Sunday, May 18, 2008

The Robertson ladies love to blog


Blair traveled to Louisville, KY this past week to spend some time with her family and to meet her baby cousin Anna. In town from North Carolina, Anna found some time in her busy schedule to visit with her eager cousin and Great Uncle and Aunt. Blair felt as though she knew Anna because of the fabulous blog Anna keeps, chronicling her day to day life as a newborn. You too can see what Anna is up to at www.robertsonbaby.blogspot.com.
She is an absolute delight and meeting her was the highlight of the visit. Anna's Dad, Rev. Ben G Robertson IV will be con-celebrating the wedding service in January. Having been a reader in Ben and Ellen's (yes there are two Ellen Robertson's one tall and one short....try to figure out which is which) wedding in 2002, I am so thrilled to have Ben be a part of my wedding and to have Anna in attendance. She will have just celebrated her 1st birthday....we will have to think of a special treat to give her when she gets here!

Monday, May 12, 2008

You are no longer listed as in a relationship

I've been meaning to post this blog for about a week, and with Blair nagging me every other minute I figured I'd better get on it. A little back story:

My best friend, and groomsman, Ira has a play in this year's Sketchbook Festival. Collaboraction, a Chicago theatre company, hosts a festival of new works every summer. I participated last year and will again this year...in Ira's play no less. (It's at the Steppenwolf garage theatre if you're interested...and you should be) The play - "Dated: a cautionary tale for facebook users" - deals with a young man who finds out that his relationship with his girlfriend is over via facebook (a social networking site these crazy youngsters use today to keep tabs on one another). It's a good mix of humor, tragedy and...erm...poignancy....? Sure, that'll do.

I play the young man and Ira, always considerate of the tech crew's time and energy (tech took over 3 hours yesterday for a 9 minute play) has written in a ridiculous number of projected slides, video clips and images from facebook, myspace and livejournal to help tell the story. We knew that we would need to use my facebook page with my picture for many of the images, but we needed to find a willing female to play my girlfriend. Blair readily volunteered to let us use her page as well. This presented an interesting dilemma: we'd have to cancel our relationship to get the frame shots we needed to help tell the story.

We were both really excited, both sharing a very dark sense of humor from time to time, and thought it'd be a lark to spend a half hour or so letting all of facebook think our relationship had ended. Even typing that right now sounds about 80% less cool that it once did, but we thought it'd be a laugh, as facebook tells all of your friends publicly when your relationship status changes (highly considerate of it with such delicate information).

So Ira comes over to Blair's place on a Wednesday evening during our Top Chef time (we're big geeks) to get still captures of our respective facebook and myspace pages before, during, and after we digitally cancel our relationship. What followed was a very unnerving forty-odd minutes. We thought the process would be quite simple, but it wasn't.

First of all, the character's name is Guy...not Jürgen, so we'd have to change my name first. This proved difficult as facebook is a little more toffee-nosed than myspace and won't let you post nicknames. "Guy" was a no-go, so we tried "Guy Smith" and were told there would be a waiting period while facebook verified this. Just to give you an idea of how long that verification process can take: this took place almost two weeks ago, and only a few days ago did my name magically change to Guy Smith for a few hours on facebook. Frustrated by that, Ira decided he'd just photoshop over my name.

Next: the cancelling of the relationship. Again, Guy is not engaged to his girlfriend, so when Blair ended our relationship instead of the desired "Guy is no longer listed as in a relationship," we got "Jürgen is no longer listed as engaged." So we had to restart our relationship as just "relationship," and then cancel it again. Splitting focus between all these problems and Top Chef was proving a mild annoyance but it was milder still when compared with the sense of disquiet growing inside of me.

The laugh I thought I'd have at our relationship being cancelled on facebook wasn't coming. What was coming was the unease I felt at all of facebook being able to access information about my relationship status. Though there were plenty of people I cared about who would get the joke and I wouldn't mind explaining the situation to, there are plenty more people I'd really rather not know about this. My profile isn't set to private so I can be searched by anyone in the area and from random theatre acquaintances to crazy exes I really didn't want the possibility of a rumor mill starting. I started getting very anxious for the whole thing to be over, and breathed a great sigh of relief when we finally recommitted ourselves...digitally.

So that's that...take from it what you will. We laugh about it now, but more about the surprise of feeling exposed. It was a wild thing to experience and hopefully it'll inform the play more when it opens....this weekend. Come and see it.

Below are the links for Sketchbook and the Steppenwolf box office respectively.

http://collaboraction.typepad.com/sketchbook/2007/01/post.html
http://www.steppenwolf.org/boxoffice/productions/index.aspx?id=453

Things we Love: Wine, Cheese and Birthdays!

On Wednesday May 7th our dear friend (and groomsman) Rick celebrated his 42nd birthday! His wife (and bridesmaid) Roni hosted a wine and cheese soiree in his honor. What a lovely time it was! Many gathered in their new condo and sampled cheese from all over and a variety of wines. Rick's mom snapped this photo of us. Jurgen doesn't like it, but I think he is just being hard on himself. Thank you for including us in the festivites Roni and Rick!

The Group!