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I was sitting in my room at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, having just gotten a job working for a film producer, not knowing that in a few minutes I would officially go insane.

This past week I had the privilege to perform some songs by the composer Gustav Mahler. His music has spoken to me since I first discovered it while in college. The reason for this sometimes hard to articulate; his choice of words, musical phrases, the joy of singing some of these exquisite lines. I cannot justly put words to the intangible.

"We feigned a normal life. We tried to forget that there was an impenetrable fence all around."

For many, The King and I is remembered as a lush, exotic, and large-scale musical about the improbable romance between a British school teacher and the King of Siam. But in actuality, this musical is a battle between sexism and racism (and no one wins).

Patricia Zohn

Into the Schindler House, sacred to modernist architecture, came Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly and the LA Dance Project. The choreography, organized around the theme of time, the clock and domesticity is wholly analogous to the original architectural concept, since Schindler based the house on a "pinwheel" plan. "Everyone has an internal clock," says Kelly. "What does 12 feel like to you?"

The London Young Vic's revival production of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge is a mesmerizing theater experience that echoes Greek tragedy as Athenian theatergoers must have felt it.

There is much to be said about taking a show-biz sentimental journey, especially when your guide is the great tap dancer/choreographer Maurice Hines.

No sooner than the Broadway revival of A. R. Gurney's Sylvia closes, in which an actress plays a dog, than Mac Wellman's The Offending Gesture, opens, at the Connelly, in which not one but two actresses play dogs.

Only in Key West, at the Annual Literary Seminar, will you find as many luminaries in the audience as those illuminating the stage. The theme of this year's Seminar is the examination of the short story. The authors invited to speak were not exclusively short story writers. But all had engaged in the art form.

With a new year brings a new festival season. The Gem and Jam Festival in Tuscon, Arizona will be once again offering a Los Angeles pre-party on Friday, January 15th.

One day, I arrived early and made my way to a booth upstairs where one fellow was sitting. Neither of us said a word for five or ten minutes. Then, to break the silence, I asked him if it was the first time he was there. He laughed and said, "no!"

But the numbers aren't delivered with show-stopping pizazz, and intentionally so. The rhythm of these familiar tunes is sped up just a notch, so that they're tossed off with familiar ease, rather than lingering on the comic lines or "selling" them to the audience.

Who doesn't love those great old kitschy neon signs that used to grace Main Streets all across America? Everyone, right? Well at least those of us who are baby boomers or beyond will remember what it was like driving almost anywhere at night and being basked in that colored neon glow.

I think of his family today, mourning someone they knew and loved while a world of strangers feels their own grief for whichever incarnation of David Bowie spoke to them.