Hello Readers
For the past year, I’ve been working to develop the Facebook group Cold Reads/Online (CR/O), through which anyone can read with others anywhere via video chat rooms. I announced it it in a lengthy post here last April 19, and featured it on the home page. Since then I’ve read nearly 200 plays with 50-60 friends in nine states coast to coast, three to a dozen at a time.
When I say anyone, I’m reaching out to you (if you use Facebook). Here’s the schedule for the next two weeks. If there’s a play you’d like to read, click on the meme to display the CR/O Events page, select the play, and click “Going.” The chat room link is is the details. You’ll get a script when you show up.
There’s no commitment. Come when you can and feel the urge; it doesn’t cost a dime.
Join the Movement
My vision for CR/I is of hundreds, then thousands of local cold reads groups world-wide, whose members all invite their friends until play reading becomes a popular free time pastime. This blog, for now, is the hub that connects these groups together, and urge you join and share your thoughts and doings.
Cold Reads/Online
Likewise, CR/O is free and open to all people anywhere, and is the medium I and other members use to post our reads. Anyone, anywhere, can sign up to read. Inevitably, as more people come on board, more than a dozen readers will sign up and the game begins to disintegrate. At that point another member steps up as host and opens another room.
Typical American Pastimes
card games, board games, party games, computer games, TV, church, sports, art, movies, music, dance, and other forms of literature.
Once you’ve become a member, I encourage you to start your own group, invite your friends to join and read.
Update
While sections in the blog on the benefits of reading plays remain incomplete, the rest, while probably overwritten, is ready for public consumption. Any comments and suggested edits are will be greatly appreciated.
Otherwise, I’ve used this site primarily to upload all the scripts I’ve read and more (nearly 400) to the Catalog, which are available for download, free of charge. Please feel free.
Beginning today, I’m going to start posting my weekly two-week CR/O schedule here, along with occasional invitations to my reads. Check us out.
Rambling
I’m continually amazed (after all these years) by the pertinence of plays throughout western history to specific circumstances in the 21st Century.
Yesterday morning five CR/O readers (Steve Howard in California, Frank Siegle and Roger Arnold in Kansas, my daughter Hallie, and myself, in North Carolina) enjoyed the first act of Jean Girardoux’s comic masterpiece, The Madwoman of Chaillot, a sharply hilarious satire on the evils of capitalism. [You can read Act Two with us next week.]
The first takes place at the sidewalk cafe Chez Francis, where a group of promoters plot to tear up Paris in order to unearth the oil which a prospector believes he has located in the neighborhood. These grandiose plans come to the attention of the Countess Aurelia, who is ostensibly not normal in her mind, but who is soon shown to be the very essence of practical worldly goodness and common sense. She sees through the crookedness of the prospector and insists that the world is being turned into an unhappy place by the thieves and those who are greedy for worldly goods and power. To thwart their plans, she and her poor friends devise a plot, which is the subject of Act Two.
We were all struck by the resemblance of the President of the bogus corporation to former U. S. President Donald Trump, whose sociopathic treatment of the indigent citizens of Chaillot mirrors that of Trump’s mistreatment of Latinos at our southern border, and that of his cohorts to the coterie of Republican crooks who even now kowtow to him.
On the other hand, the sentiments of the Madwoman seem to presage Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Cold Reads/International 