I come from a group of people called “Underachievers”. Bart Simpson never made me feel good about myself, the joke of his self-declared pride in the title is because a *lot* of us were labelled thus in school, an enormous number of us. It’s a catch-all that explains away the vagueries of dealing with the problem that not a single human can be defined in any particlular way.

When I was a kid, it was underachiever, when I got a little older, everyone was dyslexic, and then when I got into college, ADD was all the rage. Parts of some of this are applicable to some of us, but old schoolers like “Underachiever” because it assigns blame on the individual, and “disorder”s imply that the fucking snotty little shit isn’t responsible for failing. And MAN these creeky old sadists hate nothing more than a feel-good argument for why all people deserve a fair shot.

My favorite of the underachiever excuses? “Fear of success.” I love the idea that some bleeding hearts have watched me score in the 99th percentile and still fail out of school, and the assumption was that, somehow, I was scared of doing well. My laziness was seen as fear, that somehow I wanted to keep my head low and expectations lower in order to avoid even taking a chance on succeeding.

I don’t know, there are crusty chunks of my heart and soul that are covered in the viscous dark tar drippings of my hostility and misanthropy that are so hidden even from me that I can’t know everything about my own fears. That being said, I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being a fading flower, I tend to be pretty goddam obnoxious, and if I was afraid of success, I don’t know why I would not only try to get leads in every show I hear about, but brag about every single little thing that could be seen as a victory.

But I can say this, through the course of my life, when failure has occurred, and it has, believe me, I’ve done what I could to investigate every possible external source. People misunderstand me, people would cast me if I was thin, I would have more work if people were more honest, I haven’t gotten the same shakes that other more obvious people have… all of that. I’ve looked for reasons beyond me.

This has changed. I know how many of these excuses are invention, and the answer is *ALL* of it is. I just can’t stand living a life of mediocrity any more. I *really* don’t care what the external forces of my past failures are, there are people who succeed, and these people aren’t thinner or smarter or whatever than I am, they just haven’t let shit get them down, and they haven’t lived with a built in excuse for why their shit isn’t selling.

Our little company has several properties now that we think can sell, and we’ve got good people on the periphery. The people in the professional world that I am close to are all people that I admire so deeply and so simply that I have no concerns about whether they can help me, or even if they will when the walls come crumbling down. I’ve also got ways that I can make a living and build further successes that just take a little hard work and committment on my part. If I could just flake out 40% less than I have in the past, I wouldn’t have the chance to wonder why the world wasn’t giving me the life i felt I deserved, I would be earning it.

I’m saying, just for a minute, that there are things that happen to you and people say, “are you ready for this?” You have a wedding, you have a huge opening of a show, whatever, and someone is sitting next to you backstage when the curtain comes down and someone says “Are you ready for this?”

The answer is yes. I’m absolutely ready. For everything that’s coming my way, if it’s bad then I’m not gonna look for the external reasons, and if it’s good, then I’m gonna celebrate my-damn-self. If I was ever afraid of success, which I doubt, I’m not anymore.

I can’t listen to music when I work, because my work is music. So, listening to music is constrained to travel time, and that means I can only listen to that which is portable, and my iPod is dead and Jordana’s is one of those 4 gig-ers or whatever, so it’s been a while since I’ve been able to investigate new music coming to me. I should, and not just because I should, but because I’ve hit a wall in a way with the music I’m writing and listening to other people’s good music is one of the best ways to rejuvenate you ability to write.

But I’ve been thinking about the recording process and the audience’s process when it comes to music and theater, and I’m just gonna jot down a few thoughts.

There are art song cycles where wonderful composers have taken the works of poets and created an evening of music out of it. These are poems, set to music, usually sung by a guy in tails, or a gal in a shiny dress, standing next to a piano. If you happen to have the ability to sit and listen to this kind of music, you are in the minority, and good for you. I say this because I happen to have the ability but, much like my inability to understand anything remotely supernatural, I don’t attribute any kind of moral value to having the skill, it’s just something I was cowed into as a very young thing and I can’t help but focus on the music once I’m in the chair and uncomfortable.

Poets, I’m sure, don’t actually write their poetry in the hopes that the words will be set to music. I could ask my friend Jonathan, he’s a poet, but he’s got a real job and a real girlfriend and the next time I see him, I’m sure I’ll forget. Poets also don’t expect for their poems to tell whole stories, or even tell linear stories. I have a feeling that they are designed to be emotionally evocative and intellectually stimulating, and in the process of doing that, they may have to tell partial stories, but these aren’t stories in the sense that they have a beginning, middle, end, reversals, all that… It has characters and those characters have moments, but it isn’t a story.

Non vocal music is much the same way. Orchestral music, Jazz, what-have-you, the stuff that is purely instrumental is designed to be emotionally evocative and intellectually stimulating, but it doesn’t require a story. It’s not like if you listen to all of the Brandenburgs you will suddenly get the picture of a young couple eloping and then losing their children in the great war… That doesn’t happen in Music music. You might see marching brooms, but that wasn’t there before Disney put it there.

But, we hit a snag when we hit the guy in a tux standing by a piano. He’s, y’know, *singing* to us, surely he’s telling a story, right? And that story could be told with a guy, and then a girl in a shiny dress could also come out. And then the guy and the girl could tell a story about how they are doing stuff with each other… except it would be hard to come up with the right art songs because the poet isn’t exactly all that excited about regurgitating the one thousand bits of minutiae that make up a regular relationship when he’s writing… so the thing to do is to find a poet who will work with the musician, and the two of them write the thing together and tailor it toward the story.

All of this is obvious as hell, and I’m sure nobody is still reading.

The problem is, you lose a little every step. The poet has to sell out a little to the story, the music has to step back a little to the story, and the story is constrained by the one hundred years of rules and regulations that we’ve put on the art form known as musical theater. And the full scale debasement of the art form, the hideous jazz hands and clown smiles that have taken place of the great story telling have strip mined the musical to the point where our very best concepts are mockery.

So, here I sit, empty bar staves staring at me, wondering how I can pull off an honest story when there is nothing but tin ears waiting to hear it. I’m not saying I don’t have the same ears, I do. I walk into every theater with the same dread as a man released from Chinese prison would have entering a public shower, the drip-drips still echo in my mind of every horrible rehearsal, every nauseating turn of phrase, every chunk of public humiliation that, for some reason, was seen as the best one can do in this art form.

And I believe there is a way to communicate with this art form that is impossible to do with any other. But I also know that it doesn’t actually matter, that it won’t matter how hard we try, that success in our minds and success in the world’s eyes will never be the same and so we are still, even after I retire from acting, still playing darts in the dark. Only it’s different darts and only once you’ve hit *something* can you check with the world and see if the bull’s-eye is what you think it is.

Over on Isaac Butler’s blog , which I’m fairly sure he doesn’t know I frequent, he poses the question “If you had the resources to start a theater company at a somewhat-established level (like God came down and gave you an audience and a space and a budget or whatever)… What would you do with that theater? What gaps in our theater would you try to plug? “

So, I’m gonna try to answer this somewhat quickly and from the seat of my pants because, well, it isn’t actually gonna happen and we’re all gonna grow old and destitute desperately clinging to the last vestiges of our dignity while we stand on stage, gray haired and paunchy, shoving frozen hot dogs up our asses and screaming “I LOVE A PARADE” praying to get a single laugh or understanding nod from an otherwise cruel and indifferent audience. So, a quick seat of the pants answer.

It’s hard to argue that there are gaps in the theater of New York right now, simply because of the volume of productions. There are hundreds and hundreds of plays going up in New York in every single year, and it has been this way for years and years. A quick glance at two independent ticket outlets, smarttix, and theatermania show that over 800 shows have tickets available right now in New York City. Even if only 1/4 of these shows turn over every month, that’s 3000 shows a year. If you’ve been here for, say 3 years, which would make you still a fresh faces newcomer, you’ve had nearly 10,000 performances you could have seen. That’s 20,000 hours of theater in 26,000 hours of living.

Now, those are some fucked up numbers. Especially if you try to do them yourselves and you realize the enormous liberties I’ve taken (the average length of theater isn’t two hours, and 3 years is much more than 26,000, but I’m doing the numbers in my head, so give me a break.)

Man, when you consider that the theater going audience is buying tickets to the big shows, keeping them sold out for months and months in houses that seat over 500 people, and the smaller shows are actually giant budget behemoths that get good publicity and review coverage and are playing to houses with more than 300 seats, it’s a miracle that any off-off shows get seen *at all*.

So… what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. I don’t know that there are a lot of holes in the scene. Pretty much anything you want to see is either going up right now or is gonna be tried in the next six months. And I don’t think that my particular peccadilloes are being under-represented, there have been many pieces of theater that I’ve really enjoyed in the last two years. I’m not one of those people who show up to a show ready to hate it.

But there is a particular concept that is over-represented in the city, even though you have to stand WAY back in order to see it. For some reason, far beyond any grasp of logic, there is a majority of people in New York (and yes, I think it is a majority) who see the theater as a stepping stone to something larger. Theater is being produced for the express purpose of finding other work, either in another aspect of the arts (like film or television) or in another theater show.

Some months ago, Jordana and I saw a series of short plays by a woman we sorta know, and I was excited going in because there were good people to support and a pseudo-Carolina connection. Then I saw the titles of the plays, like “The Trouble With Larry” and “Another Christmas Fucking”, and I turned to Jordana and said “Um, so, these are gonna be four sitcom pitches, right?” And sure enough, the stage filled with Patricia Richardson Wannabes pumping out one-liners that would make Neil Simon alternate between groaning and blushing.

You can’t look at the listings without seeing ads for well known, well greased warhorses with choice roles being played by the young producers, even when totally age inappropriate. And it takes a while to dawn on us (and I say ‘us’ because I very well might have done the same thing in my twenties if I hadn’t been living in Los Angeles learning how to drink and drive) that once you’ve strung a line of shows together that do nothing but ostensibly improve your resume and get casting director interest, you’ve lost a big chunk of years of your career that you could have been honing your personal voice. You could have been linking arms with unknown playwrights, you could have been forging bonds with like-minded strangers. You could have been giving to the theatrical community instead of praying for deliverance.

So, if I had all the resources and a built in audience and space for everything I wanted to do? I would start with two or three playwrights I know right now, and give them commissions to live, and make them write. And then, I would start interviewing and reading and workshopping. I wouldn’t want to push any specific aesthetic, except to say to TV and Film writers “stay away from the theater”. Just because it’s less expensive to get a show produced than a pilot doesn’t mean you deserve any one of the 20,000 hours of theater currently going up.

The perfect theater company for me would be a subsidized workshop that had closed door readings and would only present a play once it was done being workshopped, and the play would be the thing. We could have salons afterwards about ways in which the play worked for the audience and ways it didn’t, and those criticisms could go into the next piece, but we wouldn’t have massive re-writing sessions to try and tailor a piece for better consumption.

I don’t know why so many people are here trying to do this. There’s no money. There’s a huge chance for fuckups. Why is Disney here? Why is Warner Brothers doing Lestat? I don’t get it. If a Disney movie made a million dollars in a week, it would be a face flop of monumental proportions, but they’re opening Tarzan here? These guys are businessmen, I’m sure they have a reason, and I’m sure a big part of it is selling Tarzan dolls and mugs, so who am I to question…

If I had the resources, I would build a company that concentrated on individual voices. Not necessarily disenfranchised, not necessarily difficult, but varied and specific. I would want to build an identity based on content, with no consideration whatsoever as to whether or not a piece is commercial. And I would want to do that because, ultimately, it is theater that is created in these circumstances that ends up being wildly commercial.

It has been so long that Blogger didn’t recognize me when I showed up and I had to dig up a login and password. Which doesn’t quite put me in the historical bad bloggers of all time, but it does mean that people who check infrequently might not check again for another week.

I should start by apologizing for not writing. I saw some friends two weeks ago who confessed that they read my blog, which simply didn’t occur to me. Two of the funniest guys I know said they like my blog, and to the both of you, Nate and Anthony, I would like to say, in short, I never liked either of you. You can both swing on my sack. Deb’s my only friend.

I’ve mentioned a Kafka quote on here before, one which I can’t seem to find verbatim and my wife hid all my Kafka books because she’s tired of me “getting all pouty”, but in it Kafka talks about how his writing stares back at him, mocking him “like a drop of ink on the side of the page that refuses to be cleaned” or something like that. There is an imperfection in the written word as it works for someone like me, and for most of my generation. *Delivery* is so crucial in an ironic age, and our sensibilities are increasingly ironic, to the point where they almost feed on themselves.

“Snakes On A Plane” will fall on deaf ears, and how do you explain it? Celebrity culture is embraced in the *opposite* way it was in years past. I don’t know when the switch was, I don’t know how to explain it, but I know that, as a kid, I went to see Steve Taylor, a terrible croonie Christian rockstar, and my friends and I have pictures of us kissing his tour bus. I’d never heard a single note of his music.

Older people wonder what our fascination is with stars that are totally devoid of talent, how we can make stars out of hopeless plastic fools, and the only explanation is that we are laughing *at* them. Not a single person wants to sit down and eat a meal with Britney Spears, and we take it as a given that her music is fun and danceable because of the team of straggly haired guys in their late forties who grew up listening to KC and The Sunshine Band and Stevie Wonder and they take a month’s worth of vocals, put her in a latex suit in the video and let us point and laugh.

We’ve struck a deal. “Snakes On A Plane”… we trust that there is a group of guys who came up with “Die Hard” and they know we’re gonna laugh at the stupid CGI, and we’re gonna laugh at the stupid dialogue, but that they will also give us what we’re paying for. And Sam Jackson knows it too. He wouldn’t let them change the name, he knows we want to watch him kick some snake’s ass on a plane. Every single movie in this genre is “product”, recycled ideas, recycled heroes, recycled crap, and Sam Jackson said “No, this is crap, this is the same crap, but instead of terrorists, it’s snakes, and instead of a high rise, it’s a plane. I’m gonna be Arnold, and the bad robots are gonna be snakes. Fucking call it ‘Snakes on a Plane’, ’cause that’s what it is.”

So. Anyway. It’s hard for a guy like me to keep a blog because I write in my voice, which is totally dependent on delivery. Even if you know me well, if you haven’t spent time with me in a while, you’re gonna start reading this in your voice. Which you should, you’re reading it. I should be a better writer, I should be able to write in the way that makes sense. But these blogs stare back at me, mocking me, like an ink stain that won’t be cleaned up.

The original idea behind this blog still remains. It gives me a chance to create characters that are reacting to things happening in the world, which hopefully will help inform the characters I create and the music I write. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the less I write in this blog, the less happy I am with the music I’m writing. I’ve felt really cruddy about some of the music I wrote for Air Guitar, and last night the three of us finally broke down and admitted that the opening song of the show sucks (for an opening song). (What do I know, it might suck as a song…)

So, I’m gonna try to be more diligent about writing. I would ask that if you find me being a total asshole on here, please understand that the show we’re writing now is full of assholes of different stripes. Oh, and also, I can kind of be an asshole a lot of the time.

This past week has been a shifting blizzard of emotions, from great highs to staggering lows to, yesterday, walking around in a complete daze and running in to walls. Some of this stuff will have to be somewhat coded, and the things that aren’t coded are things I’m willing to have guesses made about. The stuff I don’t want even guessed, I’m probably not gonna address.

The theatrical disappointments and exhilarations keep coming at a hell of a clip, but let me start with a sort of metaphysical piss-fest.

I’ve seen a lot of theater, both by established writers and companies and by unknown people, and I’ve also performed in a fair swath of theater in the past twenty years. It used to be that I was loud with my opinion but privately unsure of my footing, but as I get older I find myself becoming quieter and more confident, which probably extends to almost everyone. I’ve gotten more secure in the sense that I know what I like, but I also know when things are good, even when I don’t necessarily like them.

I found myself watching American Idol the other night, about which I am going to speak as little as possible, the show so totally nauseates me. All of the contestants were asked to perform country numbers and all of them warbled their way through admirably. But the one judge made it clear that he hates country music, and after every single performer, he said he hated the song. Y’know, because he hates “country” music.

Ignoring the fact that labels like “country” and “pop” have nothing whatsoever to do with a song’s inherent attributes, but are instead descriptions of it’s production and style, to say you hate country music is to say two things 1) I believe I’m cultured and 2) I’m a fucking idiot when it comes to music. I was involved with a theater company (for about an hour) wherein the director said “I don’t like plays that have guns in them.” Which is equally as stupid.

If you don’t like “Stand By Your Man” or “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goalposts Of Life” or whatever, then I understand, but when you throw out all of country music, you’re ignoring the fact that many pop albums on the market today have several different mixes depending on the market they are selling the single to. Jewel has as many version of her songs as possible, so that they would play on any and all channels. If you’ve heard “Underneath It All” without the reggae rap in the middle, you’re probably white and heard it in your car. “Country” doesn’t mean anything. At least with “Hip-Hop” you’re talking about a label that is embraced not as much a musical style as a culture,

Whatever, I’m totally off topic and I have work to do, so let me get to the point. I’ve learned to watch theater with an eye toward what the writers and producers were trying to achieve instead of merely wondering if it tickles me personally, and I’ve gotten pretty good at seeing the problems and pitfalls. But I do have place to tickle, and every once in a while, more often than I would admit, I either see something or am involved with something that I know is bound for greatness.

Without getting into specifics too much, when you feel that strongly about a piece and then it is overlooked or disregarded, it makes you really angry, but it also makes you feel, in a word, lonely. At least it does me. I go through my life feeling somewhat disenfranchised, lost in a sea of personalities and powerful positions, where people know without any ambivalence what is right and wrong, artistically, politically, sexually… and I feel marginalized somewhat, as I’m sure does almost anyone with average IQ or better.

But when something speaks to you and your hearstrings sing when you read it, or when you perform in it, and then for the world to pass it over without any real consideration, it makes you feel like you are crazy. An old friend of mine had a piece being considered for production and, after reading the play, I thought it was not just one of the finest bits of writing I had seen her do, but I felt like it couldn’t be produced at a better time with the political climate being what it is. The play asks questions, offers possible answers, and is funny as hell as well as being dark as… well, actually as dark as hell, literally. I’ve been stunned by failures of mine before, but this is one of the few times I took someone else’s setback completely personally.

On the flip side, Jordana, Mac and I were invited to be one of the writing teams for the 24 Hr plays, and that deserves a blog all its own. It was such a phenomenal success for us, in terms of having an idea and then some hours later seeing it completely realized. I have to write an email to the producer, so I’ll just post that. But it really was incredible, one of the funnest two days I’ve ever had in the theater.

It isn’t like a fetish or anything. Mostly, I think it’s just the best way to tell what sort of person you are dealing with. During the casting of Fleet Week, once everyone had been offered jobs and had accepted them, the director and I were talking about which of the actors playing gay roles might actually be gay, and one of them we thought for sure wasn’t because of his shoes. We were right.

I’ve always loved shoes, and I’ve always sort of hated women’s shoes. They don’t make any sense to me, the heel, the straps, they just look awful. To tell the truth, I don’t really like women’s clothes very much. Historically, I’ve always thought that women who took men’s clothes and made them their own were so much more beautiful. My wife, of course, wears men’s clothes better than anyone I know, but my sisters, Michelle and Tessa, have made it incredibly elegant. Tessa and I shared a surprise party for our birthdays some five years ago, and Tessa happened to be wearing an oversized sweater with a hole in one shoulder, and, honestly, she made it look like nicer than a ball gown.

Anyway, back to shoes. My closet has as many shoes as it does shirts. The shoes I’m wearing right now…

… are Hush Puppies, and I bought them as much for the fact that they look like little kid shoes as for the name. My favorite shoes ever ar these Timberlands, which used to be Carolina Blue when I bought them, but two home renovations and countless snowstorms have left them thus…

You’ve got to have shoes for whatever function is required of you, sure, but they should also match whatever costume you’re wearing. Yesterday, it was warming up enough to wear my leather jacket, and as I was grabbing a hat, I decided to change my shoes. Because, you can’t wear a black leather jacket unless you’re sorta trying to look like a Queens goombah, and so I grabbed my Coast Guard baseball cap and changed into brown leather zip-ups.

I really think you should have some stuff on hand, just for having fun with. I know that you’re supposed to throw out anything you don’t wear in 18 months, or something, but instead I’ve just given away every pair of shoes that no longer fits, or if I haven’t worn them in three or four years. Shoes are supposed to be with you a lot longer than, say, socks.

Don’t get me started on socks.

Plus, how could you throw away any of these?

And even these shoes, which I’ve only left the house in *once*, are still really fun to wear around the house.

…and if you don’t have some good house shoes, what’s the point in even having feet? If I couldn’t have fun shoes, just for wearing indoors, I might seriously consider having my legs removed mid-shin. Jordana could carry me around, and when she got tired of doing that, she could call my friend Mac over to carry me around. Withouth the lower half of my lower leg, I probably wouldn’t weigh that much. And without shoes? Come on, shoes weigh, like, twenty pounds.

Which is why we like the strong wooden shoe rack…

… to hold our most hilarious shoes. I know those white ones look pretty reasonable, but man, you have to be *very* careful about your sock collection. Some shoes aren’t as awesome as you might think until you consider the sock options.

But as I said, I’m not gonna talk about socks.

Except to say that these two new pairs of shoes I got…

… have their own sock considerations. First, the red shoes, which work great with white socks, but imagine them with BLUE! Or GREEN! And the other pair, which are *AWESOME*, only just fit my feet in regular socks, but then I remembered that I would probably be wearing them with nice thin socks, so I bought them anyway. A grand total of about $40 for two pairs of shoes, because DSW gots what I needs.

And no, I don’t have a problem. I like shoes.

I have a lot of friends in New York who write and produce plays. By which I mean, of course, tangential friends, guys and gals who are about three steps removed from me, but who I still consider to be within my framework of friends. I can’t call Joe Brooks from “In My Life”, but I could call up the artistic director of UCB and, if I made that call, we’d get drunk together. Except I don’t, and he doesn’t, because neither of us has the time.

Before people started producing stuff, people did a lot of talking. I’ve gotten back in touch with an old friend from my first college (of four) and the one thing I remember most clearly about him was his willingness to call us on our shit-talking. “I could fuckin’ play that role ten times better than he could,” someone would say, and Carlos would say, “then go audition and get it away from him. You sit here talking, that guy is practicing his audition pieces…”

It’s a definite leap from small town politics (which essentially College is) to big time New York Loser Off Off, but there’s still a fair amount of talking. We all like to talk about our plays, we like to talk about one another’s plays, mostly we like to talk about how much we hate certain plays and how much we like others. It’s a big shit-talking circle, where we sorta jerk off on the work of our dear friends and we crap on the work of people who have earned what we feel is undeserved praise.

But, since all of this is happening at $5,000 shots and people aren’t, y’know, starving to death or killing their careers, we can afford to be obnoxious. And it’s fun, I wish there was a lot more of it. I wish I could see more shows and then hang out with the people who made them and talk shit. I wish I saw more plays I hated with more people so we could rag on them afterwards. Fifteen bucks and a coupla hours is reasonable for a vitriol filled diatribe on my blog.

The problem is, every once in a while, someone tries for more. And suddenly, the schadenfreude becomes no fun.

In the city, there is Off Off Broadway, and there are some legal reasons for that title, it isn’t just a jokey-joke thing, What it means is that the house has less than 100 seats, you spend less than 15 grand, you usually work either outside the union or just on the periphery of the union, the runs are short, the houses are small, the ideas and artistry are usually wildly eratic, with crappy costumes and sets but great scripts and acting (or sometimes vice versa) and a handful of reviews if you are really lucky.

Then, there is Off-Broadway, and this is what most of the theater in New York is. There are only a handful of Broadway houses, and most of the Off-Off houses are converted store fronts or office buildings. The Off-Broadway houses are the 300 seat houses, the Lucille Lortel, the Roundabout theater company, the theaters downtown where you would have seen the original Rent or the latest Caryl Churchill.

These shows are a quarter million-half million, sometimes a million dollar shows. These are the shows with majestic incredible sets, perfect period costumes, and actors that you know you’ve seen before and who you never knew were this good. Henry Czerny and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Altar Boyz and The Blue Man Group, these are all Off-Broadway. These are famous people and famous shows.

Broadway, The Great White Way, isn’t something we can even deal with anymore. It’s Clear Channel and Viacom and Disney, multinational corporations that have billions and billions of dollars that make as much money keeping their branding alive and selling coffee cups as they do ticket sales, which are usually more than a hundred dollars each.

So, Off-Broadway is the real brass ring for New York theaters. And the great leap between off-off and OFF is a leap almost too large to imagine. If I raise 50 thousand dollars and I am really careful, I can produce plays off-off Broadway for the next ten years. I would eventually run out of money, but I could do three plays a year for ten years, small cast, small house, and lose a little bit of money every time.

If I had 50 thousand dollars, it would be seed money to raise five times that amount for an Off-Broadway run. Of one show. And the money will be lost unless it makes enough noise and critical praise to move or tour.

So, essentially, the off-off route is a machine gun. Just keep producing, keep your finger on the trigger, if the show you’re doing now is good, then learn what you can, the next one will be better, but just keep firing into the city and see if, by some miracle, you slay the dragon. The OFF-Broadway route is the sniper, get all the money you will ever hope to raise through the history of your entire life, pick a script, aim between the eyes and shoot.

When you have a failure at the off-off level, we can all laugh. What a terrible play! Six months ago, you guys did that great thing, but MAN I hated this! When you fail at the Off-Broadway level, that kind of devestation is impossible to imagine.

But you get props in my book for trying, for committing to a thing that you truly thought would work. I’ve never had that much nerve, I’m always assuming that this little thing I’m working on here is the thing that will make the next thing easier, for you to believe that there is one script that will set the world on fire… that’s a real inspiration. That takes a dedication and the intestinal fortitude… I mean it takes balls, and, as of yet, I don’t have balls that big.

There is no joy in someone you know shooting the moon and missing. It’s just awful. Yes, a rising tide raises all ships, so having a friend with an Off-Broadway hit would be great, but it isn’t just that. We’re telling smaller, weirder stories in the off-off world, we’re giving the world a twitchy quirky view. And then, when we get the chance, when we know the world is actually listening, sometimes we blanche, sometimes we’re bold, but always we feel relegated. We feel like there is an us and a them, and as soon as one of us is heard, them are gonna stop us from getting anywhere.

In the last 12 months, two shows that I know people in (in a producerial capacity) have made their bold move to Off-Broadway, and both have been savaged by the critics. In both cases, I feel nothing but sorrow for them. When my friends put on the most boring version of 12th Night ever seen, then I can rant and laugh about it, but when people lose a half million dollars trying to tell a story, it’s nothing but awful.

I suppose, in a way, I’m hoping people will stop checking the blog so I can just write stuff for me to read later in my life. Which defeats the purpose of a blog, I guess, since I could just as easily keep a journal.

I remember a night almost twenty years ago now. It was the summer of ’87, and we were at a girl named Jessica’s house, and we were drinking vodka and playing music. It was nearing the end of the summer, and my two best friends were going away to college, away being to Rutgers and, I think, Parsons School of Design, but since I was moving to Los Angeles, we all knew we were on borrowed time.

These two guys, Chris and Chris, it turns out, had been through a lot of shit with me. I had slept with both of their girlfriends, they had both hooked up with my sister, we, all three of us, had driven a stolen Mercedes at 115 MPH just to see what it would feel like, and we had stood on the rocks at the edge of the Atlantic ocean at four something in the morning and, during a lull in the conversation, happened to all three be looking up when the nipple of the sun popped up over the water. I taught Chris C. the trick of barfing so you can drink more beer, Chris C. taught me that when people are annoyed by your shit-talking, don’t stop, just keep going until you get over the hump and Chris B. taught me to listen to the drum line.

I’m sure this all seems pretty pedestrian romanticizing, I can’t imagine that anyone looks back on being 17 without a wisp of regret or yearning. Let me say for the record that, as much as I might have loved to be 17 in 87, the miracle of listening to my wife sleep almost silently with her nose in my neck is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and if I have to have bum knees and bad eye-sight for the rest of my life, I’d still rather be me, here, now, then me, there, then.

But we were at Jessica’s and, as usual, the days and nights were spinning by me in a blur. That night we had sacked Jessica’s house as if we were hippy vikings, all of us dirty and drunk and singing songs too loud. I have no idea where anyone’s parents were, in the 80s in New Jersey, nobody seemed to have parents. We had been playing “The Way I Walk” by the Cramps, Michelle was there, with some guy five years older than her trying to get her drunker, and Jessica and I were in the middle of our every-half-hour, on-again-off-again year long affair, and this half hour, she was interested in losing her virginity.

We were in her room, I remember between the two of us I was wearing the only pair of jeans, and Chris B. walked in. He apologized, said he was leaving, said he loved me and that he’s see me when I came back out to visit. He was leaving for New York the next morning. I got up to hug him, and he left the room before I could. It occurs to me that my getting up may have left Jessica in an indelicate circumstance, and, of course, I didn’t realize it at the time. I only just realized it right now, 18 and a half years later.

I sat with Chris in his car. We talked for two hours outside the house, smoking rolled cigarettes. He kept saying that we were all about to change, and it wasn’t just California and Rutgers, that we were all about to lose something. I remember clearly, he said he felt like we were at a moment, adrift for the only time American youth was going to be adrift. He could be hilarious, but also MASSIVELY introspective, and this was one of those times. He fancied himself an old wise man, even though he was barely 18, so he was always going on long-winded pronouncements, but I was ALWAYS a willing audience. I loved him deeply, even when I disagreed with him completely.

He said that we were the court jesters of American history, that we were here for the one time when the whole thing will be funny. I remember him emphasizing that, that the late 80s was gonna be the most hilarious and ridiculous time to be disaffected youth, or to be youth that, like us, cared a lot about a lot of things. He sat in the car mocking our politics, mocking our concept of free love, mocking us for going to a peace rally in DC only three months earlier, which we had. I don’t remember what peace we were fighting for in ’87, but we went to DC to do it.

At a certain point, I become horribly aware that he was sorta crying, and this was not the kind of thing that we did. I mean, we were hippies, we were dirty and drunk, but we were still teenage guys, for chrissake. He wasn’t sobbing, I just saw that, in the middle of tearing through his diatribe, his eyes were leaking. I guess I should say ripping through his diatribe. Damn homomorphs.

The funny thing about the whole evening is… Well, the funniest thing about the whole evening is that in the middle of something he was saying, he started coughing like a cat, reached back into his molars and brought out a pubic hair. But the strangest thing about the evening is that, if I could go back, I would certainly want to go back and apologize to Jessica. This wasn’t the first time I’d treated her like shit, I basically treated every single girl I knew like shit.

I’ve changed since then, but I have changed through a series of brutal attacks that I’ve either engineered or endured. That sweet girl was really a wonderful person, a good friend to me who always seemed to adore me. She had a scar running down the middle of her chest from when she was a baby, she had heart surgery and nearly died, and she had bad circulation still when she was a teenager. Man, I wish I could say something to her that would make her not currently affected by my bad behavior.

I don’t know. I’ve been dwelling a lot on the kind of damage we do to one another. I start telling a story like this, and I can see everyone reading it rolling their eyes, thinking “yeah, Sean, you were a fucking ROCKSTAR… asshole.” But it isn’t like that. I look back on most of my behavior from 1984 through 1998 and I’m not really proud of anything. All I remember is the asshole part, and the part where I THOUGHT I was a rockstar.

I was horrible, and it took me listening to the people who liked me for the buried kernels of goodness to get half way between asshole and awesome. And I know it’s probably generous to say half-way, but I think this half-way is as good as I can do right now.

God, this blog is a drag. I’m sure Ian’s is worse, having to write in it every single day, late at night, trying to do that dance you have to where you say something funny, fun and cutting enough to make it interesting to other people, but not honest enough to hurt anyone’s feelings. Once a week would be a drag, every day it’s really amazing that anyone can keep a blog interesting, unless they’re going to the polar ice caps or shooting a movie or something.

Well, we’re making plays, so I guess that’s kind of interesting. One thing about this show that’s somewhat different than the last few, is that I’m writing rock and pop music. I’ve said before that it’s a bit like writing haiku, that pop and rock require a musical simplicity that makes it really hard for you to fall back on anything too tricky. I have the feeling that the music director of my last show had some disdain for the music I wrote, having been an Ivy League type, but the stuff I’m writing now defies mockery in a way because rock music is as much about attitude as it is about musicality.

The fact of the matter is that no matter how carefully you say you listen to music, no matter how big a fan you say you are, chances are you are listening to music while also doing something else. It could be you’re driving, could be you’re walking to the subway, maybe you’re even facing the stage and drinking a beer, but, I mean, you are facing the stage and drinking a beer. You aren’t sitting silently in a chair that’s an inch too small in every direction, the way you are in the theater.

That’s why rock music requires much more repitition and much more of a groove. You are supposed to be dancing, drinking, whatever… *doing* something to this music. Hilariously, you are supposed to be air guitaring, that’s what rock music is. It’s designed to make guys pretend to play guitar and girls to lift their shirts.

So, take those rules and apply them to the theater, and you get a weird hybrid. When you look at the great rock operas, early Andrew Lloyd Weber is the first guy that jumps to mind, since Evita and Superstar both have a fair amount of rock in them. But both shows, you are in a position of listening to rock music sung by characters who are trying to develop the plot and reveal themselves, and in both cases you are left with holes.

Judas sings “just don’t say I’m damned for all time” and that’s a fine sentiment, except that, since you have to follow the groove of the song, Judas sings “Just don’t/Say I’m” and then he’s left for a moment to figure out a gesture or a facial tick before he sings “Damned for/All time”.

So then you get something like Rent, which is perhaps the best rock (Pop, actually) opera of them all. Yes, almost every song sung by Roger is bad, but Larson manages to balance the repeated rock refrains really well. Mimi sings “take me out tonight” several times… but of course she does, she’s begging, convincing, harrassing Roger. Tom Collins sings his song about Santa Fe, but the repeat contains tiny changes in the lyrics. When the ladies sing “Take Me For What I Am”, it’s repeated, the way rock songs should be, but, again, they’re fighting, convincing, harrassing, of course they’re gonna repeat themselves.

Switch to non-theatrical rock music, something like Jane’s Addiction or Tom Petty, and you’ll see that it’s impossible for a character to follow the repeats. “And I walk right/ Through the door./ I walk right through the door”, sure you could theatricalize it… “And I’m Free/Free Fallin’.”… It’s just that you don’t have a reason for people to repeat themselves that often. You could give these lines to characters, or you could even change the lyrics to something more active and keep the tunes… but it wouldn’t be very good. It really wouldn’t.

Because rock and pop songs are meant to be sung along to, danced to, drunk to… honestly, you’re supposed to be fuckin’ when you play Led Zeppelin Four…

(Although that joke is ruined in Fast Times since he’s told to play Zeppelin Four, and then you have a jump cut to them in the car where he’s clearly playing “Houses Of The Holy”, which, for Cameron Crowe, must have felt like getting kicked in the gut)

When Foreigner’s Dirty White Boy is playing, you are supposed to be undoing the front snap of a girl’s bra in the leaned back passenger seat of your Iroq Z. So, making a show with nothing but rock music is, actually, a mistake. But making a show about Air Guitar without rock music is also a mistake.

So, I’m straddling a little. Air Guitar music is mostly from the 80s, and there is really good guitar music from the 80s that isn’t hair band music. Robert Smith of The Cure is actually a phenomenal guitarist, The Edge is amazing, Johnny Marr is incredible, etc… And the fact is, you could turn The Smiths music into a musical without changing a note. Now, I can start out writing an homage to one or the other of these bands (included in the list is, of course, Duran Duran (who wrote incredible, bizarre songs with really sophisticated swirling chord progressions, they just wrote lyrics that were barely English) and The Violent Femmes (who’s music was really simple, but as lyrically driven as Sondheim)) (I think I got lost on the parenthesis tip, bare with me) but it’s impossible for me to copy them. I’m just not competent enough.

What I end up with is music inspired by the music of my childhood. I have always loathed doo-wop, I absolutely hate girl groups from the 60s, and I’m sure that children now will retch if they have to hear “Come On Eileen” or “Tainted Love” or “Shake It Up” or “Wanted, Dead or Alive” one more time, and little Lyra and Lucy and Jackson (and now HENRY LAMBERT!!! ONE WEEK OLD TODAY!!!) will be bored to tears by Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Two Princes by the Spin Doctors (who are we kidding, we already hate Pearl Jam and The Spin Doctors), but “William It Was Really Nothing” and “The Chauffeur” and “Life In A Northern Town” (shut up, I like that song)(okay, that song sucks, but I still like it)(OKAY, you’re right, I don’t actually like it, I just remember discovering oral sex while it was on the radio…) will always have a spot in my heart.

I hope what will be recognized, in the end, is that the music in this show is a love song to our junior high days, the same way that Fleet Week was a love song to old school musicals. I mean, who am I kidding, people felt the need to point out the height difference between The Statue Of Liberty and The Captain in Fleet Week, no-one is gonna recognize anything… but I hope that people will be able to tell what I’m trying to do.

And of course, what I’m doing instead of actually writing the music, is writing in this goddam blog.

I mean, you either like babies or you don’t. And the fact is, you end up liking babies a lot more when you’re thinking about having babies yourself, I’m pretty sure. But man, our friends have some great babies. Dan and Alia’s little ‘un is just spectacular.

Anyway. I’ll write more tomorrow. Our dishwasher broke and, for the first time, we saw a cockroach in the bathroom . The upstairs bathroom. On my toothbrush.

So, I’ve got some music to write and some phone calls to make, after that I’ll write a real blog.