As often happens . . .

I was sitting in the audience listening to some folks reading a piece at the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit the other night when an image hit me that sort of clicked the gears into place for my new solo piece; nothing that had anything to do with the piece being read, just I was sitting there and an image entered my head of who was telling the story (something of a derelict) and where (a bench or a low wall). Also that he was stoned or getting that way. Maybe sunglasses . . . so I went back to it this morning with the idea of working that in and wrote a couple of pages. Don't know where it'll go now, but it's nice to have some sort of frame of reference. Before it was just reminiscing about a colorful friend from a particulary wacky part of my life . . . now it may be a story. We'll see.

The same thing happened last spring with 'Like a Sack of Potatoes'. I was sitting there listening to a piece, might have been one of Norman Marshall's monologues, and I got an image in my head of a barn ... and somebody falling from the rafters. The opening line might have come to me right then too, but I'm not sure about that: Fell out of the sky like a sack of potatoes. I did spend a fair amount of time in tobacco barns when I was a kid so it was a powerful image, I could smell the smell and see the dust rise from the dirt floor ... and all I had to do was figure out who was falling and why. That part of it came together pretty quickly.

It's not like I'm bored by the piece I'm listening to, or that my mind is wandering . . . maybe it's something about being in a creative space that makes the receptors more . . . receptive . . . I don't know, but when stuff like that happens, I pay attention.

Oh, and I took the first three scenes of Dead Authors as well. It went very well. I loved hearing the play again, it's been sitting there gathering dust for so long; good feedback too. I'll take more in next time, see if it holds up. Bette went with me for the first time, liked it enough to go back. She read the lead, which was written for her. People responded to the play and to her very well . . .