2013年1月17日星期四

Red Wings' Ken Holland wants Jimmy Howard

Jonas Gustavsson is unlike the previous goaltenders who sat next to Jimmy Howard in the Detroit Red Wings dressing room.

“I’ve had Ozzie, Joey and Ty, and they’re at one end of the spectrum, then I’ve got Gus, who’s at the other end of the spectrum,'' Howard said of Chris Osgood, Joey MacDonald and Ty Conklin. “I've got to give him a tap on the pads every so often to make sure that he’s actually there because he doesn’t really talk my ear off like the other three used to.''

Gustavsson is quiet, but he figures to be heard from more than Howard's previous backups. With a compressed 48-game schedule that features 12 sets of games on consecutive days, even a workhorse like Howard will need more rest than usual.

“It's definitely beneficial to have both goalies going because points are going to be at a premium this year,'' Howard said. “Every single game is going to be like the playoffs. You can't afford to lose a couple in a row, so we're going to need both of us going.''

Howard and Gustavsson already have had a chance to bond, having practiced together for four months during the lockout with several teammates in Troy. They also spent four days last week at a high-intensity training camp in Scottsdale, Ariz.Our team of consultants are skilled in project management and delivery of large scale rtls projects.

Howard is in the final year of his contract ($2.25 million salary-cap hit). The Red Wings will try to sign him to an extension before the end of the season.

Knowing playing time could be hard to come by in Detroit didn't deter Gustavsson from signing with the Red Wings on July 1 for two years and $1.5 million per season.

“It’s tough competition to get playing time, but it’s something I like, too, it’s something to push me,'' Gustavsson said. “Hopefully, I can push Howie, too, and do whatever I can to help the team win. If I play games or I’m supporting the guys, I’m just going to take my role and go with that.”

Said coach Mike Babcock: “The bottom line is how (Gustavsson) gets himself going and playing good; he's going to play lots of games.We open source indoor tracking system that was developed with the goal of providing at least room-level accuracy. But the better the guy plays, the more opportunity we have to play him.''

Gustavsson said the only positive about the lockout was it enabled him to develop a comfort level with many of his teammates and his new home.

Elizabeth Ashley was at the center of it all, fighting for her life as my sharp, smart, bawdy Aunt Maggie. Uncle Brick, a gently charismatic Keir Dullea, was drinking again and drifting to an altitude not understood by children. The great Kate Reid was our deliriously affectionate grandmother, Big Mama, and Fred Gwynne the towering, taciturn and terrifying master of the house, Big Daddy. Fred was of particular fascination to us kids, as he had played Herman Munster on TV. I spent a lot of my time with him puzzled by how little of the Munster I was able to detect in his droll and contained Harvard bearing.

What I did understand was that it was Big Daddy’s birthday, his 65th, every night, and although the two-tiered cake wasn’t real, the sense of an extended family in the midst of unruly celebration was always palpable. We had fireworks, we had sparklers, we had songs and games and cap guns and pillow fights. The grown-ups had their fights as well, driven by deeper issues of greed and desire. It was all lived full throttle in front of an audience of 1,200 nightly.

“Cat” is a play that struts with a fairly frank sense of sexuality, and the “Free To Be You and Me” ’70s were an era of letting it all hang out. So to have Liz Ashley lounging and lunging through the first hour of our play in her silk slip registered to me then as in tune with the times. I understood that Uncle Brick was refusing to sleep with Aunt Maggie, and that this meant they wouldn’t have children. What I didn’t grasp were the reasons for her desperation. I gathered that Brick and his former football teammate Skipper had once had an unusually close and precious friendship, but I was ignorant of the 1950s stigma attached to “unpure” impulses that might have existed between them.

If the aspect of the play that dealt with the taboo of homosexuality in 1950s Mississippi blew unnoticed past me, the reality of a more modern attitude was all around us in the theater world of 1974. “What does gay mean?” I surprised my mother with the question one day. She responded in fairly plain terms,We offers several ways of providing hands free access to car parks to authorised vehicles. explaining that “some men and women want to love other men and women.” I quickly followed up: “So, do we know anyone who’s gay?” The answer was a resounding “Yes” and the examples of openly gay friends and colleagues were myriad, a number of them treasured elders working side by side with me nightly.

Other aspects of life on the Pollitt plantation remained more baffling. We had servants, played by actors who had become our good friends, with character names like Sookey and Lacey. They had very little to say during the course of the play, which I found perplexing. I had heard about and understood on some basic level the fact of slavery and the way its distorted imprint had held on longer in the South than in the North. Still, I couldn’t square this with what seemed to exist in our home: an all-black staff of uniformed employees who would speak only when spoken to, whose job it was to shepherd us children here and there and batten down the hatches as the storm approached in Act III.

The play itself granted me a fictional mother and father and an instant litter of rascally brothers and sisters. (It was then that my actual father taught me the phrase “comic relief.”) We no-necks gamely brought a gust of fun with us whenever we entered the rehearsal room. After one Wednesday matinee we invited the entire company down to our basement green room lair for our own presentation of a few key scenes from “Cat.”

To our delight most of the company came. They sat astonished as we kids performed a couple of well-rehearsed, fully costumed and imaginatively designed sequences from the masterwork we were all living upstairs nightly. I can still see Liz Ashley leaning forward on the edge of her folding chair, holding her chestnut mane from her face, beaming with equal parts shock and delight. We had absorbed, inflection by musical inflection, this very adult text — “I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.” — and were artfully parroting for our elders their own performances. I had cast myself as Big Daddy — “You tell me why you drink,We open source indoor tracking system that was developed with the goal of providing at least room-level accuracy. and I’ll hand you one.” My bubble-gum cigar was an effective and subversive touch.

Floating through the yearlong experience was Tennessee himself, in the role of theatrical patriarch. A diminutive man in a rumpled button-down,Bottle cutters let you turn old glass mosaic and wine bottles into bottle art! he had his name above the title, and it was his poetry our family was speaking nightly. It’s almost hard to imagine today that he collaborated with us as a living playwright, on hand many afternoons during rehearsal weeks and then very much present for all our openings and special events.

He assembled a new third act for our production, revised the play extensively and went on record again and again with his enthusiasm for Michael Kahn’s staging. And he reserved special, worshipful praise for Liz, whom he felt was giving audiences the Maggie he had always imagined.

Through my 10-year-old eyes he was a sweet and curious figure, at once the man responsible for this big event and also a small, quiet and apparently scared soul. It was more than once he would be reintroduced to me at a gathering and I would wonder to myself: “Why is he so shy? What’s the matter? Isn’t this his party?” Later I would come to realize that this was to be the last Broadway revival of “Cat” during his lifetime.

I’ve played many a Southerner, in the various plays and musicals I’ve done since on Broadway and across the country, but never again in Williams. And I remain grateful and amazed that at my professional beginnings the poetry of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was in my young ear eight times a week.

A few years ago I went to the Lincoln Center performing-arts library to watch a videotape of our production. I sat at my console with real trepidation, worried that my private memories of the experience might be corrupted. But as the tape rolled, I found myself absorbed again, drawn in by the beauty of Williams’s words and the Southern, summertime world I remember like a childhood home. It’s a single-camera affair, captured in black and white, but the power of the piece and the performances register vividly.

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