Birth Day

Found this in my docs. Wonder what else is in there!

Birth Day

Everybody has one.

The very young and the very old look forward to it.

Everybody else would just as soon forget about it.

They lie about it, try to ignore it, wonder how the hell this happened.

They view it as some view a cliff;

As something you can never come back from.

I view it as more like a slide;

A giant slide.

A long glide

That begins the moment you come spurting into the world

All red and slippery

To the moment you land

Wherever it is that the slide ends.

Some think you land in a garden

Or a cloud…

I hope it is a pool.

Much nicer to land in a pool

Than on unforgiving ground.

No matter how grassy

That landing would be hard.

And I’ve flown through the clouds.

No support there.

Better to slip into some delightfully cool water

With frolicking swimmers of all ages,

Because some get down the slide faster than others.

Unnaturally fast.

Unfairly fast.

But I am ahead of myself.

I'm still on the slide,

Fortunate,

Gliding toward my destiny

See you in the pool.

Meanwhile, enjoy the ride.

Trying again for the first time.

It has occurred to me in recent weeks that our entire approach to encouraging creativity in young people is wrong. When I was a child, my parents took me to see great Broadway Shows that had garnered many Tony Awards. They took me to the opera and concerts and ballet. We had a house full of musical scores and I loved to sing along...in private. The realization that I was not as good as those stars made me terrified to even try. My parents should have take me to see flops! I had the bug but was so easily intimidated by brilliance, I couldn't bear the thought of not being as good.

My own acting and writing careers have had their ups and downs. But lately, I have been exposed to -how to say this without sounding arrogant - bad plays.

Some context: I fell in love with a play a few years ago written by a writer I really like. It was a two-hander about two legendary figures in the world of art and commercial art. It was funny and touching and had a real message that people could take home with them and think about for days to come. I produced and directed this delightful and deceptively profound little piece and felt strongly it should move to New York. We didn't make it. We didn't know how. I didn't know how. I deferred to people who spoke a good game but, ultimately screwed it up anyway.

Last year, I got involved with another play. I loved my part but not the play as a whole. If anyone had told me that this play would end up with a New York run I'd have been very skeptical. And yet this is were we stand, on the precipice of an open-ended run in NYC this year. It is testimony to an ambitious producer who knows how to get things done, and it has, for me, been both educational and inspirational.

It inspired me to start writing again. I thought, "If this could play NY, why not me?"

I remember being told as an actress, "Never type yourself out." Submit even if you don't think you're right for a role. I always had a problem with that. I only submit when I believe I am the best person for the job. I'm not one for throwing spaghetti at the wall in the hope that something will stick.

I have also been reading plays submitted for a One-Act Festival we'd like to start. My partner in this endeavor advertised for a specific type of play with certain parameters to be met. He pressed "send" and the responses started pouring in almost immediately. Now, with over half read of the 200 submissions to date, I have made some additional observations. They are not all good. In fact, very few are good. Some are just awful!  These self-professed writers must have trunks full of plays just waiting for the right occasion. They are professional spaghetti tossers.  And here I sit with a similar collection of material and I NEVER sent any of it out. And they're good! I think they're good. Well, some of them are good. Certainly none of them are causes to hang my head with shame. Is this reluctance to share or risk because I HAVE read and seen great plays? And I'm afraid mine won't be as good so, therefore, they should never see the light of day? I've learned that there is a lot of gray area between Fiddler on the Roof and Frecklefaced Strawberry. 

And maybe, just maybe, my work can fit in there somewhere... if I send it out.

Dems, Does and Haircuts

Does anyone else do this?

My husband has different voices for the people he talks to. You can almost always tell with whom he is on the phone by the volume of his speech or the sudden disappearance of certain vowels and consonants that might make him seem of one class or another.

I just laughed myself into a coughing spasm as I listened to him make an appointment with a new barber. “Hey! Can I gettanappointment with Pat faw tamarrah?” And he’s yelling on the phone as if the guy was across the street on his stoop instead of on the other end of the phone. If he were calling a new hair salon, I’m certain he would have asked for “an appointment with Pat for tomorrow”, but the fact that this place probably charges no more that $20 for a haircut places it in the category of working class people who, as we who grew up in Brooklyn know, have certain restrictions on the use of vowels, consonants and decibel levels.

I have heard it over and over throughout the years in calls to painters, plumbers, the boilerman, the guy who cuts down our trees. The volume goes up but the tone goes down, deep into the manly chest-voice region. It is a verbal slippage into a blue-collared shirt, designed to make the person on the other end of the line believe you are just a regular guy who understands these things by virtue of the fact that you speak the lingo. Never mind if the blue-collared pro at the receiving end of your query ever set foot in Kings County, he will understand by the tone of your voice and the ‘dems’ and ‘does’ slipping past a suddenly paralytic tongue, that you are man of the people, not ignorant and not to be taken advantage of.

This is a voice that never shows up when he is making an appointment to see the doctor. If he speaks to a broker, you’d swear he was a member of the royal family. He is an actor so these personality switches come as easily to him as time jumping in “Jumpers”. “Now I’m smart!” “Now I’m regular!” “Now you see me!” “Now you don’t!” But unlike the ‘jumpers’, he is totally unaware of these speech patterns. Rather, they spring from his brain unbidden; an unconscious call for help from one peer to another; an “I’m like you so how do I get dis squirrel outta da chimney?” Or like today, “I don’t want to wait three weeks for a hairstylist; I wanna get a heh-cut tamarrah.”