Thursday, October 8, 2009

Clarified butter, and gold standards

I would have blogged sooner but I decided to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” It’s been done before, you say. But not in the miniscule kitchen of a New York studio apartment, using only a single sauce pan and a tiny convection oven. With luck I’ll manage to clarify butter successfully by the end of the week.

Rehearsals have been going splendidly and have been almost too much fun. Yesterday I brought H., a friend of mine, in to speak to the cast. (I’m using initials so you can pretend you’re reading a French novel.) H. is a delightfully sweet and winning young guy from Venezuela who has been a gay porn star and a successful escort for eight years. His mission was to help one of our brilliant actors, Steve Wilder (I mean ‘S.’), add a layer of verisimilitude to “Gilbert,” the sexually ambiguous, drug addicted hustler he plays in the show. In short order our director, A., had H. on stage, teaching S. the finer points of male hoochie dancing and showing him the (porn) industry-standard butt position for giving a blowjob.

I need to immodestly digress for a moment to say that “Made in Heaven” contains the funniest and most intricate blowjob scene in the history of the American theatre. I’m fairly confident it will become the gold standard of blowjob scenes, against which all future stage blowjobs will be measured.

-- Jay.

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