Joe McDonald sends updates to members of my group at The Activity Pit and they are awesome so I’m reprinting today’s message here.
A message from Joe to all members of A Rosen By Any Other Name on The Activity Pit!
Lots of Alison news today, RosenFans, so pay attention!
Alison’s USTREAM show begins tonight at 10pm eastern time. This week’s guests include comedian Myq Kaplan, Kimberly Flynn (creator of the The Activity Pit) and Dustin Goot. Also: a cooking demo!. Here’s the link: http://www.ustream.tv/AlisonRosen
Alison will be also be appearing on CNET’s The 404 this Friday. The internet broadcast begins at 11am eastern. You can watch by going here: http://cnettv.cnet.com/live You’ll need a computer.
And then on Sunday night Alison will appear on the TV Guide channel’s “25 Biggest TV Blunders.” The show will cover “everything from failed talk shows to bad remakes to stars who turned down hit roles.” You’ll need a TV.
In other news, Alison’s parents have entered the Twitterverse! Doctor and Mrs. Rosen are now posting comments on Twitter, so by all means go to their page and click on the FOLLOW button: http://twitter.com/alisonsparents DO IT NOW!
“Shared laughter creates a bond of friendships. When people laugh together, they cease being young and old, teacher and pupils, worker and boss. They become a single group of human beings.” – W. Lee Grant
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.” – William James
“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” – e e cummings
So I’m still playing catch-up here and in terms of games, catch-up is not at all as fun as Noodles.
Last week I was part of a live show called News Distillery at the 92Y Tribeca which I believe Dustin and I talked about on the show last week because you WANT to say 92STREET Y Tribeca but that’s just wrong. Despite the cumbersome nomenclature issues I still got there in time and knocked it out of the park. I mean, I really hit a home run with that one. I mean, I shot and then I scored. Not to brag, but I really got a hole in one. Also…
Wow, my knowledge of sports is sorely lacking because I just sat here staring at the screen trying to come up with more things to say and I fell asleep. Bullseye!
Anyway the show, which was hosted by Faith Salie and featured me and the people in the above photo is sort of like an improv show but using news and current events stories. Before the event I read a 72 page packet of news stories and I’m pretty sure I sneezed and some information about Dubai fell out. In other news, I spoke at length from the stage about The Bachelor and though about three-fourths of the audience hadn’t seen the show I’m told that may have been my finest moment. Not just at that show but ever, in all my years on this earth.
Not really, just at that show.
In other news I have these patches of dry skin on my thumbs and they’re kind of uncomfortable and I need to take a shower and wash my hair which will just exacerbate the problem. It’s a wonder I get out of bed in the morning.
Some of the games were Six Degrees, wherein you must connect two disparate news stories using six headlines, and news haiku, where you write a haiku about a recent story. This was my haiku. My WINNING haiku:
Oh Olympics, You
So cold, fast, racy. But I
Watch The Bachelor
There’s probably some kind of rule about puncutation in a haiku. Also in AN haiku, but mine was read aloud, not written, so just stop ok. Just stop it right there.
All in all it was super fun and I’m glad I got to be a part of it.
So I’m backlogged, blogpost-wise, and don’t know whether to tell you first about the Ustream show last week or about News Distillery which is the live show I was a part of or about other stuff. Hm. Hmmmmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Still undecided.
I’ll just tell you first about last week’s Ustream show. It was super duper fun and super duper is kind of of one of those phrases you need to watch out for because you start saying “super duper” as a joke and then before long you’re saying it in earnest and possibly adding “pooper scooper” on the end of it. A similar thing happened to both my sister and me with “okey dokey” (followed by either “smokey” or “salmanokey”). Luckily we each caught it early. My friend Bret once took pains to strike “easy peasy Japanesey” from his speech. So what I’m saying is this: be careful with super duper because a little goes a long way. That said, the show was super duper fun and here’s the first part and I’m not quite sure the best way to make the episodes available to you guys. I could put them right here or I could link them or I could just tweet that they’re available on the Ustream page itself. So many options.
And then there are the highlight videos too, which I could post here, like when Showalter did the wavey pencil dance or Dustin arrived dressed as “the future of TV” which is funny because my first thought when I saw him was that he’d come from some sort of Wizard of Oz costume party. Or the second fan phone call with Trapp, which was super duper (see, there it is again) awesome. Ugh, options!
Basically I feel like all these amazing moments and clips are coming from the shows and yet I’m not utilizing them correctly or pasting them to my sandwich board and ringing a bell while asking people if they have a moment to spare for being my best friend. Can we talk about that for a second? I pass by people in the street who want to know if I have a moment to spare for various causes which I actually do care about or sympathize with however I’m often in a rush or don’t want to talk to a 12 year old with a clipboard so I just keep walking and yet worry that because I’ve effectively said no, I do not having a moment to protect children from predators or protect animals from abuse or protect passersby from street solicitation it’s as if I disagree with these causes. And yet I don’t. I just don’t have time to talk to YOU about them. You know? Also, I’m very selfish and a world-class asshole. Seriously, you could travel the world meeting the finest assholes the world has to offer and you would come back to me and be like, You, you are a total asshole unlike any other and I would just smile, because it’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time.
But back to options, vis a vis options to put videos on this blog. The funny thing is that I love options however too many of them paralyze me. Options are my hamartia. Or my Achilles heel. Or my siren. Could someone please figure out what the best metaphor is and just write it for me? I’m lazy and kind of hot. Seriously, why is it hot all of a sudden? I don’t mean to be so cranky but do you have to sit there? No, I’m not sitting there RIGHT NOW but I was planning on possibly sitting there later and… okay you know what… I can’t do this right now. Not with you sitting there. Not with a belly full of Brussels sprouts.
If I were to marry a cruciferous vegetable it’d probably be the Brussels sprout, at least that’s how I feel today and how I’ve been feeling lately, however I’m not ready to stand before God and make that kind of promise. Frankly I kind of like things the way they are right now and don’t see why I have to have some silly piece of paper to make the love between me and Brussels sprouts official. Just because my last name is Rosen, not Sprouts, does that mean I love them any less? Just because my half human, half sprout children will have the hyphenated name Rosen-Sprouts, does that make their existence any less legitimate? Just because we aren’t registered at Crate & Barrel and we aren’t marching/rolling down the aisle, does that mean our union is any less real? I’m so Goddamn sick of the nonstop message that unless you’re married to a Brussels Sprout you you aren’t truly standing shoulder to leaf with your partner. And if I have to see another movie where Julia Roberts runs from a Brussels Sprout or Renee Zellweger meets-cute a Brussels Sprout and or oh look, it’s Mark Ruffalo as an underdog who’s also a Brussels Sprout or hey, is that Amy Adams or Isla Fisher acting coquettish opposite a Brussels sprout well I just might puke. You know what, Hollywood, and Belgium, I’m not playing. And neither are my vegetables.
Phew. Felt good to get that off my chest.
And you might find the following hard to believe, but I wasn’t intending to hold forth on my forbidden love in this post. I was going to instead tell you all about the nutty twists and turns, most of them inside my brain, that happened before last week’s show. But now I’m too tired. Basically it boils down to this: because I wear all the hats on my show, sometimes literally, I have trouble sometimes figuring out how to block out the show in terms of when to put guests and when to just talk to you guys alone and when to have Dustin there and when to do the phone interview versus the guest interview and how long each thing should last and whether I should have the guest arrive before I start the show and if so should he/she be sitting off camera or in the background or should I just let the guest in while the show is already going? And let’s say I know that Ustream is going to be putting the show on their front page for a period of time and so I know new sets of eyeballs (preferably in their sockets) will be on the show and I know when that period of time is, should I be getting naked right when they put me on the front page or near the end of the allotted time? Just kidding. There’s no nakedness, you guys! But you get what I’m saying. So basically all this crap is sitting in my already filled-to-the-brim-with-whatnot-and-bric-a-brac-and-Hummels-and-homemade-jam head and add fatigue to it, as was the case last week and I’m unable to figure anything out, resulting in my asking what the drummer of my band used to refer to as “Jesus questions” as in “only Jesus knows the answer to them.” Somehow I doubt even Jesus knows what time my guests should be arriving. If you really want to watch me spin in place, catch me in the midst of a colossal indecision surfeit and send me a text asking me if I want to go to dinner the next day. My inability to figure things out in the present coupled with my inability to figure things out in the future will cause me to be unable to do anything other than stare at my phone. Sometimes I drool.
What was my point though? I don’t really know. I feel like I need some kind of brain enema or brain emetic which is ironic since many people would think this blog and my twitter stream serves that purpose but it doesn’t and my brain feels filled with residue that’s preventing me from expressing myself in any sort of linear fashion.
See what I mean?
In other news, my parents joined Twitter! Except I think it’s really my dad, not my mom, tweeting as @Alisonsparents. Just like it’s more my mom than my dad typing as Alisonsdad on Ustream. Though often it’s the two of them sitting there at the computer together. It’s all very confusing.
Oh and also, also, I’ll be on The 404 on Friday. And Red Eye on Thursday night. And my Ustream show featuring Myq Kaplan and more is Wednesday night. Please watch and RSVP and tell your friends or I’ll be forced to talk more about vegetables and no one wants that.
“I thought it was just like ice hockey but with a broom instead of a hockey stick and shoes instead of skates. But it’s totally not… but doesn’t that sound like it would be a good sport?” Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Oh hi there. Perhaps you saw me on Red Eye tonight and thought, “Who is this mesmerizing vixen and what is she all about?” I SO wish I could tell you over cheese doodles and white wine spritzer but instead I was thinking that you should watch my USTREAM show tomorrow night (or tonight, really) because it’s a ton of fun and I know that you take your fun by the tons.
On the next show my guest will be comedian Michael Showalter. Here’s a video of me interviewing him last year. Might I inform you that I just watched it and it’s as charming as ever? Because I just did. Inform you of that, that is.
You may know him from The State and Stella and Wet Hot American Summer and The Baxter and Michael & Michael Have Issues and a zillion more things including the episode of Sex & The City where Carrie was dumped via a post-it. He was supposed to be on the show last week but because of the insane weather he had to reschedule. (We chatted with him on the phone last week.) I’ve interviewed him a handful of times and each time is like the first time: sort of awkward. But also amazing and afterward I’m a woman. And I never forget it. And I cry.
And I’ve booked some awesome upcoming guests. Some names? Well only because you’re begging: Jim Norton, A.J. Jacobs, Andrew WK, Myq Kaplan. And that’s not all!
Okay so there’s one more photo. Actually there are a lot more, like a zillion more, but there’s one more (above) that I should probably include with the others I posted last night however I have this weird hangup about the right side of my face—I think the left side is more attractive. Unfortunately I didn’t quite realize how strongly I felt about this, in fact I thought maybe it was something I could get over, but now I realize it’s not a fleeting neurosis, it’s a permanent one. This must be how Phantom of the Opera felt!
Perhaps you are thinking, “But many of these photos are taken from the right side,” and yes, this is true, however what I don’t like seeing from that angle is on display more so in the above photo than the others, and yet I also recognize it’s a good photo. Sort of like if you have a shirt which is orange and it’s a perfectly good shirt and you just happen not to like orange.
Sometimes I feel like the world is full of fun house mirrors because the truth is I don’t really know what I look like. My own sense of my looks is very wiggly, and yes I realize wiggly is not exactly the word I’m going for. The first time I ever saw myself on TV I was enormously relieved because I really liked the way I looked—as in I felt I looked a million times more normal than I feared I might—because I think I had this hidden fear that I looked freakish. I realize these feelings aren’t quite in accordance with reality, but they’re stronger and deeper than the visual cues which, like I’m saying, are wiggly. And I’ve always said that if I hadn’t like how I looked on TV that first time I probably wouldn’t have wanted to continue doing it. The handful of times I’ve been unhappy with TV appearances are so unpleasant that if that was the norm–if going on TV was a hardship or something I had to really psych myself up for—like having surgery or going to Kinko’s, say—I’d never put myself through it. Instead it’s validating, which I realize suggests some deep schism or emptiness inside me which is setting me up for never feeling contented later in life, but I’d argue that everyone who puts him or herself in the public eye to a degree is dealing with some combination of these feelings deep inside.
I should add though that I don’t think about this stuff all the time—when I do my Ustream show I often do it without makeup and I trust that I’ll look fine and how I look isn’t really the point anyway. It’s more like all the above feelings are in me somewhere and periodically they flare up.
Also, thank you for all your comments last night! Something weird is happening with the blog where when you click on the permalinks for the photos posts (as opposed to viewing them from the alisonrosen.com/blog URL) all the photos aren’t showing up so I just want to make sure when you indicated which ones you liked you were seeing all of them. There should have been 11 photos in all (6 in the red sweater and 5 in the black shirt).
Let me know if this changes anything!
And yes I realize there is a world outside of me and my face however I’ve spent some time in it and frankly: not that impressed.
Oh and in other news, I’m going to get my dad on Twitter! Should he be JohnRosen, PapaRosen, AlisonsDad or something else?
Oh and also also, I watched Up In The Air last night. I liked it! And then I was thinking that for most people it’s probably this weird bit of trivia that George Clooney was in Facts of Life however for me, since I’m freakishly well acquainted with FOL, when I see him onscreen I just think, “Well, good for George The Handyman!”
Here are more shots from my photoshoot with Eric Fischer (including the two I originally posted). Which ones are your favorites? Let me know which ones I should have him retouch and make awesomer (I’m hoping he’ll give me a cleft chin, goatee and blond highlights.)