Scott Langdon has recorded his wonderful one-man show of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — you may have seen it two years ago at Princeton United Methodist Church — and the CD is available for $13.95. 

Even better, he is doing the show live on Friday and Saturday, December 2 and 3 in East Brunswick. He pairs with Lynn Elson for her version of  “Cricket on the Hearth,” to complete the evening.

 The venue is the Hammarskjold Middle School, 200 Rues Lane, East Brunswick, a 30-minute drive from Route 1 at the Washington Road circle, via Ridge Road, Cranbury South River Road, and Cranbury Road.

 It is a Now Theatre Company production and tickets ($20 or $12 for students and seniors) are available online or at the door. It’s a favorite!

So much to do, so little time.

I probably can’t attend any of the meetings listed here, but my fave calendar item would be the TEDx salon today. Wednesday, November 30, 6:30 to 9 p.m., at the Princeton Public Library.

A TEDx salon — with 3 1/2 hours — lets participants slow down and really dig into the subject. How many times do we get to do that?

This salon will explore how to conquer time in the 21st century — how science can move at the speed of Twitter. “We can use the Internet to build tools to solve the most challenging intellectual problems,” says celebrity speaker Michael Nielsen. Nielsen will talk about Open Sourcing Science.

Chris Leyon, of Princeton’s Linux User’s Group, will also speak. Register for $25 including dessert and a copy of Nielsen’s book, Reinventing Discovery. A $7 student ticket does not include the book.

Three events on Thursday, December 1, compete for attention.

Morgan Lewis Bockius hosts a panel on personalized medicine at 502 Carnegie Center on Thursday, December 1, from 6 to 8 p.m.. Geert Cauwenbergh, founder of Barrier Therapeutics and now managing partner of Aramis Pharma, will be one of the panelists. Cost $15. Register here. 


An entrepreneurship event, a lesson in negotiating, on December 1 at 7 p.m. sponsored by  Princeton University’s Keller Center offers a good (free) place to listen and network. The Keller Center also hosts Kef Kasdin, VeeCee from Battelle Ventures, to speak on entrepreneurial women on December 7 at 5 p.m. 

Also on December 1 at 6 p.m., Lorelei Fenton aims to prove that positive thinking is profitable, and she follows it up on December 4.

See Princeton’s own “business” version of Dancing with the Stars on Wednesday, December 7 at noon, when NJEN’s panel hears three pitches — one wins the prize.

ACG meets on Tuesday, December 6, at 6 p.m. to hear Barry Rabner, CEO of the Princeton Healthcare System.

Any Princeton Comment readers who attend an event and want to comment about it — be my guest! Write a guest entry on this blog. Just email it to me and I’ll post it.

And may we all try to slow down to absorb the wonder of this season.

The day after Thanksgiving, and, no, we did not take the opportunity to “engage with grace,” as per the previous post. Next time I’ll practice what I preach.

But we did see the Nutcracker, a la Rochester City Ballet, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and Nazareth College’s Bach Children’s Chorus at today’s matinee in Eastman’s Theater’s opera house, named  Kodak Hall. The orchestra conducted by Michael Butterman was fabulous — I heard so many inner lines I’ve never heard before — and the sets were nice, the costumes scrumptious. Though I didn’t really intend to write about this performance, it was enough different, from any of the more than dozen Nuts that I’ve ever seen, that it’s worth a report.

One always wonders about regional ballet performances, so let’s get the “was it embarrassing” question out of the way. In no respect. Though the 24-year-old company (directed by Jamey Leverett) imported excellent guest artists for Sugar Plum and Cavalier, it would not have needed to. Its own principals — I saw Tara Lally, Courtney Catalana, and Adam Kittelberger in lead roles — seemed quite capable. The corps for Waltz of the Flowers was drawn from the 11 company members and eight apprentices, while the Snow corps also included some from a group of 16 younger dancers, labeled “trainees.”

What made it a little different included the additions in Act II — a British Toffee female soloist, dancing to veddy British-sounding music, and an Italian ice trio — plus three triple-cast sets of kids representing more than two dozen dance studios. In addition to 20 cherubim, a line of tiny red-and-green-clad Holly Sprites and another line of pages, brandishing horns, occupied the stage for a combined total of perhaps 90 seconds but think of the ticket sales they garnered!

What made it a lot different was a “Christmas Sprite,” the magical sidekick of the more-than-usually-ubiquitous Herr Drosselmayer, played by the charismatic Fidel Orillo, the company’s ballet master. Wired to fly like Peter Pan (as in Flying by Foy), Kelsey Schneider cast the spell that causes the tree to grow and the other spells as well.

As for the first act party scene — I have never, never in all my born days, seen such naughty children and such ineffective parents. Like a Breughel painting, so much mayhem happening with both kids and adults, everyone upstaging everyone else, that you didn’t know where to look. Cameron Thomas played Fritz with pathological glee, a rascal verging on bully. Seems to me a little less nastiness and a little more gentility could be just as funny.

But hey, I’m a grandma, and the kids will love it.

This week’s U.S. 1 cover story has Doug Dixon’s tech toys picks (will the Kindle Fire be the Next Big Thing? 


Maybe you went to Dixon’s talk at the Princeton Regional Chamber breakfast on Wednesday morning. 


If not, here’s another chance to learn about what tech toys to buy — a Gadgets Galore session at the Princeton Public Library this Friday, November 18, at 1 p.m. Did you know you can borrow tech toys to try them out?

Eiko & Koma make beauty from stillness and slowness. In 1980 at the American Dance Festival Eiko (she goes by her first name) taught students how to walk ever more slowly so that they could show, in their bodies, the loveliness surrounding them. In a workshop in Philadelphia in the ’90s she showed how to place your foot on the floor so it looked like you were treading delicately on tiny flowers. I found that crossing a room while walking with such care requires at least 30 minutes. The avant-garde technique of Eiko and her partner is rooted in the work of Kazuo Ohno and Mary Wigman, but it is all their own.

Eiko Otake gives a free lecture — and, presumably a demonstration — at Princeton University on Tuesday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the Patricia and Ward Hagan ’48 Dance Studio at 185 Nassau Street. Alas, I can’t be there but I can promise an unforgettable experience. In my mind’s eye (and in the soles of my own feet) I can envision what she calls “Delicious Movement.” Eiko & Koma also offer a Delicious Movement workshop at New York’s Japan Society on December 1 from 1 to 3 p.m.


Photo by Eiko. 

Here’s some good news about Rita McGrath, a Columbia biz-school professor and author who spoke at the Princeton Regional Chamber last year. She has just been named one of the world’s top 20 business thinkers. Discovery Driven Growth is the latest of her books.

Well, we here in Princeton knew that she was oh-so-smart all along. I’m especially fond of her advice to “fail fast and fail cheap.” To learn, you’ll need to fail – but if you fail fast, and fail cheaply, you can gain a significant edge over more timid competitors.