Monday, May 16, 2011

One Month Til Bloomsday!

Today is Monday, May 16 - one month to go until Radio Bloomsday 2011 is broadcast live on WBAI 99.5FM in NYC and on KPFK in Los Angeles. Preparations are well underway on both coasts and several countries. In addition to our live performances, we have several pre-recorded segments as well. Last week, we recorded three fantastic actors at the KPFK studios in Los Angeles. Actor Marc Singer makes his Radio Bloomsday debut this year. Marc performs an excerpt from the Eumeus episode as a drunken Leopold Bloom supports an even drunker Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin on their way home after a wild night. Bloom and Dedalus have spent the night carousing in a whorehouse where all of Blooms scatological fantasies were realized. He does a wickedly funny turn narrating the end of this very long day. Last years listeners will remember hearing Charles Busch perform the infamous Madame Bella Cohen practicing her sadomasochism on our heros.



Paul Dooley and Bob Odenkirk who both performed Bloom monologues last year, joined forces brilliantly this year to record several of the Questions and Answers from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses. Written in the style of Catholic Catechism, this penultimate chapter of Ulysses consists of 309 questions and answers about the main characters in particular and the universe in general. This episode, known for its relentless details, pinpoints Bloom and Molly's location with lattitude and longitude, and includes an extremely long list of men who might have slept with Molly.

The poetic quality of Ithaca is impossible to ignore, however, in spite of its Catechetical format. It is in this chapter, that Bloom and Stephen stepping outside for a piss look up at the sky and see, "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" and a more detailed description of dueling streams of urine you would be hard pressed to find anywhere. Bob as Bloom compares women to the moon. Paul as Bloom remembers his favorite memories of his daughter Milly before kissing "the plump yellow smellow melons" of Molly's rump, a touching gesture that so enrages his wife as we will hear during her following two and a half monologue, performed in its entirety one month from today.

But first, I will leave you with Molly's outrage as another amazing actor, Radio Bloomsday regular, Jim Fletcher is on his way over for a rehearsal.

any man thatd kiss a womans bottom
Id throw my hat at him after that
hed kiss anything unnatural
where we havent 1 atom of any kind of expression in us
all of us the same
2 lumps of lard
before ever Id do that to a man
pfooh the dirty brutes

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