Years back, in the early days of Britain’s National Theatre when it was still at the Old Vic, they mounted a revival of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear for which they brought over from Paris the celebrated director Michel St Dennis to work with the actors. M. Dennis, immensely experienced in the intricate and subtle workings of farce, would say to them, “Tiens! If you stand zere you will not get zee laugh. If you stand ‘ere… ” and he’d move them maybe a foot or two upstage/downstage/left/right/… “… you weel get zee laugh.” This perplexed the cast but they took him at his word and lo and behold, when they played before an audience, his predictions came true. Now while I don’t generally subscribe to the notion that anyone can accurately predict what will make an audience laugh – I find it somehow philistine and rarely productive as audiences will always surprise you – with a man of M. Dennis’s experience, it pays to listen.

Which brings me to last night: more than two men clashing over radically differing ideas of tailoring (the Republican ticket seems clueless about how to fit a jacket properly let alone a shirt collar, Ryan looked like a boy wearing hand-me-downs), we had on display two very different ideas on how to use a stage.

Beginners will always try to get as far downstage as possible thinking this gives them an advantage as they’re closer to the audience. Wrong.

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Is this all that went on?

It’s official:

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If you could go back a month — heck, let’s make it two weeks — and do things the right way, you could forget the troubling thoughts of the train plane wreck that disrupted everybody’s lives without warning. So just imagine tonight’s Preznidential Debate Open Thread/Do Over as the first such event of the season, and everything will be fine. Oh, and ignore the Demon Rabbit. We have no idea how it got there.

I am not entirely sure what this says about us as a species:

1. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

2. Stolen ( starring Nicholas Cage)

3. Safety Not Guaranteed

4. Madagascar 3

5. Ice Age: Continental Drift

6. Hotel Transylvania

7. On the Road

8. Prometheus

9. Men in Black 3

1o. That’s My Boy

Other than Hotel Transylvania, not a single film out in wide release made the list.

Odd List of 10 Most Pirated Movies [Studio Briefing]

How I’ll always remember him – interrogating Anita Hill and accusing her of perjury.

[WaPo]

Title: “Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom”

Authors: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Rank: 47

Blurb: “Warning: Our national sovereignty and our freedom are in grave danger. Stealthily advancing, the globalists and socialists at the United Nations, and in the United States itself, are trying to dilute our national sovereignty, undermine our democratic values, and mandate massive transfers of our wealth and technology to third world countries.”

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