves in impressively expensive television ads.  And don't forget -- advertizements drill into us the thrill of killing, gruesome murder death, and instant go-to bed love.

I gave top billing to Viagra because whenever there's an AD for it, I hit the mute button.

It's a silly gesture; actually ADS are an everywhere, everyday larger, fact-of-life -- with TV,  phones, ipods, ipads -- they're insta communication. No matter what you're doing, no matter how sacred, or major whatever it is that you're doing, the vision, sound, ding-a-ling refrain of some AD can flash.

Beware -- ADS have expanded and are everywhere in our lives, enabling us to do less of the things we might do if we didn't have incredibly instant communication.

Town Crier Em says turn the key, turn the knob, punch, hit, hammer the off-button off -- ADS are affecting basic breathing-eating-sleeping -- also art, culture, ambition, religion, and all, all of life's things -- pleasures and pains.

I gave top billing to pleasures, but pains create pleasures -- pains and pleasures are what life is all about -- not the advertized version of life -- real life.  

(VIDEO) JOHN CULLUM'S PARENTS

Emily Frankel, asking John about his mother, gets John describing his parents.

Though John's mother died before Emily and John met, Emily wonders if his mother would have approved of him marrying a "Jewish divorcee?"

John loves to talk about his huge family, and what it was like growing up as part of it, in Knoxville Tennessee.

HUH? WHA? WHAT?

That's me!

That's what I often look like as I watch films on our bedroom television set.

I am not sure what the actors are saying.

For instance, if leading characters are arguing -- it sounds climatic and I do hear a few words -- I find myself supplying appropriate dialogue, based on what I have gathered thus far about the story that's unfolding.

Quite often, more often than I like to admit, it bothers me -- sometimes characters whisper, or it's just bad 
pronunciation, or the actors get so deeply into what they're feeling, they don't pay attention to pronouncing words clearly -- they just let words run together.

I can't blame this on our TV set. News and commercials are clear. But it's seriously annoying. Quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet, I tell the television, "Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines."

The other day, in desperation, I fixed the settings on our television to display captions. The dialogue appeared in a white strip with each word easy to read. It's somewhat distracting from the story that's unfolding, but it helps.

Maybe it's just as well that I am missing dialogue -- the stuff I am not hearing is stuff I don't want to hear.

Hey, maybe, probably, the dialogue I am inventing improves the film!

Hmm.

I turned off captions.  Now, I simply murmur --

SALUTE TO THOMAS ALVA EDISON

Edison died October 18, 1931. The day he left the world, we lost a great man.

I wrote about Edison in my novel, "Somebody, Woman of the Century." My heroine, Cordelia, who was working as a radio reporter, after a spat with the man she loved, was hoping to hear from him. He socialized with Edison.

From chapter 32:
"Two days became four days, without hearing from Jackson. Was it already a week? Had she missed his phone call at the office? The date -- the day of the week was attached to names in the news, events in the lives of others. The 17th of October, Scarface Capone was sentenced to eleven years in the penitentiary. The next day, eighty-four-year-old Thomas Alva Edison died at Glenmont, his home in West Orange, New Jersey. Realizing it was a personal loss for Jackson, she couldn't help wondering if he'd be at the funeral.  Newspapers and radios announced that all nonessential lights throughout the country were going to be extinguished for one minute during the evening of October 21st, as a tribute to Edison. Was it Jackson's idea? It could have been.

"The date happened to be the 53rd anniversary of Edison's most famous invention -- he was the father of incandescent light, and much more, so much more. The time for the blackout was 9:59 p.m. Cordelia was thinking she might write a tribute to the inventor. Of course you couldn't ask the nation to play an Edison record at 9:59 p.m., on their Edison phonographs. Or arrange a nationwide turn on of all radios. Most people wouldn't realize that their favorite radio announcer was using an Edison microphone, that stock market ticker tapes, flashlight batteries, camera film, the electric locomotive, composition brick, automobile electric starters, all that -- and more than a thousand other inventions which affected people every day of their lives -- were Edison babies. The day before he died, he'd been working on a process that turned goldenrod, the common backyard weed, into synthetic rubber. Would the world be riding on goldenrod tires someday?

"Checking the clock, Cordelia pictured Mina Miller Edison, Thomas Alva's wife for forty-five years. Would Mina mournfully watch her clock? like me, Cordelia thought, with my dream of being a woman who leaves a mark on the world?"

And me, Em the writer-blogger -- I can't bring myself to throw out TIME Magazine, JULY 5 2010, and an article by Bryan Walsh, a deep-digging researcher whom I also admire, from whom I gleaned what follows.

"At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, children in the third-grade class bend over model cars designed to run on solar power. Working with a team of professional scientists from NASA and other federal agencies, they're putting finishing touches on the cars -- learning the way all trainee scientists  learn -- through the sort of dogged trial and error that has always been the preface to American invention, a method Thomas Edison helped pioneer.

"Edison  patented 1,093 mechanisms and processes, devices that would give birth to three enduring American industries: electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures -- it's as if he  spent his career inventing the biggest things, things that for me define  20th Century."

Reading on, I learned that after three months in school, Edison was taught by his mother at home, where he put together a chemistry lab. As a working teenager earning dimes as a railway newsboy, Edison spend $2 (nearly two days pay) so he could enroll in the Detroit Public Library. At 16, he was an itinerant telegraph operator for Western Union. In his  early 20's he was creating his first inventions -- forms of telegraph equipment. In Boston, he attended public lectures at the new Boston Tech, which later, became the globally influential Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 1870s, he created his own inventor community in Menlo Park, N.J. The laboratory and workshop -- his "invention factory" -- Edison once boasted, was the place where he and his team could develop "a minor invention every 10 days and a big thing every 6 months or so."

That's a rate that would suit Steve Jobs, and kids today. And it astounds me.

Thomas Alva Edison's birthday is a day to celebrate. The day he left the world is a day to celebrate all his gifts to our world.

(VIDEO) JOHN CULLUM'S WORST AUDITION

The minute Emily Frankel mentions "worst audition," John Cullum sings the chorus of "Luck Be a Lady Tonight," and describes his visit to the neighborhood bar, the drinks he had to brace himself.

John explains how he sang, when he was quite drunk, "There But For You Go I," for Allen Jay Lerner, Moss Hart, and Franz Allers, the conductor, who were casting for the musical "Camelot."

It's one of those stories that husbands and wives tell each other more than once, as they recall major events in their lives.

IMMOBILIZED BY BAD NEWS

Goddess Isis

Glued in my mind is Robin Williams' decision to leave the world, Bacall gone, Ferguson protests, brain damaged football guys, footballers imbued with violence who are abusing women, and ISIS.

Isis thousands of years ago was beneficent Egyptian goddess. Now ISIS is talk in the air of a war that isn't a war but is a war -- endless debates, decapitations, and bombing.

I want my life on my mind; it's become difficult to envision the future with me active, excited, looking forward to tomorrow. Here I am, merely cowering, turning off my ears, eyes, and mind about Ebola, avoiding the coming election babble -- yes -- avoiding the predicted takeover of Congress by more do-nothingers.

Fall season means green into red-brown-gold, not hearing the dreadfully dumb talk about our bad-weak-indecisive President, who is our good-energetic-decisive leader trying to lead, though his legs have been chopped off.

Surely this non-thinking, stuck, frozen phase will melt away. Snowbound, I'm trudging, lifting one leg at a time, effortfully dragging myself beyond the bad events as I step, step, step into tomorrow.

Golly, I want to be back in some sunlight, on my way to doing things with flashes of excitement and interest, heartfelt concern with what else is going on in the world.

(VIDEO) CULLUM ADVICE ON LEARNING LINES

John explains that when he first started acting, he held the script, and didn't try to learn lines until the show was blocked.

This pattern changed as he became a professional. He found that it was important to start learning lines right away -- starting with the second day of rehearsal.

Nowadays, usually about a month before the actual rehearsals begin, he starts to memorize the lines. Using a small tape recorder, playing all the parts, he tapes all the dialogue. He works for a few hours everyday, pausing the recorder, reciting his own lines in the appropriate sequence, checking them for accuracy.

Later, every day before each and every performance, in his dressing room, John Cullum goes over the lines of the play.

HOT "NEWSWEEK" NEWS

Welcome back to my mail box Newsweek Magazine -- I missed you since you and the "Daily Beast" stopped the printed issue in October 2012, and became an online magazine.

Happy day -- my new Newsweek, with JFK, Marilyn, Liz, and DiMaggio on the cover, immediately intrigued me. I dove into the cover story, expecting ... well, at least some interesting revelations about these super celebs.

Nope. The cover story by the reporter focused on bestselling author C. David Heymann's latest book, "Joe and Marilyn, Legends in Love." The magazine's reporter stated that in this book, the author invented shocking intimate details as he described Joe beating up Marilyn, Joe wire-tapping her home, Joe stalking her.

On and on went the cover story, proving that each bestseller by Heymann was chock-full of lies, distortion, and non-facts.

Quoting other celebs, the reporter showed how Heymann's book on Barbara Hutton, "Poor Little Rich Girl," his revelations about Jackie, and JFK, his proof that RFK was her lover in "Bobby and Jackie" were mostly the author's inventions.


Also, according to the reporter, the revelations about Liz's love life were not based on her confiding in Heymann as he claimed -- Heymann's revelations were well-researched rumors. Similarly, his book about Caroline Kennedy and JFK Jr., and Heymann's
his second book about RFK, are page-turners, but the reporter tells the reader, "The facts are not facts."



Remember, our admiring these celebrities, wondering about them, learning some right facts and wrong facts about them is fascinating, but like entertainment -- it distracts us from the often boring, ordinariness of our own lives.

Hmm....

Writing a blog requires me to keep in tune with the times, to wonder about things that you and millions of others wonder about. Yes, Newsweek back in print is fun to skim, but I sense, though the title isn't used anymore, the "Daily Beast"  is still behind the scenes -- still specializing in gossip, nasty news, and dirty laundry.

If you want more of this to fill the nooks and crannies of your imaginary love life, you can get the current printed magazine online, or subscribe and get the digital Newsweek on one of your handheld devices. Or buy the books on Amazon. This bestselling author, who died two years ago, made millions on these books, and lives on in these tales he told, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Obviously the "nothing" that was written by the very skilled, very savvy Heymann, is wonderfully absorbing entertainment.