Stealing from theatre

How many times have you sat through a play or an evening of short plays to find yourself in the dark pretending not to notice the inept scene changing happening onstage?

Good directors know that one of the most enthralling things about theatre is being in the presence of transformation.

Really good directors make something of even the most mechanical of these opportunities - the scene change.

Here some commercial makers use the effect to, well, great effect.

And now for a personal plea: Please make scene changes interesting for us. We can see you in the dark. We really can.

The law of attraction

As I've made clear, I felt New York pushed me away to some degree.

But it took more than pushing to get me going.

There was the life I was attracted to.

Here's a video about that.

Another "Why Theatre" - from the SF Chronicle

I've been a vocal critic of Steven Winn's reviewing in SF since he trashed every show in the SF Fringe one year without ever seeing one of them, but a friend brought my attention to this article, which despite the lukewarm words towards some of the plays he's reviewing (surprise), has some value when it comes to WHY THEATRE.

As my friend said, it echoes thoughts I - and many others - have shared elsewhere.

Forget computers, videos, HDTV -- the play's still the thing
Steven Winn
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

There's a scene in "After the War," the Philip Kan Gotanda play in its world-premiere run at the American Conservatory Theater, that made me settle back contentedly in my seat on opening night. One of the characters, the Japanese landlord of a San Francisco boardinghouse in 1948, has just acquired a new Philco TV. He and several tenants (one white, one black) gather to hoist an aerial onto the roof. As they do, a Russian tenant, Olga, charges back and forth from the parlor to the back steps to report on the reception.

"How's it looking?" the men call from the top of the house.

"How's it cooking?" Olga breathlessly asks of a Japanese woman peering hopefully at the 10-inch screen.

As it turns out, the play itself never comes clearly into focus; "After the War" remains diffuse and dramatically unrealized. But I relished that moment -- and there were a few others -- when a new play, in its first public test, seems poised to capture an audience and carry it along as one on a route never traveled just this way before. Here, in a few invigorating, economical strokes, is the world "After the War" sets out to create -- a world transformed by progress, by the compression and mingling of races and the challenges of cross-cultural understanding.

Nothing else quite matches the charge that can run through a theater when something new is first revealed onstage. The audience transcends its role as receiver of culturally certified goods and becomes a collective participant, completing the work that the playwright, actors, director and designers can take only so far.

New plays -- more so than new works of music or dance, which carry the conventions of silent attention followed by applause; and more so than the finished products of new movies or novels -- reconnect us directly to our communal natures, to the urge for experience that both stretches and unites us. Laughter, hushed apprehension, a chorus of tiny startled gasps or those arctic spells when an audience chills -- all those things aren't merely responses. They are integral parts of the social enterprise that any play premiere undertakes. New theater is participatory democracy in action.

It's a singular and salutary feature of the region's cultural life that the production of new plays remains so vigorous here. Even in uneasy times, when safe bets are tempting and screens of all kinds (computer, video game, movie, high-definition TV) exert a mesmerizing hold, local theaters continue to bet heavily against the odds and venture into the unknown. More than 130 new plays premiered in the Bay Area last year.

Without trying very hard, I caught six world premieres over the past several weeks. One of them, Dan Hoyle's dazzling monologue set in Nigeria, "Tings Dey Happen," at the Marsh, was pure exhilaration. Another, Mark Jackson's "American " at the Thick House, rode its antic momentum to a terrific party scene. "To the Lighthouse," a Virginia Woolf adaptation at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, weirdly turned into a musical after intermission. A play about sexual fantasies at the Magic Theatre, Chantal Bilodeau's "Pleasure & Pain," was like a numbing shot of novocaine.

So how'd you like it? Was it any good? Should I take my son? That's how we package, process and exchange our responses. We crave a currency, a known rate of exchange to fix the value on something unfamiliar. But such measures may finally matter less, when it comes to new plays, than what happens in those moments when something suddenly takes hold, when a door you didn't notice flies open and the light shines in on the audience all at once.

It's been a few weeks since I saw "American," and I couldn't begin to detail the plot or recall the characters' names. But I can still see and feel the throbbing pulse of the final scene, when one power-glazed manipulator after another urges the hero on toward a fatal celebrity. And then at the dinner party in "To the Lighthouse," where the guests all speak their thoughts aloud and silently mouth their spoken dialogue, the hostess (a sublime Monique Fowler as Mrs. Ramsay) delivers this exquisite, enfolding irony: "There is a profound stillness holding us together." A shivers runs softly up my back now as I remember it.

In a night of feverishly drawn characters, Hoyle hits his devastating peak in "Tings Dey Happen" at the end of the first act. Bathed in a sickly green light and speaking in a thick, strangely lucid pidgin English, the actor becomes a Nigerian mercenary describing a 2003 oil war with a blend of rage and eerie detachment. A few minutes later, in the lobby of the Marsh, an old friend introduced me to a friend of hers. This woman must have seen in my face what I saw in hers -- the shaken-to-the-bones astonishment of that last scene. "Can you believe what just happened?" she said. "No," I said. "Can you?"

Why we write

Mr. S made the comment below in response to my post about why I go to the theatre.

I thought it was worth its own post.

******

I don't think any of us write to be liked (I mean, sure, we want people to like what we write, but I don't think it's the over-riding priority). I think we write to engage, to challenge. Engagement relates to the work--being liked relates to the ego. I think we write to create an experience or to share an experience of some depth, not just likeability. A play is a broken-hearted love letter to a lover (the beautiful horrible world) that could care less. That sort of love letter demands attention, demands anger, demands hatred, demands indignation, demands love. Like is the consolation prize.

******

So, so well put.

Beyond the Owing at PCPA Theatrefest

This play is being produced at the Red Eye Theatre in Mpls, July 13-26 2009.

Check it out.... right here.
________

Drove up to Santa Maria for a reading of BEYOND THE OWING.

After working on it for two weeks and doing and in-home reading, I finally have a draft of this play that I like that's based on what started at the Clubbed Thumb boot camp. The naturalism of the first few scenes gives way to a surrealism properly as the play progresses now and the emotional logic between the characters works the way it should.

About a month ago I was ready to throw it out, so it was a great relief to hear it in new hands and feel like it could be stageworthy.

Here are a few pix from the reading.




IN OTHER NEWS....

I'm picking up work suddenly. An ad agency in LA has asked me to come in next week at the same time that an ad agency in Colorado has asked me to fly in and work for them.

Then, I have an interview with the ad dept at one of the major studios in LA - which I'm very interested in.

Cross your fingers. I do need work. And I do like to work.

Clubbed Thumb on the West Coast

Here are a few pix from the West Coast Clubbed Thumb fund-raiser gala. If you'd like to know what they do, check out the book at left on Amazon.

Great people. Great time.

And that's the beach - and the Pacific Ocean - on the other side of those windows.

The Lives of Others

The problem with art and politics is that too often the political message becomes a hammer to be used on the head. This not only dates a lot of political art, but dehumanizes the characters who carry the story and thus the message.

That's why, for me, art is better when it's deeply personal and spreads out from there.

Politics can provide the circumstances, but as the world shows, everything changes.

And as a lot of political art shows, start with an agenda and you bore from moment one.

(Edward Bond's work is a good example of the personal story being more potent than the directly political - SAVED is terrific, feels personal, clearly written from sharp observation; his later work about people pulling together to weather river floods and crony-ism bore me as the characters are flavorless shills for ideas. Only broad satire - a la SF MIME TROUPE and SNL sketch work - really escapes this for me.)

BUT... Here's a movie where the humanity of the story transcends the political issues - and yet couldn't exist without the politics.

Beautiful. Terrifyingly human. Can't stop watching it in my head.

Go see it.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS.

It'll make you remember what art is for.

Thanks, Eric.

Advertising - Music - Television - Movies: WATCH OUT!

The text below is from one of the smartest cultural thinkers I've had the pleasure of knowing - and working for: Dave Tutin. (Click on his blog to see it on his site.)

Very insightful about some of the changes that the internet has created for advertising and music and that are now coming to television and, I'm quite sure, movies.

In what seems now like another life, I was once the global creative director in charge of the Oracle advertising account. I was, in fact, the only person from the agency that the infamous Larry Ellison would talk to. I used to fly from New York to San Francisco every other week for two years. On flight 93. Yes, that flight 93! I've never worked out if 9/11 would have been my week. And I don't want to. I'm just grateful to Larry for saying to me only a couple of months before that I didn't need to fly out quite so often!

Larry's favorite phrase which of course made it into our advertising was "The Internet changes everything." We believed it at the time. The entire country (not the world as Silicon Valley believed - parts of which still don't have reliable, uncensored, affordable access to the Internet) was willing to believe it. It was this belief that fueled the ridiculous tech stock bubble of the 90s. As it turned out we were all clueless as to how it would change everything!

OK so we know what happened next. But fast forward a few years and take stock of the situation. I have had a foot in two camps - advertising and music. Depending on who you talk to, both industries are either dead or dying. And it's all because of the Internet. Or more specifically the digital technology that made the Internet possible, that made music easier to record, copy and share.

The music industry refused to accept change. It took a computer company - Apple - to show how money could be made from digital music downloads.

But not the kind of money the music industry was used to.

The advertising industry refused to accept change. It took technology companies - yahoo and google - to show how the new ways of reaching customers could generate revenue.

But not the kind of revenue the ad industry was used to.

Interesting parallel. People say these industries are dying yet there's MORE music out there right now than ever before and there's MORE advertising out there than ever before.

So what is dying? All that is dead is the ability of a handful of people - major ad agencies and major record labels - to bleed the kind of cash out of their audiences (or clients) that they used to.

Long before we had today's technology, music used to be in the hands of troubadours. Wandering minstrels who sang songs. Strangely enough these songs were often the means by which people got their news and information. They were an early form of advertising. They advertised heros (from Jesse James to Robin Hood), they unified beliefs and strengthened common bonds. But nobody did it for the money.

Somewhere down the line we decided that pop stars (and sports stars, incidentally) were worth obscene amounts of money. Which they are not. They are lucky bastards who get to "play" and get paid for it.

So, Larry, I think you were right all those years ago. The Internet has changed everything. But some people are still unwilling to accept it because it hurts their ability to make money, because it has demystified some industries that were based on nothing more than the trick of doctors who once wrote prescriptions in Latin! (Next, I hope we see the tech giants themselves demystified with the earnings of the Ellisons and the Gates' brought back to some rational level!)

When a handful of TV networks held sway over the entire American audience, it was different. When a handful of major record labels held sway over what we heard, it was different. Now these two industries do not know how to deal with the splintering of reality into a world where just about everything ever recorded, filmed or written can be available to anybody any time. And because neither of them can generate the easy money they once did, they think they are dying.

Music and communication will never die. But there will always be things that 'change everything'. And until the major companies that make up these industries embrace change and accept that the days of effortless profit are long gone we will have to endure all this talk about dying - while we listen to the most varied choice of music we've ever had and learn about new products and new ideas in the most varied ways we've ever known.

What 4 I go to the theatre

Since moving to LA I've seen very little theatre. In New York, I used to see 2 to 3 shows a week - on average. You'd think there'd be some withdrawl going on, but it's been so busy, I haven't missed it. Yet, I've found myself returning to plays to work on them and I'm still strongly drawn to the blogs of theatre lovers and the conversations they foster.

It got me thinking about why I started going to theatre in the first place.

The truth is, I've never gone for "entertainment." There's plenty of television and film that can do that for a lot less money. And often better.

Engagement, however, has been a much more powerful motivator when it comes to getting me into - and keeping me in - the theatre.

It comes in a lot of forms - laughter, anger, sorrow, horror, sympathy, sharp thought, pure bafflement, joy, mystery, beauty, scathing relevance, vigorous truthfulness, provocative ugliness, delightful whim, etc.

What makes it unique in theatre is that it's an experience you're living in at the same time the actors on stage are living in it.

So when Austin and Lee go at it in TRUE WEST, I'm not just watching it, I'm witnessing it. When Marion in Fornes's ABINGDON SQUARE awakens sexually, I feel it the way she does because I'm in the presence of it. When Mag burns her daughter's letter in the fire of THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE, she relishes the sense of injustice and dismay and pity that she inflames in me and the rest of the audience just to see the flames go higher. When the hat parade happens in Churchill's FAR AWAY, I am completely disgusted and horrified by the juxtaposition of each hat's beauty against the brutal world that produces them.

It's what makes theatre dangerous and compulsive and terrific (in the archaic sense) - which it ALWAYS has to be for me if it's to be good.

I don't even have to like it when it finds this place and holds my attention - Mark Schultz's EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT was a play I couldn't stand even as I couldn't help but watch it.

Engagement dies the moment I ask the question, "What's the point?" (In some ways, the bitterness I feel when I find myself asking this question grows exponentionally with the quality of the production. The better it looks, the better it's acted, the funnier it is just for the sake of funny - the more I begin to hate it.)

Of course, engagement can die and come back several times in a show. And that's okay.

And I don't have to be able to easily sum up the point of a show to be completely immersed in it - in fact, sometimes when I thoroughly get it, I'm totally UN-engaged. Nice endings, sincere apologies, warm understanding, untruthful dialog, punning of ANY kind, schtick (unless we're talking improv), smugness, uber-coolness, arrogance are all other ways to ruin a perfectly nice time in the dark.

A Single Woman

By Eleanor Robison - as told to Malachy Walsh
on 12/30/04

I think we’d only been going together about 5 months when R asked me. He didn’t get down on his knee, he asked me in the car. We’d been to dinner and then just, in the car, he asked me. There was nothing romantic about it whatsoever. I don’t know if we’d stopped, I have a feeling it was still so maybe we were stopped, maybe it was we were outside the house… and then he just kinda said, We’ve been going out together for quite a while and I’ve come to love you and I would really like to marry you – something like that. Just like that. Very simple.

As I’ve always said since, I don’t know if I really loved him or I just loved the idea of being married and especially to a minister.

It was very big news. We went over to a big congregational dinner and I was introduced as the minister’s fiancé.

So I was going to get married and thought I should go to the doctor and get things checked over. It was right around Christmas and the doctor found this large growth in my abdominal area. He thought it was on like a fallopian tube or something so he really thought he had to get that thing out. But when he got in, he discovered it was a big fibroid tumor in the uterus and he took the uterus out. So I had a hysterectomy and all with absolutely no preparation for it.

I found out after when the doctor came in in that dizzy time, you know, when you’re coming out of the anaesthetic and you act like you’re understanding things but you can’t really… But I do know that he came and told me, the doctor… that he’d had to remove the uterus and that really upset me because I’d always wanted to have children. That was one of the things that…

So I knew I had to tell R right away, which I did when he came to visit.

He was wanting me to get better and heal up and everything and he came and visited two or three times and I really didn’t get much of an inkling of how it was going to be.

Then it was the day I got out of the hospital that I was at home and I was lying down on the sofa out in the living room and he said, he said… he said he wanted to pass along his mental abilities to someone on down the line and that that was something he should do. He said I was not a suitable vessel for his seed.

I took the ring off and handed it back to him and told him to leave. A day or two later he came back with all the gifts I’d ever given to him and gave them back to me and I guess then he told the people in his church about it – he just told them - and they learned I wasn’t able to have children and then they rose up, in fury basically, and said that was no reason and said they didn’t want him anymore and asked him to resign. They finally got the Presbytery – the next, higher part of our church government – involved and that’s what did it. He left the church. Left the town. Left the whole area.

Anyway, I didn’t give up on the idea of having a family and when it became legal for a single parent to adopt in 1969, I just decided to find a little baby. That’s really what I wanted. But when I didn’t have a lot of luck with the agencies, I talked to our minister - and family friend - BJ. Then, one evening, after a Presbytery meeting, BJ asked me to come to sit on a curb with him. He asked me if I was still serious about adopting a baby. I said "I sure was." He told me about a baby he'd seen at the Ashland Hospital that didn’t have a name.

We got back to Ashland on a Saturday and BJ went to the hospital to find out more about the baby. He called the doctor on the birth chart at home and told him about me. Monday, my mother and I went met with him. We talked to the doctor and after the interview he said the baby would be ours and I went to my lawyer, Sam Harris, and he started the paperwork with the birthmom.

By Friday, all the paperwork was done and Sam came to the house with the baby. He told me that everyone at the hospital was impressed with the fact that the little baby was red headed and that I was, too.

I don’t know if I have the right words to say how wonderful it was, to have her put right in my arms. I felt like it was just meant to be. She was mine. Now she was itty bitty because she was premature - a bare 5 pounds. She was very little. But she had good lungs.

I’ve been told it was the first ever single female parent adoption in Oregon and the third in the country, but I’m not sure I believe it.

Years later a friend ran into R somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico or some place. They said that he was married and that he had a wife who’d had a couple of kids from another man, but that he, himself, had never had any – and they, the people from the church, were so happy about that: he’d never got a chance to plant his seed anywhere.

I was 38.

Joy, Illinois.

Eleanor was born here. She came to Ashland, Oregon in the mid-50s to teach school - which she did for 38 years.





Downtown Ashland, Oregon today.

It's a boy.

The test results are in. Due date: Aug 3. And I posted this photo of his mom just because I like it.

Eleanor - Who knew you'd be a greater influence on my writing than Hemingway, Faulkner, Rushdie, Fornes, Shepard, Shakespeare or Bond and Churchill?

She is not very tall, but when she decides she wants to be heard, she uses a voice than no-one can overlook.

She’s humble to a fault though she’s often the smartest one in the room.

She has a true belief in God, but a tolerance that might make an atheist think twice about saying no to the town square Nativity scene.

She seems like the last person you’d ask to maneuver a big truck around, but she could slip an RV into a compact parking space outside the COSCO, no problem.

She used to drive the great all-American muscle car, the Mustang.

She’s stood on the Great Wall of China.

She remembers a Fourth of July in Joy, Illinois where the fireworks were wheeled onto the local school football field and set off so people in the bleachers could watch them from above.

She uses words like “jiminey” and “rattle-trap” and “who-gee-whatsits” and phrases like “I’ll take another wonk of cake.”

She was David Fincher’s first film teacher.

On Thursdays she gets into a bathing suit to do water aerobics.

Her name is Eleanor Robison.

She’s my mother-in-law.

And she has turned out to be a great influence on me in ways that are still surprising and amazing to me.

The first time I met Eleanor I had come to Ashland to be with her daughter for a week during a Grad school spring break.

It was early in the relationship, so I was anxious about what it might be like to meet her - evenmoreso with so much riding on it.

I knew Heather was worried, too, when she suggested we stay for the first night at a local hotel. In retrospect, we were all hedging out bets, but it was probably for the best because at least I got to be with Heather before anything new got introduced to our relationship.

When I finally did meet Eleanor, I immediately liked her. She had that rare quality of being wise and curious at once – of giving off the sense that she’d seen a lot of the world and was interested in seeing more.

That still didn’t make me think I could just get around the bases without care.

Maybe she saw that I knew that during our first meal. Or maybe she saw that I really loved her daughter.

I’m not sure.

But boy was I happy, when, as I washing dishes, she marched up to me and said, “Malachy, I approve of you.”

It’s led to many, many good things.

Like the video above that became the start of an unusual tv campaign that eventually wound up in MOMA.

I’ve even put her – or a character like her – in a play about people trying to make livings in the arts despite all the financial problems that brings.

Next, the story of how she and Heather found each other in the world – in her own words.

Theatre people seem resentful of this. Why?

Theatre is something I love. And it will always be there for me.

If I were a regularly produced playwright, I'd be there for theatre, more often.

But I'm not. And the few playwrights I know who are getting produced are usually found on their knees looking for money.

That's why I'm in LA, not NY (where the showcase code and real-estate mean a three person play can cost as much as $30,000 in a house that doesn't seat 50), and not SF (where there's no business to live on). It's also why I work in advertising.

So, this note from The Playgoer didn't surprise me. And shouldn't surprise anyone else.

If I ever do make a decent amount of money, one thing I'll definitely enjoy doing with it is putting together a theatre company and producing my work - and the work of my friends - as it should be made.

The good thing about LA is that, here, not only do I think I can have kids, but I think I can put up some of that theatre even WITHOUT a decent amount of money.

Dexter

Just finished watching the entire Dexter season.

I don't think I've had a better time with a first season since The Sopranos.

Dexter is particularly, powerfully delicious in its depiction of a character addicted to murder and who - through pretending to be human - eventually becomes more human. A human who kills, that is.

He reminds me very much of people in AA who build secret lives around drinking and drugs and sex but appear to function normally in the world.

Best new show all around (acting/writing/direction) on "TV."

The TV Spec Script: 5 - done

10 weeks ago I walked into a classroom without an iota of an idea about writing a TV spec. Oh, sure, I'd read a couple, but when the teacher/professor asked which of us did not have an "industry standard outline", I was the only dummy honest enough to say I didn't.

It may have been the moment that the teacher became cold to me.

Or maybe it was an hour later when I said I was a playwright and working copywriter and that I'd drop the class in three weeks if I didn't have an outline that was passable by his standards.

After that, I never fit in. Perhaps with a baby on the way and a dwindling bank account, I expect too much. Need too much and I should just do the easy thing...

Which, when I think of it, was very very hard to break into as well.

However, outside of giving me deadlines and pointing out typos and getting a tutorial on how to use Final Draft, there was very little help about story until way late in the "semester" - and even then it was prompted by my own pushing, which in turn was prompted by questions my excellent writer friend Ross Berger posed after he read the script.

Still, I have to hand it to the teacher. He did read the work. I just feel we may have all learned more had we all read each other's scripts out loud. But if I were king, of course, the trains would never get where they were supposed to - much less be on time.

When asked where I thought the script was, I replied that I thought that was for others to say.

I should've just said, It's done. And time to write another one.

And it is.

But with so many spec TV scripts out there, I think I'll write a pilot this time.

However, if anyone asks me if I've ever written a pilot before, I'll sadly lie through my teeth and say, yes, many many times.

And I've also won the Nobel Peace Prize. Humbly, of course.

Sorkin's Farnsworth Invention

Went down to the La Jolla Playhouse this weekend to see THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION by Aaron Sorkin.

While the play's style with its heavy narrative spine isn't my cup of tea, Sorkin isn't exactly slumming it either. He started in theatre with A FEW GOOD MEN for which he was given a TONY.

The play's plot is all about the invention of television.

The theme is all about What's better for humankind, sharing information or owning and exploiting it? Interestingly the character with the most narrative responsibilities, William Sarnoff, played terrifically by Stephen Lang, is also the villain. He tries to have it both ways - make TV a personal trust and make money off it. You can guess which wins.

Philo Farnsworth (a great Jimmi Simpson) is much more noble. But he's also destroyed before he can show us whether or not he has a greedy side.

Advertising and commercialism both take pretty big hits, which seems disingenuous since commericial television has made Sorkin rich, but the subjects were clearly an interesting and important part of figuring out how television was going to work.

Sorkin is very erudite and witty. And he's able to keep the material light and thoughtful through-out - which you'd expect.

My guess is New York will be able to weigh in on this one shortly.

Non-fiction film on non-fiction theatre - who sez meta-whatever is so over?

A short film doc on the theatre doc.

Enjoy.

The Trouble with Looking for Work

The table during the day.


Lately, I've been freelancing. From home.

This means that I'm doing everything from our big table - cold calling, producing radio, rewriting copy and doing conference calls - while Heather is in the house.

Theoretically, this should be fine, but occasionally, as happened today, she'll ask me question like, "What would you like for dinner?" and I'm in the middle of doing something else - editing, whatever.

At the moment, I'm not interested in being pampered.

So my answer is a little petulant. And non-committal: I don't know. What do you want?

Today, she interpreted it as resentment that she hasn't found work. She's worried about people not calling her back. She's feeling trapped by the apartment. By our always narrow circumstances. By her pregnancy - our pregnancy.

Of course, I don't mean to do this. I'm stressed out too. About all the same things. And my answer isn't to place my energy where she does - but elsewhere. Which is easier for me since I'm a writer. I can write whether or not someone hires me. I can always work on the script a little longer, a little harder.

Acting isn't so easy. And even less so when you're pregnant.

Last night, we played tennis and went for a drive along Mulholland. But we can't do that every night.

What to do... What to do.... besides give up and become a lawyer.

No one said it would be easy, but it's these little stubs that worry me the most.


At night.

ps. this is amazingly COOL.

Beautiful

She makes me read poetry to her pregnant belly.

And I count her freckles when she sleeps at night.

Jigsaw Nation

I realize some of us think that theatre should be a hammer of leftist thought, but I don't. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons most people are not interested in theatre - they expect that it will not only be boring, but that it will lecture them on what to think while simultaneously telling them that they're dumb if they don't understand what they're seeing.

Unfortunately, these expectations are all too often fulfilled.

And since there's very little in theatre right now -- {at the always unnamed "institutions" of "homogeny" (someone else's idea, not mine) or in the churches that are apparently now considered theatre in the same sense that the Lincoln Center is (again, someone else's idea, not mine)} -- with truly revelatory, revolutionary or even mildly incisive weight on it, there's almost no reward for going to theatre at all.

Worse, theatre seems to have lost its status as a place to explore, fail, explore again. Shows are now considered products that are either digestable and likeable and ready to be forgotten -- or they're tossed aside, where they're also forgotten.

Which is why I got involved in JIGSAW NATION. I saw it as an honest process-oriented effort to bring new voices to the stage - not just the one's we're used to hearing in shows like STUFF HAPPENS.

If you're around, check it out. Even if stylistically it isn't for you, you might still get something out of meeting people who name their kids after conservative presidents while others work coffee carts at 50th and 3rd after fleeing Iraq.

The pr clip is below.

************

What does "American" mean to you? Relentless Theatre Company sets out to document the thoughts and feelings of citizens across the U.S. in a new, traveling theater piece, "Jigsaw Nation." A series of overlapping monologues culled from hours of man-on-the-street interviews, Jigsaw Nation comes to Costa Mesa, California at the invitation of South Coast Repertory for two free performances on March 16 and 17 at 8 pm.

In Costa Mesa, the writers and actors continue their quest to craft a rich tapestry of stories that reflects the American experience. Originally produced in 2005 as a workshop for the New York International Fringe Festival, "Jigsaw Nation" re-opened for a series of performances on New York's Ellis Island, and recently completed a stop at Minneapolis's Mixed Blood Theatre. Each step of the way, the company brings on local actors and spends two-to-three weeks in the community conducting new interviews to add to the already-existing script. Next destination after Costa Mesa: Louisville, Kentucky as the guest of Actors' Theatre of Louisville.

The New York Sun wrote, "Jigsaw Nation draws its considerable power from the startling immediacy of real people's speech. As the five simply dressed actors turn from veteran to teenager, immigrant to red stater, the script's uncanny ability to deliver the original voices intact makes the characters crackle with life."

The Relentless Theatre Company (RTC) founded in Los Angeles in 1994 by Honegger and Rachel Malkenhorst is committed to exploring various characteristics of the American experience. From 1996 -2003, RTC presented critically acclaimed productions, and was hailed as "L.A.'s most relentlessly gritty company" by the Los Angeles Times, "A group of first-rate artists" by Drama-Logue, "Always adventurous" by Back Stage West, and "One of the finest and most committed theatrical companies in all of Los Angeles" by Entertainment Today. In 2003, RTC relocated to New York where it has since presented Shelia Callaghan's The Hunger Waltz at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, Malachy Walsh's The Chair as part of the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival (Overall Excellence Award for Playwriting) and Suzanne Bradbeer's The Sleeping Girl at The Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on Theatre Row.

Two performances of Jigsaw Nation take place on Friday, March 16 and Saturday, March 17 at 8 pm. Admission is free to the public; reservations are not necessary.

Velvet Bark

My brother Pete was in LA this weekend for an opening at Infusion Gallery that featured some of his art.

He's been working in color fields lately and his work has a texture in person that's like velvet bark.

He says that he wants people to come up to his paintings and feel the surface with their hands.

When I lived in Europe I remember my artist friends insisting that Americans couldn't understand painting because the only way they saw most work was through 2-d reproductions in books.

My brother's paintings seem to second the demand that art can only really be experienced when you're in the same room with it.

And touching it.

It was a great show.

LACMA - cropped

Went to LACMA today.

Among these cropped images are arguments that contradict notions that art should be "nice" and "pretty" and "like-able" and, even, "comprehensible."

Not news. But nice to hear from a few artists who know.

"Live-ness"

Jason Grote recently wrote a post about the issues he's been struggling with regarding the press, audience and production in NY. In the comments section, an interesting little piece about the "live-ness" of theatre has broken out.

It's something Isaac has discussed over at Parabasis - and something we've all (people in theatre, I mean) have pondered over and debated while wolfing down coffee and pie at the Westway Diner at one time or another.

Several years ago, I noted it in a response to an article in the Times about the the state of theatre. In it, several well-known playwrights suggested that whatever the state of theatre might be, it might also be irrelevant.

Here was my response:

To the Editor:

Re ''In Times Like These'' by Kenneth Lonergan, Arthur Miller and Wendy Wasserstein [Feb. 23]:

Certainly, there's nothing like the power of human beings assembled in a room to witness a work of art as the artists create it. In times when people want to keep us separated, that in itself can be a political act. But there's also something that goes deeper. In the dark, in the moment when something happens on stage and radiates out, actors, writers, directors, technicians and audience merge in a celebration of ''aliveness'' that other arts can only suggest.

At a time when both our leaders and our enemies consider killing a means to their ends, could anything matter more?

MALACHY WALSH
Manhattan

The letter was published in 2003.

My life...

Working on a play that's being developed at South Coast.

Writing radio for a client in Orange County.

Writing television spots for an agency in NY.

Rewriting a TV spec.

Rewriting a play for a workshop at PCPA.

Thinking about producing DRESSING THE GIRL.

Entertaining my brother Peter who's here for an art gallery opening of his work in downtown LA.

Trying to stay sober.

Interested in going to La Jolla to see the latest Aaron Sorkin play.

Being pregnant. Or rather, being the male half of being pregnant.

Pretending that this blog entry is not a repeat of the one before because it's a list instead of something more directly narrative.

Am I making progress?

A friend shot me an email the other day saying he enjoyed the blog and all, but he couldn't tell if I was making progress out here in LA.

Early in this blog's life - a life that will end around one year from my first blog entry here (Aug 15th or so) - I was probably better at giving a sense about all that.

In the last month, there's been a decided drop-off in that direct kind of reporting because I've been trying to scrounge up work.

Luckily, I've found some, but it's clearly made it difficult to pursue other goals as well.

I have finished my MEDIUM spec and am about to start a Pilot for something original.

I also have a workshop of BEYOND THE OWING coming up at the PCPA Theatre Festival up in Santa Maria.

In addition, over the last few weeks, I've reworked my screenplay, UNIONVILLE, and a producer asked to look at it when I told them what it was about.

Finally, I'm working with Relentless Theatre on JIGSAW NATION at South Coast Rep later this week. It's a project that I helped start and I was one of the original contributing writers for the piece in New York.

Considering what Heather and I have done since August - left NY, found a place in LA, moved in together, looked for work, discovered we're pregnant - well, I'd say we're doing pretty good.

However, I've been low about my writing. Re-reading my screenplay, I felt it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Re-reading my MEDIUM, I thought it was actually too funny for the show. Re-writing BEYOND THE OWING, I thought, well, I was lost. Plus, I got the rejection letter from New Dramatists which always casts me into deep self-doubt. (Though it did have an unusual paragraph about how well my work was recieved, plus hand written notes of encouragement from Todd London and Emily Morse at the bottom...)

This dip in confidence is consistent with the way I work and feel about work. I go up and down all the time.

The stakes, however, have been made higher by the new, aforementioned clock in my life, our pregnancy.

Plus, while I've found some work here in LA, it's not been as convenient as I'd like - or as constant as I need.

Believe it or not, despite my new passion for THE END OF FAITH, I have found it quite comforting to hit the floor with my needs and say out loud that I'm a little lost and need some help.

So, am I making progress? I don't know. I'm actually trying not to think about it.

Though I am getting itchy to bring a project to production. And I'm starting to look at my plays with an eye to producing one of them on my own. Trouble is, I just don't want to do it in a theatre, for a theatre crowd.

I want to do it for myself. And a few friends.

That makes it very tricky, indeed.

Though, on the upside, LA is not a temporary place to make work for me - unlike New York.

Anachey in the UK (sic)

This is how I want to feel when I leave the theatre. ON FIRE with such enthusiasm for what I just saw that I'm trying to repeat it for myself. The kind of passion that inspired these two to make a video like this.

The kid with the flyswatter, the tenement in the background, the schoolboy shirts.

Yeah. Anachey - like the way the kids spelled it.

In lieu of a real post...

I've got a freelance gig this week. Between that, revising a play and my MEDIUM spec, I've been too busy to blog.

But I've been thinking about theatre a lot lately, especially since I'm certain I won't find a staff job on a TV show this season based what I understand of the hiring cycles.

Until I can get my thoughts together for a real post later in the week, I thought I'd "share" these ads I wrote a billion years ago for my theatre company in SF. They ran in a Fringe Festival program for less than $200. (Proof that not all marketing has to cost an arm and a leg.)

Though the ads sold no "specific show", it generated interest. Our summer short play festival was packed from opening to closing.

I "stole" the "Lights come up..." line from my friend Kurt Bodden.

Nachi Sanchez art directed.


























The theatre company was called The Iron Workers Local 202 Theatre Company. There were three founders, myself, Cameron Galloway and Eric Schniewind (who now writes for Killing My Lobster). Our mission stated that we were "devoted to producing Bay Area Playwrights" since nobody else seemed to be doing that, despite there being "no paucity" of talent there.

We mostly worked out of the EXIT on Eddy Street.

It was a good time.

The Blog Roll - The Internet equivalent of your high school lunch table

Let's face it. Who you were in high school was defined as much by what you did and how you dressed as who you sat with - at lunch.

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMNONT HIGH certainly made that clear. The Dorks sat at the Dork table. The Jocks at the Jock table. Preps with Preps. Freaks with Freaks... and so on.

Today, this high school mentality is mirrored in the blog roll. It says, I read these people. I look at these pages fairly regualarly. And, most importantly, look at me and my cool friends.

It's quite natural. But it's also interesting since people make a big deal of updating their list of friends. Those who get on are given special status. Do those who don't make it continue to buzz around with trays of grilled cheese sandwiches looking for a place to sit? The recent need for a "blogroll amnesty day" (thank you Mr. Excitement) suggests they do. Afterall, why else devote a day to remove names from the rolls without feeling guilty? You wouldn't if feelings couldn't get bruised by such things.

Some people are very persnickety about who's on their list.

Some people aren't.

Some lists are made early in a blog's life and then forgotten about. Links that linger and ossify long past their expiration date.

I imagine there will be books about the history of the blog that go into the social and intellectual implications of this phenomenon.

But for now, in the theatre world, looking at these rolls, you also get an idea of what theatre cliques people belong to. Because who is not on that list says as much about a particular blogger's tastes and attitude as who is.

Just like the school lunch table.

My policy is simple. I try to put people on my blog when:

They comment on my blog.
They put me on their blog roll.
I read their blog and think it's interesting.
I know you and I discover you have a blog.
I find a blog that I feel has particular relevance to the idea behind my blog (working and finding my place as a writer in the United States with a more than strong interest in theatre).

I remove you from the roll if it looks to me like you've stopped posting.

Or you send me an email that says you don't want to be friends with a dork like me anymore.

***********

EDIT: Interestingly, I've also noticed that I often navigate to other pages/blogs through my own blog roll but rarely use other people's blog rolls to get around. I suspect I am not alone in this.

Everybody's problably read this already, but maybe we should all reread it anyway

I watch football with a friend who suggested I pick it up.

It's frighteningly direct. And strikes me as frighteningly right.

At one point, he asks us to imagine a world where it's believed - on faith - that certain films were made by God. Or that Windows 98 was the word of God in code form, written with Divine inspiration.

Preposterous? Why is it any crazier than believing - on faith - that the Bible was written the same way and should be taken as the Word of God?

Here's an excerpt from early in the book where he attacks "religious moderates".

**********************
"...While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness...."

Jealousy

Last week, I had the pleasure of watching my friend and ex-roommate - Adam Szymkowicz - have a successful reading at South Coast Rep.

I mean, really, it couldn't have gone better. The audience ate up his play like a kid eats up candy.

I felt good because it was a good thing for him - plus, South Coast flew him out so I got to see him. (We've been missing each other in New York the last few times I've been out there.)

However, I couldn't help but feel a little jealous.

Which is somewhat crazy since I not only love Adam's work, but I've personnally tried to get his work read everywhere I've been as a reader.

Still, it got me thinking about the pig farmer who starts with 2 pigs and 10 years later finds himself the owner of 200 hundred pigs. He is unhappy, however, all the time. His wife asks him why, since his stock has gone up 100 fold. He replies, because our neighbor has 400 pigs. Would it make you happy, she inquires, if he had the same number as you? He answers: Only if they were all dead.

Obviously, artistic jealousy is absurd. You do what you do because you're crazy inspired. Because the work you're doing calls for you to do it this way, not that. Accomplishments can't be measured apples to apples. "Good" is subjective. "Better" even moreso. "Bad" is a judgment that really doesn't help make anything clearer.

But while I'd love to be as noble as those thoughts, I'm afraid I'm not as often as I'd like to be.

Which is why, for my part, when this kind of thing comes up, I try to remind myself of those simple artistic principles. And that nothing I have done has been based on what I deserved, but rather what was given to me - usually as a surprise to my best plans.

What do others do?
**********************************************
In advertising - an often cutthroat business - this problem is dealt with head on. So, for instance, when someone you know wins an award, you look at the piece that won it for them and you say - out loud and to someone else - "I don't know. Is that really good? I mean, I could've thought of that. In fact, a couple of years ago, I did. I just don't have a good client like that. Fucking asshole, got lucky. His partner probably did it all."

You only get back to healthiness when you get back to work.

Reasons...

While it snowed and sleeted in the Northeast, this is what I was doing with my wife in California.

The Agent Thing - Again

Ken Levine (his link is in the margin) posted about the absurdity of finding an agent for a play he wrote.

Mr. Excitement (a link is also in the margin) posted a response.

I've been pretty vocal in both places about it, but rather than post more about the subject, I thought I'd just offer links to my previous agent entries.

Here's where you'll find my experience with a Hollywood agent. It was - overall - a good one.

Here's where you'll find my take on theatre agents - as I've known them so far.

Super Sunday Follow-up

A commenter on my Anna Nicole Smith spot (he also did not find it funny) reminded me that I'd promised to point out which of the Super Bowl spots I did some very very peripheral work for.

My reply to "eric" is below - with some simple revisions to the original (which you can see in the ANS spot comment section).

***************************************

Here's where you can find the Super Bowl spot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQKk3PI-DW8

John Hage (writer) and Bernie O'Dowd (art director) at Deutsch/LA came up with it. I have to say I liked it from the first time I saw it - which was in a rough cut two Fridays before the Super Bowl. It's a very good spot in my opinion.

It didn't get a lot of talk, but all of the talk it got was positive. And it was one of the higher scoring spots with regular people too.

Unfortunately, I've heard through the grapevine that there was one major complainer. NAMI (National Assoc for Mental Illness) thought that the spot made lite of suicidal ideation. GM - after a few days - decided to alter the spot to soften this. I haven't seen the remake.

Knowing the people at Deutsch, I'm sure it'll be good, too.

The thing I worked on (guided/oversaw might be better words) was a "movie trailer" for the spot. It was to be used on the Internet to "tease" people into looking for the spot when it ran on the game and, then, after the game to get those who hadn't seen it yet to watch the full 60 second spot elsewhere.

I found the trailer as recently as early last week on YouTube. It has since been removed from that YouTube page - presumably because of the above NAMI controversy.

It was more or less a cut down of the 60 with a Don Lafontaine-like VO along the lines of "See what happens when everything you once loved is suddenly taken away. And you're a robot."

It had a melodramatic flair that matched the emotional tenor of the original - though there had been a version of the spot that was also funny that made it look like one of those ridiculous action adventure stories of a Robot driven to madness when everything he ever lived for turned into a nightmare.

This is a snap I took of the Robot in the Deutsch/LA lobby the week before the game. It took several puppeteers to animate it.

Very cool.

***************************************
ps. the Bernie O'Dowd mentioned here is, indeed, the skateboard guy. I knew nothing about him before sharing an office with him, but apparently he was quite well known at one time. Google his name and you'll see.

***************************************
EDIT: Here's where you'll find the Robot spot with the new ending.
http://www.gm.com/company/onlygm/quality/index.html?cmp=RobotOLA_Branding

I am sleepy

The whole day was spent worrying about finishing a script to send to an agent by the end of the week.

The whole day.

This meant I was isolated from my wife the entire time and now she's asleep.

I should've gone to a meeting today.

And spent less time worrying about things I have no control over.

Let's start again, tomorrow.

My Anna Nicole Smith ad

Done just after she won the first round of the lawsuit over the money her ex-husband left her.

I have always hated it - not because Anna was bad, but because I never found it funny. However, my art director at the time had come up with it and would not let it go. There were many fights over how to improve the ads - but I lost them all. Even the ones with the client where I tried to tell them the campaign would not be effective in generating calls without major revisions and a new media plan. (Media departments at most agencies drive creative - this is what has happened in the last 10 years and it is bad: It leads to irrelevant messages in places that are even more irrelevant. Ugh.)

Interestingly, I never thought I'd actually have to shoot the ad because while the client had bought the idea of celebrities applying - but discovering they're not qualified - for jobs at 21st Century Insurance, nobody wanted to do it for the money they were offering.

Then Anna said yes.

Turned out she was the cheapest of the three celebs we used (the others were Alice Cooper and Randy "macho man" Savage).

The day before the shoot I thought I'd get a reprieve from it when Anna broke her arm in a "weight lifting accident" and tried postpone the shoot.

The client played hardball and she came out to fulfill her contract.

The producer said Nicole asked for Crystall and Godiva Chocolates in her trailer. She stayed in Santa Monica under the name Norma Jean.

Yeah. Norma. Jean.

She never came out of character. But she was completely professional at all times. Even when the client made her try on shirts though she was clearly in pain from the arm injury which turned out to be real.

I will also say this about her: In person, she appeared to be nothing more than a big boned Texas woman with a lot of make up, but something different happened under the lights in the camera's eye. She seemed to radiate. I've seen a few actors since who do this - appearing rather normal in rehearsals or auditions, but becoming incandescent in front of an audience - but this was the first time I ever experienced it.

It is a very special thing for which there is no real explanation.

I have a picture of me and her together on the set somewhere but I can't find it right now.

As I've already said, I never liked the ad - strategically it was wrong for the company - and entertainment-wise it wasn't funny (there'd been arm wrestling). Plus, I never like creative driven by celebrities - always seems like a cop out to me. But everyone was too busy trying to have a story to tell their golf buddies over a round of 18 holes to care.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. The ad was pulled after one weekend because it didn't create enough calls.

Over a $1,000,000 was wasted on this effort.

The TV Spec Script: 4 - If painting by numbers doesn't make great art, what makes anyone think writing by numbers will work any better?

Are you writing a 4 act or a 5 act?

Does your show have 35 scenes per hour? Or 48?

How many times does your main character talk?

How many pages does your script have?

Does yours have too many? Or too few?

THESE are just a few of the questions you are told to ask as you sit down to write a spec script for TV. They're similar for movies.

But since writing a television spec is about showing you know how to do it, these questions are emphasized over and over.

Of course, this nonsense is akin to saying that because you've written a poem in perfect iambic pentameter in 3 quatrains and a couplet (abab, cdcd, efef, gg), you've written a good sonnet.

It's all part of the anyone-can-do-it myth that's grown up around an auto-pilot, mass manufactured world of entertainment.

I blame Syd Field for doing this first (though I'm sure he was not the first) and JAWS for making it seem like the only way to get people to spend money on a story. The misuse/overuse of Joseph Campbell's ideas hasn't helped either.

The combination has, at its worst, led to dull, predictable emotional and action tropes.

It's lazy storytelling and, worse, it's led to an even lazier "teaching of storytelling".

I say this because it seems rather than tell someone, "Hey, you know, this script doesn't have a strong idea" or "Go back and figure out what this character is interested in emotionally" people are told to watch shows and make hash marks every time there's a cut to a new scene.

Other, less numerical, but just as mindless tidbits are often shared.

Things like, "don't use 'is' and 'was'" and "make more stuff happen" and "think of your story like a mountain range with valleys and peaks" and, my favorite, "no scene in a movie should ever be longer than a half page".

Does anyone else find this annoying?

All I can say is, thank god Sam Shepard didn't write True West, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, Fool for Love or Lie of the Mind this way. And thank god Fornes didn't give a shit that Mud is too short for a "real evening of theatre".

In fact, thank god for theatre in all its baffling, unwieldy beauty.

A prediction that came true... except for the tropical part

In August we drove up 1 along the Oregon coast. Along the way, we got into some kind of bickering thing and when we pulled over, my co-dependent self wanted to make up for everything and get back on track.

My extroverted self decided to record it.

And then I made a prediction about conceiving a child.

For some reason I thought it would happen in November.

I also thought it would happen while we were on a honeymoon that we hadn't taken and that we still haven't taken (for financial reasons, mostly).

As you know, I was wrong about one of those predictions.

But what I'm really wondering is: Does anybody in the blog world actually watch these posted videos?

ps. this video is only 50 seconds long.

Something to write for: The Coppola Theory

There’s a theory about art and artists.

Kids get in the way.

They take up time. They take up energy. They take up money. They change your life focus.

Then there’s another theory. I’ll call it the Coppola Theory because he’s the first one I ever heard make it.

And that’s that kids make you better. Faster. More urgent.

***************************

When my wife and I got married a year ago, we knew we wanted to have kids. However, we were both still working and, because our jobs had us separated on a temporary basis, we weren’t in a hurry to get going (plus, you try getting pregnant with 3,000 miles between you).

Naturally, as we planned to move to LA, we hoped that by finally living in the same place we’d be able to start the family we’d always talked about – but even then, we were cautious.

We were both going to need jobs. And a place to live. And cars. And… well, you get the point.

Plus, I really wanted to take a stab at film and TV, which meant breaking into a new field from my bread and butter career: advertising.

But I was certain I’d find work. And all the rest would follow quickly.

Then I moved. And work was not easy to find. And it was more expensive than I thought. And then there was the housing problem – which I’ve already blogged about.

Things came to a head the weekend in November when Heather came down from Ashland to look for a place with me. It was a tough couple of days for us. I was particularly down since my worst employment fears were being recognized. And she was upset by the lack of livable housing that we seemed to be confronting.

The subject of kids and starting a family came up when one potential landlord (who is now our landlord) asked us if we were planning to have a baby anytime soon.

I didn’t hesitate.

“Oh, god, no,” I said flippantly. “We have other things to do first. Like a find jobs, a place to live. Stuff like that.”

Heather brought up my response later that evening. Apparently she was worried that we were not on the same page.

I backpedaled.

“What I meant, was, uh, that right now, in the immediate moment, while I don’t have a job and it doesn’t look like I’m going to sell a screenplay or get a staff job on a TV show anytime soon, and well, the ad agencies don’t seem like they need help, well, I don’t think it would be a great time to have kids, cuz, you know, well, uh, do you think it would be good?”

A very very very long conversation ensued.

And, of course, we, uh, well, you know what we did.

About a week and a half later, I got the call that landed us the address at Sunset. And the same morning, an invitation from Clubbed Thumb to go to New York and work on my play, Beyond the Owing – about two people struggling as artists under huge grad school debt.

All this made me happy and so I went up to Ashland to celebrate Thanksgiving and then to NYC to workshop my play.

And, boy, was the workshop intense. In fact, I was quite worried that I was going to embarrass myself if I didn’t write better faster when I got call one night from Heather that started: “I have to tell you something…”

Now, I don’t know what it has felt like for others when they were told they were going to be a parent, but me, well, there was a little thing that started at the top of my head and shot down through me like a field of soothing electricity and there I was born all over again myself right there in a studio apartment overlooking West 43rd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

I mean, I was like, Shit. Happy happy happy shit, but Shit.

I don’t know how long it took me to stop smiling (though my wife claims that I went back to my dramaturgical issues within 10 minutes), but I do know I felt there could be no greater event, no more positive a thing than being told I was going to be a dad.

Until my first sonogram, that is. (The above is the second, most recent sonogram.) I watched in disbelief as a doctor pushed and poked my wife’s flat belly looking for something that could, potentially, some day be a child but for now would look like a grey pea. It was a miracle perhaps that the doctor could find it – but when she did, well, the look on my wife’s face was maybe the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

Part wonder, part fear, part joy, part love, part true amazement.

On arriving in LA, two friends who’d had a child only a few weeks before recommended a doctor in Beverly Hills and I got another look at that expression.

Only this time, it came with a heartbeat.

(There was also some prodding and poking required that I had to turn my head from since, if I was looking, I’d have had to have kicked the doctor’s ass but good. After all, here’s only so much a man will let another man do to his wife before such displays of macho-ness are required, regardless of the medical degree from Stanford.)

I’m pretty sure the doctor turned the volume up real high, but even without that, I think the Notre Dame marching band drummers couldn’t compete.

We’re due in August.

And despite all I’ve written here, it still hasn’t quite sunk in. (I told my wife this weekend something like, “When the baby arrives in 9 months we’ll – “ and she interrupted me to point out that it would only be 6 months. Doh!) But I’m reading books, er, well, a book and asking about prenatal vitamins and thinking about my job search in a totally different way.

But I’m still a writer.

And now, to all the other changes in my life over the last few months, I have another thing to prove with words.

That I can be good enough with them to make a good life for someone I’ve never met yet, but who I’m completely and totally responsible for.

Which makes me a Coppola Theory acolyte.

Amazing.

***************************
This photo was taken 24 hours after H told me I would be a father.