The Traveling Players Ensemble

This is the first of what is hopefully a series of posts about what everyone is up to this summer.*

Last Friday evening, Burke.Word fled the sweltering sidewalks of DC for the theater among cool grass and shady trees near Great Falls.  Close to the banks for the Potomac under the setting sun, three acting troupes from the Traveling Players Ensemble performed 2 plays by Moliere (The Miser and The Learned Ladies), as well as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

TPE is a non-profit professional theater company whose mission is to “bring great theater into the great outdoors.”  As part of its mission it has a summer camp for kids where they learn, produce, rehearse and perform plays in a theater of trees and grass.   TPE also promotes the ‘ensemble’ as a way to teach and promote creativity and community.  As the evening went on, including the finale which was a riverside s’more fest, you saw how close and supportive the kids, and counselors and staff had become.

A number of Burke kids played big roles this summer at TPE, both on and behind the stage, including Jeffrey (’10), Lawrence (’11), Ellie (’12), Julianne (’16) and Kate (’16).  The good news is that there are more performances, including Love’s Labor Lost, which begins on July 27.  You can find the schedule and locations here.

You can also see lots more photos at BurkePix.

* Are you doing something cool this summer?  Yoga Camp, or a cruise, or trip to Sweden, perhaps (you know who you are)?  Then you need to do a little show & tell for the rest of the class.   We’d love to hear what you’ve been up to!  You can share your summer stories and photos with Burke.Word by sending them to ramaz57 [at] gmail.com and we’ll get them posted to the site.  Thanks!

Shows are only $15 and there is really so much great work to see.

There are tons of reviews of the shows at great places like:

THE WASHINGTON POST fringe reviews

FRINGE AND PURGE – the City Paper’s Review Site.

and DC THEATRE SCENE – a great site for all theatre reviews.

The Festival only comes around once a year – and is a great chance to see theatre cheep – and see things you won’t ever see during the regular theatre season in DC or elsewhere.

visit www.capitalfringe.org for more info or to purchase tickets. Or you can stop by the box office at 6th/NY ave NW!

Click image to enlarge…

You can read all of The Organization Comics by clicking here

The Organization is Copyright ©2010 Jeffrey Robb

Sam R. might recognize this

After attending Burke’s recent graduation ceremony, I came across the commencement address that Jeff Bezos gave this Spring at Princeton.  Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon.  When he started work on Amazon, most people didn’t know what the Internet was.  Even the people who were aware of the Internet thought that he was crazy to think that people would want to buy books with their computers – especially since the majority of people didn’t have computers.  Even after Amazon started to get some traction, people again thought Bezos was nuts to keep raising huge gobs of money to fund exponential growth of its infrastructure and product offerings.

In hindsight it’s easy to see that Bezos is a uniquely smart, creative, thorough person who had a brilliant, well thought-out idea.  But, he told Princeton’s graduates that these characteristics weren’t the keys to building Amazon.  For Bezos the truly important and lasting thing was that he made the choice to start Amazon, even though it meant leaving a very successful job.  Our individual gifts aren’t really what make us who we are.  They don’t define what we stand for, they don’t point to where we want to go, they don’t leave an enduring map of where we have been.  Our choices do.

He closes his speech by asking:

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Good questions for graduates of all ages.  Read the whole thing: We Are What we Choose.

One: Burke.Word offers a lot more freedom to the strip in terms of space and subject matter. Knowing that the Cageliner comes out only four or five times a year (not including the Valentines issue) gives a cartoonist a headache when it comes time to decide what your strips are going to be about. Are they going to connect at all? Are they going to be meaningful and timely? You can’t go and write a comic about the student outrage over the grinding ban when you know that people will be reading it two months later, when the whole issue has died down. Well, you can, but then people will read it and roll their eyes, muttering to themselves about how the Cageliner should just run Garfield reprints if they want a comic so badly.

Two: They promised that they would give me the whole back page for one of my comics and then did not deliver. And no one reneges on a promise to The Organization without facing the consequences!

Three: I kind of graduated.

So, yeah. Here’s the first all new, all totally rad The Organization comic made especially for Burke.Word. As a tribute to our new home, we’ve started out with a special Edmundification featuring three out of five members. Enjoy!

[Click image to embiggen]

You can read all of The Organization Comics by clicking here.

The Organization is Copyright ©2010 Jeffrey Robb

Contact me for more info – coryryanfrank@gmail.com

The festival opens in just ONE DAY!!!

Rumor has it that google is developing a site to rival facebook – check out the article here on cnn.com

Have you heard about the google.cn drama? Basically, China has asked google to censor it’s search results, something that goes against everything google stands for. You can read about the latest in that saga here.

In addition to the rumors about a facebook rival, google is also in development for a music download service.The rumors are pretty huge – and when the wall street journal is reporting it, it must be true.

also check out: 10 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Google

And Finally…Like all those fun google Logo images that happen throughout the year? Want to see them all? Well then you should click popeye and check em out!

There is so much info our there about google – so go google it (ba dum ch)

Ever thought to yourself – I wonder what it would be like if we owned two of them, and created a dance piece using the two scissor lifts?

Well, now you don’t have to wonder anymore, here’s what it might look like: