Hedwig

Tuesday, 16 February 1999

I got my Hedwig album today!

A few months back, Lise Eisenberg organized a trip to see the off-Broadway show Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a musical about an East German punk rock singer who's received a botched sex-change operation, and her ambiguous reconciliation with the man who stole her soul. I expected something very, well, angry, but the show is funny, insightful, and far more touching then I'd expected. It speaks about sex roles, true love, false love, power games, identity, Greek mythology, and rock and roll both as a historical phenomenon and as a tool of personal transformation. And it rocks.

There wasn't a cast album available at the time of the show. There is one now -- it was just released last Tuesday, and immediately rocketed up to being the 53rd most popular album Amazon.com offers. Kevin and I each ordered a copy right away; I also ordered another CD and a couple of books. Over the weekend, a box arrived at the office (I get my ordered delivered there because it's easier than having them show up at home when I'm not there nad then having to trek up to the post office) for me from Amazon. Kevin (who often works weekends) said it was a real struggle to refrain from opening it to see if I'd received my copy before he had. But no, Amazon had split my order. Both our copies of Hedwig arrived today. I played mine three times at the office, and once again for Chris when I got home (after Buffy was over, of course). Chris predicts that she will have to personally intervene to keep me from playing nothing but Hedwig for the rest of the week, and she may be right.

The musical is still going. If you live in or are visiting New York and you like rock music, go see it. (Follow the link in my first paragraph for details.) For the rest of you, there's a movie in the works. I can see Hedwig becoming the next Rocky Horror, but the show deserves more than a cult following.

In other news, I ordered something from Amazon UK for the first time: Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal and The Star Fraction. Tor is publishing his third book, The Cassini Division, for the US market later this year, and I've heard a lot of good things about them, so I figure I might as well get hold of the first two before then.

I have done things that don't relate to Amazon.com, really I have. I went to Boskone over the weekend, and had a good time. And while I was there I turned 33, a mildly sobering experience which I don't think I want to do again. I picked up a copy of Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion (the 1962 novel of which the short story "Then There Were None" is a part), and Chris got me a copy of Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder for my birthday. And as if to demonstrate that things other than books occasionally enter my life, I also bought yet another tee shirt with frogs on it -- that makes three. I don't plan to start collecting any old befroged tee shirts, only those that meet my high esthetic standards.

I haven't been to the gym since before Boskone; that's five days without working out, the longest span since I joined back in December. I'm feeling a little doughy. I need to wake up early tomorrow so I can get in a workout and still get to work at what Crossover considers a reasonable hour.