A Story from Hanky and One from Ken Kesey

(Many thanks to Hanky Girl for that wonderful story yesterday. I would love to have seen the girlie's face when she told him she was pregnant and that the baby was surely his and then he said "Now that's interesting, you see, since I had a vasectomy when I was 21.")

Meanwhile, once again Plotnik rues the price of theater in America. San Francisco Playhouse and Aurora Theater Company, one in SP and the other in The Near East (Bay), produce consistently excellent and exciting theater that Plotnik knows his readers would love, and the venues are small and intimate so you really get a sense of the performances. But tickets at both theaters are $40 each. Even before the current crunch, with incomes pressured but costs not decreasing, it was hard to interest people in paying a hundred bucks or so for a night's entertainment, when cable is cheap and you can always play Grand Theft Guitar Hero.

So what happens? Plot and Duck see fantastic shows they would love to share with their friends, but with the exception of the Mushnik/Billnik Organization nobody ever goes to see any of them.

And theater audiences get older and older. Nowhere is this worse than at Theatreworks in Mountain View, where you feel like they're wasting their time to point out the emergency exits because the roof would cave in before people got those walkers headed up the aisle. But the same is true at other theaters and in other cities, at a time when only older people who have season subscriptions and low mortgages seem to be going to the theater.

One of these nights they're going to stop a performance somewhere to let the EMTs do CPR on an entire row.

But go to ACT and sit close and your senses are boggled at the labor that goes into staging and costuming and lighting, to say nothing of story, direction and acting. This ain't Cuba: somebody's got to pay for it. So prices remain high.

Pity, because once again, there's a new Four Star kid in town: SF Playhouse's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It's superb, if perhaps not quite as unique as "Jack Goes Boating," currently running at the Aurora. We reviewed 'Jack' last week, and you can read the SF Theater Blog review of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" here. You'd better keep your eyes on the amazing Big Chief.

And to those to whom this question would make sense: When you see that photo above does anyone see ex-Tiaposian Sharon Carew?