The Aunties watched Baby Cianna tonight while Amy and I sat down at the historic Patterson Theater for the first show of Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey's Lovers and Haters Valentine's Day Cabaret [ }rixie interview here ]. This is the first time we've seen Trixie & Monkey's act in front of a live audience. We were enchanted by the acrobatic acts involving the trapeze, big feather fans, a giant fabric condom and a tiki-themed fiberglass volcano. Special guest Miss Dirty Martini from NYC astounded the audience with her artful balloon-pop striptease, and we also witnessed her twirling tasseled pasties! My history video played smoothly with just a flash of DVD menu at the beginning. It was gratifying to hear the audience crack up at all the right places in the video. Playwright Dahlia Kaminsky played the show's hostess Dolores, who was the keeper of Cupid the dog. Dolores read love letters and generally engaged the audience between acts. Vaudeville Accordionist Full Bladder delivered humorous musical interludes, and DJ Bump expertly kept the musical pipeline full of arousing music. The 90-minute show flew by in a wink of the eye leaving us hooked on Trixie & Monkey, and ready to see more shows in the future.

- mike lee - baltimore

Just an hour before the Trixie show, it was discovered that the theater's DVD player would stop part way through the video. So we're up in the projection booth swapping our player in. With a few minutes to showtime, everything shoud be OK. There's no stopping Trixie!

- mike lee - baltimore

- mike lee - baltimore

Across an ocean, people are well into their day. Here on the dark side of the pond, my daughter has decided she wants to start her day too. Oy.

- mike lee - baltimore

Keri and Adam (2) came over this morning to rehearse the final timings of our short video on the history of the charaters in their neo-burlesque act, Trixie Little & The Evil Hate Monkey. For maximum flexibility, I assembled the sequence of Photoshop-composited images and caption slates in PowerPoint. Then we used PowerPoint-to-DVD to combine the timed PowerPoint slides with an MP3 audio track for burning to a DVD. We all giggled through the dry runs, especially when the photo of Uncle Tosso and Muddles appeared (4). And the background music Keri chose was perfectly appropriate.

The three-minute video, which I may post to my main blog next week, will debut during one of tomorrow night's performances of the Valentine's Day Cabaret with NYC's Miss Dirty Martini at The Creative Alliance. Amy and I will be there sans baby for the 7:30pm show. The stationary trapeze and a giant volcano awaits.

- mike lee - baltimore

February 9th is the date of this year's Chinese New Year. It's the Year of the Rooster.

Before I left work today, I posed Lucky Cat, which is supposed to draw wealth to a business, over three boxes of fortune cookies at our office snack spot. This is on the heels of today's Mardi Gras cake.

Tonight, we have a family dinner out, and Sunday we might catch a parade in D.C. or Baltimore. This year's celebrations are special because Cianna is old enough at 15 months to begin to understand what's going on. She also got her very own Lucky Cat, which he promptly hugged and kissed.

- mike lee - langley park, md

Over the next few nights, I'm doing the final compilation of the slideshow history of Baltimore's neo-burlesque superhero Trixie Little. All of the images will be burned onto a DVD to be shown at the beginning of this Saturday's Valentine's Day Cabaret at the Creative Alliance.

Here are some of the Photoshop layers for an illustration of Trixie flying on a trapeze. The original photo (1) was shot in Trixie's studio a few weeks ago. I cut a pen tool path around Trixie (2), which is shown here as an alpha channel mask. Then I could easily cut Trixie to a new layer, and place a blurred background image of blue clouds behind her (3). Since the slideshow is supposed to look like a black and white silent film, I did a mode change on the image to colorize it in sepia tone (4). To give the image a aged feel, I created a mask (5) that would let me darken the edges of the frame for the final image. (6).

It's good to know I can still navigate around Photoshop pretty quickly. The hard part of this project (besides the tedious work of making the masking paths in Photoshop) was doing the photo shoots with live actors and also rounding up all of the extra prop elements to photograph as add-in elements.

- mike lee - langley park, md

Atomic Books has a shipment of the Neo-Kaiju Project vinyl action figures. Neo-Kaiju stands for "new Japanese monster" and is a series of figures designed by U.S. artists in Japanese style.

The plastic egg opens easily to reveal the main figure body, plastic parts in three bags and a tiny catalog booklet (2). Assembly was easy--the parts are simply pushed together. And the figure pictured here, Pupik by Gary Baseman even fits back into its egg (4). You like? You buy!

- mike lee - baltimore

It looks like you could go to most any carwash to pick up free "Support Our Troops" or American flag magnetic stickers that have been blown off by the water jets.

- mike lee - baltimore