not falling down

Luminary days: my school has been a stop for some really amazing people recently. Tuesday, next year’s writer in residence, Herman Farrell, hung out in senior seminar with the drama kids. Talk turned (it always does) to the war and its roots, and, to my shock, I found a fellow mind who was more interested in thinking about them than in screaming for a side. It was to my deeper shock, later, that I realized how thirsty I’ve been for that, and how utterly parched this campus is. Shouldn’t academia be more about discussion than denouncement? (Cynically: has it ever actually been?)

Last night was Wynton Marsalis, of course, and then tonight was Heather McHugh. Confronted by a grinning poet, I found myself speechless. This is a theme recently. She was wonderful, and very funny, and I wanted to tell her “thank you” for the reading and failed utterly. I think she got the idea from my face, though.

Also, as Lisa relates, this has been Dante Marioni week. Centre is a house party!

I can’t segue well into this, but I didn’t get into IU, which is a little strange–they really seemed to like me when I visited campus. It makes me wonder whether Carnegie Mellon was a fluke. Thanks to my standing over them with a bat, Louisville is supposed to tell me yes or no on Monday. Time grows short. The plot, as Ian would say, thins.

Also, while looking up the usage of “denunciation,” I found the single weirdest text ad I’ve ever seen:

There’s too much in the play, and I know that now. I tried to write thirty pages into nine, which is maybe challenging but still self-defeating. There’s just too much in there to wrap up in ten minutes.

Yet the production was dirty, gritty, flawed, perfect. My faith in my director was not only well placed but exceeded; she took a mess of a difficult script and made it funny, funny, funny, headkick. It was better than I had any right to hope for. It was exactly right.

The critique afterwards was honest and accurate, with more compliments than I expected and a clear and firm analysis ofthe problems–again, that it’s overstuffed. That was pretty much the only thing they found wrong, though, and I was a little surprised by that, but it gives me hope. Last year I wrote a real ten-minute play, spare and tidy and clean in form. Afterwards I was worried that I couldn’t write anything longer, but now I have something that’s going to be a one-act, and it’s going to be full.

I’m still too close to the play to rewrite it while I’m here, but rewrite it I will. I think when I have a real ten-minute and a real one-act I can start sending them to competitions. Maybe going to grad school for comp sci doesn’t mean leaving drama behind after all.

Meanwhile I’m going to read a lot of Atwood and play Diablo on my borrowed laptop (shh!) and maybe go to a workshop or two. I make the joke that I’m the one who doesn’t have to do anything here, but I don’t think that’s true now. Everyone else is networking, interviewing, getting ready to earn their pay at this; I’ve got a play and a half and the email address of a director who’s going to shake the world up in a few years.

I’m not going to post the play as I have before, because it’s not done yet. When I was twelve, I read about David Eddings in Something About the Author and I still remember a quote that disturbed me: he said you had to “write a million words, the best you’ve ever done, and then throw it all away,” before you could consider yourself a writer.That scared me, because even then I had a hard time letting go of anything I’d written. What if the best you’d ever written turned out to be the best you ever would?

He’s right, though. Maybe this play is part of those first million words, and maybe it’s not, but I’m going to throw it away and start over and do it right, and then I’ll let myself post it. I’m looking forward to that.

I got her, Michelle, the director I wanted. My instincts were right, this time: she’s a genius. My director is AMAZING. We (where by “we” I mean “she”) talked about the play for almost an hour, during which she came up with better and more interesting character profiles and staging and motivations than I could have imagined. Her mind moves like water on hot grease. Synergy. This play has the potential to be incredible; I wanted to kick people in the teeth, and that may just be what she’s going to do.

I’m exhausted, ecstatic, emotional. Obviously I’m in a heightened state; I haven’t slept since we left the Days Inn yesterday morning, a low-contrast memory. But I’m excited too, and something in me is trembling. Doing this hurt. Last year I felt fatalistic about what was going to happen that night. This year I feel terrified, and joyful, and I ache.

I’ve written happy and sad before, but I don’t think I’ve ever managed to clearly transmit pain until now. I think The Laramie Project was the most important thing I’ve ever done. I think this was the hardest, and I think I did it right.

Twelve hours of sleep until I watch it come to life.

Having it read aloud was like being naked.

I’ve never written anything I count as drama before, and this play is dramatic. The cushion of laughter was still there, at the beginning, but it didn’t help because I knew it wasn’t achieving what it could yet. I wanted to make it hurt, which meant I had to make it feel good first. It hurt me. I can’t tell yet if it hurt anyone else.

The directors are picking out plays in the next room, and I’m still nervous, because there are one or two of them I’d love to have pick it and three of them whom I dread. I could babble on here about how I made mistakes for the cold reading and why I want whom I want, but I’m going to turn this thing off. My fingers hurt. My play is done, and it’s barely started.

It’s called “One Eye, One Tooth.”

I kind of forgot to mention this, but I’m in Virginia. SETC again, and the 24-Hour Playfest again, and I’ve just finished the third draft of my play, which is pretty close to final. I’m an hour early, which may mean that (end-of-the-world joke of your choice).

I’ve got enough caffeine in me to power a small country for a week, so I need to be doing something or I’ll be fidgeting and bothering the senior playwright who’s going over my piece right now: thus the entry. I’m as nervous as I was last year, because there’s no safety net. Doing comedy is hard, but writing tragedy is harder, and I think I wrote a tragedy. Or at least something that hurts.

Tony called me out last year for only writing comedy; he said he thought I had it in me to write deeper, darker stuff. I don’t believe my comedies have any less depth just because their tone is different, but the challenge irked me anyway. They do that. So this year I wrote something with a bite to it. It’s the play I couldn’t write fall term, and if you were around you know what that means, and if you read the play you might figure it out.

Or you might not. I have to edit now, I think. I don’t want the ending to feel tagged on, especially because it wasn’t.

Incidentally.

Between 12:01 am Monday and 11:59 Tuesday, I:

• attended the last four classes of my junior year.

• put together, along with the infamous David “DC” Clark, the very first Very Short Short Play Extravaganza fromscratch.
• which included two performances of this old thing by yet another
  beautiful and perfect cast.

• wrote a comp sci project in rather a stunning 4.5 hours.
• did a toon.
• spent 2.5 hours getting my head fried (see above).
• slew Krugs by the dozen.
• watched a movie that was exactly as good as it wassupposed to be (read: pretty damn good).
• slept, for the first time since about March, in.

Sometimes I think maybe I steal hours from summer for days like those.

I may be numberless, I may beinnocent
I may know many things, I may be ignorant

Glorious, hellish, surprising, panicked, funny, awful, done. Except not really surprising at all. I’m starting torecognize that there’s a reason people rave about this kind of timed project–the artificial limits bring out abilityyou otherwise have no reason to use. Anyway, it was worth it, and this is what I got.

That’s there to read only if you’re well beyond “bored” into “catatonic.” This is not to say it wasn’t entertaining; Iwas lucky to be assigned an incredible director and a great cast who made the play into more than I could have hopedfor.

There is a full account of the whole process that led to the play, but it’sfreakishly long and boring. I wrote that and I’m keeping it for myself; I don’t recommend it for human consumption. Ijust wanted to have a good record by which to measure all future periods of stress (”Rescuing my pregnant sister from aburning house with my arm broken in three places? I give it .6 Playfests”).

Also, my stomach’s all better now.

The past 48 hours have been the longest, well, 48 hours I have ever lived. In fact, I’m recounting on my fingers right now to make sure I’m numbering them right–it feels like it’s been at least a week since I wrote my last journal entry. Which, coincidentally, is where the whole thing starts. To help me keep things straight, all times are in military.

Shortly after I finished fiddling with the idiotcam©, Ken asked if I wanted to go out somewhere for dinner. Certainly! I said, but as I was flat broke it seemed the possibilities were limited. But wait! I had the free pizza I’d won from Little Caesar’s, didn’t I? Problem solved!

Unfortunately, the bastards at said pizza joint were apparently resentful of having to give away anything at all, and so laced my double slice with a hearty dose of poison. The rest of that night was entertaining, to say the least (which I will), and the fact that I was slinging together an entire toon from script to finish didn’t exactly make things easier. I finally trudged to bed around hour 0100 hours, to begin a series of short naps interrupted by–well, fill in the blanks yourself.

After one such nap, I awoke not long before my alarm was due, and decided to turn it off so it wouldn’t wake up my poor roommates. I then forgot about said precaution and crawled back under the covers. In the words of The Spleen, “Big mistake!” Jon finally woke me up himself when he noticed that it was a good half hour after my planned wakeup call, and while I engaged in The World’s Fastest Shower© David was calling my room to see where, exactly, the hell I was.

We got into Henry’s car only running about the aforementioned half hour behind (but let us not forget that my body was just beginning to make me pay for the pizza). We got to the airport around 0815. I was writing Henry a check of appreciation for the ride when it became clear that yes, in fact, my pen had exploded all over my hand and made me look like some kind of squid molester.

I think it’s to my credit that only then did I start making signs against the Evil Eye.

I set off the beeper at the security checkpoint, of course (foolish, foolish zipper!), but even with all the delays it turned out not to matter–our flight was late and we were routed onto a different jet, an hour behind schedule. Having removed most of the ink evidence from my hand, I covered myself in my coat, shivered and began the practice I’d cite to Matthew repeatedly (and weakly) whenever he checked up on me over the next six hours: hanging tough.

David got the window seat on the way to Atlanta, the bastard.

We’d missed our connection, of course, but things actually began to look up at this point. They put us on the next jet to Mobile–only an hour and a half behind–and meanwhile I bravely consumed a Sprite and four peanut butter crackers. I didn’t actually think I was going to get on the flight, as they waited until roughly every single passenger was on before assigning me a seat. As it turned out, though, that meant I got the window seat in the very first row of the plane.

Allow me to state, for the record, that flying up front–even on a one-hour flight, and especially when you’re slightly feverish–is a very weird thing. I think the stewardess spotted me as a first-time first-class passenger, though I can’t imagine how my ratty khakis and bewildered expression would have given me away. She was even courteous enough to help me stow my carry-ons, and to smile, and to get me a lemonade from the back when first-class passengers were supposed to get soft drinks. I believe I will love her until the day I die.

The fact that our luggage was actually in Mobile can only have been a huge mistake on the part of our airline. I fully expect to have the repercussions hit on our return trip, and it only remains to be seen whether we’ll accidentally be flown to Norway or just get sucked out through the toilet at 29,000 feet.

The three-hour nap David and I got at the hotel was up there with turkey sandwiches as the best thing. Ever.

We registered (David had problems), we ate (I had problems), we went back to the room to unpack our snazzy borrowed laptops, and we arrived at the ballroom just in time for auditions to start.

Yes, This Is Still Going, I Warned You

Auditions were the most heinous display of “AC-ting!” I’d seen since I volunteered to time qualifier auditions, but there was promise here and there. I took notes like “sycophant elephant” and “you can’t kill a roach with a rolled-up newspaper” in hopes of inspiration, which were almost as helpful as they look. Finally, around 2330 hours (central!), they cleared the place out and told the chosen six of us to get to work.

It should be noted that we were all guys, and fate is cruel.

There has been plenty of “well it has been interesting!” content already, I think. The next seven and a half hours, though, take the proverbial cake as the longest stretch of time ever measured by human experience. Let’s recap: I had slept no longer than three hours at a stretch out of the last twenty-four; my digestive system had yet to even apologize for the things it had put me through; the only idea I had was for a zany cross-dressing comedy that involved a baseball cap and a wedding veil; and as I am me I was of course unable to get anything useful accomplished until way behind deadline.

After about five false starts, I finally started on something promising around 0100 hours; the first draft was due for a group read-through at 0300, but when that rolled around I had three pages out of a required ten, and no idea where I was going next with it. The waning half of the night followed a fairly standard cycle: I would write one line, stare at the screen, and get up to walk around for a while to wake up. I couldn’t recite much of the dialogue from my script if I tried, but let me tell you, I could find my way around the second floor blindfolded.

The scripts were due at 0700, and at 0600 I had six pages. By well-established Brendan habit, of course, I finally got down to work when it was clear I wasn’t going to make it, and at 0659 I was done and casting about desperately for a title. David (who had finished at like 0400, the bastard) gave me the nudge I needed, and at 0705 I was hand-numbering the pages of the finished product.

They gave us a break just long enough to lug our bags back to the hotel room, and at the final read-through with the directors I finally came up with a much better title, which I naturally made everybody write in on their own copies. It got a good response, and I got assigned a very funny director, and David and I finally got to go back and get four hours of sleep, and now I’m sitting here finishing the longest journal entry I have ever written before we go to dinner. The performances start at 2200, and even though my script has to go first I am looking forward to this more than I expected. My hands are off–it’s their baby now. And no matter what happens, it’s going to be fun.

That’s all.

Oh, unless you saw my other play and recognize that I recycled like an eco-bandit. In which case: shush.

I’m going to be on a plane very soon. This hasn’t quite settled in my brain yet. I love flying, probably because I getto do it so rarely–the last time I was in a plane was on my way back from Brazil, summer after senior year, when I wasexhausted and homesick and weighing 120 pounds. That wasn’t the best flight, actually. But the way down, six weeksearlier, well… of the roughly fourteen hours we spent over ocean and rainforest and cloud, I’d say I spent at leastthirteen just looking out the window.

I’m going to be crazy far behind in my classes when we get back late Sunday night, and I’m probably going to be boredonce the sound and fury have settled down, andmost everyone but Ian and I are going to be drinking heavily at night, and I’mgoing to miss the chance to copy edit for the paper this week (for which transgression someone has already beaten me severely). Evenso, I’m looking forward to this. I keep getting asked if it’s a competition, but if it were I doubt I’d be going. We’regoing to be half-killing ourselves just because it’s never been done before, and that gives me kind of shivers Iimagine mountain climbers must get.

I need to figure out what books to bring, and also how the hell I’m going to get to the airport. Wish me luck.

they saythe more you fly the more you risk
your life

I’m in kind of a quiet mood, but I was just getting ready to write when I let a fluffy and whoooo doggies what a smell.There goes introspection.

So I’m going to Alabama from the 6th to the 10th for my first ever SETC. This is normally where drama majors go to audition for summer stock or apply for tech jobsand stuff; I thought about it, but since I wasn’t ready for the qualifier auditions back in fall I didn’t try out. Iwouldn’t be going at all, actually, except I signed up for this new thing and somehow got in. I’mgoing to be an overnight ten-minute playwright.

I would be nervous about that, but when I think about it, I actually wrote all my scripts for playwriting class thenight before they were due anyway. This will probably be the same thing, only with snacks.

Standard update for the dozen or so people who ask me every day if anything new has happened with a certain someone:no. But it is terribly thoughtful of you to ask!

now if there’s a cure for this
we don’t want it; we run from it