[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u1Q3IWxyG4]

He’d spent the morning with his gramma, and he was very happy to come home

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei7VG9-DK_c]

The cuteness of the boy’s ballet slippers is not to be missed.

You can’t walk out of a play with a simple “I didn’t like it, it just wasn’t for me.” I mean, you can, but if you do then you’ve wasted an awful lot of time. More often than not, the play isn’t for you, it’s for the people who made it, and it’s up to you to do a little work to figure out what it all means.

I suppose it could be argued that a great piece of art will translate, but I’m pretty sure that it translates *eventually*, that very often some of the most groundbreaking stuff we’ve witnessed had to be seen through the lens of history, it had to be understood by what came after it. You know that the first Jackson Pollock was greeted with at least a handful of people saying “that’s what my two year old’s room would look like if I didn’t clean it.”

I think what you can say is, “It was very good, and it wasn’t for me,” which is how I felt about the play In Security, now playing at the 3LD Art and Technology Center.

As you walk in, you see a woman frantically trying to learn Spanish from a tape as she goes through her personal and professional schedule, time and again, ironing out all the insanity that her friends, coworkers and family keep throwing at her. The utterly surreal tone is set immediately as she goes through her surgical schedule (her medical degree from Harvard “hangs” on the wall behind her as a projection) and repeats the phrase “Would you like to fix the exhaust pipe” in Spanish. The entire space is full of white furniture, outlined in black pen, all of it looking like a child’s sketch.

There is only one actor that appears live in this piece, the woman who’s surgery schedule and impending wedding are about to have a fender-bender. Every other character is portrayed by videotaped actors, and are projected on the walls behind her.

This works really well in a number of ways. The alienation is palpable all the way through, you never get a sense that she belongs anywhere. Also, the inhumanity is startling throughout, we are sharing our time with a woman who is trying to be perfect, to be more machine than person, and the rest of the world comes at her as projections from a machine. This is a wonderful idea, and it folds in neatly with the rest of the script.

The problem I had is a personal preference, really. The show is actually a very linear play, and the projections are, if my memory serves, always characters on the phone with her. These are filmed actors, and they exist in a completely surreal world, but in the end, we aren’t hearing voices in her head, we aren’t getting any manipulations of standard storytelling. There is a clock on the wall that moves either quickly or slowly, but it’s always simply moving forward.

Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to have seen the play. The use of projected images isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but the artists who are doing it in this show have a steady hand and are very, very smart. The look is seamless, from the images into the actual space. Also, Anna Gutto is wickedly good, spitting out huge chunks of dialogue as fast as the human ear can hear them. I try to stay away from praising people that I have a personal fondness for, but Alexis Poledouris’ direction is really elegant and makes excellent use of the indiscriminate parameters of the piece.

I just walked away wanting something stranger. There were some profound moments, but the intelligence and the bravery inherent in these moments implies that the entire piece could have been a lot more bizarre and I would have enjoyed it that much more.

Vampires were definitely my scare of choice as a little kid. They infiltrated my nightmares, and I used to be able to visualize them coming in to my room to munch on my neck. Mind you, these were real vampires – terrifying and silent, living (barely) on to feed on the blood of children.

I complained to Jordana the other day that vampires had been ruined. The Anne Rice novels certainly went a long way, and then even Bram Stoker’s Dracula was made into a movie with Winona Ryder (my porn of choice as a little kid) lusting after her bloody suitor. But Twilight? Come on, what exactly is so bad about being a vampire if you get to be super-fast, super-gorgeous, glittering in the sun, eating only cows and winning the triwizard cup. It’s annoying to have your sense of right and wrong so profoundly messed with.

Pretty Theft starts with this idea and runs with it. There isn’t a character in the play that doesn’t steal something from someone else, and each of them is doing it as an act of romantic compulsion. It’s as if every single person’s mind is a room with doors marked “Do Not Enter” and all of them have the same running thought in their heads, “who are They to tell me not to open this door!”

They make it out to be a lie. There’s nothing romantic about things stolen, about being stolen yourself… it’s actually a series of tiny nightmares. If you say to yourself, “these rules don’t apply to me!” then you are also agreeing, “okay, the protections are no longer mine either.” That’s not to say that if you shoplift, you deserve to be robbed at gunpoint or anything, but it is asking the question – Why is stealing important to you, and how much are you willing to risk to avoid your social responsibility.

It’s a fascinating exercise, as you’re being swept up in this perfectly pitched piece, to watch for every moment of thievery. There is shoplifting, there are sandwiches ordered which cannot be paid for, there is even a stolen car… but those are nothing compared to stolen moments, shared secrets, even kisses and embraces that are snuck in as if sheer audacity is all that’s needed to overcome a shattered social compact.

There isn’t a bad actor in this piece, anywhere. As a former actor, I’m always far more aware of the fact that the scene chewers usually have an *easier* job than those to whom the play happens, and Marnie Schulenberg does a masterful job of *not* chewing the scenery or anyone else in the play. I am always knocked out when an actor decides to fight the urge to fall apart, even when her character probably would. There is incredible strength in this performance, she has fought for honesty in every single second, and it’s a thrill to watch.

And, as much as I like to see someone control the throttle when the character calls for it, it’s equally compelling to see someone lay on the gas when the turns get tight. Todd D’amour is fantastic, like a coiled snake drunk on his own venom. He prowls like an animal, and he manages to chew his lines without spitting. There are two or three sentences that turn on a dime, and he has a knack for letting the most important chunks of the play just be, while manipulating other small bits of dialogue likes he’s feasting. There’s no sense of self-congratulation in his performance, he’s just wickedly precise.

The evening is wonderfully staged and produced, save for one problem. There are split scenes, with parts of the plot spinning like memories, ballerinas litter the place and the surreality runs thick, which is really, really great. The problem is that there is a scene that happens in another state, another literal state… like, say, a diner in Kansas. So you have scenes that happen in a theatrical head-space, and then a spilt scene with something that’s *actually happening*. At a later point in the show, characters from the one state show up at the diner in the other, and that’s your first hint that the diner is a real place, and not another bit of theatrical gymnastics.

However, I have to give huge props for the staging, which is fantastic through-out. I have said before, on these pages, that violence and nudity (which I enjoy ENORMOUSLY on screen) are both hard for me to take on stage. I can’t help it, I just look up there and say, “Hang on, that actor is, like… that’s a friend of mine! I don’t want to see her naked…” and stage combat is either very fake, or very real, and both of those upset me.

It sucks because… of course there’s sex and violence. That’s what makes the world go round. And there’s plenty in this show, BUT, they handle it exactly right for me. There is both sex and violence, but they stage it so you know what’s happening, and you’re never taken out of the play, you never worry for the safety of the people you’re watching, but the drama is razor sharp and the climax is still heart-shattering.

I know, I’m a prude. But primarily, I was an actor for years, and I’ve been a producer for years. If I could put a topless girl in every show, I’d sell a lot more tickets, but I don’t think I could watch it.

It would totally suck if I didn’t mention the other actors, but I run out of superlatives. Also, two of the cast members (Cotton Wright and Zach Robidas0 have worked with my company and I liked them enormously backstage, so my opinion of them (which is super high) is probably as much informed by that.

All in all, I’m just so knocked out by this play. It was worth going to the Access Theater, which I swore off years ago. Flux is continually blowing our minds with incredible work, and I’m so glad they are here and doing it.

Just one person’s perspective on the whole thing.

I was mis-diagnosed with several behavioral and developmental problems as a kid. Bi-polar disorder, dyslexia and epilepsy were some of my favorites, and none of them was even close to right. Which feeds the fire, somewhat, that these problems often go misdiagnosed and we might be relying on medication quickly to solve problems that require more attention than anything else.

There is an ugliness about medication in America, and ugliness that goes hand in hand with self-righteous ignorance. You can almost hear the sneer in people’s language when they say, “Just pop a pill and it will all be better!” There are aspects of this that aren’t all that destructive – for example, if you want to give birth and feel every single moment of pain, then by all means you shouldn’t take any pain medication. Or, if you feel like you want to lose weight simply by dieting and exercising, then by all means, don’t take any supplements that will help you burn calories or control your appetite.

There is a real problem, though, when you decide that it’s “bad” for me, if I want to modify the amount of pain I’m feeling, or the amount of work I’m willing to do in order to lose weight, just to follow the examples above. If I take painkillers and then deliver a baby, two years later, I’ll still have the kid, and I won’t have missed anything. If I take some supplements that help me get my weight down, and then I’m able to exercise more and get healthier, then in what way have I been immoral?

I understand that the argument is that these medications and supplements don’t actually do all that they promise to do, and that people are getting rich off our national obsession for the modification of discomfort and pain. I don’t think this argument has legs. People are getting rich off a thousand different things, it’s what makes our country work. As consumers, we know that it’s up to us to be informed, that Caveat Emptor is for us, not them. If the shit we’re taking doesn’t work, then we stop taking it.

Also, it’s much like my friend Ehren’s problem with the Amish – there’s no logical consistency. If you want no pain medicine while you give birth, then you should also probably not have a doctor there at all, logically. Don’t do it in a hospital, don’t have a baby fetal monitor, don’t go in for check-ups during the run-up to the birth. I mean, I don’t have this moral compass, but if you want a natural childbirth, the way the natural animals of the world do it, then you should probably just do it on the floor of your garage. That’s the logical conclusion for me. If you say, “I want all the benefits of modern science, I want the 4-D pictures of my baby in utero, I want them to save my baby’s life if there’s any complications… but I UTTERLY REFUSE to take pain medication…” well, that’s fine, draw the line wherever you want, but don’t pretend you’ve got some moral high ground, or you’re sticking it to the man.

When I was diagnosed with these various developmental problems, each time I tried to embrace it, but always knew it was wrong. I’m gonna try to break this down in as simple terms as possible.

My bipolar disorder diagnosis was due to the fact that my mood swings were wide and weren’t responses to stimuli. I would have prolonged periods of perfectly normal behavior, where I acted like a normal kid. Then, I would be paralyzed with depression – and it’s important here to explain that this isn’t “sadness” or “melancholy” or anything. I’d be unresponsive, I’d be in a room and feel like I was watching my life from the end of a long tube. I didn’t mope, I just couldn’t move fast enough, my mind was mush. When offered something that I wanted desperately, I couldn’t make it happen, when put in a position of extreme discomfort or pain, I couldn’t take any steps to move away from it.

Then, I would even out and be able to resume my normal life. This normal life included sadness, happiness, melancholy, satire, etc. If I failed a test or a girl dumped me, I would be sad, and I’d talk about it, or I’d cry, or whatever… but this is different than chemical depression.

Other times, my mind would race off the tracks. I’d sleep five hours a night, and I would start talking and be unable to stop. One might even say that, if I had a blog, I would start writing in it and find myself not even half-way through the thing having brought up topics so disparate and seemingly un-linked that a casual reader would stop reading after about the tenth paragraph. If good things happened to me, they did nothing to improve my mood, and bad things had no effect.

So, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I started to read about bipolar disorder and… it didn’t fit. These people were really, really sick. Yes, I had mood swings, but I was never a danger to myself, and although being obnoxious certainly hurt a lot of people’s feelings, I never lost sight of belonging to this family, this school, these people. I had something else.

It turns out there’s a word for it. Cyclothymia. Basically, bipolar lite.

Had I known about this when I was a child, my life could have been much better.

I’m going to edit down this next section, I just wanted to lay out the logic of mental illness before I got too deep into this.

I couldn’t pay attention in school, and I never knew what was going on. The teachers, my parents, everyone would occasionally scream at me, but it didn’t work. I assumed it was because I was stupid and lazy, and for the most part everyone agreed with part of that assumption. The problem was, every standardized test, I was off the charts. I was reading at a college level in grade school, and I ended up getting an almost perfect math SAT score.

I assumed this was because tests like that were designed for rich white liberal kids to do well on. Yeah, I looked around me and couldn’t figure out why my friends had such a hard time figuring stuff out that I thought was pretty basic, but they were getting good grades and, starting when I was about eleven, I was failing school completely.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I even went to special classes for dyslexics, and I just knew it was wrong. I kept thinking “these people keep getting numbers backwards and they can’t read… why am I here?” I was there because in 1983, nobody knew what the hell was wrong with me. Earlier, I spent a couple of years staring out the window and wouldn’t respond even when my name was being screamed at me, which led to the diagnosis of epilepsy. The teacher assumed I was having a “fit”.

I was 26 before I got my hands on “I’m Not Lazy, Crazy or Stupid”, and I remember reading it in the car outside my gym. I locked in on it, and it wasn’t until a stranger knocked on the window and asked me if I was okay that I realized I was sobbing.

I had a quarter century of rage and humiliation built up inside me. I had failed out of high school, failed out of the four colleges I lied my way in to, lost job after job, lost friend after friend, and now someone said, “Hey, you don’t have to underachieve. At all. You can achieve whatever you want. Go see a doctor.”

I did. I went to Duke, where they have a lab for ADHD. They had me take a test, a series of things so inane that I wanted to throw the computer out the window. There was a written portion, during which apparently I berated the guy giving the test. The things they were having me do were the kind of things an ape on methaqualone could do.

They gave me 10 mg of Ritalin to take the next morning, before re-taking the tests.

Look, I won’t be able to describe what happened. I didn’t know there were a thousand ideas running around in my head all the time, and I didn’t realize there was always one voice repeatedly screaming out some inanity that made it impossible for me to deal with the others. All I know is that I took a tiny amount of methelphenedate, and the voices stopped. And I recognized t
hem as my own voices.

When I went in to take the test, I made a conscious choice to take the test, and then I took the test. It sounds very simple, I know. But my whole life, I would sit down to do an activity, and then spend the entire time trying just to wrestle my broken brain to the floor, trying to make it focus on one thing. This time, before I even realized that I had consciously decided to take the test, I was taking it.

It wasn’t until months later, in therapy, that the guy giving the test described my hostility during the first day, the fact that I was mocking him for doing this for a living. My resentment and humiliation were more than I could control, I had a hard time even being a decent person. And, while on the medication, my life became something I could understand and control.

It wasn’t easy, I had fucked up a lot of stuff. I was in a horrible marriage, I was going to college, even though I was 25 and I wasn’t enrolled, I had given up my professional life in an effort to prove I was useless. I was deeply, deeply unhappy.

Because pills don’t fix things, and anyone who is on medication KNOWS that. Unlike devout followers of Jesus, we don’t think that simply TAKING the pills will fix the problem. For those of us with mental illnesses, the medication clears the path for looking at what’s really going on, and THAT’S when the horror show really starts.

I still haven’t dealt with the anger. I am still so resentful of the fact that I was allowed to fail so much for so long without anyone trying to catch me. I so quickly became an asshole that no teacher wanted to help me, and my parents were deeply distracted with their own horrible marriage and the needs of my siblings.

And I have lived for so long with the ignorant rantings of those who think a world without medication would somehow be more pure. Sure, I guess that’s true. I mean, the fact of the matter is, nobody in this world *needs* me to be successful or even alive. I’m not doing much of anything that matters, and neither is almost anyone else I know. But the effort I put into making something out of the shards of my life is time well spent, I may as well get my meds and *try*.

When you tell me that I’m just weak, or that these meds don’t help anyone, or that ADHD is invented, I guess I have to ask… Who are you helping? What are you trying to do? And how GOOD does it feel to mock a parent who cares deeply for their kid, enough to go through the pain and torment of doctors and tests and meds? What do you get out of trying to prove it’s wrong?

said, after the LSU game, that we proved we had what it takes, but…

WHAT?

Is there any comparison? The way this team played was so utterly
inspiring. This is a life-lesson team, this is a series of games that
you can *learn* some shit from. I remember when I first became a heels
fan (way after you guys did, I’m sure, and I have no defense for that
except to say, I wasted my late teens learning how to be an artist,
and only got on board once Ian wouldn’t let me go to college anywhere
else…) we would watch games, and I remember the satisfaction of
knowing we were doing it “right”.

Whoever we were playing, we would win, because we were doing it right.
They’d go on a run, and Ian would say, “everyone goes on a run, don’t
worry about it, Dean knows what he’s doing…” And sure, some asshole
would go nuts and drop 40 on us because he was exorcising demons, and
it was almost as if Dean was saying “we might lose this game, but this
kid’s gonna walk away feeling better about his life. That’s part of
the game, we’re not gonna double him five feet from the three point
line – We’re gonna play the right way. Period.”

When you’re a Carolina fan, you have automatic reactions to stuff. Ty
jacks up a three early in the shot clock, half way through the second
half, and we’re up by 20. Everyone in the room said, “We didn’t need
that.” The scrub runs the whole floor and tries to score in the final
seconds instead of passing up to a Senior, and that’s one of the
things we remember. Because we’re playing right, in the moments when
we’re not playing right, we notice.

The way this team finished, you wonder how we lost a game all year.
But maybe that’s the lesson. We don’t need to win every game, in life.

This was just amazing, amazing, amazing. Every team, we just got the
car to the best speed we could, and then we started working on our
mileage. Never cruise, never take your eye off the road, but don’t
feel like you have to gun it every time some jerk in a pimp-mobile
comes by. How many dunks did we have last night? One? I only remember
Wayne on a break away, other than that, we were like a kettle drum
that didn’t need a tuning key.

I wish I had enjoyed it even more, this season. I wish I had watched
knowing this was one of the best teams we’d ever have. 101-14 over
three years? Is that right? The best stretch in the history of
Carolina.

This team won, not in the way that sports teams normally win, but in
the way that science moves forward, one low-drama discovery at a time.
It almost made sense that Ginyard was wearing a tie, it was as if the
playing of the game was as important as the mind-set. Every game in
the tournament felt like surgery, and when the last game came around,
we were so good at it that a life-threatening procedure felt workaday.

I’m elated. I’m sated. This was just wonderful.

My dear friend Jonathan (not his real name) began a campaign with our group of friends to stop using the word “Fag” when we were referencing stuff that was actually just precious or twee or feminine, and not actually homosexual. I didn’t actually roll my eyes, because my friend Jonathan is much bigger than me, and he’s also vastly smarter.

Okay, I admit it. Jonathan is his real name.

But I felt a great deal of power using the word “faggot”, it has a depth and a bite to it that the replacement words don’t. The word “nigger” can also be an extremely powerful word, when used as an endearment. I would never use the word in a racial setting, and I would never consider its use a condemnation. For my friends and I, when the word is used, it’s used the way we hear it used by the artists we admire. It’s a term of endearment, as if we were POWs in the same war. To say, “this is my NI-gah right here”, you were announcing a kind of man love.

Unfortunately, we were using the word “faggot” to denote a different kind, a sort of fawning and weak-kneed man-love. And it has been used ad-nauseum to describe the Duke Men’s Basketball team.

There’s almost no situation you can be in where the passion that these kids have for one another and for their school isn’t condemned as equivalent to being the receiver in anal intercourse. There’s a racial component as well – because the Duke players tend to be white or at least *act* white, and because the black community has shown itself to be less-than progressive when it comes to homosexuality, there is a sense that the tough awesome dark-skinned black players on most college teams are expressing pure esprit de coer when they smack each other on the butt or hug each other after a big shot.

But the white, or light-skinned black, or even dark-skinned black but high-test-score-receiving black kids do the same at Duke University, it’s seen as an act of homosexual love, and therefor beneath rooting for. I’ve seen it a hundred times, guys who would march in a parade for gay rights, guys who love their gay friends and family members deeply, will still mock Duke’s players for being “faggots”.

Now, my friend Jonathan wanted us to stop using that word, and I more or less did. But it didn’t really bother me, in the same way that the N word doesn’t bother me in music or in conversation. But I did find that when I used either word, on the rare occasion when I did, it started to feel… awful. Just awful.

Now, I’m in the theater world, so obviously I’m more involved with gay people that I am with urban black culture. Every black person I know is only black in so far as that’s his *casting*, and the world of hip hop, no matter what people might be trying to do, is still in a different universe than musical theater. So, it could be that the gay stuff rubs me passionately the wrong way.

But I’ll say this – Our first black President has come out against gay marriage. And, while I think that my lifetime will contain watershed moments where homosexuality can be accepted as a natural part of our existence, I do think that our race relations are in a better position than our understanding of one another’s sexual preference. And it chills my blood every time the white guys at Duke are accused of homosexuality. Not because it’s *true*, but because the joke is the most emasculating, most de-humanizing taunt the anti-fans can come up with.

The first time I hear Barnaby use language like that, I won’t know if I will be able to handle the shame. His sense of race is already more even-handed than mine, we have friends and kids in our neighborhood of every stripe, and he sees black men and associates them with heroes, not thieves. But he also sees gay men and women every day, and he knows that they are men and women, to be as trusted and admired as the rest of our friends.

Which might not be much, we can hang with a motley bunch.

Anyway, I don’t think I can push him to be as much an anti-fan of Duke as my friends and I are, because the language that surrounds that stuff is pathetic. I’m not linking to anything on this blog, but do a search, particularly an images-search. If this is what hating Duke is, in any other context it would be shameful. And if being a Carolina fan means behaving this way, I don’t want that for my son.

Family Guy is being GROSS! Call the COPS!

It isn’t possible to watch everything your child is watching all the time. But it is possible to turn the TV off.

My mom had her TV paused at her place, and Barnaby came in the TV room. She un-paused the TV and turned it off, but during that four seconds, a person was being suffocated on screen with a plastic bag. It scared the shit out of Barnaby, he had to curl up in my mom’s lap for two or three minutes to get over it.

So, why do parent’s groups seem to protest the loudest when it’s sex? My son has seen me and his mom, and himself, naked a thousand times, and he doesn’t seem to notice or care. If he had watched the Family Guy episode quoted above, he would have seen a cartoon, and, during the cartoon, he would have watched a baby eat cereal. I don’t know, I just can’t imagine he’d need to curl up in my lap from that.

The world isn’t safe for babies, that’s just the truth. If you want to make it safe for kids, you’re wasting your time and you’re disrespecting your kids. You have two choices you can make when it comes to raising children, and I’ll use handguns as an example. You can either a) tell your kid that a handgun is just about the scariest thing in the world, and there is a trigger that makes bullets come out, and there’s a safety and this is where the bullets go in…

or b) you can pretend there’s no such thing as handguns.

Now, the context for the Family Guy episode demands that you pretend your child will understand that the cereal *might* have horse sperm in it instead of milk. And that your child will know what horse sperm is. And how one gets it. And then equate that with sex with a horse. And then decide that they like beastiality. Or, you can spend one second thinking about the fact that it’s gonna require at least a junior high school level of education in order to even *GET* the joke.

Any kid under ten who watches this clip will see a cartoon baby eating cereal. And they won’t have a CLUE why you’re laughing. And they also won’t have a CLUE as to why you are so offended, you culturally vacuous waste of time.

I’ve been having conversations with old friends over facebook, and I’ve had to explain how it is that I’m still producing theater when so many of them have given up. The short answer to that is simple, we’ve never made any money, we never will, and so it’s a lot like asking someone why they are still… I don’t know… watching football after all these years. I do it because I like it, and it doesn’t cost too much.

But, the long answer is more complicated than that. We have a wonderful built-in editing device in our company, we’re totally incapable of following through on a good idea. It sucks, and it means we’re not as prolific as we might be, but a good idea will hang around for a while before quietly disappearing. Mac and I had a post-apocalyptic musical, the three of us had some pretty good Mexican Wrestling ideas, and then there was Jordana’s “Lucretia Jones II, Lucretia Journeys To The Center Of The Earth”… all good ideas, but not *great* ones, and none of them lived past the shit-talking phase.

Now, the ideas that really make our nipples hard, the *great* ideas, survive for much the same reason that the good ideas (and the bad ones) show up at all. We’re having a conversation. We’re in the middle of a conversation, and it’s almost always our turn to talk. The New York theater culture is one of the voices that adds to the culture of America. The zeitgeist that pushes our corner of the world may take some time to affect all of America but… But Angels In America ended up on HBO. It happens.

And our culture, the theater of our city, is based on a very specific formula. You make a show, and I make a show, and our friends make shows, and people we hate make shows, and each of these statements pushes the next person to respond. Each performance, and, more importantly, each production is a small ingredient in a larger recipe. If I add baking soda, the cookies will puff up, and if I don’t, they won’t.

Now, the culture of our country is gonna keep happening whether we say anything or not. We don’t have a responsibility to make sure the wheel keeps turning, it’s gonna turn without us. When we *aren’t* producing plays, there are *LOTS* of people who are, and they don’t miss us for a moment when we keep our yaps shut.

But this conversation is our obsession, it is what keeps us doing the myriad other survival things we have to do with the rest of our lives. I see it in Mac and Jordana, I see them experience something and, almost immediately, begin to re-tell the story to themselves as a piece of theater. Understanding that our flaw is that we have no careers, and yes we know it, and yes we’re all, all of us, ashamed that we haven’t done more (even Mac knows he should be doing more, and he’s trying the hardest) – understand that, we still know that our passion for The Story Told trumps that.

And it’s in our plays, it isn’t in our reviews and it isn’t in our blogs or our theater-theories over cocktails. It’s in our plays. Would you like to know who we are? Then come see our plays. Come see our plays.

(Yes, I did, I just wrote in my blog about theater about the fact that our opinion about theater isn’t in our blogs. Yeah, I did that.)

And, here’s the thing. If you don’t come see our plays, then… I don’t know. What can I say? If you have a theory about culture, and you talk about it a lot, either in print or over cocktails, but you don’t come see our plays then you’ve stopped us from having a conversation. It’s a monologue. YOUR monologue.

If I can extend the ingredients metaphor, you aren’t allowing the baking soda to be added. And it’s possible that you don’t care about the baking soda, but you can’t know that without knowing WHAT IT IS. If you’ve seen my play, and you say, “This adds nothing to the conversation”, then I respect that. Believe me, I’ve probably said it about your play too.

But if you aren’t gonna come see my play… then WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME TO COME SEE YOURS? See, I can’t help but feel like you want me to come because you need to sell as many tickets as possible. If you send out a personal plea to *me*, and I buy a ticket and bring a friend, and I tell a lot of the people I know, then you’ll sell more tickets and you’ll have a better chance of covering your nut.

But if you haven’t seen my play, then I have to assume you aren’t all that interested in my opinion of what you do. Because you haven’t listened to my side of the conversation. You haven’t sat across the table and let me have my say. So, let’s take this to the next logical conclusion.

If you want me to come see your play because you’re worried only about ticket sales and not about my opinion, then that had to have factored into your decision when you were picking the play you produced. You can’t have been picking a play based on holding up your end of the conversation because you aren’t *having* one, you must have picked something you thought would sell tickets.

At this point… Look, it’s not that I want artists to starve or suffer. I don’t want us to be poor and miserable, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you’re doing, especially if it is the devotion of your life. But if you’re making decisions based solely on tickets sold (or “units moved”) then why theater?

My GOD, there’s NO MONEY! We had a song in one of our shows called “The Same Twelve People” because the joke is that there are 12 people with $18, and on any given night, eleven of them are at the twelfth’s performance, they just keep passing the same ticket money around to the same people. THERE IS NO MONEY TO BE MADE IN THEATER. The overhead is ridiculous, the return on investment is miniscule, every single artist involved would get paid better if they worked in a different medium, and the product you created literally ceases to exist the very second it comes into being. IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA.

The only reason to do this is to be part of the conversation. And the conversation matters ENORMOUSLY. What we say in a piece of theater today will affect the world in a matter of time. A fireman will pull you from your burning home and save your life, but six months later, having lost everything in the fire, you will walk into a theater a broken person, and walk out having been SAVED. And you will be saved by spending EIGHTEEN DOLLARS, because the saving is the reason, not the money.

I know you think you need to keep your head above water, but it would be better if you didn’t make plays at all. If you can’t be bothered to talk to the other kids, then why are you at the playground? If you’re just there to sell candy, believe me, the cool kids are gonna figure out REALLY fast, and they aren’t gonna bother with you. Drop your lollipops and get on the swings, man, it’s the only reason we’re all here.

Obviously, I called this morning to see if I could get dance lessons for the boy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHnRRvP34nY]

You have to be very, very careful when you’re constructing the narrative of your life. I mentioned something about this in my last post, but I think there’s a lot more to it than just unintentional lies and misremembered circumstances. We need for the truth to match a path, our lives need to be somewhat linear (regardless of how often we see they aren’t) and where the dates and arcs don’t line up, we inadvertently add details and buttresses to give the whole thing meaning.

I got in touch with an old girl friend of mine named Erin. We never dated, we were far too close for that sort of thing, but we were like brother and sister. I sang at her wedding just before she transfered schools and went to the far side of the US, and soon after, we lost touch.

Her voice was singular and amazing, and her sense of humor was unparalleled. At least, for me. She was scrappy and vulgar at times, and she spent about two months homeless during the time that I knew her, although she always had a place to crash because of our network of friends. Erin made me laugh so goddam hard, all the time. She was shameless, she would make fun of me as quickly as she made fun of herself.

She was a peerless mimic. In a way, her vocal talent was off the charts because she could just decided to sound like someone, and then she sounded *exactly* like that person… and when you translate that into performance it’s really stunning. I remember her doing Patti Lupone in Evita, and it was scary it was so good, and then later, we were drinking beer and she sang “Still Crazy After All These Years”, and you would SWEAR it was Paul Simon. She was that good.

She had a pretty good appetite for dating, and she was the perfect combination of funny and funny looking to get most of the guys she was interested in. I was always wing-man, honestly, setting her up and letting her knock them down. And most of the time, she’d end up crashing at my place, sleeping on the floor next to my bunk bed while we criticized the partners du jour.

So, naturally, she showed up on Facebook. I jumped out of my skin, I was so excited. I’ve been in touch with a lot of people, and I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of it – the happiness WAY outweighs the mild discomfort I’ve had with some of the reconnections, but this woman was so dear to me, and I loved her so much, that I just freaked out.

Of course, I friended her, and of course I wrote to her. Gushing, a little, I guess, but not in any way that could be misinterpreted. I just wanted to let her know how much she had meant to me, and how much it would mean to me to be in touch with her again.

I got a response and… See, this is what is bound to happen. I can mock it all I want, but nobody remembers the past the way you do. On top of that, we’re not all in the same big forgiveness boat. We don’t all look at what we did when we were nineteen and laugh it off as the mistakes a child makes.

She tells me her story in two quick paragraphs. Fantastic college opportunity squandered because of a little too much pot and a move back to Los Angeles with her husband and kids. Then, a move from LA to Pheonix because of a sense of cultural discomfort… and the finding of religion.

What can I do? This woman will never be friends with me again because she sees the time we spent together as inhuman, non-divine. My vulgarity will never be funny to her, any time I spend with her from now on, even on-line, will be spent with a wall up between us. She looks back on the time she was friends with me and is appalled. She feels nothing but shame – her words, exactly.

She said she always thought I was “clever” and that it would be cool to maybe be in a band with me. Then.

Ugh.

I’m not mad at her at all, and I don’t think I’m better than her or have more insight or anything. It’s just heartbreaking. She’s found Jesus, and that’s pretty much it for me. I don’t know Jesus, I never will, and that is a wall that will always separate us. I had thought about writing back instantly, telling her that I had so much regret about that time that I lay awake some nights…

But I didn’t. I probably won’t. My regret isn’t about living outside the grace of God, I live utterly without God’s love right now and it isn’t a problem for me. My regret is how I treated people, how I behaved with people. The GOOD parts of that time for me were the times I spent with my friends laughing and loving and, sure, smoking pot. The times I regret are the times I was dismissive and superior, as if I knew something that I couldn’t possibly know.

Ahhch. I don’t know.

It’s so sad. I’ve thought about this person for at least fifteen years, I’ve thought about her once a month, wondered where she was, even tried to find her to cast her in a show I was doing a few years ago. I know now, she would have turned me down anyway, and she would have been uncomfortable with the show, with New York… with spending time with me.

I still love her deeply, this old friend. I know we were a kind of kindred spirits, curled up in my shit-ass apartment, counting our toothbrushes as one of our ten assets. I know that we deal with our own regrets in our own way, and she’s certainly found a better way than I did, I’m pretty sure she sleeps just fine at night. But it’s a painful and sad end to a friendship, and I wish she could have just remained a mystery.