Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Two and half weeks ago, the four of us arrived safely in Louisville. While our Dog ponders when we will actually go back home, our Cat has embraced the entire adventure. Despite having many comfortable places to sleep, she has taken up residence in, of course, a moving box.

The unpacking task feels endless, and we need some electrical work done before the computer room/work space is fully functional. The laundry room finally gets hooked up today.

Three out of four of the Beloved’s Brothers have already been to visit, as have her Parents, niece and nephews. A San Francisco friend will be passing through in a week. Visitors, family always welcome here. A needed break from the unpacking.

In order to transfer my driver’s license, I need a social security card, so a replacement card is in order. When-oh-when was the last time I saw or used my SSN card? Thirty years ago maybe? Oh dear. Once the plumber has left, off to the SSN office I go.

I’ve never lived in a place where the neighbors actually knocked on the door and said things like, “Welcome,” and invited us out to dinner. In San Francisco, we knew our neighbors, ate dinner with them. It took many months for that to happen, however. Our SF next door neighbor hopes another nice lesbian couple buys our house. And now that we are gone, we hear we were the “most loved couple” on our block. A mythology begins!

I have dropped the word “normal” from my vocabulary. Chaos is the word of my days.

We’ve carved out some sanity AKA “A Box Free Zone” in the kitchen. I take much solace in the morning coffee and New York Times.

Last week, at 6 AM, we snuck into Churchill Downs to watch the horses work out. The Beloved is expert at looking like she belongs wherever she has crashed. For a good forty-five minutes, it was just us in the stands watching the horses on the track, and that was, well, cool.

In my Western world, horse racing is not meant to be as dignified as it is here. And at the other extreme, it is not meant to be an amateur drinking event. There is much for this Californian to adjust to.

These last few weeks mark the longest period, some ten years or so, I have not been putting pen to paper. Or fingers to keyboard. Writing. Working on a play.

Last week, a new play idea took root. Today, I’ll finally turn my attention to the play I began last year and have not yet finished.

And did I mention the birds? Always singing here. In quantities so unlike my San Francisco backyard, where I had one hummingbird (sometimes two), a handful of Chickadees, a blue jay, a occasional Junco, some seagulls, and always a murder of crows.

We love our new home. A block from the park, although the neighborhood feels like a park to this SF transplant. Both Cat and Dog have discovered the colony of squirrels.

This morning, a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, three Robins, a plethora of house sparrows, four Northern Cardinals, and many as yet to be identified feathered creatures.

My DSL will be turned off at the end of the week, and it will be another two or three before I have steady internet access again. Next week, we’ll hit the road and drive across the country, as the Beloved, our two four-leggeds, and I move to Louisville.

Saturday, we had an early supper with MBH and his wife PVP. More than once, MBH and I took mental or physical notes on our writing projects, the one we’re doing together, and the ones we’re not. One of the reasons we are good friends. We cannot stop writing, even when we are doing other things. PVP announced over supper they will not follow us and move to Louisville, a fantasy I refuse to let go of anytime soon. MBH gently reminds me he doesn’t "travel well," and I recall of how special it was that he trucked down to San Diego for my play gig. He’ll travel for a play, so we’ll see about all that.

Sunday, we said goodbye to another friend of mine, ALF. She does travel well, and often. And today, I have lunch with another favorite writer friend, TM.

Some people you know you will see again, like MBH and ALF. Others, however unintentionally, will be left in the distance. The internet alone cannot sustain real friendships.

The Safe Group has carried on without me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, is that no matter how much  you are loved, the hole you leave doesn’t last long. One of Members has a reading at the Magic this week, and I am happy for him, yet astounded by the casting of his play, which includes an actor he says he’d never work with yet always does. I guess I’m not that astounded…sigh…

As much as I love San Francisco, I am glad to be leaving its theatre quirks behind; a city that loves it’s culture, yet somehow has not really embraced its theatre. How else to explain how poor the quality is? We do better by television and movies than the stage. Enough, already, I vow to give up complaining about the state of theatre.

I’m looking forward to the coming adventures in KY, and creating a new theatrical home of some kind.

Why Louisville? It has good theatre, of course. Decent, and in some cases way beyond decent, food. (We  Californians do excel at food, and it’s important to us.) It’s a great hub:  A two hour flight from NYC, a nice drive to Chicago, and a little over an hour from the Beloved’s parents. And the economics of living are  far gentler than San Francisco.

I hope you will send out your good thoughts for our journey across the country.

Thanks and cheers!

For the first time in a very long time, I am not writing. I am packing boxes, talking to movers, dealing with  real estate issues, and lunching with people I won’t see again for some time.

The Beloved and I will drive across the country with our dog and our cat. I’ve fretted a bit about the sweet cat, and the four day drive with the dog she cannot stand. We came up with this solution:
She seems to like it, having spent the last couple of days hanging out in this new “car condo.” She can stretch her legs, lay flat, curl in a ball, stand completely up, or even sit up like a normal cat. I think it’s gonna work. Light a candle for us, dear readers, if you will, around mid-April.

Friday we left a carload of books with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library donation center. Books I loved yet felt unnecessary to move across country. I believe it is important to donate things that are loved and wanted and still of use. I am often startled to see the stuff, and that is using the word kindly because I really mean trash, people give to charity. If it’s broken, smashed, torn up, how can these items be of any use? To me, it’s tantamount to treating non-profits as a dump. I come from poverty. Trust me, there’s a difference between trash and something well used.

Ah well, as a friend of mine says, I digress. I really meant to write about my book collection à la some recent posts on Gasp!.

This is the forth purge my book collection has endured. The first purge circa 1983-84 was unplanned, and the details uncertain. What I know is I was drunk, moving across town, and in the process, I abandoned a Fatal Attraction-like roommate who looked remarkably like Glenn Close, and, sadly, several hundred books in my care. A time of shame and pain. I still reach for some of those books, only to remember why they are no longer on the shelf.

The second purge was much smaller, and more sober. I hadn’t had a drink in three years, which would place us around 1988. A friend in recovery had discovered the joys of selling books at flea markets, and I donated my psychology collection of some eighty books to her cause. It was more about shedding some old parts of myself, than it was about being altruistic in helping her. For a long time after that, I would go to the book shelf and look for a particular book, only to remember I had given them away; the repeated nightmare of the book-hoarder, uh, book-lover.)

The third purge was seven years ago when I moved into my current home. I don’t even remember which books I gave away or sold. I was determined to move into this house with only things I truly loved, and so everything in my life I didn’t love was shed. There was quite a lot of "stuff" that did not move with me.

As we prepare to move across country, it was time again to check the shelves. I was shocked by how many books about writing I still had. I let them go. (Okay, I kept five of them.) I let go my beloved Edward Gorey collection, too. Most of what I let go was fiction. I decided if I was keeping books just to keep them, they probably needed to go. If I didn’t know anyone personally who would love them as I did, they probably needed to go. It was tough, yet felt necessary. There are always more books coming in.

The books that remain serve various purposes. Some contain research material for current, and future projects. Some I can’t bear to part with, irrationally, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon. I have very few fiction books. As I go along, I read less and less fiction, and what I read is either given to me, or written by someone I know. Fiction requires losing myself into someone else’s world, which can be enjoyable and even expansive, yet can take away from my own creativity. I find inspiration in non-fiction and choose to spend most of my time there.

The shelves are currently divided as follows:

• a small poetry section that is many years old; alongside the few novels I retain
• death and grief
• mythology
• spirituality
• William Butler Yeats poetry, plays, biographies and related material
• disasters, including earthquakes, viral, environmental, and "man-made"
• the human brain, which includes books about brain traumas, and language disorders
• dictionaries of all kinds, books about words, idioms, language
• plays and playwrights
• Radclyffe Hall novels, biographies, and related material
• the paranormal
• the Catholic Left

There was a time I felt getting rid of books was sacrilegious. Sure, sometimes I’m looking for a book that’s no longer under my roof. Yet, the need to keep books, as well as things in general, just because I can is nearly gone. Maybe I’ve spent too much time digging out the homes of friends now gone.

I’m off for a week to see a showcase of one of my plays. The box project packed as carry-on.

Cheers.

"Can I read your play?"

Over the years, I’ve learned to avoid answering. Unless the person asking, of course, could bring my play to life. No, the people I dodge are the well-meaning friends, acquaintances, strangers, relatives, who upon hearing I write plays, think they want to read them. They don’t. Not really.

What actually happens is these well-meaning people take the script, and it sits somewhere in their house or apartment or car gathering dust. I know this because when they see me, over a period of months or years, they announce, "I haven’t read your play yet." And they never do.I find this a particularly uncomfortable ritual which I now avoid at all costs.

The standard answer I give, is, "Well, it’s a play, and it’s meant to be seen and not read." Even though I don’t necessarily believe that, this statement does work a lot of time, and stops the asking dead on.

Previously, I tried saying, "I’m not comfortable having people read." That statement only worked part of the time, causing people to want to assure me they were really interested, nice readers. The thing was, I wasn’t uncomfortable having people read my plays, and I just ended up making myself uncomfortable with this little lie. (Hey, I’m a sensitive soul.)

Occasionally, undaunted, someone presses on repeating their request to read. Depending on our acquaintance, I sometimes tell them why I don’t let people "read" my plays. If I feel myself weakening, I delineate my expectations. If I give out a copy of one of my plays, I expect the following:  that it will read it sooner not later; that it will be given back to me; and that questions must be asked of me if the play or some aspect of it is not understood. Then, I usually change the subject. Very rarely, the person comes back to The Question, stating they are aware of the reading obligation and are fully prepared to meet it. Only then, do I feel I really have to consider the request, and if it feels good, I give them something to read.

It’s not that people are not sincere in asking. I believe many of them are. A lot of people don’t know how to read plays. (Some of them are literary managers of theatres. Ba-dum-bum!) Once they have the play in their hands, they grow intimated by the thought of actually reading it. That’s one theory I have anyway. I have a ton of ‘em. Theories, that is,

I’ve found a system that works for me, and whatever theories about why people don’t ever read that which they have asked for, well, don’t really matter much. If I seem a little sensitive over The Question, it’s only because it already takes months and months and months for the people who do have the power to bring plays to life to read them.

‘Nuff said.

The story stands at this: Whatever, whenever, the O’Neill is not going to take money from playwrights’ proceeds.

Updates are here:

Playwright Jason Grote – O’Neill Controversy That Almost Was, or Wasn’t

and

Playwright Adam Szymkowicz’s blog

and

Theatre Boy

The original email which claimed ‘foul’ came to me from three different reliable sources, and I do not believe that email was a hoax.

Finally, from the NY SUN, Playwrights Protest…

Needless to say, the funds for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference remain in dire straits. That’s the state of the Arts in America, folks.

On the heals of a thought provoking Dramatist Guild article about playwrights and royalties, here’s this
post about the O’Neill Playwights Conference from

Adam Szymkowicz’s blog.

Very bad, disturbing news for play development

I wish I had known this before I submitted this year.

Now, gotta retrieve the application.

Oh dear.

I cannot seem to find my comfort zone with blogging. This is my third try at blogging, over the last three years or so. One of the things that happens for me is I begin to have conversations with people I don’t like very much. People I don’t know who, well, threaten me because of my own insecurities, or who I’ve just plain formed some ill opinion about for something he or she has written on their own blog. And so, I stop writing until I can banish these silly conversations/arguments/polemics from my head and begin again. Some time has past, and I’ve forgotten who those people are, and I try the blog again. And so…