NYMysteries Feb. 16

We’re sitting in tiny $100 seats in the Minetta Lane Theatre on Minetta Lane waiting for Colin Quinn’s show, Red State Blue State to begin. But wait. A vagrant in a hand-me-down shirt, Salvation Army jeans, and a batch of new whiskers moseys onto the set.  Should we call Security? No. It’s Colin Quinn, everyman’s everyman. Quinn dives into the state of the nation. He has a pleasant edge. If you were arguing with him, bar stool to bar stool, he would make you listen even though he’s pro-guns and pro-death penalty . He’s also pro-choice and pro-marriage equality. In other words, he’s a mix. Colin Quinn for vice president on the Howard Schultz ticket! 

Red State Blue State is a one man show with a cast of thousands. Well, a crew of nineteen including Quinn. Edward T. Morris’s set is great. It’s a  back wall of wooden planks with splotches of U. S. states. Quinn has a great riff describing the various qualities of all fifty.  Red State Blue State is 75 minutes of manufactured simplicity and honesty and it works.

 

 

Edward T. Morris’s Red State Blue State set

 

 

 

 

An annual event I dearly love is our Chinese New Year’s dinner at Evergreen. I have all the fun. A wonderful friend from hiking days does all the work. We were twenty four old friends who spun with gusto the gigantic lazy Susan laden with Shanghai-influenced dumplings, noodles, pork buns and more.

 

 

Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder. 

Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a  dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed ?  His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?