She was rapt throughout a 1.5 hour  long play, sitting at the very back of the large theater, with a live orchestra in the pit in front of us.  And yet she attended to the dialogue, looking around for new voices as they piped up, clapping as each song finished, and standing in her seat to join in when the dancing got wild.  My favorite moments were when Li-Li felt the need to join in the chorus of kids who had come out into the audience and were very near our seats (conveniently close to the back exits for easy getaway in case of toddler or mama meltdown), she was standing up on the seat and chanting key lyrics. At one point, they were singing “Sold, Sold” while Li-Li was calling out “Dog, Dog.” Hey, it sounded like “Dog” to me too, at first.

Li-Li then joined the director onstage after the show for a chat:

The lighter side of dark M&M’s

Mars focuses on fun as it adds dark chocolate to its permanent M&M’s collection.

August 29 2006: 8:33 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A new ad campaign launched by the owner of the M&M’s brand aims to make eating dark chocolate a scream.M&M’s is offering 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the return of “The Scream,” a painting by Edvard Munch that was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in 2004.

The campaign accompanies the permanent addition of dark chocolate candies to the M&M’s product line, which was announced earlier this month.”We’ve received tremendous interest from consumers to make M&M’s Dark Chocolate a permanent offering,” Michele Kessler, vice president of marketing at Masterfoods USA, said in a statement.Masterfoods USA owns the M&M’s brand and is a part of closely held food manufacturer Mars, Inc.The campaign aims to bring some fun into the dark chocolate category, which is perceived to be more serious, Masterfoods said.

I have been working with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation software, as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the “medium.” I have shown these pieces in galleries and museums and most recently have produced a book with a DVD (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) as means of presenting these curiosities.~ David Byrne on PowerPoint 

“I love not having an unlimited palette. In that sense it’s like a pencil. You don’t expect to have other typefaces or fonts; you have fun with what’s there,” Byrne said. “Freedom : who needs it?” ~ Byrne at Berkeley