“You have a watch repair appointment tomorrow night.” That’s the first cryptic message slipped through my cyber-mail slot by The Speakeasy. It’s a reminder that this is Prohibition we’re stepping into. From 1920-1933, buying drinks in a nightclub wasn’t just breaking the law but the Constitution. Shh! If the feds find out what we’re up to, we’re history.
We’re history anyway, since The Speakeasy’s immersive theater starts with period costumes. If you can’t deck yourself out in a flapper’s beaded dress and headband or a natty suit and fedora, you may be re-togged at the club.
But first we have to get in. Step One: meet a woman in red trenchcoat on a certain North Beach street corner and ask her a certain question. She directs us to a watch-repair shop nearby, where a surly bouncer guards the oh-so-secret entrance.
And suddenly it’s the Roaring ‘20s! Scantily clad girls are prancing behind ostrich-plumed fans on a cabaret stage, while roulette wheels and card games get under way in the casino, and dramas erupt in the bar. Through windows in the hallways of this maze we peep and eavesdrop: In the office, the club owner and his wife are arguing. In the dressing room, the star singer threatens to start a slapping match with a chorus girl.
The joint is jumping! Cocktails appear and disappear. So do gamblers, showgirls, and customers. An emcee tells punchy jokes, a jazz combo plays, drunks lurch, a reporter gets the boot. Sandwiches? No thanks. We watch the show for a while in the cabaret, stroll through the casino, and almost get caught up in a bar fight. The only thing missing is a cigarette girl.
My involvement in theater and storytelling goes back to childhood; I vividly remember my sister and me acting out our own version of the TV show The Roaring Twenties, singing about Prohibition and bathtub gin long before we had any idea what they were. Now that it’s almost a century since the U.S. passed the only Constitutional am
endment it later repealed, The Speakeasy has a slightly different role from its namesakes. This is storytelling in action — a grownup version of the make-believe history my sister and I performed for our stunned parents. 35 local actors are paid (yesss!!!) to steer a nightly crowd of participant-spectators from the arm’s-length entertainment in the cabaret to the hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye action in the casino. I was fascinated by the 4-D script: how does each actor know when to move from one scene to another, with so many going on at once? How often does someone from the audience step into the drama, and then what? Crucially, can this crossover between theater, gaming, and 3-D real-time reality become as engrossing — even addictive — as its virtual counterparts?
What do you think?
Every other time Roo and I have watched a movie together, I’m in the rocking chair and she’s on my lap. Our priorities — our interests in this pastime — barely overlap. Not this time. Kedi is a delightful documentary about the cats of Istanbul: not quite feral, not quite tame, they survive between the cracks. It reached out from the screen and grabbed her.
peering around the dials looking for the tiny people who must be inside.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
You know Facebook now has a link in those dots in the upper right corner where you can flag a story as fake news. The problem is our yearning to believe any story that confirms what we already think. 
Money. The 21st century’s lingua franca for power. If you have it, you’re a winner. If you don’t, you’re a loser. When people squeeze the universe into a ball, as TS Eliot said, when they reduce the interactions between humans 
My favorite comment about that contradiction, that irony, that paradox, is by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He was writing about Spanish, but as part of the international brotherhood of writers, I suspect he was thinking of English, too.
Did 2017 spit you out feeling demoralized, angry, confused, and/or frustrated? Quick, go see Man of La Mancha! Custom Made Theatre’s production of this marvelous show by Dale Wasserman (book), Mitch Leigh (music), and Joe Darion (lyrics) is much more than a nostalgia trip. It’s a rousing cheer for the bright side of humanity: not just love but honor and aspiration.
OK, the production is a bit rustic. Not every supporting actor is excellent, although each of them excels at something. But Edward Hightower was born to play Cervantes/Quixote — swelling each moment with drama, pivoting in a breath from the mad old knight to his pragmatic creator. As the innkeeper, Anthony Aranda also is outstanding, and Rachael Richman makes a convincing Dulcinea. Best of all is the show itself: an inspiring, energizing reminder that human civilization has been stumbling over itself at least since Cervantes wrote this pioneering novel 400 years ago.
Pity the poor 21st-century writer who became a Josephine Tey fan in her/his formative years. Vanity Fair contributor 
Francis Wheen writes:
What a 21st-century writer must contend with, unlike Tey, is a flooded book-publishing market in a culture that’s shifted its focus to television, film, audio, and other content-delivery modes. Commercial publishers rarely consider new authors at all these days, even in genre fiction, but they shrink in horror from a genre fiction book that’s not part of a series. It’s all about marketing. The looming mystery in the publishing world is how to forge that crucial (and preferably lasting) connection between books and readers. And among the core assumptions is that readers’ interest is “not in the book but in its newness” — the same author writing the same kind of story as last time, but with some different characters and a twist in the plot.
We feel like we know and understand the world. But in fact, we live in metaphors. In fact, the sun and moon are not the same size, and stars are not candles in the sky, and a piece of wood isn’t solid. It’s mostly space, dotted with atoms flying faster than a mosquito. We treat it as solid because that’s how we perceive it, and because we have a practical need for it to be solid, as furniture or fuel or whatever.
I spent Thanksgiving week in London and Barcelona. London is gearing up for Brexit, to leave the European Union, and Barcelona’s preparing for an election following the recent vote for their province of Catalunya to secede from Spain. I worried it would be crazy over there, maybe dangerous. But after the US, I felt like I’d left a place of chaotic insanity for a healthy safe atmosphere that I used to define as normal. 
And I look at my cat, fighting the imaginary mice under the living room rug; and I wonder: Are they imaginary? Maybe in her metaphor, she’s keeping me safe from deadly demons.
That’s an allusion to Pronoun’s launch 2 years ago as a rebirth of Vook, an early cutting-edge multimedia e-book platform whose greatest asset turned out to be its data innovations. As 
bought Pronoun a year later, the consensus was that they were after these data assets more than the stylish e-books Pronoun was producing. Although the connection to a major publisher may have been a carrot for aspiring authors, it did not propel them into any lucrative contracts with their new parent.
free services to authors. That changed in 2017; 100% royalties to the author became a sliding scale starting at 65%. Not enough, evidently.
Of course it makes sense for an e-book publisher to aim to be all things to all people. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing hits that mark with a brisk, bland breeziness. Pronoun chose to shoot for a cutesy specificity of tone — Valley Girl meets Lizzie Bennet — and gambits like The Verb, a chatty dashboard-topping distraction with heads such as “Are You a Pantser or a Plotter?” that to me felt more patronizing than professional. Still, they did move the needle toward authors as the core of publishing, a valuable nudge to the industry. I’m sorry to see Pronoun go. I’m sorry to see one more hole blasted in the hull of that noble frigate, the book.