more '010 reflections

Another reason to love '010: I discovered Tolstoy! After all those years of being lazy or whatever the reason du jour was for not tackling him I finally did . . . and then read his two mammoth books back to back. You want suspense? You want great story telling with compelling characters? You want spiritual information? Insight? He's the man. I can't believe I waited so long, but having done so, I can honestly say I'll never be the same. Amazing work!

Also saw Hot Tuna not once but twice! That wasn't planned but just the way it worked out. The first time was in Purchase which is about 15 minutes from home and had Steve Earle as an opener . . . hello! Add GE Smith as second lead guitar and you have heaven. An incredible show. Not long after that they announced Jorma's 70th birthday shows in the Beacon . . . how can you pass that up? Steve Earle was a guest that night too, and Bob Weir . . . another incredible show . . .

Add to the mix The Wall at the Garden and Stew and Heidi at BAM (and finally getting my daughter to a CSN show!) great year for music. Didn't see much theater, I guess I was too busy making theater myself . . . and being unemployed of course . . . but did see Our Town which was . . . if you're going to see few shows, one of the ones to see.

So more on '010 as it comes to me. Got a nice email from Wallace at the Fringe, apparently this year was the first year in a long time that he has ended in the black for the festival . . . nice to be part of that.

'011 has big shoes to fill . . . I'm game . . . let's get it on!

a little looking back

As '010 blizzards to an end, a time for reflection? Maybe. Absolutely when the year is as unprecedented as this one. I've been pinching myself and having flashes of memory of the past year, it was a good one . . . and for someone who spent eight months of the year on unemployment to be able to say that . . . well that's something. I guess that's what happens when your identity isn't wrapped up in a job. Jobs for me have always been a means to an end . . . a way of paying the bills while the real important work can get done. Now, I realize that it may sound precious to think of my artistic pursuits as 'important', but they are to me. In fact, when all is said and done and I'm breathing my last, guess what I'll look back on as accomplishments, here's a hint, it won't be selling anything to anybody . . . it'll be whatever I leave behind that I've created. And I don't look on it as failure if I don't ever make a ton of money at it . . . the only failure is not to do it . . . not to try. The only failure is to sit around living passively wishing you could do something. Well guess what? You can!

I sure did. I took the leap into the unknown, pulling up stakes and leaving family and friends behind . . . and it was hard . . . but it was the right thing to do. And I've never regretted doing it. Yes it's hard with aging parents 500 miles away, but we all live our own lives and make our own choices . . .

At any rate, '010 was a great year in very many ways and I'm looking for '011 to be wonderful as well. More from Old Hickory perhaps, another solo performance maybe. My new two hander . . . and the new job, which I think will prove to be lucrative. It's nice to be closer to sixty than fifty and still have the fire and excitement about what's happening next. I hope I never lose that, and the best I could wish for anyone who reads this is that you never lose it either . . . and if you have . . . then find something to rekindle it.

Blizzarded . . .

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas. I sure did. Hanging with my wife and daughter, with nowhere in particular to go . . . very nice. Of course, then Sunday we got smacked with the blizzard. Hard to tell how much we got; but I'd say close to two feet isn't much of an exaggeration; and then there were the drifts! Luckily my workplace is civilized enough to not open for business today. I can work from home as needed, so I've been doing that a bit; but mostly reading Tolstoy.

I did manage to get some scribbling done on my new two-hander yesterday. I went back to the beginning and just started reading with a critical eye to cut what isn't necessary or to add where something needs it. Early drafts can be rife with talk for the sake of talk, or general stuff that needs a bit more specificity; that's what rewriting is about to my eye anyway: to bring clarity. That's what I'll be looking for as I hack away at the piece, trying to get that block of granite to look like something coherent.

Oh, I did get a nice run in before the blizzard yesterday, did my seven mile-ish Nyack to Piermont run. Felt great.

Christmas night we went to see True Grit. Great yarn. Excellent characters well acted by the three leads in particular, Barry Pepper was a very convincing Lucky Ned Pepper, and Josh Brolin had just the right dim bulb vibe for Tom Chaney. It's really Rooster Cogburn's show though, and Jeff Bridges was excellent. More debauched than John Wayne, and a lot more going on under the surface. Finally a good LaBeof! Glen Campbell was embarrassing in the original, but Matt Damon was right on. The new girl was wonderful as Matty as well. I still thing The King's Speech is the one to beat this year, but True Grit is very worth seeing.

A little free form . . .

Felt like writing something, but didn't know what . . . so thought I'd sit and see what the first thing I write is. Sometimes that spontaneity leads to pretty wonderful things. I did that with a one act once upon a time: I sat down and wrote the first thing that came to me . . . which was: Hobart throws things around the room. And then I had to figure out why . . .which ended up being my one act What of the Bird? That was fun. Of course I'm not sitting here to write a play, just to kind of jam on el bloggo. There is some modicum of theater news, my play Dead Authors was rejected by the Schreiber studio people for their development thing . . . another punch to roll with. If you want easy, don't look to theater. Nothing about it is easy. It takes intense focused determination and you have to able to make a living somehow because, except for the few fortunate ones, making money in theater is very very hard to do.

Of course, making money in the arts isn't why anybody gets into the arts. If you are an artist, it's just who you are. It's what you do . . . so you find your ways to get your stuff out there and find a way to keep a roof over your head and plug away until your ashes fertilize some forest somewhere. It's much like the curse of Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot: they can't go on, but they must go on. Why? Because they are there.

Monday update . . .

I actually did something a tad unusual yesterday: I ran lines for Old Hickory, but not while running. I was in the house, relatively undistracted, and ran them just to see how they flowed. One or two rough spots, but nothing unmanagable . . . which is good; you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time out. So I feel pretty good about that. If I keep working them I should be in good shape for when we rev it up again.

I also read over the new piece. It held up pretty well. There were some redundancies, which is to be expected at this stage; the way I work, writing in spurts and not necessarily in sequence, I never really know until I come back and read through the pieces that I put together, what to expect. But I think it has real potential for a moving piece . . . if I don't screw it up. Now I can sort of fill in the blanks of who these people are and what they have been through in the thirty years since they saw each other. It'a a bit too tiddy right now, but that's what rewriting is for.

Other than that, most of the weekend was spent with Christmas stuff. Did go see The King's Speech; a marvelous movie that will win lots of awards. I've seen three of the five SAG nominees for lead actor, and Colin Firth is the man as far as I am concerned.

First run, running lines

So I ran this morning, first time in over a week; but it was my default four miles and feels like nothing really. Hardest thing was to steel myself for the cold, but it wasn't as bad as I was psyching myself into believing that it was. While I ran, I also ran lines for Old Hickory. Since I know there is another production coming this winter some time it is crazy not to pay attention to it. Went pretty well, a couple of rough spots but nothing major.

Still thinking of ways to beef it up some, not that it needs it, but I think if I want it to be a stand alone eventually it will need to be an hour minimum. I'm thinking that maybe an age difference between our narrator and his horrible ex-wife might be good. He being older than her. It's something to think about/play with. Again, not that it needs it; it's a pretty successful piece on its current merits, but I'm just saying . . .

This weekend I'm going to make a real effort to read through the sixty pages of my new piece . . . very interested to see what it needs.

I was planning on going to WV this weekend, but the weather uncertainty gave me pause. It's Friday and they still are having a tough time predicting what is going to hit us on Sunday, could be major or might be nothing . . . so I decided I'd wait until January to go.

More on stuff later. Oh, an interesting blog note; I mentioned my blog on Jorma Kaukonen's blog and when next I checked stats I noted that five people checked my blog! If you're back for more, welcome happy to have you.

What? Two posts in one day!

It just occurred to me that today is the anniversary of the Silver Bridge falling. I lived in Pt. Pleasant WV then and was on the bridge about fifteen minutes before it fell. Bumper to bumper traffic . . . we felt a rumble and my dad thought it must have been the concrete truck in front of us grinding gears or something . . . who could have imagined.

We had time to get home, and the lights flickered. A few seconds later my mother, who was a stringer for the Huntington paper, got a phone call from her boss telling her that the bridge had fallen and to get down there. She told him she had just been on the bridge and it was fine . . . of course, he was right.

At any rate, that was a close call. I can't let the date pass without mentioning it. To this day, if I'm in traffic on a bridge I get a little nervous.

Must be getting soft . . .

There once was a day when I wouldn't let a little thing like frigid temperatures stop me from running. I guess those days are long gone. Maybe it's the combo of the cold and not having run in a while because of the cold/flu/whatever it was, but I was going to run this morning and just thought: 'You know what? Uhuh.'

Does this throw off my thing with the marathon? I don't think so. Seems like there's plenty of time once this big chill breaks. Once I get back in the rhythm of running every other day I won't think twice about running during lower than ideal temps, but for now it can wait. One thing I won't do is run on a treadmill at the Y. I never could get that treadmill thing, but then I've never tried it so I shouldn't be too quick to judge. It just seems kind of . . . I don't know, it's just not my thing.

So instead of running I'm blogging . . . yea! Not much else happening. I printed my new two hander the other day and I need to read it one of these days. Still working on War and Peace. What a terrific writer. And the research! Nowadays you can get practically anything you need in about five seconds on the web; in Tolstoy's day it required a bit more effort I'd say. But what a story . . . what scope. There was a piece in the Times the other day about history plays not doing well (bad news for my Emma Goldman plays). Anyway, scope in theater, by which I mean real sweep, majesty and not just falling chandeliers, but big stories with depth are pretty much a thing of the past. Angels in America is a recent example (recent being almost twenty years ago); there may be more but I don't know of them. It's what John Guare attempts apparently in A Free Man of Color, which was one of the subjects of the Times piece. So go for it. I used to write big ensemble pieces and my hope is they will be performed some day, but who knows? Right now I'm doing smaller pieces for the hope they will be performed (hey, it worked with Old Hickory!). Onward.

100th Post!

I just noticed when I signed on that this is my 100th post! That's cause for celebration! I wish I had something significant to talk about but I guess the fact that I am still blogging away and walking the earth is good enough when you get right down to it.

So maybe I'll use this post to reflect a little on the past year, because this year has been significant to say the least. #1 of significance is Laurette blossoming in college. I knew she would but the transition from HS to college is full of land mines and a lot could go wrong. She has hacked through the underbrush though and found her way, she is gonna be just fine. #2 in the highlight reel of '010 is of course: Old Hickory. The journey to get that piece from paper to performance was and will probably always be, the theatrical highlight of my life. Having the ability to work as long and hard on it as we did, Wallace and I, was precious time to me, and every step, the reading, the One Man Talking, the rehearsals and performances in Woodstock is all stuff that I will never forget. I still pinch myself when I think of how cool it was hanging on the porch in Woodstock listening to the night sounds, and then waking up and rehearsing all day; painters from the artist colony outside their cabins working . . . it was all pretty damn idyllic and I appreciate all of it. And it is all because Wallace Norman saw something in that piece . . . he is a saint and a visionary as far as I am concerned.

A lot of sidebars could split off the Old Hickory thing: the review, the radio interview, bumping into a guy months later who saw the play and liked it . . . so many things, so many memories. It was great. Of course one of the most important events to come out of Old Hickory is this blog! I started it to track the progress of rehearsals and what have you and it has become something of a diary for me . . . albeit one that I am not exactly regular in attending too (apologies for that). But it has been fun for me and I enjoy it . . . so I am sticking with it.

What is next for Old Hickory? Wish I knew. There is the possibility of production in Carmel, NY sometime this winter. I have also applied to the Dramatists Guild for a one day self-production seminar . . . if I get into that maybe that will inspire me in that (somewhat scary) direction.

Also this year, I guess it would be #3 in the significance rating, was the radio presentation of Where the Rain Never Falls. That was pretty damn cool.

#4 is not my thing but Bette's. The guy that was gonna make a film of her one act is actually doing it, they have been bouncing ideas back and forth re the script so all is moving forward there, it looks like it's actually gonna happen!

So all that has happened in the span of time covered by the 100 posts. It has been an amazing time of artistic growth and expansion. It has had its frustrations but overall, I wouldn't change much about it.

Going forward? Well, I'm working on the new two hander, taking Family Matters to the Fringe group this winter, submitting the O'Neill play to One Man Talking (I just decided that yesterday) and still planning on the marathon piece (if I can shake this damn flu/cold thing and get back to running!). Also other submissions to things as appropriate.

I thank everyone who reads this, whoever you are and hope you are around for the next 100 posts!

OK so I lied . . .

In my last posting I said my time for the half marathon was 1:29 . . . I wish . . . actually that time was for the ten miler . . . the half marathon was 2:06 . . . just wanted to set the record straight.

I spent some time yesterday reading the first act of 'At Death's Door' and thought it held up pretty well. But while I was reading it, I couldn't help but think that maybe 'Dead Authors' deserves a shot at the Shreiber competition. It's been a while since I put that one out there, and I think it has a very definite NYC feel to it. Seriously thinking about it. I would like to see it on its feet in front of an audience. The readings have always gone well.

Nothing much else to talk about. Had a nice run this morning, probably seven miles or so, I'll have to clock it later, it was a new course; and still enjoying War and Peace.

There are a couple of things I want to get done this weekend: one is to send Dead Authors into that competition in the city, the other is to print my new piece and read it . . . very curious as to how that holds up.