Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

The world is in our minds, it’s up to us
whether it changes or remains the same.

playwright Carlyle Brown,  The Fula from America

I’ve made a final checklist for the large cast play I’ve been writing.

I know, I know, I wrote a few days ago that I hated list keeping. That’s about those freaks who insist you gotta checkoff the 1,000 people/places/things before you die, or keep bird lists, or have a detailed travel itinerary for each moment of your vacation. Some of us are not built for that kind of list-keeping, thank you very much.

There’s a handful of details I want to be sure I haven’t missed. The list contains questions about metaphors, specific character actions, things that need to be repeated, foreshadowing events, dialogue consistencies, whatever the things knocking about in my mind. I want to be sure I’ve dealt with them.

My plan is to be done with the draft by the end of Tuesday. I’m more than ready to let these characters go. The Powerbook has behaved since last Thursday, so no obstacle there. I’ll pass the draft onto my Trusted Friend, and then turn my attention to the joint project with MBH.

It’s Derby week, and we’ll head to the track this week to watch the early morning workouts. My reward for finishing the draft.

My friend Eddie Conner believes "America’s real crack problem" is the way we contradict what we want with what we say, and as a result cut ourselves off at the, uh, knees. Okay, that’s my paraphrasing Eddie. He would never say it that way. He’d be very funny while he was saying it, too. A handful of years ago he even wrote a book called Kicking the Big BUT Syndrome. If you don’t know what a big BUT is…listen to how many times you are offered help, or advice, and you respond with "Yes, but…" Or you tell yourself, "I want ____ in my life, but the ____ won’t let me." Okay, you wouldn’t say "______" You might say, "I want to be an artist, but I can’t make a living at it." There are a myriad of more subtle ways we express our contradictions. I digress…this journal entry is about Eddie.

Except this paragraph is about me…. When I’m writing, I like to pay homage to my family in some way, and I put some gesture, personality trait, habit, secret, uh, something that is known to us. Sometimes I get in trouble for doing that. Anyway, my homage to Eddie has been to try to write this creative coffee-break journal without using the word "but." When I did a Google search on Intermission, I found I’d used the word some 41 times in the last three years. Not shabby.

Eddie calls himself a "soul intuitive coach." He teaches "new thought" principles. You know, law of attraction, Esther and Jerry Hicks and Abraham, Wayne Dyer, The Secret.  Only thing is, Eddie teaches with humor. He could be a stand-up comic. He’s my personal Mark Twain.

He has a DVD being released in May, Living the Hi-Frequency Life.  I love that title. Then, I’m all about energy, what others call vibration or frequencies. I watched his DVD last night. It’s in a workshop format…you know, Eddie doin’ a workshop for some people. It’s a great collection of his teaching tools, and the principles he uses in his life. If you want a different take on the law of attraction stuff, with some simple, practical tools, then check out Eddie’s DVD. It’s a lot of fun.

I’ve known Eddie more than ten years. I don’t have many people I consider real friends. There’s like three of ‘em, and he’s one. Yes, he’s my dear, sweet friend, and I’m so proud of him!

To quote another friend, "WOOT!"

The photo is of the Carolina Chickadee nesting in our backyard. I’m not sure which it is, the female or the male. We hope they’ve got their clutch full by now, and are looking forward to seeing how the babies will thrive.

This morning, we chased balloons from the Kentucky Expo to the Water Tower. From there, we watched them fly over the river and land in Indiana. A gorgeous morning for the Great Balloon Rush-Hour Race. Balloons are a happy thing. Last September, we chased balloons from Bowman Field to some unsuspecting neighborhood way on the other side of town. This is a photo from that chase:

Saturday night, my Powerbook started freezing up. That lasted until yesterday, when I found the apparent cause and corrected it. (A loose Airport Extreme card.) It was more of an opportunity to obsess about something else than it being a panic problem. Because I have redundant backup systems, I wasn’t
worried about losing any files.

The niggling thought was that the PB failure was timely. I had promised my compadre, MBH, I would get him a copy of my
play by the 25th (uh, that’s today, as I write this entry). I need to get this off my plate, and give some attention to a joint project we are working on. As long as
the PB didn’t work properly, I could obsess about fixing it, and hold
on to the play. Reluctance to let go, and all that.

Still, it’s good to rest the writing mind, and focus on unrelated things. In those moments, inspiration bubbles forth, and new lines of dialog or action are created.

So, back to it. The day is early still.

Last year someone told me if I put up a bluebird nest box, bluebirds would nest in it. Falling for the bait, I read a lot about bluebird houses, where to position them, when to put one up, how to protect it against house sparrows and snakes, and installed one in the backyard. Then we waited. We got mealworms, hoping the wiggly things would catch the bluebirds’ attention.

Nearly every bird in Louisville has been in our backyard. ‘Cept them bluebirds.

A few days ago, a pair of Carolina Chickadees ate up the mealworms, and moved into the nest box. These are tiny, handsome birds. In just four days, they took an empty box and built a moss nest.

Uh, I suppose that’s what is meant by “busy little bird.” *ahem*

Well, I was very impressed. We’re still moving furniture around.

Two days after finishing up the nest, the first egg came. Some five to eight eggs may get laid in the nest. I’ve calculated she should be up to three by now.

The egg is that white round thing to the left. It has red-brown spots on it. (You may have noticed, my photography skills have yet to improve.)

Okay, so Project Feederwatch is over. Now, NestWatch is on.

A year ago, we landed in Louisville. A year ago, I knew nothing about Bluebird conservation, Chickadees, moss nests, or mealworms. A year ago…

Around 5:37 this morning, we were awakened by the house shaking. At first I thought, "must be a thunderstorm," and as the vibration wore on, I thought, "WTF, an earthquake?"

One of the reasons I left California was out of weariness of expecting the next "big one." My Higher Power has a wicked sense of humor. Honestly, I’ve recognized at least one other tremor in the year we’ve been here. They pretty much happen everywhere, don’t they?  In San Francisco, tremors occur with all the time. When you grow up along a fault line, you don’t freak out when there’s a moderate or minor tremor.  I was cocky about it at times, too. "Oh, a 5.2? No biggie."

When you know how devastating quakes can be, however, you learn to do the best you can to prepare for one. Which means: prepare to survive as best you can during, and then afterwards. No one can telll you when a bad quake is going to hit. It’s a little like guerrilla warfare. You know it’s gonna hit, just not when or where exactly.

Today is the anniversary of California’s 1906 earthquake. As a kid, I was taught the earthquake itself didn’t do much damage. It was the fire that caused San Francisco’s collapse. As an adult, I learned that the fire story was a lie, perpetuated by the real estate and business community, which was trying to prevent panic about moving to San Francisco back in the day. The fire was bad. Sill, it was the earthquake, not the fire, that set the City in ruin. Thousands of people–not hundreds as originally reported–lost their lives. Gladys Hansen set the record straight in her wonderful book, Denial of Disaster.

Denial of Disaster was published shortly after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. Oddly, this book helped me through some my post-traumatic stress from that ‘89 quake.

Years later, I studied screenwriting with James Dalessandro, who wrote a novel about 1906. He made a pretty good documentary about the quake, too, The Damnedest Finest Ruins. Brad Bird is directing the film of James’ novel.

Fortunately, in today’s quake, centered in Illinois at 5.2 magnitude, no one was hurt, no real damage sustained. It was a little tough watching the news people here who did not know how to report the quake. Uh, folks, we don’t call the police when an earthquake hits. We call the USGS.

Folks here love to talk about the pending big one expected along the New Madrid fault. That fault line throws out a magnitude 6.0 or greater every 80 years. It’s over due. People talk about this pending quake like it’s a source of pride, or it’s some kind of weird contest with California. No one seems prepared for it.

Yeah, I’m a little cranky today.

I’m prepared, too.

Started a year ago or so, it’s new to me, blackcover.net discusses the quest for perfect little black notebook. Now I’m trying to figure out which of my international traveling friends I can talk into bringing me back an Alwych or a Stifflexible notebook.

Until then, the Miguelruis still rules.

This time last year, our house was about to empty of furniture. More importantly, our dog and cat were about to prove to us even a four-day trip across country, sharing the backseat of our car, would make them friends. Ever.

Ever.

I mean it.

Ever is not a word I use lightly.

Ever, never, always, try, yes, but, and just are words much overused. Thus, I aspire to under-use them.

A shake-up for "Intermission/Writing the Play" is in the works, too. The journal will be moving away from Typepad. When depends on if, uh, I can get the new site setup to my liking. I decided to revamp the journal from scratch, which required dusting off my CSS skills. Not pretty, my friends. Of course, we’ll stay here until "then."

Perhaps even more daunting, I took the "write a poem for 30 days" challenge for National Poetry Month. Every good lesbian writes a bit of bad poetry now and then.

Meanwhile, exciting to a theatre slash word nerd like me:

    New York Magazine has reprinted three of Steve’s crossword puzzles.

I’ve been looking for the book of the Sondheim puzzles for years.

Tonight we’re seeing Last Summer at Bluefish Cove at Pandora Productions. I’ve avoided reading the reviews, something I do more and more as the years go by. I prefer to see what I wanna see, and make up my own mind about a show without anyone else’s perspective at the back of my mind.

I think it was about fifteen years ago I came across the play in a San Francisco used bookstore. I’d never heard of Jane Chambers. I liked the play very much. Probably even more, I was relieved, even encouraged, to find a lesbian who was a playwright, and who wrote about what she wanted to write about. You can imagine my, uh, role models have been few and far between.

I devoured what I could find of Chambers’ work, A Late Snow, and My Blue Heaven. The plays vary in style. Not much survives in print. Chambers died of cancer in 1983.

She even was one of the honored few developed at the O’Neill. For those of you who care about such things, and I know some of you do. There’s an award for women playwrights named after her. It used to be an award for lesbian playwrights. I guess there weren’t enough good lesbian playwrights to go around, eh?

There’s a documentary in the works about Chamber’s life and work. It’s called the Eight Faces of Jane. Chambers said the characters in Last Summer are the "eight schizophrenic sides" of her playwright’s personality. I can relate, as I’m sure a lot of writers can, with that sentiment. I hope it gets finished, released, financed, whatever it needs to get out into the world. Projects like this make me wish I had a ton of money to give away.

A couple of years ago, the ATHE’s Women and Theatre Program held a beautiful reading of Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. It was co-produced by About Face with a distinguished cast. Made me weep, that reading did.

There are times when I doubt what I am doing, as a playwright. It’s Chambers example I return to for strength and inspiration.

From November through the end of March, we participated in Project Feederwatch, a winter-long survey of birds visiting backyard feeders. It’s an easy way to help out all those ornithological-scientifical-people track what’s happening to bird populations. Stuff like, are migrations of certain birds being disrupted (perhaps by environmental changes)? Or like, what’s up with bird flu? All we gotta do is count the birds, two days a week, for as little or as long as we want.

‘Course now all we do is watch them without purpose.

This morning, a female Hairy Woodpecker came by to feed. This is our first spotting of the Hairy. Our backyard has hosted Red-Bellied, Red-Headed, Downy Woodpeckers, and Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers. Mostly we see a very aggressive Red-Bellied at our seed feeders. The Downys have disappeared. While they were here, they fed at the suet feeder.

I don’t keep a bird list. I don’t keep a lot of lists. In fact, I hate lists. I just enjoy the birds. They help me to pause. Pausing is good for you. A couple of weeks ago, while walking our Dog in Cherokee Park, we came across over 20 Robins standing still. They looked as if they were taking a collective moment of silence. We, and the Robins stood still for what seemed like five minutes. Maybe it was only one. It felt like five. Me watching, the Dog wondering what was so great about not being able to chase the Robins, the Robins standing still, listening I suppose for worms or something else edible.  Then in unison, the Robins started moving again, and the Dog was relieved for us to be on our way.

I try not to dismiss a play, even if it’s not my cup of tea. I don’t always succeed.

No one person can be the intended audience for every play. That wouldn’t make sense, would it? My own expectation is there is an audience for the plays I write, and it doesn’t include everyone. I feel it’s important to remember there are many kinds of audiences, and plays serve different purposes. Personally, I don’t like The Lion King. I understand, however much I bemoan the Disney-way of theatre, there are kids who are brought to theatre because of it, and if they keep coming to the theatre, as they grow up they may expand their theatrical horizons.

I feel the "new play" label often stigmatizes a play. It creates an open season on the playwright who wrote it and was fortunate enough to have it produced. The label also incites an incessant chewing up of the play itself, looking for each and every flaw, every dead moment that should be ripped out. As a playwright, I have tended to look at a play as how I would have written it. I try not to do that anymore. What’s the point? To make myself feel better? I often feel artists in particular emphasize a work’s flaws in order to make themselves feel better about their own lack of recognition, ability, or insecurity. Such head tripping is not thinking critically.

While in NY, we saw Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl. We had low expectations as neither of us really appreciated Ruhl’s The Clean House. Mostly we, uh, were there to watch Mary Louise Parker and Kathleen Chalfant. The evening was a pleasant surprise with a very funny, socially relevant play.The ending (I wish I’d written it) contained one of the best written passages about love ever. Uh huh, that’s what I said.

Back at home, MBH and his wife came to visit, and we attended some of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. This was our first Humana, and it was a ton of fun. The excitement and energy in the lobby, in the hallways, and in the theatres was palpable. In particular, I enjoyed The Civilian’s This Beautiful City,  Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfroddo, and Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, by Jennifer Haley.

Haley’s play caused the most heated dinner conversation. At least one of us hated it. The Beloved loved it. I found Neighborhood 3 an extremely funny play, spot-on in its social commentary. It was also a horror/slasher type play. I confess I covered my eyes near the end, knowing what would inevitably come, and not able to stomach it. While I may not be Haley’s audience, I love what she is writing for it.

Sondheim lyrics cover the complexity of human emotion, saying all that needs to be said on any given subject. After listening to a Sondheim & Lapine/Wheeler/Wiedman/Goldman/orotherguywhowrotethebook musical, I often feel, “Why does anyone else write anything?”

And then,

Time Passes.

(and I pick my pen back up, see another play, enjoy another piece of music.)

Of course, you’ll guess I found the current revival of Sunday in the Park with George an extremely satisfying theatrical experience. This was the only version I’ve ever seen that showed the love between George and Dot, which made Dot’s choosing Louis ever more sad, George ever more the brilliant, tragic artist, and the “Act 2″ George’s journey, uh, ever more relevant and poignant. When contemporary George reads from his great grandmother’s book, Seurat comes alive again.

Many tears joyfully shed.