INTERROGATION (III): PROJECT 365

The lovely and talented Miriam Daly is Irving Berlin's great-great-niece. Every day she writes a song and takes a photo, and she will be presenting a special performance of these daily musical reveries under the rubric of Project 365 at the special Pretentious edition of Brick-a-Brac on Sunday, June 3. (More information, as always, is available at bricktheater.com/pretentious) She has submitted to our rigorous questioning with the following results:

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
I sing words like "cyclooxygenase." ("Ibuprofin" 11/09/06)

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Obviously, one of the influences on my work is the Xiuhpohualli. I'm very into time constraints and numbers, and the Xiuhpohualli was an Aztec calendar cycle constructed from a count of 365 days.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote "For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture." Explicate.
Not only can an artiste with short arms never make a fine gesture, they also have a hard time reaching the pull-chain to turn on ceiling fans.

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
I will alienate my audience by never singing a song about heartbreak or true love, but may instead sing about the history of maraschino cherries, or the inflatable Union Rat. My audience will also be alienated by the fact that they will get to choose some songs, but will have to choose BLINDLY - just by date, without seeing the picture or knowing the title.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
Hermits like me don't just have one enemy - the entire outside world and all the other shows included in that world are full of craziness and chaos that we'd prefer to avoid.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
"Thank you. Without your support I would have never received this award. Which I guess makes me co-dependent. Which probably goes well with my OCD...."