• Cinematic goddess Parker Posey was spotted shopping at Elliott Bay Book Company on Sunday, November 17. She is reportedly somehow even hotter in real life. In less-hot celebrity-sighting news, Dale Chihuly was seen leaving an evening showing of Dallas Buyers Club at the Harvard Exit on the same day.
• The only Seattle artist anyone can remember being included in a Whitney Biennial was Wynne Greenwood in 2004, and she was in Olympia then and making work as Tracy + the Plastics. The Whitney's 2014 biennial list was just announced and it includes HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a collective that includes Seattle poet/performance artist Christa Bell. Asked for details, Bell said it's "an evolving collaboration of multidisciplinary artists of the African diaspora. Members of the collective have lived and worked together, in various iterations, over the last 20 years." We will bring you more details as we learn them, including, naturally, instruction on how to say "yam" in African.
• During a tech rehearsal last week for The Hound of the Baskervilles at Seattle Rep, actor Connor Toms tripped and broke his foot while wooing onstage lover and real-life wife Hana Lass. Evidently, the train of a silk Victorian dress is quite slippery if you step on it in patent-leather dinner shoes. But Toms is already back onstage, according to a source with inside information: "He's been acting on a broken foot and killing it."
• You heard it here first: Velocity Dance Center's 2014 artist in residence will be Jody Kuehner, better known as huge-haired, worship-worthy Cherdonna Shinatra. Kuehner's skill set—she's a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and performance artist—collides within Cherdonna as a one-of-a-kind spectacle, her physicality somewhere between showgirl and seizure sufferer. There isn't a critic at The Stranger whose mind hasn't been blown by the shit Kuehner comes up with.
• Whenever David Sedaris goes on tour, he recommends a book by another author to his fans. At his Benaroya Hall reading last week, Sedaris recommended Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. It's a collection of interviews with North Koreans about how terrible North Korea is. Sedaris said one selling point for Nothing to Envy is that there is literally nothing you can do to help North Koreans in need, so you can read the book and then spend ridiculous amounts of money on frivolous pursuits rather than feel guilted into giving charitable donations or whatever. He says it would make a great Christmas gift. 
