I show up, you place a freshly poured beer on the table before me. It goes into my mouth. You buy another one, you put it on the table before me, it goes into my mouth. Beer after beer, into my mouth, down my throat, into my stomach, through my blood, and finally I am passed out in your kitchen drooling onto my phone.
Know that if you put that drink before me, it will always, always go into my mouth. Not just because it is my birthday. Not just because I enjoy a strong lager. Not just because I love being drunk, I love the way it slows me down, I love being given permission to say awful things or belch in your girlfriend's face.
It will go into my mouth because, at 32 years old, I haven't yet figured out how to leave it on the table.
Ce n'est pas un gèmissement. C'est simplement un rapport de fait. Je suis légérement accablé avec écrire en ce moment. Je travaille intensément sur deux manuscrits dramatiques, un dans l'atelier et un dans la révision (tous les deux dont, étrangement, ont les sections énormes écrites entiérement dans une langue étrangère). Il est impossible à travailler intensément sur deux projets sans sentir mon début tête pour éclater. Je suis étourdi, je ne peux pas penser correctement, mes maux de cerveau, et je ne peux pas avoir des conversations normales avec des personnes.
Et mon Français est terrible.
Mais heureusement je verrai Patricia en trois semaines.
Joie.
Courtesy of my friend Johnny Z...
Want some juicy LA theatre gossip? First go here, and spend some time... Then read this.
It's fanTAStic.
I got this email a few weeks ago: "I was thrilled to be your student. You are truly a witty and enthusiastic professor. Bravo. Also I peered at your hip and peculiar fashion style, even though it ran counter to my own tastes; it made me see you as a kind of anti-conformist 'smarty'."
I have nothing to say about this. I just loved getting it.
(And YES, I had already sent in grades.)
I was at this benefit party for an international theatre group last night in Tribeca... yummy middle eastern food, a junk raffle, a hoola-hooping stripper, live music acts from around the world and LOTS of alcohol... and at some point everyone in the room began greek dancing. The space was too small for it and everyone was too drunk for it and the people who weren't dancing were getting smacked in the head and some of the dancers were falling over or spilling wine on their outfits but everyone was laughing... and I was thinking about revelry in the name of theatre, and how I don't think I've been to a theatre party in a while where I didn't feel like we were all gathering to mourn a dead uncle none of us knew very well.
Please buy a pair of these (watch the video) and wear them to your shitty office job. And don't smile the entire day. That'll show 'em.
I have a pre-connubial hangover. The Crack came over last night, newly engaged, armed with two fat bridal mags and a bottle of beaujolais. We then commenced with a frenzied pageant of self-indulgent bridal whimsy, the likes of which can only be seen at a Vera Wang Sample Sale.
It's now 6am, I haven't gone to bed, I'm loopy, and I'm making decisions. I have decided that my fiancé and I will be forgoing traditional wedding vows in favor of dramatic readings from the roast beef section of Stein's Tender Buttons.
I think Jamil would have liked that.
They are just blueberries. He is just a cute kid. But something sinister is afoot. He is TOO cute. I mean he was regular-cute before the blueberries, or maybe a little above-average. But when Soph's mom starts to feed him, it's like the room erupts in chaos... all scramble to watch and/or document the phenomenon.
Okay, HALF scramble. I don't (I'm eating ice cream in the background-- you can see me at the end, if you squint). But after I watched the video I understood. It's pathological, it's unhallowed. THE CHILD HAS POWERS.
Believe me, I did everything I could to avoid being swayed by it... I even tried setting the clip to a German WWI trench song (I wish that was a joke). But he cuted right over the thing. So I surrendered and lay down an appropriately maudlin Smashing Pumpkins track.
Oh, you'll see. When Billy Corgan sings the line "taste me", watch the woman push back her chair to bear witness.
Now you can tell all your friends you have been bested by supreme cute-osity. But hey, there are worse things in life (see previous post).
Man, I am so bloggy these days! Maybe because Soph is at the MacDowell being all arty and shit, while I'm sittin' in Brooklyn enjoying the solitude (trans: "no love")...
So what does a lonely gal do on a Wednesday night with two glasses of Tempernillo in her belly (from testing out her fancy new rabbit pump)? Naturally, she calls NPR.
The "On Point" guest tonight was Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes. He was pimping his new book, which advocates the trend of folks leaving the cities to buy property in rural areas. I noticed that he was not addressing the multitudes who CAN'T leave the city due to the nature of their work, and so I called in to represent (I come in about 38 minutes into the show, if you wanna skip ahead.)
I was so fucking nervous that I took notes while I was waiting to go on-- stage fright in full effect. My notes are stupendously moronic, and I asked my question with such velocity I wouldn't be surprised if their toupees went asunder. And by the way, I was not satisfied by his answer. Who the fuck can telecommute to a rehearsal?
Click it and watch it grow:
That's right. It's snowing in New Haven. Ask me how I know.
Because I'm HERE. After working last night until 4am on my application to teach a playwriting seminar at Yale, I wake up this morning expecting to trot on over to FedEx and do a same day delivery on that mofo (the 1/11 deadline being the ever lethal "receive by" date). Imagine my dismay when, after a little cyber-sleuthing, I discover that not only can you not GO to FedEx (they come to you), but same day delivery to CT will run me over a hundred sardines.
So I hop on a Metro North feeling like a schmuck, travel two hours to Union Station, jump in a cab, rush the damn envelope up to the second floor of the college seminar office, and exclaim breathlessly to the coordinator, "I CAME ALL THE WAY FROM NEW YORK!" And she looks at me as though I'm trying to fit into the pants I wore when I was two. And then she says, lugubriously, "you should have called."
You see, if I had phoned ahead with my crisis, I could have overnighted my app. For like twenty bucks. Half of what I spent on the train and the cab and the comfort-latte and the really-bad-idea low-carb cheese bagel from Dunkin Donuts.
And now I'm on a train back to Grand Central. It might have been worth the ride had I been able to sit by a window and watch the snow... sleepy me, lazily lacing in and out of consciousness… but the only seat on the train with an outlet is in the windowless corner next to the bathroom. So right now, I am eating poopey-air and slowing the train down by using up all the electricity to power my laptop.
So if you hear a news report of a stalled train on the New Haven line, you'll know who to blame. And I'll be like, "Sayonara, suckers, I'm flyin' home on the wings of my G4…"
Why are the Suicide Girls so outrageously smokin'? Good lord, those ladies make me feel like a 14-year-old boy (not that it's much of a stretch). And I just can't get enough of the promo video for their tour. It literally makes me woozy. Even that Jay Z/Beatles mash-up is like, WAHNGGGK. I mean with the oh-yeah's and the braggadocio and the grunts at the end, like he's in an alley with some gal's hair around his fingers... mama.
I *almost* bought Soph and me tickets for the show last spring -- had it on my calendar and everything. But I didn't. Maybe I was nervous about unleashing all that unbridled lust into the universe. Coulda got ugly.
And FYI, they're not just a bunch of punk-rock babes who like to show their privates... they have a social conscience too. They just did a benefit in Anaheim for the Tsunami victims. Sadly, this depletes some of the guilt from my guilty pleasure.
In other news... NOOOOOOOO!
So Soph and I are writing this play for a highschool in Virginia, and it's based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, and one section of the play is supposed to be written in musical theatre pastiche... and so we recorded ourselves coming up with ideas, not realizing how daffy we would sound to ourselves in playback.
My favorite part is when Soph turns into Louie Armstrong. Enjoy.
...I'm sure she is a FINE agent and that she is working very hard for her other clients, but I was passed on to her from another agent who left the business and so we never had that mutually joyous moment of discovery with each other, so perhaps we were doomed from the start. My relationship with her existed primarily of me asking her for photocopies and her taking percentages from commissions that I had worked for (to be fair, she read my contracts and added clauses to them, and spent time writing new contracts for me). She DID come to my shows and was verbally supportive of my work, but she hadn't read most of my plays and I don't believe she was sending out my work on her own. She also told me that I write the kind of plays that she likes to see but that don't make any money. However, she has really good taste in writers and if she's courting you, you're in wonderful company.
And if you must know, I made two major boo-boos with her by 1) writing a laundry list via email of things that I wanted her to help me with and ending it with "I thought having an agent would lessen my workload but it's made it heavier and I'm trying to figure out why", and 2) by missing a meeting with a TV/Film agent at her agency because I was on pain killers from running the marathon the day before and I slept right through it. So I take full responsibility for not being nicer to her and respecting her efforts more.
So. For all those who keep recommending this agent to me or keep asking me what I think of her, I am the wrong person to talk to. Ask Bridget Carpenter, or Jordan Harrison, or Eisa Davis, or Rinne Groff, or the other folks she represents whose asses she didn't fucking dump. They probably love her, and theatres do as well (from what I've heard).
Thanks.
Someone invent a word for that dillemma one encounters when one brings one's laptop to a café to work and at some point during the course of the session one finds one needs to pee desperately, but one does not want to seem mistrustful of those around her by taking her laptop into the stall with her (also making for awkward prop-management while wiping or washing hands), but of course one realizes how ridiculous it is to leave a $2500 piece of equipment on a table in a crowded café (equipment that contains her career, her personality, her essence).
Acknowledging that this need for relief is on a *slightly* lesser scale than the near-biblical uproar in Asia of late (insert weak sarcastic grimace to mask deep despair), one channel for donating aid recommended to me is Madre. It's a human rights organization dedicated to women and families worldwide. Of course the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, Unicef, and etc. are also taking online donations, if you prefer household names.
Not to be overly simplistic or fatalistic or whatnot, but with this and the re-election and the business in Iraq, doesn't it seem kinda like... forget it. (Anyone wanna join a Left Behind reading group with me?)
