I gotta say, that I’ve done some things in my life that make me sad. I’ve cheated on lovers and had to admit to them that I did. I’ve failed classes and shown up with homework not done. I’ve been at rehearsals for shows I didn’t like and wasn’t willing to work hard on. I’ve had to ask my parents for money. Man, I’ve done a lot of stuff that bums me out.

But for some reason, every time I break a glass it makes me terribly sad. It’s the sound of the glass coming down, it’s the destruction of something so lovely and so useful. And there’s the horrible wait as the glass is heading to its doom, it always takes a certain amount of time for it to drop… in fact, there’s a moment before it drops, when you know it’s going to… Jesus, that’s awful.

I mean, a lot of times there is a drop that’s about to happen and you catch it, and you congratulate yourself. Think of how many times you’ve been so relieved, and felt so smart and fast, when you’ve caught that glass right before it falls. And sometimes, the glass doesn’t fall, doesn’t break, it just tilts over and you dump water or milk or diet coke or whatever all over the table, and it never occurs to you how bad it could have been because you’re pissed about spilling shit all over everything.

And that’s the thing, no-one ever gets mad about a broken glass. There’s something universal about it. In fact, I gotta say, if someone comes over to your house and breaks a glass and you get mad at them, it says something about you. It says that you don’t understand that people genuinely are trying to do the best they can with their lives and that sometimes we don’t live up to it. If someone breaks a wine glass at your house and you get mad at them… I mean, what the fuck, they were drinking wine at your house, they got drunk, what were you *thinking* was gonna happen? You should look at glasses that house alcohol as essentially disposable, and if you get to re-use them, you’re ahead of the game.

I just broke a water glass. In fact, I broke it on my brand new poured concrete floor in our kitchen. And, seriously, my night was over when that happened. I was just so fucking bummed. Jordana and I were talking shit and watching a dumb movie and she asked me to get her a glass of water, and in the course of doing it, I fucked up and dropped a glass, completely full of water, right into the drying cement.

(Jordana and I realized something today. We like asking the other to do things for us, because we like doing things for each other so much. A lot of times, she’ll ask if I want her to make the bed, or I’ll ask if I can get her something from the kitchen. It’s stupid little stuff, and it’s actually just a game, like we’re flirting with each other. But it’s nice that we both understand what it is. It’s not the kind of thing we keep score on, and, in fact, we can totally refuse to do the nice thing without any hurt feelings because we’re asking for stupid shit anyway. But it seems to be a good part of being married for us.)

(The bad part is talking about money. She doesn’t like to be stupid about money, and I’m teetering on the edge of stupidity always. Plus, she’s wrong.)

I dropped the glass because I was pouring water into it while I was checking my voice mail. I thought I was being awesome. I wasn’t. I broke a glass.

God, it sucked. I’m going to bed.

About ten years ago, I was coming out of a rest-stop bathroom and I asked my brother Ian if he could tell me what someone had written on the bathroom hand-dryer, in lieu of the actual instructions. Even though he hadn’t been in there yet, he knew what it said. It used to be that instructions were needed on the hand-dryer in bathrooms, but now, apparently, there’s just a picture of someone pressing the button and two hands rubbing together.

(As an aside – these hand dryers (which don’t work) don’t really need instructions any more because people have basically gotten the hang of them. But for some reason, we still need directions on shampoo? I gotta assume that, unless you’ve been following Phish since you were in diapers, everyone, even in third world countries, can figure out how to wash their hair. I mean, seriously, if you live in the most desperate circumstances possible, don’t you think that learning how to wash your own hair would come months and years before learning the English required to follow the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle?)

Anyway, there were instructions on the hand dryer that said this.

1. Push button
2. Rub hands under warm air.
3. Turns off automatically.

And almost always, I mean in about 90% of cases, the dryer instructions were altered with a knife or a pen or whatever so that they read.

1. Push butt
2. Rub hands under armhair
3. Turns off automatically
4. Wipe Hands On Pants.

Someone went to every single bathroom in America and took the time to write in the fourth step. Because, frankly, you do have to wipe your hands on your pants. The same pants you wiped your hands on after you coughed last. After you sneezed last. The same pant legs that caught steaming molecules of your last meal. That’s where you wipe your damn hands when the air dryer doesn’t work.

But that’s not my point.

See there are things that people say that they think are funny. A dog will lick its balls, and someone will say “If I could do that, I’d never leave the house”. Someone will say “what do they call 100 (fill-in-the-hated-profession-here) at the bottom of a river? – A GOOD START!”

It’s boring as hell. GOD it’s boring. You people should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.

You know that guy on the train? The guy that woke up just long enough to locate his bottle of cheap liquor and drank from it before passing out again? That guy who just peed on his own clothes? That guy is serving a purpose. Those of you who repeat a joke that someone else told, you are the worst people in the world. The absolute lowest.

But wait, there’s more.

Because it isn’t just repeating a joke. It’s repeating the same fucking idea. Y’all who have lines to pick up girls? Especially lines you’ve tried before, and they’ve worked? Y’all should go fucking kill yourselves. The years are ticking away, jackass, the years are running down the drain and you are gonna path-of-least-resistance your way right down to the day you die. You’re gonna have kids with one of these dumb ass mental cripples that falls for your line and you guys will have fights that don’t make any sense and your kids are gonna grow up and try the same lines you tried and they’ll work and some other fucking idiot is gonna procreate and the world is just gonna spin down to dust while NOT A SINGLE ORIGINAL THOUGHT COMES OUT OF YOUR FUCKING HEAD.

But wait one second. That’s not my point. This is.

For you fucking idiots who have found a way to jam your heads up your asses about Bush’s total failure as our President this last week, purely because you feel like you need to constantly return to the idea that those on the left are ALWAYS wrong and those on the right are ALWAYS right, you’re done.

Months of us taking off our shoes at the airport, and all a terrorist had to do was blow a hole in a levee in New Orleans. They could drive an SUV full of fertilizer and fuel oil to the levee, and thousands would have died. But they didn’t. We had years of warning, everyone knew the levees would break, and no-one did anything. The Republicans didn’t, the Democrats didn’t, America is a teaming mess of classism and racism, and these things need to be dealt with on a Federal level.

You can support President Bush after this, of course. This was a monumental mistake, but, provided you believe the rest of what he does makes up for this catastrophe, I don’t mind you supporting the President. But if you tell me that the federal government isn’t to blame for this…

You’re just writing what you’ve read someone else write. You don’t know anything. You are too stupid for me to listen to, and, especially your idiotic blog comments… I mean, you’re no better than the wall in some truck stop bathroom, and twice as full of shit.

So, one interesting thing that happens when you produce a show is that you find out just how clearly you communicate ideas. When you are writing a musical, you have three writers (sometimes more, sometimes less) and so even from the first moment, you have a combination of ideas.

Coming clean, somewhat, and speaking for only me, I felt that we were writing a Dadaist musical, and anti-musical. It’s tough for me to try to follow up on it, because I thought the basic point of this musical is that musicals are completely absurd. In order for that to have been the clear message, we would have needed to be a lot more aggressive in how we produced the play.

In some ways, the problems are systemic, because we don’t ever have one person on stage who is deriding the ridiculousness of the circumstances. We’ve asked the audience to be the person calling bullshit on the show, and for a lot of people, they just dismissed it as “silly” instead of reading our minds and realizing that we consider the entire genre somewhat silly.

But the truth is, we didn’t make that show. Our show had a sweetness and a purpose that snuck it’s way in. It happens with every one of our shows, somehow we can’t help but add a second layer of something completely seperate. Sometimes it’s like adding vinegar to oil and putting it on the salad, but this time it was more like adding a second dressing to an already dressed salad.

How can we claim that the show was meaningless when it so clearly has a political point that we were trying to make? How can we claim that we were mocking musicals when we so clearly worked so hard on crafting the songs? We ran into a problem early on because I hate parodies that aren’t as good as the thing they are parodying. “Wet Hot American Summer” is amazing because the thing it’s choosing to make fun of, retarded 70s camp movies, is actually dumb to begin with. I didn’t like “Urinetown” as much as I might have because I actually really love the musicals they were mocking.

Anyway, one can’t complain when one’s writing is not taken in the tone that it’s given, it means there is a flaw in the writing, not in the audience.

So, let me clarify what I was saying in my post about Christianity.

I believe that the love the Christ child received is what made him the messiah. I believe in the parable. I have made my own Christianity, and I feel allowed to do that because everyone else does it too, and in my mind Jesus isn’t a real man, he is a story. His lessons are all told in parables, and I’ve chosen to believe that the story of his life is a giant parable.

A child is born in desperate circumstances, in abject poverty. His mother never had sex with his father, but his father doesn’t ask any questions, he loves her and he loves the boy without question. Out of nowhere, shepherds came and stood watch over the sleeping baby, giving him love. Three men, in their wisdom, brought gifts to a baby they didn’t know, out of love.

When this boy because a man, one by one people turned to him and said, “I will give you my devotion, my love” and because he received their love, he became more and more divine. He was able to turn the love he was given into a source of magic, he was given so much love that he could heal the sick and feed the hungry, always claiming that the power came from a source beyond him, the source that created him. He said “God is love”.

His father was love, that which made him divine was the basic human element of love.

He said things like “what good is it to love only those who love you? Anyone can do that. Love those that don’t deserve it.” And he said that because he knew that, as a baby, as a boy, he was given love for no reason. I don’t believe in a corporeal Christ, I don’t believe that these words mean what Christians think they mean. I’m just saying what the story means to me.

I have been remade because of the love I’ve received, love that I didn’t deserve. My brothers and my sister love me despite my years of not giving a shit about them. My parents love me despite the years I spent disregarding them. My wife loves me despite the fact that I have never treated women well, despite the fact that I never deserved it. I’ve been remade because of the love I’ve received, and that is the story of Christ to me. It’s why the story means so much to me.

So when Jesus says “the path to my father’s kingdom is through me” what he means is, in order to become a holy man, you have to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, to be forgiven for one’s trespasses, one has to forgive those who’ve tresspassed against one. I’ve decided that my love for the story, and my belief in its truth, makes me more a Christian than any other religion. It’s one man’s decision, and it isn’t that important.

There are a number of reasons that people choose one faith over another, I guess. Mostly, though, it’s hardly faith, it’s ethnicity. Your great great grandparents are Catholic, every one you’re related to is Catholic and Surprise! you’re Catholic. There was a time when your religion was your people, and now the whole idea of ethnicity is so muddied, we’re all such mongrels (not Mongrels, I suppose) that we call it a faith or some-such.

So, everyone gets to pick and choose. There are Catholics out there that are pro-choice, and that makes sense to them. There are people who are basically agnostic, but they’re *POSITIVE* that Scientology is crap. Everyone is inventing their own rules about this stuff, so I get to as well.

On our first date, Jordana asked me what my favorite childhood story was. Apparently, she’d been told that you can tell a lot about a person by their favorite nursery rhyme, and she thought it was an interesting thing to investigate. Although our first date was actually a passover seder, I told her the truth, which is that the most powerful nursery story I was told was the story of Jesus Christ.

We were raised on it, even though our parents had no religion. My dad was totally disdainful of religion, openly mocking my mother’s Mormon relatives. But our lives have been shaped by the Christ story, totally and completely.

Every Christmas, for years, I spent almost all of my time singing carols as part of a choir. From the age of 15 until I was about 23 I performed every single Christmas, and a large chunk of that was the standard fare. God Rest Ye, Here We Come A’Wassailing, that kind of stuff, and every year we had to sing “Little Drummer Boy”. And every year, at some point, if it was during the 13th or 30th or 300th concert, I would listen to the treble voices tell the story while I rum-pummed my way through, and I would cry.

I recorded some 1800 or 1900 songs over the course of ten years. Songs from every influence, songs that I loved, songs that I *wrote* even. And these songs moved me to some degree, sometimes quite a bit. But when we were recording the Christmas album, when we recorded the songs my mom wrote about the Christ child, I actually had a hard time with it. She asked me to sing the Stableman’s Carol, a song about the man who ran the stable, who tried to keep the animals quiet so the baby would sleep, and I couldn’t record for about ten minutes because I couldn’t stop crying. It had never happened before, it has never happened since.

I don’t know what it means to have someone die for your sins, and it makes even less sense pre-emptively. I don’t know why hate-filled controlling monsters call themselves Christians, I honestly don’t know what the hell they are reading. Jesus didn’t hate homos, he didn’t hate Jews and Arabs, he didn’t say a word about abortion, and he didn’t say anything about taking over America. I don’t know where the hell these people are getting it. If they’re getting it from the Old Testament, they should check out the part about “I came to complete the law…” Or maybe I should just butt the fuck out of it.

I’ll tell you why I’m a Christian. The story goes thus; a baby was born of two poor people, and a kindness was performed. The shepherds came and stood watch. The inn-keeper gave them room when there was none. The kings brought gifts. I don’t know that the child would have been the messiah if he had not been loved, but he was. His is the example, that kindness can bring peace.

This baby, it could have been any baby. It could be Skylar or Polly. It could be Lucy. The child is born the child of God and the more love it gets, the better chance it has to save the world. I’m a Christian because I believe in that hope, in the hope that love creates love, that love makes people better. If the shepherds had turned away, if the kings hadn’t followed the star, then who knows. Maybe he wouldn’t be Christ.

I’ve been saved by the love of the people around me. It doesn’t matter how late it starts, it doesn’t matter. If you are 50 years old and you haven’t yet been loved completely, then you are still the child waiting to be born. And even now, no matter when it happens, someone’s love can save you, and your love can save other people.

The last entry was about Puppetry of the Penis, and I promise you, there will be more like that. But I just want to say, the allegory for me, the reason I am a Christian, is because I believe in the promise of humanity, I believe, firmly, that the love I’ve been shown has made me able to love others more and better, and the gifts that the shepherds and the stablemen and the kings gave to Jesus made him able, later, to cure the sick and heal the blind and gave him the courage to say “love your neighbor and pray for those who persecute you”, and that as soon as you love someone else, it comes back to you ten fold. That is the promise of heaven, that’s what he means when he talks about the kingdom of his father, about the kingdom that doesn’t exist on earth.

When I hear the Little Drummer Boy, it makes me cry, because that boy made Jesus into Jesus Christ. And if it makes me cry, then I’m a Christian.

Jordana: Do more!

Sean: I can’t remember any of the other ones.

Jordana: You suck at Puppetry of the Penis. None of your things looks like you say it will.

Sean: Wait, I think this is supposed to be a beating heart…

Jordana (laughing): It looks like gonzo

Sean: Dude.

Jordana: Seriously, you’re terrible at this.

Sean: Gimme just a sec… I think this one’s called “Diving Board”…

(pause)

Jordana: Like I said, none of them look like you say they will.

Sean: Yeah, I don’t think this is happening…

I don’t know at what point people will find this blog. God knows there is no way for me to hide what I’ve written about in here, and there is also no explanation that will suffice. If there is anything I’ve learned over the last month it is that communication, actual communication with the written, spoken or sung word is basically useless. We are masters of deception, us humans, and we constantly talk out of both sides of our mouths.

One of the things that I take some pride in is knowing that my friends and family know that I am incapable of lying. I am definitely capable of saying things that aren’t true, but I won’t say much that I *know* isn’t true. Half the shit that comes out of my mouth is patently false, but I generally believe every word of what I’m saying, I’m just, y’know, ignorant.

My friend Mac is the greatest liar I know. He has a wonderful ability to somehow totally mishear what you’ve just said, or to miraculously miss something that he doesn’t want to hear, and yet, later, he will be able to recount *every single syllable* of what you’ve said back to you. He has invented this fantastic other-worldly persona that has you totally conned unless you’ve spent as much time with him as I have. He’s faking it. And he does it so well that I can blow his cover right here, right now, and you’ll still think he isn’t paying attention next time he tells you he missed what you just said.

Jordana is the worst liar I’ve ever known. Her contempt and her delight are both so transparent you’d swear her face was drawn by John Kricfalusi. As a matter of fact, if she is even slightly uncomfortable, you’ll swear she wants you dead, and if she’s even a little bit thrilled, she looks like she has fallen in love.

Between the two of them is me. I can hide what I feel, but only for a very short time. And it’s because I have no inner monologue. I have a blog, and on that blog, I just keep writing and writing until people I work with beg me to stop. I am a really good actor, but that’s because I can purposefully forget large quantities of information and replace it with fantasy, and I can do it fairly quickly. Maybe it came with moving so much, maybe it’s because as a musician my art has always been algebraic in nature and replacing loved ones and memories feels to me like switching keys or, more likely, I’m just a juvenile, obnoxious show off with mild retardation.

In any case, I probably should have handed out a sheet of paper with each program to our show, just to make sure nobody missed the salient points. Despite the fact that *all* of our press material promised a love affair with the statue of Liberty and the Captain of the Coast Guard as the fated duo, we still got reviews that claimed such a union was impossible, and, even worse, seemed to take a real leap in logic.

That’s right. We had people complaining about a leap in logic during a musical.

So, let me explain just a moment. The show isn’t about Coast Guard Spastics defeating terrorists. It is about assuming your identity, the one you actually have, not the one you have fashioned for yourself. We wanted to say something about lying, about living inside a lie and about the ways that we can live beyond them.

It’s a musical, and we live in an absurd world, so we chose to feature the relationship between the two as a counterpoint to the sailors. You know this because they sing about what they were like when they were young, and the mistakes they made, and they describe *exactly* the young sailors in the play.

Now, maybe we should have had the two of them watch the sailors and comment on the sailors directly. We didn’t, it didn’t even occur to us that it was necessary. Maybe we should have named the song “Back When We Were Like The Other Characters In The Play”. I think it would be a touch blatant, but it seems absurd to miss it.

No-one knows us from anyone in the world, so maybe it’s all right that people watch the play and assume there are mistakes instead of wondering *why* things are said the way they are. There isn’t a single person who is aware of the Statue of Liberty who doesn’t understand that she is very large, very old, and doesn’t actually date, so I don’t understand how someone could watch the show and think we didn’t know that.

We have a girl dressed as a man so she can fight in the Coast Guard. Why, that doesn’t make any sense. No, no, you’re right, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Every single person who is familiar with the Coast Guard knows that women can serve in the Coast Guard, so I don’t understand why someone would think we were the only ones who didn’t know this.

Let me explain. There is a woman dressed as a man to serve in the Coast Guard because there was a time when women were not allowed to be soldiers in the military, and in our minds this archaic idea is just as ludicrous as the denial of same-sex marriages now. We are going to look back on this time as only slightly ahead of post WW II America, the very American ideal that we are lampooning in our show.

We wanted to draw a direct corollation between the “good ol’ times”, which happened to be the height of the Hayes code and also the height of the American movie musical, the time in America that existed before Civil Rights, and we wanted to compare that with our current mindset. Now, it’s “terrorists” instead of “commies”. It’s “Arabs” instead of “Blacks”. It is the subjugation of gays in place of the subjugation of women. When we made the terrorists from Martinique, we felt sure people would think it was sardonic.

Now, virtually everything we tried to do with the play was designed for laughs and songs. There is a girl tied up for half an hour in the second act because we just thought that was horrible and funny. “Seaman Ravioli” is one of the most disgusting jokes anyone has ever come up with. (I found an earlier draft where one of the sailors was named “Seaman Sandwich”. I don’t know how that got lost…) And there are some huge mistakes in the play, mistakes that can be addressed with fresh eyes and a willingness to add eight minutes or so to the running time.

But if you think we are faking something, if you think we’re glossing something over because we want to get away with something, just think about it for a minute. We’re terrible liars, we really are. We said what we wanted to say here, it’s in the words and music if not in the production, and there’s a reason for any of it. If you want to know why something in the play is there, well… ask me. I’ll tell.

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last few weeks bitching about people’s shortcomings. Don’t worry, if there has been a shortcoming and I’ve bitched about it, there’s a really good chance I bitched right at you about it, I have absolutely no ability to censor myself.

(Before I get into this, Mac and Jordana have taken to thinking of me as “the nuclear option”. I have no idea what the nuclear option is in politics (aside from the obvious meaning) but in our situation it’s a bit like they’re the pruning sheers and I’m the back-hoe)

But in an effort to try to stable my mental condition and also to repay the enormous kharmic debt I’m in for all the bitching I’ve been doing, I’d like to just say a word or two about my sister Michelle.

Michelle is a blue collar artist, and she always has been. She has always been a girl of callouses, the great irony being that she is so terribly sensitive at the same time. Whatever it is that she is working on, she absolutely never backs away from the understanding that great achievements only happen when dilligence, intelligence and inspiration are gathered in vast quantities.

Where there is no intelligence, she will provide it. She is simply one of the smartist artists I have ever worked with, especially in music, and even more especially as a singer. Where there might not be inspiration, she will provide it. If you think a thing is unachievable, go ask Michelle, she has eleven ways you haven’t even thought of. And where there is no dilligence, Michelle will create it. Even if you think there is dilligence, her example should shame you almost immediately. When you think you have something finished, you’ve got your smarts, your works and your muses all in a row, bring it to her. I bet you anything she’ll say, “let’s spend another hour on this, I think you’ve just started…”

Michelle and I wrote plays and songs together as little kids, of course. I’m fairly certain that every kid in the world put together plays featuring their dolls and such and then produced them for the family. The difference is that Michelle had such an incredible discipline to our combined imaginations. We played a game called “Candyland” (completely different from the board game) where we were creatures made out of candy. Initially, I was a lion made of, y’know, candy, but Michelle insisted that I find every possible joint and bone and define them all. To this day, I think back and I know that I had candy cane front legs joined with taffy at the elbows, I had a mane made of cotton candy, a trunk made of muscular twizzlers. I remember it to this day.

Our playpeople had vast towns made of cardboard, each family defined, each business creating transactions. This wasn’t me, it was the two of us together that made these things happen. I was creating drama with the characters and coming up with funny stuff while Michelle was making sure that orders placed at the pretend pharmacy were taking an actual hour to come through.

Years later, I would find myself going back to her inspired sense of detail. I remember, I was doing a Christmas show, and the director wanted my character to move downstage center. There was no other actor on stage, but I had established the entire fourth wall in my mind, I knew there was a window downstage, and I moved to be there, to look out the window, the way Michelle would have insisted in 1979 in London.

Two performances later, the director had added a gobo of a venetian blind window.

Last year I was in a show where I sat in the front seat of a car talking to someone in the back seat, and I knew every inch of the inside of that car, despite the fact that we never rehearsed it. My friends said it was the best thing I’d ever been in, almost like I get better the more a director leaves me alone and lets me pretend I’m following Michelle’s orders.

When we got older, we started doing actual plays together, and we started playing in a band. The plays were crap and Michelle shone, certainly, but she never had the patience for a high school era bullshit choreography boring ass nonsense. I was into it, man, I was shaking my money maker, Michelle almost endured it. But in the band, Jesus. She was the bass player, and she created these rhapsodies, these bizarre enigmatic bass lines that were pure profound counterpoint.

We would play gigs and Michelle would bounce in the corner, shock of blonde hair falling in her face, ignoring the audience. She’s essentially a private person, and even then she didn’t want her intimacies on display. To this day, she is a more diligent woman than any of her playboys, and a funnier and funner woman than any of her leftist disciples. She was always a mystery, an enigmatic figure – on stage but face invisible, beautiful blonde perm but one side of her head shaved, complete rebel and magna cum laude.

It’s hard, having a sister like her. I have found people who compare, but they are few and far between. Right now, she’s pushing and yanking and pulling an artistic community around on to their feet in Napa Valley, and it seems like she’s doing it with a plastic spade and bucket, moving sand around to stave off the incoming tide. There is a story of me, at 5, being told to get something out of the basement, and I disappeared upstairs. I came back down, braving the basement with Michelle, age 3, holding my hand, saying, “See? There’s nothing to be scared of…” She has set the benchmark, as much or more than my parents did. She is the inspiration for me to not give up hope that whatever I am working on has the chance to be better, to be brilliant.

I hate the ways in which she has been wasted. I hate that she can be given a job and it’s like focusing a laser, she simply isn’t going to stray from that job. Her talents are enormous, but her dilligence is even larger, and her passion is simply unimaginable. I don’t know how she sleeps, I really don’t. Except that I’ve seen it, she shuts down quickly and without warning, like a prison at lights out, but I almost imagine her asleep, mouth muttering instructions, hand moving with a pen or a bow or a fretboard in it.

I know if she was where I am, she would work twice as hard as I do. And she’d put up with 1/10th the bullshit. It seems amazing to say, but I can’t wait until I have earned enough cred to bring her back to New York so she can work with me. I can’t wait until I’m important enough to work for my little sister.

Every single artistic expression has two opposite and equally horrible ends. First, you are met with a blank piece of paper. There’s a blinking icon at the top of an empty file, there are five lines without so much as a clef, there is a giant piece of marble or a stack of bronze or a row of closed paints lying in wait, and though you’ve done this before, though you know those five lines or that blank page will soon be full, there is the horror of that blank page feeling.

(I should say, it isn’t the first blank page, because the first blank page is usually inspired. It’s the blank page for the song you know you have to write, but you don’t know what it is yet. It’s the blank page for the scene that takes the characters from one scene you’ve already written to the other scene you’ve already written, and you don’t know how they get there…)

The other horrible moment is when you’re done with the writing, there are hundreds of pages full of thousands of notes, and you put together the novel or the sonnet or whatever and you realize, you’ve said too much. This is its own kind of hell. Maybe some people are good at it. Maybe the guy who got done with the Venus de Milo said, “Y’know, this is good and all, and I spent more time on her hands than on the whole rest of the statue combined, but these have to go” and he took a mallet and whacked off her arms. But for most people it is hell.

I find myself looking at the play we wrote, and realizing the first act is 50 minutes at break-neck speed, and the second act is 54 minutes. The first act is fine, it’ll play like that and even if it’s a minute longer with applause and laughs and stuff, we can hammer through the whole thing.

The second act needs a cut, probably more than one. Something needs to go, and the time we need to shave off can’t be done with just dialogue or jokes or doing stuff faster. A song needs to be cut.

So, I’m staring back at those empty pages, those empty five line staves that have been coaxed into existence. We always tease Mac by saying “My words! My lovely WORDS!”, and so, in the same way, I have to laugh at myself taking this all so seriously. I’ve already had almost as many songs dropped from the show as were included initially, but now we are down to the kind of cuts that hurt.

I have a song in the second act that is sorta special. The lyrics are really amazing, just amazing, and the song is the most musically challenging song in the show. But this has turned out not to be the right show for this song.

We started in the spirit of contempt, it’s true, but over the months of crafting this show, we’ve fallen in love with the stories and the characters and, even though it’s a big ass broad comedy, we’ve still managed to add a lot of heart and a little bit of the subversive hostility that is our life-blood. (Jordana, although she would never admit it, has as much a sense of wanting to rip the world apart as Mac and me, she’s just terrified of what’ll happen if she gives in to it). All of the characters have wonderful stories, or at least have great jokes.

But we’ve run out of time, and we have to make a decision about who’s story is gonna be told, this time around, and who’s story will have to be told next time.

I heard an interview with Billy Joel from, like, 1981 and he was asked how he felt when he heard his songs on the radio. He said something like “it’s like each one of those songs is a kid. If it comes on after a great song and it just sorta falls flat, I cover my face and don’t admit to anyone that’s mine out there. If it comes on after a stupid song, and it’s one I’m really proud of, then I’m like a parent in the stands at a game…”

I feel the same way. This one song, right from the beginning everyone kept saying, “this kid is special”, but in that, y’know, “special olympics” kinda way. We’ve tried to keep him in school and the teacher has done everything with this kid that she can, but I think it’s time to get him out of this school and put him in a school where he can meet his potential.

The honeymoon I actually went on some 12 years ago now was actually a really uncomfortable thing. I was broke, the woman I was with was “not very good with money” and I actually find most vacations boring. I hate going places where there’s nothing to do. I mean, Jesus Christ, anyone who had my life would say I’m on vacation all the time. I almost never do anything I don’t want to do every single second of my life, so no wonder I find vacations boring as shit.

That being said, every cast I’ve ever been in has had a honeymoon. And then, after the honeymoon, the honeymoon is over. I would say, with this particular production, the honeymoon has ended. Every time I speak to Mac, we talk about nothing but the show, and the moments when we aren’t talking about the show, we talk as fast as we can to get the jokes and the news out of the way so we can get back to talking about the show.

Jordana and I talk about nothing but the show. Every once in a while we’ll talk about other stuff, but the show is basically it. And yes, in rehearsal, we’re ahead of schedule. It is alarming and lovely that the cast is basically off-book for the entire show right now, they know all the choreography and the blocking and they know all the music and their lines. And we don’t open until two weeks from tomorrow.

Holy CrapNuts. Two weeks from tomorrow…

But, we’re running on steam, the three of us, and we’re running out of steam. Lindsay came up with a relatively dumb idea the other night, but instead of just saying “that’s a relatively dumb idea” which is how we’ve all managed to speak to each other, I just flipped out like a drunk ninja and started in on my fucking routine, which fortunately I’m able to smother most of the time otherwise I would be one boring shithead.

Our days start with phone calls, with fires that need to either be put out or started, and our days end a few hours after rehearsal. So, when I’m in rehearsal and the actors are screwing around, I want to boil my own testicles. It’s infuriating.

That being said, they are actually ahead of schedule, the only sense of panic comes from the fact that the producers are behind schedule and we don’t really have any help. We have plenty of *advice*, we have lots of big ideas thrown at us, but each big idea requires twenty phone calls, and each one takes minutes, and at the end of the day, we’re all out of minutes, and we hang up the phones and keep going.

I’m sort of melancholy about all of this because my whole family is together in Utah. Not just my family, but every cousin who draws their breath because of my grandma, they are all getting together this weekend, and I’m the only one not there. Of course, if this was a play or a movie, and the main character had the following problem “Larry could spend three days in New York surrounded by artists, homsexuals and Jews, or he could spend three days in Utah with his Christian cousins and their babies”, then I would think it was pretty ham-handed, right down to the red-state/blue state obviousness of locale… but that was the decision that was facing me and I simply couldn’t find any way to do both.

Next time, we’ll have just a little bit more money. Next time the three of us will be able to say, “Call that woman from the New Yorker that Jordana spoke with, she seemed really sweet.” This time, the interns and the production staff, the gophers and the grips, the ASMs and the PR reps – they’re all just us.

I’m not bitching, I swear to God. I’m just saying, it’s like spending a day sailing and realizing, as you’re making your way back to shore, this would all be so much easier if there was an engine in the boat.

It seems that some people have found this blog.

So.

Now, I don’t realy know what to say.

I mean…

Okay, here’s the thing.

Wait, that’s not what I wanted to say.

What I want to say is…

Okay, I know what I want to say.

There is a Kafka quote that I could, y’know, actually *quote* if I had eleven extra minutes and my pocket Kafka on hand, but it’s a letter to his friend or father or something, where he talks about his writing. He says that his writing mocks him, that it stands as a testimony to his inadequacy, mocking him. He likens it to an ink stain on the paper, leering up at him, refusing to be blotted or wiped up.

He writes it much better than I do. He’s maybe my favorite writer, although I didn’t realize that until I wrote that just now.

I’m not a good writer, despite what many of you think. Yes, you all think I’m a great writer, and you’re wrong. What I’m good at is writing in my own voice. I’m good at making these words sound exactly like what I’m thinking, misspellings and all.

But, what I’m thinking is very often unsavory. I have opinions that most people would disagree with. (I hate the political left, contantly embarrassed and humiliated by the intellectual rigidity and the emotional outbursts tied to aspects of the world that are actually deliberate and free of humor, but I absolutely *loathe* the political right because of its deliberate laziness and anti-intellectualism, combined with a selective bleeding heart and a blind unthinking committment to its leaders.

When I listen to the left using slogans that rhyme, or puns, or even anti-Right bashing posing as stand-up comedy, I just sort of lower my head and keep walking. “When Clinton Lied, Who Died?” is one of those things that simple minded fuckwads embrace as a political stance, and they just make it harder for the rest of us.

When I listen to the right explain why gay people shouldn’t marry, why civil liberties should be curtailed to prevent terrorism, why the death penalty helps society but abortion hurts it, I don’t lower my head. I stand agape and wonder why intelligent people don’t follow through to logical conclusions.)

But the problem is, I write this blog almost as an excretion. There have been times, like the zombie blog a few days ago, where I was honestly thinking about zombies late on night. We’ve been talking about producing a few horror plays in October, and I’ve been thinking about the nature of horror, and I had zombies on the mind. When I sat down to write my zombie treatise, I realized that it could be a very subtle dig at the Bush administration. Or a support of the Bush administration. You could read it either way.

But, more often than not, I write a blog about a) whatever play I’m doing b) how hard my life is or c) how great my life is. Very often, C comes out as a love ode to my wife or my friends or the weather or New York. B comes out as a rant about my work, or the weather or New York.

I’m not saying I’m gonna stop writing. I have a feeling that the people who find my blog and who love me will take the medicine with the sweet, and anyone who dislikes me isn’t gonna like me any less. But I do feel stymied by the idea that if I talk about headaches, I very well may get a call from Long Island reminding me to drink more water.

Speaking of which, I do have a headache. And I am gonna go drink more water.