Mary Birdsong "3 Days in the Tub"
At Joe's Pub last night, I saw the remarkable Mary Birdsong's new piece 3 Days in the Tub. It's rough (I think this was only the second time the piece was in front of an audience) but there's a lot of rich material there, and Birdsong is a prolifically creative, remarkably multi-talented tour de force, singing, acting, and impersonating everyone from her own mother to Judy Garland. Joe McGinty, who I've seen about 1000 times in the Losers Lounge (lots of my Losers photos here) was in the band, which was excellent. Birdsong is a great singer, and I hope she will add more music to the show, and I hope that this piece (with a bit of shaping) will find a future life.
Birdsong is of course best known for her hilarious role in Reno 911, but I first saw her in 1996 at a taping at NBC of a comedy sketch show pilot a friend was working on, called "Live on Tape", and later in Martin Short's Fame Becomes Me.
Here's some photos from last night, (technical notes below):
And now for some photography geekery:
I didn't bring my big camera to the show, but instead I tried out my new Nikon P7000 and its excellent "low-noise night mode". The P7000 certainly doesn't take pictures anywhere near as well as my D90 (see those Losers Lounge shots for examples), but it did very well. Somehow, I need to shorten up the shutter speed a bit, and it's too bad it only shoots JPG's in this mode. But given the lighting conditions there, the shots came out pretty well for such a small camera, and needed only a little tweaking in Lightroom and no noise reduction. When I shoot the Losers in the same conditions with my D90, the pictures need a huge amount of post work in Lightroom, but the increased clarity makes it worth it. But considering the P7000 is 1/3 the price of the D90, it did very well. More photos here.