The Abbey Gets Racy

I know it's really just a soap opera with classy accents and longer skirts, but I'm really, really into Downton Abbey. I received the first two seasons on DVD for Christmas and Ed and I blew through them in an embarrassingly short time. I, who often find my eyelids drooping around 9:00 P.M. these days, stayed up breathlessly to watch the last two episodes of Season Two only to discover to my horror that I was wide awake when the final credits started rolling at 1:00 in the morning with work only a few hours away.

Typically I purchase tickets for Selected Shorts series only when authors I admire will be speaking, but when I saw that there was a performance coming up called "A Night at the Abbey" I booked immediately. The four stories chosen had some of the same themes that run through the show, and the icing on the cake for me was that Jim Dale, narrator of the Harry Potter audiobook series, would be reading one of the stories. Dale's voice has accompanied me up and down the state of California and back and forth across the country on countless road trips, encouraged me while doing large cleaning jobs, and kept me company during marathon baking sessions. I've listened to each book several times and am endlessly impressed by his talents. So it was with great eagerness that I took my seat next to Ed in Symphony Space last night.

Jim Dale, standing uncharacteristically still

As always, the selections themselves and the performances were great. First, we heard an excerpt from the novel The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton read by actress Clea Alsip. It's about an American heiress who travels to England to get married and her experiences as a sudden member of the aristocracy, so Alsip had no need to put on much of an accent, though she did do a nice job with her British mother-in-law and husband. Next, we heard an excerpt from Below Stairs, a memoir written by former kitchen maid and cook Margaret Powell and read by actress Jayne Houdyshell in a delicious cockney accent. I was struck by the humor she brought to the reading, because when I focused on just the words themselves I don't know that I would have found the book to be all that entertaining. I'm not sure I want to read it on my own; I'd rather have Ms. Houdyshell come read it to me. I wonder what she's doing on Friday. B.D. Wong, also our host, did a masterful job reading Saki's "The Reticence of Lady Ann," which is so funny that I had to link to it. Wong comes off as a bit awkward when he's just winging it, but give him a page to read and he metamorphasizes into a spellbinding pro. Finally, Jim Dale read a delightful piece called "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum" by P.G. Wodehouse. When I listened to the Harry Potter books, I always sort of pictured Dale sitting on a stool with a novel held in one hand before him as he read; he seems to have a rather dry sense of humor. To the contrary, he's a dynamic performer who gesticulated so enthusiastically that I thought he was going to knock over the podium on several occasions. He waved his hands, bobbed up and down, and seemed to virtually bubble with enthusiasm. It was a great performance, but a bit disappointing as well because this story was only the first of a two-part series called "Jeeves in the Springtime" and I felt it ended with a bit of a cliffhanger. Fortunately, the sequel is available online for free, so my lunch hour today is booked solid as of now.

There were two scheduled additions to the program that came as a surprise to those of us in the audience. One was an appearance by Chip Kidd, designer of book covers (B.D. Wong: "Think of every book cover you've ever looked at and liked and it's probably his."), author, snappy dresser, and very funny dude. Kidd regaled us with a reading from an author he dubbed "the Rachael Ray of her day, only with class." It was from a "cookery" book and explained, in unbelievably dramatic and pretentious language, what to serve and what not to serve, how to make mint jelly and turtle soup, etc. I wish I knew how to find the text so I could share it; I've never seen Ed laugh so hard in a Selected Shorts performance. The other feature was a screening of an episode of a spoof on Downton Abbey called Downton Sixbey that runs on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. Its writer, A.D. Miles, introduced it and warned us that it was a bit more, er, scatological than the folks at the original Abbey would ever dare to be. He was right, but it was still pretty funny. The name, by the way, comes from the studio where it is filmed: 6B.

The artist, who likes to wear a mustache while topless

There was one unscheduled addition to the program that came as a surprise to those of us in the audience as well as those on- and backstage. As A.D. Miles walked up to the microphone, a woman in a hat stood up near the front of the theater. She said something too quiet for me to hear, and she was pointing either a digital camera or a cell phone at Miles. "This," said Miles, "Is the most awesome thing I've ever seen. There is a topless woman in the audience." I couldn't see too well, but Ed confirmed that this was indeed the case. She repeated her words a little louder and then Miles repeated them into the mic, something about "topless shock syndrome." "OK, thanks for that. Topless Shock Syndrome," said Miles, then launched, rather professionally for a comedy writer, into his introduction as though nothing had happened. Several theater personnel fluttered around the row where the woman was seated, but she didn't seem to be causing any more disturbance, was possibly fully clothed again, and was seated dead center so that removing her would have caused minor havoc. In the end, they chose not to act and the rest of the program proceeded smoothly.

Of course I googled "topless shock syndrome" the second the show was over. Apparently this woman is an artist who tries to shock people out of their misconceptions by showing up in public places and at performances without a shirt on. She's writing a book about her experiences, too. Or something. Surrounded by the stellar literary and performance skills at Symphony Space, I have to say that I found her "art" shocking alright, though perhaps not for the reasons she hoped.