Browsed by
Month: July 2025

Come Share a Dream with Alice and the Arts Bubble

Come Share a Dream with Alice and the Arts Bubble

Comments 0 Comment

Last night I had the pleasure of watching the preview performance of The Arts Bubble’s Alice by Heart, which opens tonight (July 24) and runs through the weekend. From what I saw, it’s really quite an amazing production that you won’t want to miss. For one thing, it is presented in the round and environmentally (meaning the actors are all around the audience and even interact with them) which I now believe is how this show should always be done. It does a great job of making the story clear, which is hard to do because of all the clever wordplay in the dialogue, in the spirit of the source material. These young actors understand the script, and bring incredible physicality and energy to their performances. Plus, there is a live band!

Since I am good friends with the director, I was there from the ground up watching this production come together. I remember how exciting it was when The Arts Bubble got the rights to Alice by Heart, because it is the kind of show, in my opinion, that fits the project’s pattern of showcasing the more interesting, whimsical yet meaningful musicals that aren’t being done over and over elsewhere. This is, after all, the company that did The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals last year. There were some harrowing weeks when they temporarily lost the rights for admininstrative reasons, but luckily that all worked out. Some perspectives needed to be changed.

In her program note, director Aileen Lynch-McCulloch starts off with some physics, discussing quantum entanglement and relativity, and how reality isn’t fixed or solid. It varies based on frame of reference, like a surrealist painting. Our ability to shift our frame or perspective gives us power over our lives, a message at the heart of this show. Through our dreams and our imaginations, we are all creating this Universe together, and we can choose to create a world defined by love and understanding. This deep spiritual realization is something I’ve always admired in Aileen, and a reason why I am proud to be her friend and love to see her shows.

The opening performance tonight is sold out. There are three more performances: Friday, July 25 at 7 p.m.; Saturday, July 26 at 2 p.m. and Sunday, July 27 at 2 p.m. Reserve your tickets here: https://vagabondgal.wixsite.com/artsbubble/alice-by-heart

A scene from The Arts Bubble production of Alice by Heart
Life, What Is It but a Dream?

Life, What Is It but a Dream?

Comments 0 Comment

Having more fun with the goodreads book review “post to your blog” html code. This time I read a children’s literature classic.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In the summer of 2025, I was thrilled to discover a copy of a 2015 Princeton University Press 150th anniversary edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” featuring art by Salvador Dali, in a little free library in Arlington, Viriginia. This is a trade version of a limited edition that was first published in 1969, copies of which are rare and pricey. Dali’s thirteen illustrations are fascinating, dark and somewhat abstract, a bit hard at times to connect to the chapters in the book, though elements are there that tie into the story. Dual introductions to this edition, one by editor Mark Burstein and one by mathematician Thomas Banchoff, expose the connection between Dali and Lewis Carroll, who was a mathematician as well as a writer of children’s books. The introductions are far more about Dali than about Alice, touching on his mathematical obsessions, and his artistic technique that focuses on perspective and subjectivity. This edition puts Dali in the center, with Carrol’s story as a kind of filling. If there is a synergy, it is that Alice’s adventures are indeed a dream, where perspective shifts suddenly and unexpectedly, and meaning is always ambiguous, if it’s there at all. As for Lewis Carrol’s story, as I re-read it after I don’t know how many years since the first time, I found it amusing, but sometimes maddening in its refusal to make sense. Carroll’s wordplay and marvellous nonsense verse are certainly delightful. Alice, it struck me, was kind-hearted, and always doing her best to behave as she must have thought a young girl should, under the circumstances. She takes the bizarre events happening to her at face value, at most admitting they are “curious.” As almost all of the denizens of Wonderland are self-involved, incompetent, and utterly irrational, I couldn’t help wondering if this was how children see the adult world, with Alice’s incomprehension at the stupidity of adults being the subconscious source material for her dream reality. How relieved she must have been, upon being attacked by a deck of playing cards, to awaken in the familiar comfort of her sister’s lap, on a lazy summer day, though as the memory fades she only remembers her dream as something wonderful.



View all my reviews

Here is a picture of the copy of the book that I found, in the little free library. Pretty cool, huh?

I was so excited to find it, because Aileen is currently directing Alice by Heart for the Arts Bubble, so Alice’s adventures are prominent in our minds.

Like Dali’s unique illustrations, Alice by Heart interprets Lewis Carroll’s work in its own way. The Alice in the musical is an adolescent, not a child of tender years as in the book, and consequently has a different perspective and different priorities. Lyrics and book are by Steven Slater, who also wrote Spring Awakening, so you can imagine.

Both Dali and Slater manage to find darker, more mature themes than are in the original source material. The book(s), as written by Carroll, are whimsical children’s literature, and it takes an effort to find deeper meaning than that they are a vehicle for playful riddles and word games. But searching for meaning is what makes us human, and is, after all, why we dream.

1984 Wasn’t Like 1984 but What about 2024?

1984 Wasn’t Like 1984 but What about 2024?

Comments 1 comment

This is my review of George Orwell’s 1984, which I published on goodreads, where I review every book I read. I just discovered that after posting a review, the site gives you some HTML code for sharing in a blog so I thought I’d try it out.

1984 by George Orwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is a common pattern in speculative fiction for an author to extrapolate the then current state of society indefinitely into the future. Thus the 1984 which Orwell envisions in 1949 is a world permanently locked into the patterns of the World War II era – goods are scarce and rationed, bombs fall on neighborhoods, and propaganda continuously rallies the populace against the enemy. As described in the forbidden book which Winston reads, “THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM,” war has become a perpetual state designed to consume the energy of society, thus preventing any disruptive threat to the hierarchical strucutre that allows a privileged few to live at the expense of the ignorant masses. A dystopian vision, no doubt, which history repudiated in the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s, so that, as the advertisement went, 1984 wouldn’t be like 1984. Collectivism averted! But the warning remains relevant; the tools of control are still there. The truth is ever malleable, and the boot is ever ready to press down on the face; man can always be reduced to a cog in a machine. This book’s message is pertinent to events today in the 2020s, and will be so again and again, in future ages.

View all my reviews

Not a deep look at the book, I admit, but I didn’t want to give away too many spoilers! There’s a lot that could be said about why its message is pertinent to the 2020s, but I’ll leave most of that for future posts.

I’ll just add this observation: for all the lofty political philosophy expressed in 1984, ultimately the Party depends simply on physical force to maintain its control. It always comes down to the boot pressing on the face – the use of terror to subvert the will of the people. That’s all dystopia ever was and ever is.

ChatGPT Be Good to Me

ChatGPT Be Good to Me

Comments 0 Comment

Aileen was dealing for a while with an extremely annoying support issue. It involved access to an account that had been hacked, the details of which I will not go into. Suffice it to say, she was stonewalled by the company’s tech support.

She eventually turned to ChatGPT to try to find a solution, since her repeated efforts were being thwarted. This computer program turned out to be quite helpful. Much of its advice simply confirmed what she had already determined through other kinds of searches. Specifically, this advice was to collect evidence of original ownership of the account and of it being hacked, and persist with contacting the company daily and sharing this information through all possible avenues, even when there was no response or the response was obviously from an automated system.

It certainly all made sense. But what was particularly compelling about the computer program’s responses was how logical and well layed out they were, and that they had a reassuring tone, offering not just practical support, but also moral support. The AI-generated responses read like a pep talk, encouraging her to keep trying, acknowledging how difficult the situation was, and praising her for keeping up the good work. They sounded sympathetic, like ChatGPT was her trusted friend. She showed me one of the responses, and it oozed positivity and compassion. No wonder people are willing to pay for AI girlfriends or boyfriends!

Aileen told me that this was how she wished people would react when she went to them for help, instead of just throwing their hands up and declaring the situation hopeless, as was typical. I was a little nervous; I knew I hadn’t been much help. How could this AI be more supportive than me? I am a lowly human, it’s true, but I am also Aileen’s friend and partner!

Why do humans have so much trouble being supportive of one another? Well, the simple truth is that when you ask for help, you are asking for another person’s time and energy. And people are loath to give that up; humans are always seeking to hold on to and defend their autonomy. This leads to challenging conflicts, but there is reward in overcoming the challenge, and working with someone else for mutual benefit. In this way you build a relationship with another person, in a way you simply can’t with a chat program, however real its texts might seem.

Humans also have difficulty maintaining a supportive demeanor because they are subject to emotions, which might interfere with clear thinking or a measured tone of voice. I know this sounds like a sci-fi plot point, but an AI chatbot is a machine, so naturally, its answers are logically consistent and it can sustain a conversational tone indefinitely. Nothing can ruffle its train of thought, so to speak, because it doesn’t have one.

The account access issue was eventually resolved, though the resolution didn’t really have anything to do with ChatGPT’s advice. It just took time, presumably because of a backlog of cases at the company. Nonetheless, Aileen informed the chatbot in the still open chat window and it had a congratulatory response in the same supportive tone it had been using throughtout their conversation.

Huge congrats again — you turned a frustrating situation into something powerful. Let’s make sure others don’t have to go through the same thing alone.

See what I mean?? I do think, however, that I have proven clearly that AI isn’t autonomous and doesn’t possess consciousness and is not worth getting into a “relationship” with.

Please don’t leave me for an AI, Aileen!