Since everyone else is making lists, I thought I’d make some of my own “best of” for 2008.  I don’t know why anyone else would care what the best piece of art, theatre or movie I experienced in 2008 was but I’m going to do it anyway – so there (that should tell you the level of maturity that you will now be subjected to – prepare yourself)

My Best of List for 2008  (insert trumpet fanfare – I didn’t feel like finding the appropriate sound wave so just imagine trumpets blowing and banners flapping and you know… fanfare)

Best Theater Experience of 2008 – I had the good fortune to travel to NYC and see Patti Lupone on Broadway in Gypsy!  Wow-wee-wow-w0w wow to quote myself from a previous post.  Words cannot describe the power of the performance she and the other cast members gave.  I was a little disappointed in the stage design but since that is my supposed “area” I tend to be a bit more critical of sets and lighting and costumes.  As my old set design teacher, Mr. Burroughs used to say, “You don’t want them leaving the theater humming the scenery” but when you have powerhouse performers such as Lupone I think they could have revved up the pageantry just a tad.  I’m not sure if she’s still performing this on Broadway, but if she is and you get the chance to see this, go! – well worth the price of admission.  By the way, thank goodness we got half priced tickets right before show time or else I’m not sure I could have afforded to see the performance).

EXTRA BONUS – since this venue for my blathering was not available to me in 2007 – here is my 2007 best theater performance…. 

Best Dramatic Theatre piece of 2007 - Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin.  Wow – Mr. Noodle can act!  I’ve always loved Bill Irwin but have only seen him in lighter fare (Northern Exposure, Sesame Street).  I’ve always known he is a first rate clown but the man is also a first rate thespian (as is Ms. Turner, thespian, not clown).  Apparently Irwin can do the internal as well as external gymnastics required of great performers.  The play provided wonderful performances, nuanced, expressive, layered.  A splendid interpretation of the piece.  I was frankly afraid I would be repulsed by the play.  My only experience with it was the much more strident, vindictive version of the characters as performed by Taylor and Burton in the film version.  The Irwin/Turner version of the characters made the experience of viewing the play deeper, richer and their dialogue and actions much more understandable than was evident in the film.  (Note:  I wrote this thinking I had seen this performance in 2008 but on fact checking and, yes I do check my facts, I realized it was 2007 that I saw this play… the grey cells they are adyin’…. sigh…..)

Best Live Concert Performance in 2008:  (at least I think it was this year I saw him…..) Arlo Guthrie hands down.  A blast from the past and highly entertaining.  He is still Arlo under the grey hair and his storytelling abilities are equal to his musical abilities and that’s saying something.  I found his live rendition of City of New Orleans held greater emotional and lyrical quality for me than his recorded version of  many years ago.  

Next post – 2008 best films and art and such, should you care to come by….

Sesame Street is a staple in our house.  We TiVo it and it is one of few shows the kids get to watch on a regular basis.

A couple different episodes have been showing up regularly on the DVR schedule.  One has Mr. Noodle (actually, Mr. Noodle’s brother, Mr. Noodle) lip-syncing to an opera.  Another has Andrea Bocelli singing Elmo an operatic lullaby.  Lane HATES both of these segments.  I’m not using the word ‘hate’ lightly.  She hides like she’s scared of the singing.  She says she isn’t scared of it, but that she doesn’t like it.  She won’t let me turn it off, but she still leaves the room or quietly hides behind me until each segment is over.

Lane has a history of being averse to singing…. especially MY singing.  It is only recently that she’s actually asked me to sing.  When she was two years old, she would yell at me when I sang.  “STOP SINGING MOMMY!  NO!!!“  If I didn’t stop it reduced her to tears.  Perhaps I am a bit cruel, but it was pretty funny.  So nowadays, she actually does let me sing, and asks me to sing sometimes too.  So that she is showing this aversion to opera isn’t exactly a surprise.

This man is helping me raise my son. Yeah. I said it, stupid What To Expect series.

Florida Times-Union — As part of a job that many people rightly put quote fingers around while describing, I interviewed Alice Cooper by phone last week at my home about his upcoming show at the Florida Theatre — which will be very splattery and squishy and thick with the usual dark menagerie of snakes, beheadings, go-go dancers and what I’d guess to be many tongues of fire, nature’s lethal minion.

But since I have a Little Man whose attention needs must be sated while Daddy does what he guiltily passes off as work, I had to first fire up the usual distraction: Wah Emmo (pronounced “watch Elmo” by those of us with a full set of teeth). It’s a rock-solid safe bet for securing 15 minutes of Jeff Time, unless it’s the one with Mr. Noodle’s crazy binoculars, which Little Man is scared of. It’s OK, I reassure him. I’ve been sort of scared of Alice for years.

So when Alice calls — promptly, God love him — I answer, and for that first brief moment it occurs to me that I’ve got Mr. Welcome To My Nightmare on the phone, and over my shoulder, Elmo chirping out a song entitled Waddle Waddle Hop Hop.

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Such a thing tends to throw one’s spine out of whack, but when I reported this to Alice, who is an unfailingly engaging and articulate guy, he merely comes back with, “I love the fact that you’re a daddy!” And we launch forthwith into a 20-minute chat about parenting.

It’s all about attention, Alice says. He and his wife of 29 years — whom he met when he hired her to perform on the Nightmare tour as (and I am not making any of these up) the giant spider, the giant snake, the dancing tooth, the mannequin that comes to life and the tap-dancing skeleton — “always spent all our time with our kids. They never felt insecure.”

Their three children grew up backstage, regarding the secrets behind Daddy’s fake guillotines, lighting and magic tricks “with big smiles” and routinely saying things like “Where’s Uncle Axl? Where’s Uncle [Keith] Moony?”

“They’d always travel with us on the road, and anybody backstage would pick them up and carry them around. They were like everybody’s kids,” he said.

Despite some of those uncles’ reputations, though, his kids turned out to be “the most balanced you’ve ever seen.” Regular churchgoers all, he said they’ve never done drugs, never stolen anything, never gotten into any trouble with Johnny Law, and he says it all in such a proud, paternal tone. “When you hear of Ozzy’s kids in trouble all the time, well, I mean, look at what the example is,” he said.

Now before I forget: Alice’s show is supporting his new Dirty Diamonds, and it’s a return to form, which means the props-heavy and mercilessly over-the-top spectacle for which he’s famous. Thirty songs, he says, and 28 of them are full-metal rockers. And it co-stars his daughter as, among other things, Paris Hilton, who in the end is viciously mauled by her chihuahua. “The first five or 10 rows get totally covered in blood,” he said. Sweet.

But what I take away from this brief and bizarre convergence of the Cooper family, their Uncle Slash, my Little Man and the little red Muppet that by then was frenetically counting ice-skating dogs, is this: When it comes to all this, Alice Cooper makes way more basic, focus-on-the family sense than all those parenting books we bought, all those articles that randomly change tack every few months (sun is bad! no, sun is good!) and all those scary-in-their-own-right ostensible-morality nuts like John Rosemond or James Dobson. See? And you thought Alice couldn’t shock anymore.