I love to cook. There are a couple of things I do that really give me a sense of peace, and although golf is one of those things, I’m not gonna talk about that. Probably not every again, if I can be disciplined. But cooking, I really love.

There is something about having in front of you a stack of stuff, especially when that stuff is in your fridge or pantry or drawer and you can just roll up your sleeves and use your intuition. Almost any pasta dish, I can do something awesome for you. Anything in the sandwich category, and I include all of the wrapped stuff like burritos and calzones in this, I can take care of. And, I’m really pretty good with sauces, I can make gravy and bechamel and marinara without much worry.

Baking I can handle. I don’t have quite the same gift for it that I do for stove-top, but I can handle it. Every once in a while, a loaf of bread or a plate of cookies comes out *really* good. Growing up, I always thought of baking like a science experiment, like if you’re off by an inch the whole thing is gonna suck. But I’ve actually made quiche and even souffle without any problems, and I’ve varied bread recipes to the point where I’m better off now if I don’t measure and I let fate determine whether there’s too much flour or not.

This cooking thing extends to building stuff as well. I love building things, and again, I’m not talking about Ikea furniture. I’m talking about doing all the measuring and cutting from raw lumber, and using screws and glue to make somehting work. A couple of days ago I built a massage table for Jordana, with a hole cut out for her belly and even though it’s ugly as hell, it was a joy to make.

The thing is… after all this, I just have never been able to make a good pot roast. I make a *great* turkey, I’m not kidding. If you had my turkey… well, let’s just say that last time I made a turkey, I didn’t get to the table fast enough to eat *any* of it. That skill extends to chicken as well, although since that is basically the staple ingredient in anything I make I can’t really take too much credit. Stove-top or oven, I got chickens pretty well covered.

I just really wish I could make a pot roast. Just the beef, the tiny strings of melt-in-your-mouth beef. No bullshit, no raisins or bits of celery, just the pot roast and the accompanying gravy, that’s what I want to be able to make. Either my mom or my dad made it when I was a kid, and it was, hands down – lights out, my favorite meal ever. And both parents were great cooks with their own things they did well, but that pot roast was the best thing ever.

The thing is, my mom says it was my dad, and my dad’s had all these cooking lessons and I don’t trust his memory. The recipe has been lost.

Last weekend, I went to an Amish Buffet in Lancaster PA, and they had pot roast. You could grab a slice of it if you were really careful, but mostly it just melted on the serving spoon. On the plate, it didn’t pool, there was no grease, and when you put it in your mouth it turned into beef flavored butter.

If any of you out there that read this (I’m looking at you, Mac) know how to make the perfect roast, tell me about it. If I try it and it works, I’ll have you over for dinner. I’ll make a salad so you won’t feel unhealthy. Salad, root vegetables, maybe some biscuits.

But trust me, I’ll only be eating the roast

Many of you who know me know that I have an irrational reaction to our tenant who lives upstairs. It’s more than irrational, it’s actually an over-the-top hissy fit kind of reaction, the sort of thing that sent me to a therapist who, while normally opposed to medication, suggested that a little happy pill might make my life a little smoother.

I can give you the rundown on it, but it’s tough because it goes right to the root of some of my worst feelings about EVERYTHING. Let me just do a quick break-down. The guy is a chainsmoking drunk who considers himself a musician, despite the fact that he practices twice a month, at an intolerable level, and plays two gigs a year. He’s about 45 and divorced with a ten year old daughter and a wife who doesn’t like him very much.

Just look at the description, and you can tell why this guy is pretty much the Ghost of Christmas Future. How do I know that when I’m 45, I won’t be divorced, living in a one bedroom apartment above some real musician, drunk off my ass and wondering where my life went? I was *this close* to being this guy. Jesus, I had to quit telling people that I was an actor because the fact that I wasn’t getting paid to do the shows was humiliating.

So, he comes home every night, stumbling, crashing and watches TV for an hour, from 3 to 4, before passing out. Then he’ll get up, start playing Billy Joel and Bob Seger songs on his electric and amplified piano while singing into a microphone. I can’t even hear the TV in the *basement* when he does this.

Pretty quickly, I set some ground rules for him. After midnight, he needs to play piano or watch TV with headphones. So, then he came crashing home and just spun around in his living room for two hours dropping change and shoes and hammers and cutlery… And his living room is right above our bedroom, stretched over us like the skin on a drum.

This is getting long, so let me jump forward.

Two months ago, I told him my wife was pregnant and that he needed to move out. My mom was gonna move in up there, and we need her here to help with the baby. My mom’s not very organized, and she can’t do dishes worth a damn (I remember bitching to her about dishes in high school, showing her that there was still food on the plates when she’s done washing, and she said “the person *drying* is supposed to get off whatever I leave on there!” I said, “But mom, there’s still FOOD on here!” and she said, “What are you bitching about? I just washed it, it’s *clean* food!”) but she is amazing with babies, so calm, so put together, and she has boundless love for the grandkids she’s already got.

Now, I felt a little kharmic bump when I did this, like I was driving this guy to have to go find another apartment just because I’m a neurotic asshole. I had thought to myself, countless times during the year and a half that he lived upstairs, “this guy is going *nowhere*. If I asked him to leave, it would at least shake him into doing *something* with his life”. But that thought existed only in moments of longer harangues in my head about how much he was making me crazy.

About nine months ago, he told me he had given up drinking. Which I responded to with my usual spoken “that is really great, I mean it, that’s just such a smart move” and my usual internal, “man, when people *tell you* they’re about to change, then the telling is the important thing, and this will never take.” But, as the months stretched on, I didn’t smell anything on him, I didn’t notice him coming home and passing out with a giant thud. He still staggered once in a great while, but he’s basically given up drinking.

About four months ago, he told me he had quit smoking. Again, “Great” (“riiiiight”). But then I heard him. He *had quit* already. Two months. He’d been smoking for some 35 years, since he was 11 or 12, and he hadn’t had a cigarette in two months. This was really exciting to me, mostly because I own his apartment, but partly because it seemed he had actually changed something destructive about his life in his *late 40s*.

He came and rang my doorbell an hour ago because he saw a friend of mine letting himself in, and the light was on and the mail was all spread out. He was worried about us, about Jordana, and my friend came and got me. I had been hoping he would be out by the first of November so I could renovate his apartment before my mom and the baby come, and I was hoping he would be telling me about that.

“Listen, man,” he said. “I’m definitely gonna be out by the first. I’m moving a lot of my stuff into storage bit by bit, but I’ll be out by the first.”

“That’s perfect, I really appreciate that. It’s tough to move when you’ve got a lot of stuff, a storage place is a good idea.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a smaller place, so all the music stuff is going into storage until I need it.

“Did you find a place here in Astoria?”

“I’m actually moving back in with my wife,” he said.

I was stunned. “That is… Oh my god, that is really great!”

“Yeah,” he smiled to himself. Like, not a smile of *joy* or anything, but more like relief. Like a guy might smile when he’s lying on the beach and the battle is over and he looks over and notices that neither he nor his good friend are dead.

“I gotta tell you,” I said, “my parents split up when I was in junior high, and if suddenly, out of nowhere, somehow they coulda worked it out… I mean, it’s crazy, but if suddenly, my dad had moved back home, it would have just… it would have been the *world* to me and my little sister.”

“Yeah, our girl is really happy, and I’m just…” he looked at me kinda hard. “Look, the baby? It’s gonna make your hair go gray and it’s gonna make you sleep like shit and it’s gonna make you wish you were a better guy every single day, but it is totally worth it. There’s nothing like it. I get to see her every day now, and it’s the best thing that’s every happened to me.”

“And your wife is cool?”

“She’s great,” he said, not totally believing it. “The space is small, and it’s hard for her to let me back in, but this last year I think… I think she’s *careful*, but still, she’s great. It’s so great for our daughter that I think… That just really helps.”

So.

I think the good news is that people can change their fortunes, even when they’re in their late 40s. I’ve begun to worry that the ruts I’ve been riding in are gonna define me forever, but this guy turned his *LIFE* around. I know that I kicked him out because I didn’t want to have to listen to him having a life that I barely missed having, but the fact is, I bet he’s got a story to tell now. A broken bone will set stronger at the break than the rest of the bone, and it could be that his life has made him stronger than a careful, well planned life would have.

I guess I just feel a little less guilty, but mostly, I’m just so thrilled for him.

I had left UNC and was living in an apartment over my friend’s recording studio, way the hell out in New Jersey. When I look back on it now, I can’t believe how long I lived there, it was basically all of August and September, which is a long fucking time to crash at somebody’s pad. I was living with a girl at that point, and she moved up with me to stay in this three room crap-hole with no kitchen, mounds of stored equipment and a couple of giant boxes of porn. The girl and I slept on a fold-out futon, and every once in a while we had to find somewhere else to sleep, if a rock band from the city was staying out there for a week. We’d come back from staying in the sleaziest motel in New Jersey to find cocaine tracks on the laminate furniture and porn remnants strewn everywhere.

I had been offered a tour with Theatreworks, which I now believe is one of the very best theater companies in New York city. They’ve employed more people than the WPA in the thirties, and if they weren’t sending out small union musicals for kids to enjoy all over the country, then Equity’s unemployment rate would leap by about 15%. But, since they didn’t want to cast the girl I was with, I turned it down. Strange to think of now, had I taken the tour and gotten my equity card, I would have had six months employment, I would have dumped the girl, and I would have been living in New York since ’96. Instead, I turned down the tour and, in January moved to LA with the girl who would eventually break up with me because she simply couldn’t stop fucking the busboys at her waitress job.

Anywhoodle.

It was getting to be the first of October, and I had turned down the jobs offered to me, either because I was taking the girl seriously, or because the money was terrible and I had no way of getting into the city every day because the train was expensive, and our car needed to be parked somewhere and that was outrageous. I was starting to get freaked out and desperate.

At the same time, a lovely little theater company in Rome, New York was looking for three cast members who could do their Christmas musical. Their biggest concern was that they had a small two room apartment to house the actors, and cramming all three in there was tough if two of them didn’t want to share a room. Plus, they only had one car to let us use, and they’d discovered that two cars was really important.

It was, perhaps, the single greatest auditioning experience of my life. I came in and sang and they fell in love with me, then my lady friend came in, and they found out we were a couple, and BANG, they gave us contracts.

We got the scripts in the mail, and as I looked through the three acts, I thought to myself “Um, this seems like three and a half hours of show.” It wasn’t that we had two weeks to rehearse it that worried me, it was that… I mean, it’s THREE HOURS! Who the hell, outside of Wagner, wants to watch three and a half hours of theater! Especially when one of the acts is a Christmas Review containing “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

(I will eventually come up with a list of good Christmas carols and bad Christmas carols, but, trust me, Do You Hear What I Hear is on the list. I believe that Charles Manson could have gotten off if he had just played a recording of that song for the jury and said “This is what our culture has come to! Don’t you see? I had to kill SOMEBODY!”)

We began rehearsals, and I also hustled myself out as a carpenter for building the set. An extra $6 an hour, on top of the several hundred we were getting a week to act. But, the cool thing is that I spent all that time with the husband/wife team that run the company, and I got to exercise every ounce of my talent.

I’m not saying the shows were great, by any stretch. The first act was a straight up Christmas pageant, where we somehow married “It’s A Marshmallow World In The Winter” with “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”. I got to wear a sparkly bow-tie and spangled vest with a tux shirt, and I’m pretty sure I got to sing a solo in the middle of “I’m Gettin’ Nothin’ For Christmas”. The second act took place on a train car in the mid 30s, I’d guess, where I played a singing waiter and I got to play guitar. Because guitar was big in the 30s. The last act was set in present day, but I played the ghost of a woman who lost her husband in WWII.

We opened after two weeks with a flawless set, perfectly off-book and on key, with a Christmas show that lasted four hours. And four hours is a long time, definitely, but when you are doing the show for the strictly over-70 set, you can imagine that bathroom breaks were long, hearing aids went up and down, and there was a lot of LOUD snoring.

Oh, and yeah, you did the math right. I got the gig the beginning of October, and we rehearsed for two weeks. Look, I’m not making this up, I’d tell you the name of the company, but there is the farthest outside chance that the couple who still run the theater have heard of google, and they’ll show up here and get hurt by my slick ribbing, but I’m telling you, this Christmas show opened, not just before Thanksgiving, but BEFORE HALLOWEEN. We had a couple of days when it was HOT.

Now, after we opened, the producers, being no dummies, realized they needed to drop one of the acts, and the one hour train ride with the inexplicable and barely understandable immigrants and the anachronistic busker/waiter would have to go. With that removed, it also dropped one half hour intermission, so all we had to do was tighten up the two other pieces, and we were right at two hours.

(I’m sorry, permit me a little aside here. Why a half hour intermission you ask? Well, that’s gonna lead me to something else. The performance space was one end of a restaurant, a buffet with long tables. I gotta say, some people just know how to make money, they really ought to just be allowed to print it, for chrissakes. They had a restaurant that was never completely full, so they just built up one end of it to look like a performance space, replaced the area in front with long tables and set up a buffet. Instead of charging for a $8 meal, they charge $65 tickets and pack the place with octogenarians. Which means that the first five minutes of the first act, during the opening monologue and number, one of our responsibilities was to gently remove people’s purses, canes, keys, wallets, even FEET, from the front lip of the stage, and to sweetly try to make sure everyone is either awake for the show, or will remain asleep for as long as they need.)

(But why a half hour intermission? Because there was one toilet for the men, one for the women. Including the actors.)

(((I’m sorry, let me be a little bit more specific here, because often “toilet” means “the room wherein several stalls and urinals are held”, and that’s not what I mean at all. I mean “one toilet”. For each. Which means there was a long line of men waiting outside, and one old guy inside staring at his dick, praying that the pee would come out at some point.)))

(((((Yes, I know. But for the grace of God, and one day… I know, I know.)))))

So, let me talk about this last piece, because it really is a touch of brilliance. The producers were the husband/wife team, but the director was the husband, and he had also taken on the role of “playwright”. Now, this guy was corny as hell, he was a bigger punster than my Jewish friends, but he was also wicked smart and as pragmatic a man as I’ve ever met. His advice for producing is stuff I’ve held on to tightly.

(He said “advertise a comedy, but give the people a drama.” Everyone likes to think they’re going to see a comedy, and it gives people permission to laugh at stuff, but what people really want, when they’re sitting there in the dark, is a tight drama. He said “build every set with the basics first and flourishes next.” I’ve lived to regret ignoring this, since my garage now has two sets of baffles in it. He said, “Producer, Audience, Playwright, Director, Designer, Actor,
in that order.” By which he meant, if an actor was having a problem, it would have to be passed up the chain of command, which would be four levels away from importance to a producer. If the Playwright had a problem, it was only one level away. The audience was the final arbiter.)

In this last play, I was a ghost of a woman that was married during World War II. The actress playing the woman was 73 when we started the play, which, I don’t think makes her old enough to have had a husband and kids before the war, but maybe she started early. In any case, the character has a boyfriend that has been pushing for marriage for ten years, asks her every year at Christmas, but, y’see, the first husband was declared dead, but they never found his body.

So, I appear as an imaginary figure at one point, singing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, just the first half of the first verse, ending with “and presents on the tree…” and then the show goes on. Then, I come to life as a ghost in my WW II uniform and sing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” playing it on the piano in her living room, this time the whole song. We have a wonderful ten or fifteen minute scene, at the end of which I tell her that it’s time to let go. It’s time to embrace the life she still has left, she should marry this man. And then I kiss her good bye and sing a little something I like to call “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”.

Now, this shit was fucking SOGGY. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, which matched perfectly with the fact that, already, there wasn’t a dry seat. All of the “MARGARET, WHO IS *THAT* GUY”s had already been gotten out of the way during the first part of the act, so every single ancient audience member knew who I was by the time I had my long scene. And every single person in the audience saw themselves in Gail, the actress playing the grandmother.

Gail had lived upstate for about 20 years since she stopped acting in the city. She taught acting at SUNY Oswego or something, and now, in her early 70s, she had retired from teaching and just did the odd show now and then for fun. I don’t know how she survived having to listen to me sing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” three times a show, two times a day, five days a week for almost two months, but I very quickly found myself thanking God that she was willing.

She was still tall, although not as tall as she had been, and still had a striking frame, although a bit stockier than it once was. Her hair was silver, not white, and cut into a strangely specific long-bob, as if she had gotten a very severe haircut once in the 70s, hated it, and then a month later when it grew in she realized it framed her face perfectly. She had the blue twinkley eyes of a woman that was used to men’s attention, and the earthy slowness to her gestures that implied a sort of center. This was a woman who, for a ringing phone, dropped exactly nothing.

And, the thing I found most attractive, she suffered fools not at all. The specific cast of this show was made up of hippies, gym rats and extroverts, to the point where every single person (except for me, of course) had fantastic bodies, and every single person was completely naked all the time. It’s hard to describe the level of depravity, but I can tell you exactly what each of the women in the cast had their pubic hair trimmed like, exactly what sort of nipples they have. All it takes is one actress to tip the balance toward nudity, and this particular cast happened to have, in every single role, one of those actresses.

Except for Gail, of course. I hung out with the actors and with the woman I was with, but man did Gail have no patience for my bullshit. I would go on and on about something (big surprise) and every once in a while I’d see Gail just glance at me like I was a fucking ASSHOLE. I remember, one time early on, I had a particularly good zinger. I don’t know if it was a pun or an observation or what, but it was powerful and insulting and everyone was laughing and Gail was staring at me. I told her I was sorry, almost as an impulse, and she said, “Don’t you want to try for more than this?” and I asked “more than what” and she said “More than *this*” and she gestured around a room of naked laughing hot girls, letting her hand almost linger on the woman I was with at the time.

And then, every show, on stage, I could tell she was in love with me. I came out in a soldier’s outfit and she had several opportunities to get close to me, and she would climb inside me, almost. The weeks crawled by and we talked more and more outside the show, walking around the grounds together between shows while the girl I was with went to the gym with the other hotties. We were supposed to kiss during the show, just once, just as a good bye, and it quickly became the best moment in the show.

I started dreaming about her. I wanted so badly to talk to her when she wasn’t around. When we had huge snowstorms, I would think about the fact that they might cancel the show, and it would kill me because I wouldn’t see Gail. This woman who was almost fifty years older than me.

It was amazing on stage. After sitting for an hour and forty minutes, the audience that had been spinning and moving and getting up to go to the bathroom and asking for more coffee suddenly didn’t speak. I know it’s because they were seeing one of their own talk about their own lives, but part of it is because there was a sexual electricity going on between the two of us. You can always tell on stage when two people want to be together but haven’t yet, in the same way you can always tell when two people have already done it, and the former is so much better than the latter. When I held Gail at the end, the audience applauded every night, as if it were the end of the show. The end of the show was six minutes later, when Gail’s character accepted the marriage proposal.

In the middle of December, the director pulled us aside. There were only about 15 shows left, but the relationship between the two of us was getting distracting to the audience. I laughed him off at the time, but he was right. By the time the other actor came on, the entire audience wanted Gail’s character to die so she could be with me in heaven. It became the end of “Somewhere In Time”. Gail suddenly figured out what was going on and kiboshed me hard. I’m sure she thought all of the affection she was getting from me was identical to her many students, and as soon as she realized that I had a full out crush on her, she sat on it.

I never told the girl I was with. Never really told anyone. She was 73 in ’96, she’s be 83 now, and I don’t know what she’s doing. Gail isn’t even her name, I’ve totally forgotten her name. But my… whatever it was… love affair, I guess, with her was the beginning of the end of that life. I had spent my time making as many pretty girls laugh as I could, and that had been enough for me as an adolescent, and that started to change by early ’97.

It took me years, but every time, after that show, every time I looked at the woman I was with, I wanted her to be more substantial, more relevant. Our relationship was dying long before she started fucking busboys, and she wouldn’t have had to seek out the attentions of busboys if I hadn’t lost so much respect for her that winter. I wanted to share my life with a woman who would laugh at my jokes and then say “what *more* do you want? If you want more, then I will stand by you and get more with you.”

It’s weird to think now, as I do when we’re upstate New York for Christmas, about that show and that time. But the smell and the frozen crunchy snow bring me back to her, and it’s amazing to know that a love affair doesn’t need anything more than a conversation and shared passion, nothing more than a dare to achieve and a circumstantial kiss for it to be capable of changing your life.

My grandmother was an intimidating woman. She was maybe only about 5 foot 8 or so, but to a nine year old, that was just terrible. I feel like I might not have known her very well, I’m sure a lot of other people would disagree with my assessment from a long way’s off, but she seemed to be one of those people you just don’t fuck with. She was incredibly smart, incredibly judgemental and incredibly strong, quick to call you on your own bullshit before you’ve even asked her to. She held the family together through sheer force of will despite several late starts in life, a big crowd of dependents and a crappy husband.

So, naturally, when she told us, every Christmas, that we would be acting out the Christmas story, it didn’t even occur to any of us to complain. Each one of her four kids had pumped out between four and eight of their own children, so there was something in the neighborhood of 25 kids forced into this pageant, and it definitely led to some awkward casting decisions. Naturally, whichever cousin was the closest in age to, y’know, newborn had to play the baby Jesus, and then the pecking order was established, with favored cousins getting juicier roles. There were always more girls than boys, which may have been the only thing that kept my long-haired brothers from having to play angels, but definitely the cousins that my grandmother liked were the ones announcing the visits from the wise men, or getting to be Joseph.

Which left me and my cousin Michelle to play the all-important roles of “Christmas Asses”. I know that one year I played a shepherd, but I think I laughed too much, and from then on, I was an ass. A donkey. I guess if there is a cast of 25, and verisimilitude is paramount, there’s no way to play out the Christmas story without at least two animals near the manger.

My cousin Michelle was born three weeks after I was. It didn’t take much math for either one of us to realize that she’d been named “Linda Michelle” after my mom, Linda, had the unfortunate circumstance of having her fourth boy at age 38, and therefore wouldn’t be able to use her favorite name “Michelle”. When the cousins would come visit, I would sit there just stunned at Michelle’s beauty. I was speechless, I could hardly look at her.

Look, I’m not gonna get creepy here, despite the horrible “kissing cousins” jokes her mom made to us, and despite the fact that my moral compass spun on a whim (thanks to growing up in a classical music family in the 1970s), I never had any feelings for Michelle other than sheer amazement at her beauty and her craziness. Shit just rolled off her when she was a kid. She was the classic middle child, cleaning up after the younger girls, dodging barbs from the older crowd, and just generally doing enough to get by.

We had that in common. We were surrounded by gigantic personalities, and, in her case, something even worse. For me, I had four brothers who commanded their own share of the spotlight, I was in line behind the poet-lizard king, the genius introvert and the screaming menace, and after I was born, almost immediately, there was Princess Diana. I love my siblings more than anything, but it was a big fucking mess growing up, and let’s just say, you yelled for what you needed, you ate fast or you didn’t eat at all, and nobody had much time for silent suffering.

My cousin Michelle had it one step worse. First of all, there are six girls in her family, all of them like shining jewels of beauty and neurosis, each accomplished in their own way. Second of all, whereas I had ADD, which is something that translates into failing grades by high SAT scores, she had profound dyslexia, which translates into a sense that you’re just stupid. On top of that, she and I shared a hardcore punk attitude, fewer inhibitions and more, shall we call it, experimentation than most of the people in our families, but her crowd were a bunch of right wing Christians. I had sex with my girlfriend when I was too young, and my mom told me it was a bad idea. Michelle did the same with her boyfriend, and she literally couldn’t talk about it to anyone.

And, of course, the worst thing. She had had an older brother, three years older, who was killed in a horrible car accident and, essentially, Michelle was born to replace him. The only son of an only son, died tragically in a way I don’t think I can bring myself to describe, and Michelle was born a year later. But Michelle was just a girl among five other girls. She was born and never knew that she would never be able to fill that void. The boy who died would always be there, just over her shoulder, as a comparison to what might have been, and Michelle wouldn’t ever be as perfect as the boy who wasn’t there.

So, while I was always the smartass, earning my Grandmother’s disapproval the old-fashioned way, Michelle was always disliked by my Grandmother for totally unfair reasons. And the two of us, we got to be Christmass asses. Generally, this meant wearing fur coats and standing off to the side mewling and creeping, which, of course, meant that we forgot about the Christmas story and started playing, like kids. Strange, that during a performance I wouldn’t recognize the fact that we had the grown-ups in rapt attention, staring at us.

But maybe not. My cousin Michelle broke up with her high school rock and roll boyfriend senior year, and within two years was married to a returned missionary. She’s three weeks younger than me, and she now has five kids, damn near teenagers. She lives in a track home in Utah and pounds anti-depressants, like so many of the other Mormon women I’ve known. She has chosen the life that was forced on her, imposed on her. Where once she had been the sexiest, freakiest girl in our high school, she quickly became just another Republican, switching medication every eight months, trying to keep up with her kids and her husband, and running a beauty salon out of her kitchen.

And I’m sure there was a moment, some moment in 1987 when she looked around and saw the look of betrayal in the family’s eyes, when she realized that if she kept her shirt open and her skirts short, she’d be writing checks that her parents religion couldn’t possibly stand cashing. There was probably that horrible movie moment, when the camera spins around the room and she sees every scowl, every shaking head, every disapproving look and she swallows hard and gathers her sweater around her open shirt and realizes she’s not wearing her temple garments underneath.

But before that moment, long before, when she and I both had the disapproving looks from all around, but for some reason didn’t quite care yet, when her beauty may have been unmatched. Her sky blue eyes and long features and crazy swept hair, it’s no wonder that my brother’s wife and my wife look very little like each other, but both look like her. There was a time, when we were both eight years old and wearing fur coats, standing to the side of our well-liked cousins that got to be shepherds, who were standing next to our very-well-liked cousins that got to be Mary and Joseph, who were standing on either side of a piece-meal manger that contained whoever’s baby was youngest, who was really just standing in for that little boy from year’s ago who died when he was still the Christ child, who will always be the kresh baby… there was a time when she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

So maybe it isn’t strange that I didn’t recognize this, my earliest public performance, as something that I would obsess over for the rest of my life. Because it was my first experience with a beautiful, crazy, mysterious woman. Art would become the thing I work at and commit to, the theater would become a sort of salvation for me, the answer to my neurosis and the balm for my screaming mind. But this, a girl who’s beauty is beyond explanation, who’s mind is beyond understanding and who’s affection is like a homecoming… even at eight years old, long before the complications of boy/girl relationships would mean a
nything to me, this was my first introduction to pure love.

There is a joke in Southern California that all the streets are named for the very thing that was bulldozed to make way for the new homes that sprung up in the fifties. There are people who live on Elm Street and Grove Street and all the rest, although there are no elms to be seen, and the groves disappeared decades before I was even born.

So, it takes a bit of an imaginative stretch to understand why I was in a group called “The Citrus Singers” for three years. It’s affiliated with Citrus College, which, of course, was named for the orange farms that were gobbled up when the school was built. The college is in the valley, just west of Montclair and North of Clairmont, if that helps.

It was incredibly difficult to get in to the troupe, there were usually hundreds of people auditioning for what were sometimes only six or seven open positions. I happen to get in to the group during an off year, when there were eleven of us chosen. And even if there had been only one open position, it probably would have gone to me. I’m not being arrogant here, for a “singer” I was just about the best musician these people had ever seen.

Keep in mind, this is southern California, so it isn’t exactly a cultural Mecca. I understand that it’s begun to blossom lately, but in the late 80s, Southern California could trace it’s cultural significance back about ten years, when David Lee Roth met Eddie Van Halen. Before that, there was the Beach Boys and, I guess, Jan and Dean or something, but basically southern California was where the shadow of the birthplaces of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon extended just to the edge of the valley, and just over that hill was where the cast of Hogan’s Heroes was snorting coke off willing underage hookers. If a guy with a nice voice shows up that can read music and recognize Bartok, you’d better grab him by the ankles.

Naturally, I thought I was the shit. Mostly because the staff kissed my ass a little bit. But, Holy SHIT, the other people in the program laid down the law on me hard. And thank God they did because it didn’t matter if I could sightread. Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen to me.

Starting in September, we were preparing for Christmas. At the time everything flew at my so fast, I didn’t really do the math of what exactly we were putting together, but it now occurs to me that we were preparing four completely different concerts.

First, we had to work on the classical concert, which was a fully orchestrated 70 minute evening of chorales and selections from Handel’s Messiah. Which was fine, I had done the Messiah, virtually everyone I knew were pretty familiar with at least certain parts of it. My brother Kent used to giggle at the “Oh, we like sheep” part. Really the biggest challenge to this wasn’t learning the music, it was surviving the rehearsals. The tenor part… well, let’s just say that the tenor part is so damned high that a couple of us went to the library to try to figure out if maybe Handel was writing in the wrong key, if maybe back in his day those notes weren’t quite as high as they were now.

Or, I should say, a couple of us said we were gonna go to the library. We never made it.

The second performance piece was what we called “The Pop Show”. Now, this had nothing to do with Christmas, I admit, but we did have to put together a 50 minute show choir performance, complete with choreography and between songs banter, that would be performed throughout southern California starting in October. We would, in fact, perform this show throughout the year, going to resorts and golf courses and country clubs.

Which is weird because this is also where we did the third show, a stand-up a capella choral performance. 12 or 13 carols, done a capella in four to six part harmony. Oh is that all, you ask? No, I say. No. Because no Lilly is gilded enough unless there is also a 16 PERSON HAND BELL CHOIR that performs with you. Where are these 16 people from? From within the choir, dummy. You play handbells, sometimes as many as FIVE, while still singing your frickin tenor part to “Sleigh Bells” or whatever the hell it was.

So, yeah, I guess the third show contained a fourth show, inside it, which had to be rehearsed totally separately.

But the real fourth show, or, um, the fifth… Jesus, I don’t know… let’s call it the fourth show, the REAL fourth show was the grand-daddy. This show would be a 60 minute all original musical, full costumes, amazing sets, done at our 1500 seat Performing Arts Center. Ten shows a week, three weeks, sold out run all during the month of December, complete with Santa Claus, usually some kind of toy maker, sometimes Jack Frost, life-size dolls that have their own dance number, elves, the whole works. This is the crystal cathedral crowd, remember, where they went to see the Christmas pageant and saw real life camels and donkeys and the angels actually flew and they got to watch as God impregnated Mary.

Okay, there was no impregnating. But our show was the secular answer to that, with live donkeys, full Dickensian costumes, huge two and three story sets, real ice skating on stage, the whole works. It was a spectacular, written new every year to feature the best of the Citrus Singers. I should say, the plots and characters were re-worked every year, but you weren’t gonna be surprised by any of it. It was heavily borrowed from Hans Christian Anderson and Dickens and, *ALL* of the music was “borrowed” from other plays. I have no idea how they could afford the royalties, but I guess when you’re selling out a 1500 seat auditorium at 40 something bucks a pop, you’re doing okay.

So. Give me just a second to describe the schedule.

Monday through Friday, 9 AM to Noon was music rehearsal, Tuesday and Thursday it was from 11 to 1 and dance rehearsal from six pm to ten pm. Monday and Wednesday, from 2 to 6 was hand-bell rehearsal. Each section (tenors, altos, etc.) had their own sectional rehearsal. Ours was Tuesday and Thursday from 2 to 5 and Saturday from 6 am to 8:30 am. Saturday we had dance rehearsal from 9 until 6.

Now, this wasn’t nearly enough rehearsal for everything we had to learn. And, some of the people in the group were idiots and took classes from the community college as well. The fact that I could sight-read came in handy, I was usually ahead of everyone, but I still fell hopelessly behind expectations immediately. I mean, this was the scheduled time you had to be there, but every person put in at least another ten hours a week scrambling to learn all of the music and lines. I understand that med students and shit have it worse, way worse, but, I mean, if we could handle this, why the hell weren’t we in med school?

That’s the thing. The military, med school, fancy-lawyer school, those are all places that me and the rest of the Singers would have been frickin’ KICKED OUT OF. I understand that an eighty hour week is par for the course for a dude in residency, but we were the kind of people who did “Godspell” in high school and were like “man, performing is fun!”. It never occurred to us that it would be this kind of commitment.

(Also, just as an aside, none of us has ever made the kind of money that med school or fancy lawyer school guys do. I mean, honestly, actors don’t usually make as much money as… Jesus Christ, there isn’t even a comparison. Nobody makes less money than us.)

By the time we got to late November and the Christmas season was really on us, we started having extra rehearsals on all sides. Especially funny were the handbell sleepovers, where we would all cram into someone’s shitty ass apartment after having stolen the five handbell cases from the locked closet (community college, like community theater, is chock full of thieves. Nobody locked their keys in their car for long, I can tell you that. Most people in the group could get into your car in about three seconds). During these all-nighters, the bass clef bells would s
leep for half an hour while the treble bells rehearsed and then we’d switch off. I know one girl who could sleep and play her part damn near perfectly.

The handbells come into play in this story because they set off a peculiar chain reaction. My second Christmas with the group, there were three of us that sort of vied for all of the leads and all the solos and, frankly, all the extracurricular play. It’s incredible to think about, but we were all twenty years old, and if you worked us 80 hours a week, we were still going to find time to have sex with as many of each other as possible.

We had a set of rules about sexual contact. Anything that happened on the van or during an all-night rehearsal didn’t count as “cheating” on whomever you might be dating outside the group. Any “above the clothes” rubbing also was fair game. There was a fine line about sleeping with other people inside the group, it was totally fine as long as you didn’t take the person too seriously. There was a “time-zone” law created for while we were on tour in Hawaii and in Europe, which got switched to an “area-code” law during the Christmas season. If memory serves, after a particularly strange oral sex swap I had with an engaged girl while on tour, the “stairwells don’t count” rule got invented.

In any case, there was Me, Charles and David, and the three of us were constantly battling one another. Charles had beaten out David for a solo in something, but David had been cast as Santa Claus, leaving Charles and Me with the two larger but less impressive leads in the show. I was the “red shoes” style tinker and Charles was, I believe, “head Elf”. Everyone called us the big three

So, during one of our stand up -n- sing carols performances, while the handbell choir was doing “Dance of the Wooden Soldiers”, David kept whispering shit-talking right into Charles’ ear. Charles responded by swinging his G3 bell ever so slightly behind him into David’s nuts. It was guy stuff, even though by this point I was essentially in charge of all the guys, I didn’t worry about it. Charles, who was a shit-talker from way back, for some reason also didn’t think it was that big a deal. David, who was 6’4″, 290 pound former football center, took it kinda seriously.

About two hours later, there was an epic battle, which landed Charles in the hospital with his face more or less caved in and landed David clean out of the group and fired from the show. While it may seem like it would be hard to replace one bass and one tenor, and even harder to replace G3, Ab3 and A3 to the handbell section, we also had a mere eight hours to replace Santa Claus and Head Elf.

One of the voice teachers happened to be a fat guy, and also had been the one to teach all the music to Santa in the first place. He just had to learn twenty pages of dialogue or so, figure out a couple of dances, and try like hell to keep up with the blocking. For Charles’ part, a kid in the chorus got his shot. He had been in the group for 3 and a half months, living always in the shadow of the Big Three, had been to every rehearsal and done all of his work… and somehow he had also learned all three of our parts in the Christmas show. He knew the choreography, sort of, he knew the songs, kind of, and he knew all the lines and blocking, perfectly. If he had more talent, then the choreography and songs would have been great.

God. That kid. I still remember him. The little fucker.

Of course, the show is still remembered as “the Christmas Miracle” and the rest of the season went off without much of a hitch. And that one kid? Last I heard he was cast in “Avenue Q” in Vegas. Say what you will, that little fucker never let an average talent slow him down. I’ve also seen him, over the years, in several national commercials.

And I guess that’s the moral. When I got in the group I was massively talented. I still am. But talent means very, very little. It’s like saying that an atom has the capacity to be an atom bomb. Who the fuck cares? I didn’t find my own discipline until years later. In fact, I was there for all the hours I needed to be, all the other hours I didn’t do an ounce of work. I could sight-read and I memorized really fast, plus I understood the math of the music, I could always go somewhere that made sense even when I was singing in a quartet or a trio.

But that’s what I’m saying. If you’re not working during Christmas, it’s because you don’t want to. It’s because you’re not trying hard enough. And I went years without working during Christmas, until it finally dawned on me that maybe acting isn’t for me.

From 1989 to 1991, I was involved with a series of Christmas shows as part of a performance troupe called “Citrus Singers”, and I always hated the title of the show. It was called, simply “Christmas is…” and then the year, so my second year it was “Christmas is… 1990”. I understood what they were doing, they were saying “You fill in the blank, you create the magical dream that *is* what Christmas *is* for *you*…” But for me, it ended up reading exactly the way it looks. Like “Christmas is 1990”, that Christmas is the gift of the year 1990. And I gotta tell you, those years weren’t exactly gifts to me, so it seemed like total crap.

The thing is, Christmas does mean something different to a lot of people. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I found out that Christmas meant Chinese food and a movie for all my Jewish friends. I don’t know what I thought they did on Christmas, but it didn’t occur to me for a second that there would be people missing out on the gigantic pile of greed and sloth that is Christmas in my family, with a ceiling scraping tree and an entire room dedicated to presents. I was so dizzied by how frickin’ awesome kid-Christmas is that it took me years to realize it wasn’t just a grab bag of gluttony.

But here’s the thing. Christmas does mean different things to different people, even among those who celebrate it. For most people, there are carollers, or they go to church and hear the songs. For a lot of people, it’s the TV specials, the claymation thingies with Rudolph and “I want to be a dentist!” and Mr. Heat-miser and stuff. And I’m not at all under-selling the fact that for a majority of people, the holiday is about promise, about the fact that in every little baby child there is the chance for greatness that can change the history of the world. Even for non-believers, the Christ-story has such significance because at birth, this little thing, this baby, was powerless and simple, born in the humblest of circumstances with only the shepherds and donkeys there to watch. From this tiny moment would come, if not the redemption of the world, then one of the wisest and strongest souls to ever set foot on our planet.

Yeah.

Y’know what Christmas means to me? MONEY.

Look, I’ve spent my life, since I was a kid, I’ve spent my entire life as a performer. And Christmas is when everyone wants a performance. You know that cartoon, that clamation thing? People got some *ROYALTIES* on that mother fucker, tell you what. You know how you go to your country club and hear that amazing group of carollers sing “Little Drummer Boy” and “Hark How The Bells”? Those carollers have sung those songs ONE THOUSAND TIMES, and every fricking “brum-pum” the tenors coo means money in their pockets.

Seriously, I know that there are no atheists in foxholes and there are no hungry homeless on Thanksgiving, but there are also no unemployed artists at Christmas. If you aren’t working at Christmas, then you just don’t want the work. If you spend all year in your studio writing 12 tone cycles decrying the war, then just chill out for a minute, pick a key and write a song about missing your soldier boy. You will find yourself with an extra 1200 dollars a year in royalties. If you spend all year at the gym, getting up at 6 in the morning for your EPA audition and saving your pennies for new headshots, then come November, go to every regional Christmas show audition. You’ll find yourself in Dayton playing Bob Cratchet.

Now, I’m a softie. Just because Christmas means work doesn’t mean I’m not still moved by the miracle and all that. I am, and I’m sure over the course of the next week or so, that will totally leak out. Jordana asked me, on our first date, what my favorite story was as a child, and I told her it was the story of Christ’s birth. Now, fortunately, I can say that, as an ardent atheist and asshole, it becomes a “Nixon Goes To China” kind of thing. Most people say that on a first date and the Jewish girl would be all “I forgot something in the car… Or rather, I have to take the car to where the thing is that I forgot and it’s, um, in another city… where I will be living… from now on…” But fortunately, I had already been plenty obnoxious, so it just came across as a moment of sweetness in a lifetime of assininity.

Yeah. Assininity. What?

Anyway, I’m gonna take the next several posts to write about Christmas. It’s the only way I know how to do this, so I’m doing it this way. In the end, I don’t know how much of this will be useful, but I have discovered that when I write by myself, absolutely nothing comes out. When I write on this blog, not only is an inner censor on (the censor that tries to cut out “boring” stuff, rather than “offensive” stuff) but I also seem to actually write. I’m a horrible narcissist, if nobody’s paying attention, I just don’t see the point.

It has been said that there are two kinds of people, those who split the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. The truth is that, as much as I may claim to be a progressive thinker with a liberal bent, I tend to split the world into two different kinds of people, and I wanted to include some of my favorite theater-related pairings.

Actors
There are two kinds of actors, those that are willing to commit themselves to truth in performance, and therefore will allow themselves to look like complete fools for the sake of a show, and those who commit themselves to look good, regardless of what the show asks of them. There is, of course, a certain amount of pride and hubris in allowing yourself to look like a complete ass in a show, so it’s sometimes difficult to make the delineation. The guy who’s willing to come out on stage in a thong even though he’s fat and covered in hair… this guy is acting out of pride. The guy who fights for a character that is extremely unattractive, this guy doesn’t care who hates him.

Audience Members
There are two kinds of audiences, those that want to buy what you’re selling, and those that want to figure out how they got ripped off. I’ve been to shows with people who complain about the way an actor’s British accent slips, or how you could tell that one guy wasn’t a real golfer or whatever, and meanwhile, going on all around them, there’s a wonderful play. I’ve also been to plays with people when someone gets kicked in the nuts and they go ahead and laugh. The show’s got nut kicking! Go ahead and enjoy it!

Critics
There are two types of critics, those that want to protect the audience, and those that want to protect an ideal. When you read reviews and you get a simple recounting of the plot, the critic is simply doing her best to let you know what happens, so you can be prepared when you go see the show. She will even go so far as to explain which bits are good and which are bad. But the type of critics who watch a play with the perfect version of the play in the back of their minds, these critics will celebrate certain things and savage others with a religious passion. A critic who really eviscerates a show is someone who wants to punish the people who made the play, as opposed to the critic who simply wants to warn an audience away from an unpleasant experience.

Playwrights
There are two types of playwrights, those that are telling you their story, and those that are telling you a story. It takes some people a lifetime to stop writing the play that exacts revenge on the world they were born in to, to stop declaring their own brilliance within the plots of their stories. Many playwrights have no need to stop telling their story, their story is exciting and every new version works. The playwrights who tell you a story are working within their own frame of reference, of course, letting you in on their mindset and sometimes revealing more about themselves by not including a suspiciously familiar playwright character in every play, but you won’t find more than one (if that many) play that features a young man or woman who struggles to create something and ends up conquering all enemies through art.

Musicians
There are two types of musicians, the fashion designers and the coalminers. There are musicians who talk about how important a specific performance of turn of phrase is, and then there are musicians who practice. Every day. Like, they practice their scales. One the one hand, you’ve got musicians who go back and forth about the various recordings of Grateful Dead or Liza or whatever you’re particular bottle of wine is, and then you’ve got guys who have figured out figured bass. There are guys who pick up a guitar and *love* the way it feels, and there are guys who spend hours every single day mining greatness one small note at a time.

Directors
There are two types of directors, over-educated, under-experienced megalomaniacal jackasses and potters. I don’t know how better to describe the first group, except to say that I’m fairly sure these people exist in giant numbers. The second group are people who know how to let the wheel spin and let their hands sit on the clay. They can shape both by speeding up the wheel, or by pressing harder, they can throw more clay on, they can use different tools to take clay off, but mostly, they simply work with the material given and turn it into something beautiful. If you’re one of these people, please feel free to write me an email.

Obviously, there are more than two types of people in every group. Seriously, I don’t split groups into twos. But each group just keeps being split into twos, on and on. Except for directors. That part is totally right.

I’m the only one left in my family that actually lives in New York and though I understand the clarion call of, y’know, “the possibility of success and happiness” I’m just bummed that I’m the only one left. It may all change in the coming months and years, but as for now, my family’s gone. It’s not a bad thing, it just is what it is.

And, the thing is, if I was doing what I’m doing now in any smaller town, just about anywhere in the country, I’d be a phenomenal success. If my writing partners and I were living in Pittsburgh or Toledo or whatever, then the shows we’re putting on would be responded to. As a matter of fact, if this latest Fringe Festival proved anything, we’d probably have as good a chance or better if we were producing musicals in the middle of America of getting them seen in a New York venue.

And there’s a part of me that would love that. I’d love to be like my dad, the most famous musician in all of Cedar Rapids Iowa. I’m not being remotely ironic or snotty here, I really want that. And my whole family is on the west coast now, AGAIN, as there seems to be a constant shift from one coast to another. The theater community is booming in the valleys of southern Cali, and if I moved the company, lock stock and barrel, to Napa, I’d have an enormous support system already in place.

And if I was in one of these places, I could develop a show over the course of months instead of weeks. The truth is that we’ve developed an arsenal of theater pieces that would cover us for the first two years of shows. We choose two established plays and put them up with two-three pieces we’ve already developed and the first two seasons are taken care of. Rehearsal space would be a fraction, the shows could run for the same length of time they do here, except they would be well-attended, and you can’t convince me that the audiences in San Francisco are less educated than the idiots on our audience here…

So, why do we stay? Why wouldn’t we follow the exodus to a place that makes more sense.

I can’t describe it, but it’s the city itself. It’s the very sense that what you do here doesn’t make a mark on the greatness of this place. The towers went up, the towers went down, and it didn’t change New York. Disney moves in and, eventually, Disney will move out. The crack whores will be replaced by some other kind of whores, but New York hasn’t changed. There are surface alterations, but this is still the center of the universe.

I live in Astoria now, and I don’t get in to the city unless something forces me in, but I still go in at least three days a week. When you get out of the subway at 47th street, when the rains come in mid-September, when April hits and you can smell the thaw…

We won’t leave this city. We have no loyalty to her, and god knows this city could give a flying shit about us. We stay here because we love the city, like the way you love an opera or a girlfriend or a book. I’m the worst romantic I know, and I love the city the way I love old recordings, the way I love a great friend’s great idea. I love the city in the way only a convert can love God. Every day, this is where I want to wake up, and when I’m on vacation I want to come home. This isn’t where I started, and I can’t say that New York is my home, but I didn’t know who I was until I was myself here, and it really doesn’t matter how much better aspects of my life would be somewhere else, that life wouldn’t be lived here.

I think that this blog will, in pretty short order, be turned over to a daddy-n-me blog about our boy who’s supposed to come at some point between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. What I would like to do is to create a theater blog that is completely anonymous, but that’s basically impossible. The other option is that I call a spade a spade, and everyone who works with me does so knowing that they will end up being mocked or praised relentlessly on this site, but the people I work with most frequently would really rather I didn’t do that.

I’m not sure how people manage to post politically, but it might be that most people are in development a lot more than we are, and their pieces certainly don’t suffer for it. We are always pressing toward a production, we are always actually working with people we don’t know, and there is a fear that they will find this under-read blog and get pissed.

Which is kinda weird if you think about it. What if I never wrote anything that wasn’t true? What if I relentlessly mocked someone for, just as an example, saying all of their lines letter perfect in rehearsal and then *never* saying them in performance? Or if I made fun of a director for not knowing the plot of the show he was directing? I mean, these would be criticisms that the rest of the theater community should know about, by hiding these deficiencies, am I actually hurting the art-form that I love most deeply?

It’s a question for another time, I guess.

What I would really like, in a perfect world, would be for an assembly line mentality to putting on a show. I wish that there was an understanding of how long a rehearsal schedule was, of what the responsibilities of each person involved are, and a timeline by which those things needed to be accomplished. I wish there wasn’t this sense of “okay, by Saturday, we’re off-book, and by tuesday, we’re doing a run” or whatever.

I know that’s insane. but I really wish that when you get cast in a show, and then you don’t have your lines memorized by a certain number of rehearsal hours after the beginning, you didn’t have a leg to stand on. I wish that it didn’t have to be *said* that what happens in rehearsal is what is supposed to happen in performance, barring a person in the audience dying or a falling fresnel or whatever.

Of course, I guess the question is, who would decide? What would the industry standard be? In my opinion, it’s perfectly reasonable for a director to spend 25% of the rehearsal period working out the physical space, 40% of the rehearsal period working out the emotional and interpersonal relationships, and the last 35% of the time fixing problems. The actor should be expected to use all of the time outside rehearsal developing the internal personal life of the character and articulating all of the personal physical motions and movements, so that 100% of the time in rehearsal is spent working on timing and relationships with other actors.

But that’s just my opinion. The very second that a director says “At this point, you should take your hands out of your pockets and cross them” I think to myself “the money that was just spent on rehearsal will never come back, the ten second it took for that director to say that will never come back, those ten seconds are now gone, and now something important will disappear…”

Of course, the second an actor says “why does my character cross stage right” I think to myself, “Oh my God, I hate you so fucking much.”

Actually, what I think is, “Since you obviously have never taken an acting class in your life, and since you’ve never worked toward solving mildly inorganic problems in a way that makes sense, let me just let you know that your entire life when you are not on stage you make movements toward no obvious goal, you have very small and simply motivations for everything you do, and discovering those little things is YOUR FUCKING JOB. Establishing stage pictures and balance is the DIRECTOR’S FUCKING JOB. If you want to learn about yourself and have magical feel-good moments then go back to school and get some fucking Svengali acting teacher that will learn you how to cry real tears and shit, but so help me God if you stall in the face of forward motion on the making of this play, I will take it as sabotage and I will want nothing more than to rip your fucking heart out.”

Which is why, maybe, I should create a blog where I’m anonymous. That hatred that you guys feel toward dictators and bad presidents and your boss at work? I reserve that ire for bad theater people. I’ve never been torn from slumber by President Bush, but I have from bad directors and actors.

I wanted to post some pictures from the recently closed run of Air Guitar. The show lives on where it always lived, inside our minds, regardless of this show closing. In fact, regardless of this production at all, but, in any case, here’s what you may have missed.

The gorgeous Jeff Hiller. I can’t tell you how many people cornered me and said “where did you *FIND* that guy?” as if it would normally be impossible to hire this level of talent for a showcase show. He was just fantastic.

Yes, now that the show has closed we can reveal “Princess Slaya” in all her glory. Also, Seth, the guitarist and Chris, the drummer, who make up 1/2 of GODS OF FIRE, who should, in a righteous world, also be too famous to work with me.

The closest thing to a cast photo we’ve got. Michael Poignand, on the left, Becca Ayers, on the right, are, again, phenomenal talents who are probably on the cusp of world domination. It makes me sad that the only picture I have of Clayton is this one, with his back to us in a yellow hat. Clayton Dean Smith is the kind of actor who gives you so much joy, you want to write a show just for him…

Jeff Hiller, airborn. He put this production on his back so many times, he pulled the performances out of both the frying pan and the fire almost every night. I take credit for hiring him, of course, but he should take credit for this production being as fun as it was.

We’re going on vacation today, flying in to Myrtle Beach, where the eye of a tropical storm is making landfall at almost the exact same moment we’re landing. I gotta tell you, it feels no different than the last two months…