It’s interesting, you can tell how old Barnaby is by what month it is. It won’t always be this way, in fact he’ll end up with the same problem my mom has where you have to figure out how old she is by counting from the year *after* she was born, but for now it’s convenient.

How much better is everything? It’s indescribable. I feel like I should have some capacity for describing the joy in having a ten month old, I certainly went out of my way to lavishly paint the nightmare of an 8-9 month old, but in the fashion of my family, I’m only really good at describing the horrible things. I don’t know what kind of damage we sustained as infants, it had to be at the knee of my overly dramatic mother, but misery and pain seem to be the things I have the most words for.

Let me try. I really should try, because my days right now feel like a real gift and if I don’t find a way to make that clear, it’s unfair to anyone reading this who’s thinking about kids, and it’s unfair to Barnaby if these words somehow still exist in 25 years when he might be thinking about it himself.

The first big step that meant so much was when we were able to set Barnaby down and he could sit without falling over and hurting himself. People talk about the milestones, the crawling and eating solids and smiling and all of that, and yeah – all of that is cool. But setting the baby down and not having a hand on him and knowing he’s safe for more than six seconds, that feels miraculous.

The next big step is like the first. It’s the independence he’s found in his daily rituals. He’s crawling now and damn near walking and babbling and eating like a champ and all of that, and we’re so happy for all of the developmental stuff he’s doing that’s on time, and excited about the stuff that’s a little advanced.

But now, he has a small number of toys that he’s become really attached to, and he will play with them for a short time without wondering or worrying about who else is there. He has taken to crawling away from a group of people and sitting with his back to them and chewing on a toy or playing with something while looking away entirely.

The liberation is astonishing. I can run into the kitchen and pour a cup of coffee, or I can go to the bathroom for three minutes, and he doesn’t really care that I’m not there. He know I’m gonna come back.

This isn’t as joyful as it is refreshing. The joy comes from how completely he interacts with us when he choses to. In the middle of playing, he’ll crawl over to me and climb up on my lap and run his fingers through my beard. Then, he’ll climb down and go back to what he was doing. To say he’s attached to us isn’t exactly right… I know the word doesn’t imply any kind of physical leeching, but there is a sort of sense of that. It’s more like he adores us, simply and completely.

And we adore him so totally. He’s had a tough week this week, really, which means simply that he’s spent more time being a little distant and he’s had a harder time staying down for naps. But considering he’s got a cold, he’s got a tooth or teeth coming in, and his naps have been totally screwed, it’s incredible that he hasn’t been losing his temper at all.

He’s one of those kids that makes everyone smile. I’ve become so accustomed to people lighting up when I walk by with him in his stroller that I get confused when someone doesn’t. I do live in New York, the city where nothing exists unless it has been thoroughly commented upon, so it shouldn’t seem strange that I get told ten times a day that he’s beautiful. Of course, they don’t seem him at his best.

This is what he looks like with egg yolk and spinach on his face. Although clearly not also under his arms…

He is a light in our lives right now. Not just because of who he is, that is a revelation and a joy, but because of what he shows us about ourselves and each other. He makes us love each other more, because we know where he gets it from, so to speak. When he falls and bashes his head and sorta shakes it off without crying, we know he gets that from me. (Despite my constant kvetching on this blog, I have a really high tolerance for pain, I just have no stomach for illness or emotional upheaval…) When he comes to one of us and crawls into my lap and pats me on the back, it makes me love Jordana even more. Because that’s her inside him.

He’s ten months old today and if I can paraphrase Dean Smith, the best thing about babies under ten months is that they become babies over ten months. He won’t ever be the baby he was, and if he’s any inkling now of the kind of boy and man he’s gonna become, we’re incredibly, incredibly lucky.

I have had a wonderful outpouring since my last blog, and I feel like I ought to say something about where we are now. While it is true that Barnaby has turned a corner, I’m not sure that is the whole reason that things have gotten so much better. It might be a bit of a story, but I’m gonna just tell it in the hopes that I’ll be forgiven for the self-indulgence, both in terms of the last blog and this one.

When Jordi and I bought this house, I found myself in a tailspin full of nightly panic attacks. These attacks are describable, but I’m not sure if they translate. I would start having trouble breathing on the walk home from the train, and in the middle of the night, I would lay wide awake with my lungs in a vice and my eyes on fire.

It turns out, I had some of those “issue” things everyone’s always talking about. I went in to therapy and got on citalopram, which is a medication that helps you deal. The therapy was as helpful, if not more, but the medication jump started the whole thing so I could deal better with my life.

Why panic attack? I guess in retrospect, it makes sense. We’d borrowed a fuckload of money, and now we owned a home that required paying a mortgage, and I freaked out. It was the same time that a show we were producing was getting reviewed in the Times… I mean, it was a heady fucking time and I had no skills for how to maintain.

After about two years, I went off the medication. I did this because I was just having a hard time feeling empathy for anything, I had basically stopped reading fiction or watching TV because I didn’t give a shit about what was happening in anyone else’s life. Also, I had started rehearsals for Hail Satan, and the idea of going back into acting with this numbness was intolerable.

It started being a problem pretty fast. I actually ended up getting in a stupid fist-fight, and I didn’t realize that the several verbal fights I was getting in might be attached to the medication. I hadn’t told anyone that I went off, I just did it and didn’t think about it.

It’s the problem with these very mild emotional problems, when you medicate them away, they feel like they’re gone because of something organic and internal. So you think you can dump the medicine, and when you do the problems sneak back in as if the problems are external.

Because everyone can find stuff that explains their point of view. You can just say that your job or your wife or whatever is making you feel crazy. In my case, I had a show that I was working on, and I had a baby.

But this is just bullshit, at least it was for me. I remember Jordana was really upset this summer, she’d barely slept and I was being a total fucking prick, and I told her she shouldn’t be upset because the things that were making us miserable were the very things we had been hoping and dreaming for. And I was right, except that I would ignore that very fact the second I had a chance to.

My kid eats really well, and he sleeps marvelously. It sometimes takes him a while to go down, and he doesn’t stay down for that long, but I’m comparing him to some of my friends kids who sleep 16 hours out of every 24. Barnaby sleeps 11 hours at night and gets close to two hours of naps a day. He eats three big ass meals and nurses four times a day.

The rest of the time? He’s amazing. He laughs and goofs around. He’ll take a toy and crawl ten feet away and sit and play by himself for ten minutes. He will fall down on his face, look at us as if he’s gonna cry, and then he’ll just… not. Every time he cries, there’s a reason. He’s tired or he’s hungry or we’ve been asking him to do nothing for too long. So far, those are the ONLY three reasons he ever cries. Hungry, tired or bored. He does cry when he hurts himself, and he hurts himself a bunch because he’s pretty fearless, but he gets over it in about ten seconds.

He’s a miracle of a kid. I have no right to complain.

About a month ago, Jordana asked about my medication, and I told her I was off. She was stunned, and then really frustrated, obviously. Fairly soon after that, my mom asked if I was taking my medication, and then last week, my brother told me I need to go back on my meds.

I mean, look. I’m not crazy. I’m not in a fucking movie, it’s not like when I’m medicated I’m a drooling phebe and when I’m off I feel ALIVE and I run up during a concert and start conducting along with the orchestra. But when I’m on the medication, meltdowns like my last blog don’t really happen. When I’m off, I find myself staring into the face of some 25 year old Brooklyn hipster who I’ve just punched 30 times.

I went back on the medication last week, and although it takes a couple of weeks to metabolize, I actually feel a lot more in control and, even better, I’m much closer to Barnaby. The feeling I had, back when we bought the house – the feeling of my lungs shutting down – that’s basically gone. When he cries while falling asleep it’s still there, it’s still terrible, but I’m dealing with the rest of it pretty well.

So, anyway. I’m embarrassed about the last post because it felt very real when I wrote it. I’m embarrassed that I’m the kind of guy who needs medicine to be a tolerable member of society. And I’m embarrassed that Barnaby will read it one day and feel like he was ever a burden to me.

He’s a little miracle, he really is. The problem was never him, the problem was me.

Do you want to know why I haven’t written? Two months of Barnaby entries, the 8th month and the 9th month, both skipped. There probably isn’t even a readership anymore, but let me see if I can explain, should anyone stumble on to this blog.

I need to start by saying, if you think I just need to suck it up and that there are starving and homeless people right here in New York, I’m gonna have to extend a mild “fuck off” to you. It never fails to amaze me how many people comment on people’s blogs about the solipsism and self-centeredness, as if a blog could possible be anything but.

My kid is just about the best kid I could hope for. He’s sleeping through the night, he’s eating like a champ, he’s growing, he’s smart and developing like crazy. He seems to be really fond of me, very excited to see me every time I walk into a room, and he’s really well-adjusted and affectionate.

I’ve never been so consistently miserable in my entire fucking life. When I was going through a divorce, I at least had the rest of the world to look at me and go, “Yeah, well, y’know, he’s going through a divorce.” Now? This is supposed to be great, or at least nice, or… at the very least, there are tiny, tiny moments that might break your heart.

Two days ago, he went down for his nap at 10:45 and slept until 12. Then he went down for his nap at 3:45 and slept for about 25 minutes. I was over the moon. I was in heaven, he had actually woken up after a full night’s sleep, then napped when he was supposed to, eaten when he was supposed to, and then went to bed around 8 without much problem.

But, you see, I wasn’t actually happy about this, I didn’t actually enjoy this. At all. This was the feeling of finding out the Trig. test has been postponed for a day, giving you an extra night to prepare… when you know nothing about trigonometry. There was a horrible sickening foreboding all day, that when I didn’t have to deal with him screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming… that was a fucking SHOCK, that was just the next drop NOT falling in the Chinese Water torture.

I’m fighting with all of my friends, constantly, and my family as well. If I’m not fighting, I’m silent, but I’m pissed off and brewing. Day after day, night after night, month after month of getting four or five hours of sleep. Day after day of feeling beholden and guilty for the help we get, of feeling responsible for making other people’s days bad because he won’t stop, he just won’t stop.

He’s crawling now, diving for disgusting pennies on the ground, trying to get his finger into outlets, putting every electrical cord in the house in his mouth and biting down. He climbs to the edge of the bed as quickly as possible, without even a pause at the edge. My days now are, every eleven seconds, saying “no” or grabbing him and trying to stop him from eating lint or a dead bug.

I’m writing this at 11:56, on my clock. He’s got a 10:30 nap that I’m slowly giving up on, moving it back and back and back because he just won’t got to sleep. I rocked him in the rocking chair. I used to rock him for five minutes, then it was ten, now it’s twenty, it takes that long for him to quit kicking me in the stomach and to stop clawing my face. I rock him and sing and he does a low constant whine of misery and impatience, but this is what the books tell me to do.

I put him down tired, relaxed but awake, and he starts screaming. I starting the rocking at 11:04 today, he was yawning, could barely keep his eyes open, and the second I set him down in the crib he started screaming. I rocked him for twenty minutes, so really he’s only been screaming, screaming, endless breath-catching screaming for about 35 minutes now. His nap is from 10:30 to noon-ish. It’s now noon, he’s still standing up in his crib, screaming.

Fuck you, don’t tell me that if he’s standing and screaming he isn’t tired, I take care of him, every fucking day I’m locked in this shithole in Queens that’s falling down around me, towel racks ripping out of the wall, doors that won’t close so I can’t even put anything between me and the screaming. If he wasn’t in his crib, he’d be screaming anyway, he’s just be sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at me and screaming. He’s exhausted, he’s nine months old and he’s been awake since 6:30. It’s *NOON*. He’s so tired he’s lost his mind.

But he’s tenacious, I’ll give him that. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him no, doesn’t matter how often I take him away from the socket in the wall, doesn’t even matter if I put up a gate around it. He crawls to the gate, picks himself up, rocks back and forth and screams. Because he wants to put his mouth on the electrical socket in the wall. He has a tenacity I never had, he will hold out until the job is finished in a way I never could.

He can, and has, screamed all the way through the entirety of what should have been his nap. He’s close to doing it now. He’s still screaming, in the time that it’s taken me to write this, he’s still screaming.

So, here’s the thing. I have a show opening tomorrow. I had tech. last night and dress rehearsal tonight. This is how it is, every day. There was a time, a short time, when my mother could take Barnaby upstairs and put him down in her apartment, but that was a cheat, a stop-gap measure, and it stopped working. He literally stood up in his crib upstairs and laughed at my mom.

Every day, this is what it is. The idea that I could possible work during the day, even in five minute increments, is laughable. I can clean the kitchen, it’s downstairs, but I can’t work on the same floor where he’s sleeping, he has Jordana’s sensitivity to light and my ears, the slightest noise or shadow passing and he wakes up and starts screaming.

But when the screaming stops, two things happen. First, the nausea abates just slightly, I don’t actually sit at the edge of my bed and dry heave any more. I still have the dying sobs of an abandoned baby ringing in my head, and not just in the way that I hear them constantly in my head all day and all night, more in the it-just-stopped-for-a-second-but-could-start-again way.

But then, within five minutes, starts the countdown. This nap could be twenty minutes long, it could be an hour and forty five minutes. So… am I running lines? Not out loud, of course. Can I do any repairs on our house? Not with any power tools, of course. My house is a goddam pit, trash cans overflowing, piles of laundry and dishes… I can’t clean anything within fifty feet of his crib. The sound of a garbage bag opening is one of the sounds he hates most.

As I write this, I pass the 12:15 mark. His screaming calmed to sobs and now he’s quiet. When he wakes up, I’m gonna be aware of it by his customary post-nap screams, which will then go into “Completely Fucking Insane Playtime” where our totalled living room, covered from one end to the other with toys and random shit that Barnaby has decided are toys, will be eschewed for yet another attempt to suck on an electrical outlet or to put a golf ball that has rolled through 18 holes of duck shit in his mouth.

This will last until the next imposed screaming session eventually ends in his second nap. Or… doesn’t – there have been a fair number of days when he just screamed right through any attempt at a second nap and allowing him to sleep would make his night impossible.

And, you see, at some point in all of this, I’m supposed to take a shower. Nothing as complicated as working on a script is possible, and the high concept idea of actually CREATING a new script is one of the most absurd ideas possible. Yes, we get a ton of help from my mom, if I went to her and asked her to take Barnaby she would, in much the same way that she drops anything, always, for any of her kids. But then she wouldn’t be able to do any of the stuff that she wants to do with her day, and it’s not her fault we have a child, it’s ours.

The first few nightmare mont
hs had, before them, the promise of a corner turned, of an aware child who would interact with you and the world. The horrorshow of the five and six month old, where schedules are not just borderline impossible, they are literally beyond the mental grasp of your offspring, contained the promise of a time when your child would understand you and be able to act on impulses rather than scream out of frustration.

So, now we have him, a child who’s awake and aware and mobile. Who smiles at me and loves me, who knows his name and the names of most of his things, who laughs at the same point in the books we read him and, for the last two days, has been standing next to the coffee table and not holding on to anything.

I just don’t feel any better. I haven’t written because I didn’t dare say how much I hate this. I worried that Barnaby would read this later and think I didn’t love him, but the truth is every single person I talk to, for any reason, knows I love my kid. I don’t hold him responsible for these things, he’s nine months old, he only knows how to behave in the ways we’ve taught him.

I just know, in my heart of hearts, that I am terrible at this, and there has never been a time in my life that I was terrible at something and then kept doing it. I’ve walked away from everything I was even slightly bad at. But this… it isn’t even like doing terribly in school. It reminds me of being a kid again, where school was a place that I feared and hated, and my home was a place that I loathed and the only comfort I ever felt, ever, was when I was in transit moving from one place to another.

Only now, there’s no going home from this, and there’s no getting up and leaving it. Even when he’s asleep, I have a monitor, a speaker that broadcasts his inevitable screams into any room I’m in.

Why did I bother even writing this? I’m saying this because there are a lot of people out there who keep talking about how they want children. I’m sure you do, I really, really wanted children. And even now, even when the horrible feeling has become so pervasive that I’ve let it infiltrate my very being, so that the horrible taste in my mouth is just how my mouth tastes now… even now after saying all this I’m still so glad to have him, to know that he’s got a chance with my family and his family’s help to become a great man.

But you should know that you very well may have a child and realize one day that as glad as you are to have him, he may not be very lucky to have YOU. Unless you can give up 80% of your life right now, and do so without any sense of panic and without any concern about resentment for the useless upheaval your life has taken, then you should take a deep breath before you go making any decisions.

I don’t like doing this, I hate ending these blogs with any kind of a punchline, but, for the sake of honesty and clarity, I should report that Barnaby slept for 25 minutes, woke up and started screaming again. I just asked my mom to take him from me. It’s 12:52, I’m gonna take a minute to finish this paragraph, and then go take him back.

We had a really good crowd for Hail Satan tonight. By “tonight”, I mean, this afternoon, of course, since we have an incredibly difficult schedule within the festival. We have five shows, and four of them are before 5 or after 10, which doesn’t really feel like a vote of confidence from the folks who run the festival, but we’ve managed to actually sell pretty well so far.

Last I heard we had sold 8 tickets to the show at 3, and when I started the opening lines, I could tell we had about 50 people in the house, so that’s pretty exciting.

I’m posting under “delicious grapes” because I noticed on my friend Mac’s blog there was new comment on an ANCIENT post. I went back and read it, when we were not accepted by the Fringe several years ago.

I realized that we’ve come a long way. I still think that Lucretia Jones is the perfect show for the Fringe, it’s actually a much better idea than the last two shows that have been accepted. In a way, the Fringe Festival is the exact *wrong* place for us to put up Hail Satan. James Comtois points out in his blog that this incarnation pushes a little more for laughs and although it was more true for the show he saw than for the actual run, he’s not wrong at all. People come to the Fringe to see shows that have very broad humor or very avant garde seriousness, and the audience at that show treated us like a drunk night at UCB.

And that’s great, it really is… But we found ourselves holding for laughs, and we were unprepared for that. We’ve been creating a psychologically specific piece, and the comedy actually comes from the fact that we’re playing everything as honestly as possible. When a character says “My… My workday ends at five” and everyone laughs, it’s not because he just got kicked in the nuts, it’s because we’ve all been in a situation where we’ve done what we thought was expected of us and then learned that we weren’t doing enough.

On the flip side, we’re really not being precious with the material. We hope that people have fun when they see the play more than we hope people LEARN or anything. We’re not trying to stop the war, we’re not trying to live with hope… I mean, we’re saying something that we think is true, and it being true makes it funny and hopefully relevant, but there’s no sense that we’re reinventing the wheel.

Lucretia Jones is the perfect show for the Fringe, and maybe we’ll submit it some year. Air Guitar was a mess, an unfinished mess that we produced badly, which got no help from the people we turned to, and Hail Satan is a show for a more sober crowd than the Fringe, and I still don’t understand, after all this time, why Lucretia Jones wasn’t accepted. It would be perfect.

But all that being said… we had fifty people at 3 o’clock on a shitty Tuesday, where it’s pouring down rain. And there are a lot of people talking about the show, both on the internet and in person. Other theater pros are hanging around and emailing us later and stuff.

That’s a miracle, it really is. I remember thanking the crowd at The Gershwin Hotel for being part of our first sold-out weekend, and we had about 60 seats in a theater that is now the back room at a bar… and we gave everyone brownies for showing up. Mac wrote it and the three of us acted it. Reviews? HAHAHAHAHAAAA. We played six shows and poneyed up the PR and the rental space and everything. We weren’t gonna get REVIEWS….

But… I’ve been frustrated by the reviews we have gotten. I don’t mind if people have a problem with what we’re producing, and I usually agree with people if they don’t like a show we’ve done, but a bunch of our reviews have recounted plot points wrong. When someone thinks it would be scarier if Satan did not appear on stage, I get that critique, but since Satan DOESN’T appear on stage in our production, it makes that particular point useless. Someone didn’t understand why one of the characters suddenly joins the church… except that character doesn’t ever join the church. That kind of thing.

But we’re in the festival. Elena is lovely to us, knew me and Mac and Jordi on sight and played with Barno. Five years ago, I would have given my left nut to have Time Out New York review our play, even if it was an intern from the restaurant section. There is a mountain still in front of us, but it’s important to look back and realize that what still looks like a mountain is actually just the top half, and we’ve already climbed so far.

(Oh, and also, the play is by Mac Rogers, who’s been produced all over the city for the last eight years. Not “Marc Rogers” who is, according to what I can find, a wonderful Canadian accoustic bassist.)

I got some private emails, and I’m gonna do my damnedest to come. It’s a tough sell, in this climate, particularly with everyone talking about how the Fringe sucks…

Look, it’s possible that the Fringe Festival in another town would bring the whole city to its collective knees, but New York isn’t like that. It just isn’t, we’ve been through too much. I can tell you that on by September 14, 2001, most of the people in the city just wanted to get back to work and have a drink with their friends, if you really expect a THEATER FESTIVAL to turn this town on its ass… well, then maybe you should check out Philly or Edinburgh or whatever. It’s not gonna happen.

But for the number of people who are involved in the festival to work as hard as they have, just to have people say “the festival doesn’t attract the real offbeat and the real established artists…”

Before I go off on a rant, and I’m going to so prepare yourself, let me put some links up here.

First, Galatea, which I am really excited about.

http://www.theateronline.com/playbill.xzc?PK=16249

That’s the link they sent me. I love the pygmalion story, and I LOVE THE FRINGE FESTIVAL, so I’m going to this. Also…

The Wisdom That Men Seek, who are also from Astoria, did some work on their site

http://www.genesis-repertory.org/

So, I wanted both those up there, so you’d know to go to their show.

You know what? No rant, sorry. It’s just assinine. There are hundreds of people putting on tons of wonderful plays, and there are a bunch of crappy ones too, but, you know what? What did it cost you? $15 and a couple of hours? When you’re dead, are you gonna say, “well, thank god. I was gonna go see that show, but then I would have died without that extra $15, and I wouldn’t have had that awesome *nap* that Thursday…”

The Fringe is amazing. The people who run it are one of the few companies anywhere in the world that have figured out how to present 200 shows a year and break even. Oh, and they do it in New York.

I say all this because I got pissed about the voice piece, and I got a little rankled by David Cote’s blog. And then, of course, in the next paragraph he goes and singles out our production and says there ought to be a producer out there to develop our show for the next level. So… um… David Cote, I disagree with you! Except for the part where you think our show is good!

Cote’s blog

There was a pervasive sense that the first trailer had some problems. It wasn’t “good”, if I remember correctly. It “sucked” according to my sources.

So, I did another edit. I think this one’s pretty fun.

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

The play we’re producing right now is largely a discussion of tolerance. At one point, one character says to another “If someone said that their religion tells them they don’t have to stop at red lights, would you just tolerate that?” and the answer, of course, is no. In fact, the answer there is so obvious that it isn’t even given, the question is a point in and of itself.

Now, earlier tonight, I was explaining to some friends that Hail Satan was born out of a frustration with the liberal mindset in 2004, that somehow the left had become so obsessed with being reasonable and respectable, so tolerant of every viewpoint, that we had quit standing for anything.

When I described the liberal mindset as too tolerant, I was jumped on. My friends are very conservative, twice voted for Bush and only three days ago said they would vote for him a third time if he could run. They claim that the left is too rigid in its thinking, and that from their point of view, it’s the liberals who are hopelessly dogmatic.

When pressed I was asked questions like, “What if I want to pray in school, the liberals won’t let me do that!” and “What if I want abstinence taught in school? The liberals would have a fit!”

Now, naturally, these are people who get all of their information from right wing sources, so I just sat there waiting for them to dig themselves a hole. Then, I pointed out, in a few short moments, the myriad ways that they were wrong. The response at that point was, put simply, “we disagree” and then silence.

My brother’s blog, about a right wing Texas educator who basically had the book publishing world by the short-n-curlies for decades got a series of pissed off comments from people who think that he’s being intolerant to people who want to worship Jesus.

So, let me clear something up.

Oh, and by “clear something up”, I mean, “write something that won’t make any difference to anyone because this is just another blog itching about stuff.”

I don’t give a shit if you worship Jesus. I don’t disrespect you, I don’t respect you, it has no bearing on my opinion of you whatsoever. If you think my wife and I should worship Jesus, then I respect your opinion on the matter, and I’d love to talk to you about the whole thing and exchange some ideas. Maybe you’ll convince me that I should worship Jesus as well.

But if you think that everyone should worship Jesus, all the time, to the point where you think we should have a time at school where everyone prays at the same time, then you’re trying to make me and *people you don’t know* do things when you don’t know if they want to or not. And that’s just not fucking fair, it’s just not.

So, no, I am not tolerant of you thinking that. I have to fight it, as should every person who believes in the American system. It’s just un-American to make people worship something they don’t already worship, that’s just bullshit.

Why do you have to worship Jesus IN THE CLASSROOM? WHY? Don’t you worship him at home, and at church and before every meal, and can’t you just fucking pray whenever the hell you want? Like, can’t you just lower your head and pray right before class starts, and then, y’know, do THE THING YOU’RE IN THE BUILDING TO DO, and then LEAVE and then go pray or do whatever the hell you want ON YOUR OWN TIME???

WHY?

Seriously, I’m at a full boil, but will someone write to me and tell me just why the hell you can’t pray all the time in your leisure time, and then let TEACHING happen at SCHOOL? When you go to your job, like, when you deliver a package for fedex, do you show up with the package and then ask the person to bow their head and pray with you before they sign? HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE?

I think I know why. I think I know why you need prayer in school. This is my blog, so I feel like I can state my opinion about it. You want children praying in school, because you know adults won’t do it. If you were delivering a package and you asked me to pray before you gave me the box, I would… in short, I would demure. I would thank you for the invitation and say no.

But a little kid? You can control them. And the truth is that religion is a pretty hard pill to swallow unless you get taught it at a really young age. When you’re a little tiny kid, the idea of a grandfather figure watching from the sky makes some sense, you’ve got bigger, stronger adults around you watching you and protecting you all the time. But, if somehow you don’t get religion as a little one, you aren’t gonna get it once you’re a grown-up smartiepants.

What I am saying is not a denial of the existence of God, or the truth of any particular religion, and I genuinely believe that if someone can explain their faith to me in a way that makes sense to me, I will happily embrace their religion. I’d be more than happy to talk to someone about all this, hopefully over dinner and beers. Or, if you’re Mormon, dinner and Jell-o. I don’t even like drinking anymore, I’ll do it over dinner and anything.

In short, those fighting against prayer in school aren’t intolerant of prayer, and aren’t intolerant of prayer happening in school. We just don’t want MANDATORY, ONE RELIGION PRAYER FORCED ON OUR CHILDREN. I’d be willing to support an Arab prayer in school, just to get the Christians thinking about how awful their kids, and the Jewish kids, will feel.

The same thing about abstinence. NOBODY IS PROTESTING ABSTINENCE EDUCATION. I mean, I’m gonna be really honest with my kid, I’m gonna tell him that 15 year olds have a thousand times the levels of hormones as adults, that basically kids are absolutely crazy, technically crazy, and that he’s got to be SUPER, SUPER careful. So, I’m not gonna teach my own kid abstinence, but that’s between a father and his son.

What we protest, and you can tell in the name, is ABSTINENCE *ONLY* education. It would be like saying, “We’re gonna teach history, but we’ve decided to leave out the teens and twenties, the sixties and seventies, and both President Johnson’s presidencies… Why? I mean, there’s information there that we think children shouldn’t have…”

We’re not intolerant of telling children not to have sex. We’re not intolerant of teaching children the many benefits of abstaining from sex. But if you don’t teach children how to use a condom, how to responsibly take the pill, what sex IS, then you’re just being obtuse.

And we have to fight that.

It’s a horrible sort of pretzel logic that has left the liberals fighting for neo-Nazis to have the right to their opinions, it’s the liberals who’ve fought constantly for the freedoms enjoyed by trash-talking right wing pundits and swift-boat style trash talkers. We keep fighting for these freedoms, we keep fighting to open the doors for more and more and wider a set of ideas and facts to be learned and shared within our culture. This sort of “tolerance” has left us weakened, our constant ache to keep the world open for everyone has left us weakened because the people we fight for actually hate us.

We’re fighting for something so hard that we forget sometimes that we have to fight against people who have twisted the freedoms we strain for to insure that they remain free and that those with opposing viewpoints aren’t. But you can’t say that intolerance of intolerance is intolerance. That’s a twisted logic that doesn’t make sense after even a moment of thought.

We are restricted by the union and by our own empty pockets from shooting a feature length film based on Hail Satan, but we can do this…

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

Here’s the second half of what I think might be good at the festival this year. If you aren’t on here, write to me and tell me why you should be, and if you are on here, you better let me know to come to your show. I’ve got brothers and aunts and relations showing up for Hail Satan and they want to see theater while they’re here.

Yesterday has the first part of the alphabet, today is the last half.

On Air Off is totally trying to seduce me into coming. It’s a radio show gone nuts, with voices from the future and bizarre shit going down. This sounds great.

The Other Side Of Darkness has, in its cast, one of the best performers alive today. Rob Maitner is what Nathan Lane wishes he was, a genuine original talent with a heart as big as his flamboyance. I love Rob as an actor, I might love him even more as a guy.

Poppies looks interesting. I have to say, on this level you have to be really careful the way you advertise dramas because they can rub you either way, but this one really attracted me.

Riding The Bull is written by a guy I’ve worked with in the past, and who I believe is a good writer. I know nothing about the show, but I trust Gus (August Schulenburg as he is listed) to put together a good evening of theater.

Ripper’s 5 gets qualified interest from me. I know that it’s gonna be a smaller musical, which really intrigues me, because of the venue, and I love the subject material… but it is 2 hours and 35 minutes long. Now, the last show I was involved in producing ran damn near three hours with intermission, so yes, I’m an asshole and a hypocrite, but that show was one of the best shows I’ve ever read. If Ripper’s 5 is as well, then I’ll be glad I saw it.

Semi Permanent is a really great show. I’ve known Rick for a long time, and he is one of the best storytellers you will ever find, and this show is so lovely, so warm, so funny and so beautiful. I can’t wait to see it, and you should leave this blog right now and buy tickets.

Slut looks a lot more interesting than the name suggests. I have a soft spot for Canadians talking about sex, what can I say?

Theremin (no working link) – are you kidding me? Of course I’m going to this, this is the guy who basically invented electronic music. Good grief… I’m going and I’m bringing people.

Victor Woo, The Average Asian American is going to be fantastic. Sometimes you just get a feeling, and I just know this show will be great. I don’t know anyone in it, and have barely read the blurb, but I’m POSITIVE.

I’ve never been wrong about this kind of thing.

The Wisdom That Men Seek has one thing going for it as far as I’m concerned, and that’s that they are from Astoria. Their website has no information on their play, but it does have an awesome picture of the track and bridge from about five blocks from my house. So, naturally, I’m gonna go see their play.

So, that’s it. These are the shows I’ve got warm fuzzies for, but I could be off by 80% (the guys I know in the festival, I’m still gonna vouch for) (oh, and that Average Asian thingy, that’s gonna win an emmy one day, trust me), so please drop me a line or use the comments area to tell me to come see your play. I would love to be wrong about something I disregarded, but I’d hate to regret it.

I am acting in a show in this year’s New York International Fringe Festival and I’ve got some time between opening and the second show.

What show? Oh, sorry, of course, I’m in Hail Satan, being produced by some very attractive people over at Gideon Productions, with whom I’m tangentially connected.

My family’s coming and they’re gonna want to see some more New York Theater while they’re in town, but Broadway is looking more and more ridiculous, especially with the prices, and it occurs to me that they’re gonna be here to see my Fringe show… maybe they can go see other Fringe shows while they’re here!

So, I’m gonna write down a list of things that sound like they might be cool, but if you’re not here, please write to me and tell me to come to your show.

…Double Vision gets points right off for warning about nudity. It also seems to be set on a subway, so I’d love to see how they’re gonna pull off that staging.

7 Stories High has a really cool premise, and it fits nicely into our modern attention span. Does it suck that I’m excited by a 75 minute show? Maybe, but I’ve been swimming through the Fringe for years now, 75 minutes is not too big a commitment.

Ancestral Voices seems to be what the festival should be about. A dance troupe from Ohio telling a personal story, it just feels like this could be a really wonderful piece of theater.

Asking For It is not usually the type of show I do, but DARK, comedy and sex… even a one person show could be great.

Better This Way is another dance piece, but full company and multi-media and Greek Mythology thrown in for good measure.

Bucharest Calling just looks weird, awesome and foreign. Apparently, it’s in English, which is definitely a selling point…

Champ, A Space Opera can’t possible be as cool as it looks. I mean, this looks really friggin’ fun.

Dear Dad, Confessions of a Go Go is a show I want to see for completely wrong reasons. But… I still want to…

The End has a shitty website, but if Austin Pendleton thinks it’s good, then who am I to argue.

Farmer Song is one of those pieces that is doing for the Fringe what it should. some have argued that these shows aren’t being supported by the New York theater community, but it looks like it’s at least being supported by The Fringe this year.

Galatea (no website found) looks really fascinating. I’ve always been a little obsessed with the Pygmalion story, (as a guy who never had a very strong sense of self and who was obsessed with creating stories and characters) and this piece looks really lovely.

I Dig Doug probably doesn’t need my endorsement, but it does look like it could be a fun diversion. I’m beginning to notice that I personally have no need for serious political theater… I guess I feel like there’s no difference any more between political theater and the actual political theater. But it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in funny political satire.

The Jazz Messenger might be the most exciting play going up right now. This sounds just utterly fantastic, and I honestly can’t wait to see this.

Lost In Hollywoodland (etc.) could be terrible, but this is yet another show that looks like they had me in mind when they wrote it. I’m definitely down for this one.

The Mercy Swing seems terrifying and possibly really relevant and moving. I think when you’ve got the Fringe menu out, there are drama/comedies galore and you have to wait to see what resonates with you. This one set me off like a tuning fork.

Notes To The Motherland is yet another one person show that I’m excited about. I usually loathe these things, but the truth is that I’ve done really well going to one person shows in the Fringe, the festival really shines when the technical requirements of a big show are eschewed, and this piece looks marvelous.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the last half of the directory and hopefully narrow down the choices to a reasonable list that I can actually go see. In 2004, I saw about thirty Fringe shows, because I was acting and not producing, but the last two years I really screwed myself, only getting to see a handful each year.

I’m hoping that, but staying ahead of the curve, I can spend some days in the city between our opening and our second show, just jumping from venue to venue.