The Gmail Bop-Bop

My phone bop-bopped yesterday. It was the G-mail bop-bop.

That’s different than the text message do-ding, and it’s not the same as the Yahoo! Mail blong, and it definitely wasn’t a voicemail, which is the first 22 seconds of the theme from “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” followed by a ga-ling.

I lazily pulled out the phone from my trouser pocket and noticed the insistent red light flashing at the top right-hand corner, letting me know that someone was urgently trying to tell me something. In emergency circles, flashing red lights indicate matters of grave import. In the black-and-white, bygone days, at White House, they had red desk phones with no buttons, and no rotary dial, just a flashing red light that would go off when Premier Kissoff urgently needed to speak to President Muffley.

Nowadays, we are all our own Merkin Muffleys. We can all be reached at any time of the night or day, and every email, text message, or voicemail carries its own little red light, indicating that it must be responded to immediately.

Of course.

Because my Spam and Junk folders have ironclad testicles, I am rarely disappointed to see that a message or an email is for scams trying to sell me discounted psychotropic medications or enlarge my PEN!S. Because my online work scheduling software is synched with my phone, I am, however, disappointed by receiving frequent emails alerting me to shifts that need to be filled that I will not be filling.

“You don’t ever work extra, do you?” a colleague asked me last week.

“Nope. But I’m very grateful that there are those that do, so I don’t have to.” And I thought that was a diplomatic way of stating my belief that I wouldn’t want to stay in that place one millisecond longer than I had to.

(No offense.)

The email that I received yesterday following this particular bop-bop was from my old boss. She had read somewhere that there was a local playwriting contest going on, so she forwarded the email to me. Not trying to be an asshole, though probably sounding like one, I wrote back a brief note thanking her for thinking of me and adding, “You still think of me as a playwright. That’s very sweet. I like that.”

Really, though—do I? Or was this email just another reminder of who I was, or barely was. I mean, I was a student who wrote plays. Then, I graduated, and I wrote a couple other plays. I’m not really sure that qualifies me as… much of anything, really. But I guess you are whatever people think you are. At least, to them.

Perception is so funny, and so tenuous. If you inflate your opinion of yourself just enough, you’re maybe looking at delusions of grandeur. If you minimize and undercut and justify, then you’re on your way to Poor Self Esteemsville. I wonder sometimes if it is even possible to have a completely untarnished, unbiased view of oneself, and if what we think we are is any more or less accurate than what others think we are.

I read that email and I knew I wasn’t going to write anything for this playwriting contest, but I lied and told my former boss that “maybe I’ll whip something up for this thing,” like it’s no different than preparing a bowl of mashed potatoes or a batch of brownies. Obviously, if I had any intention at all of taking this contest seriously, I would be sketching out ideas and creating well-dressed, middle-aged male characters who do silly things, in the spirit of my old friend Gilbert, and my not-as-old friends the Pythons.

But I’m not doing that. I’m writing to you. For you. For… me?

Well, probably not. But maybe I’ll write for me some day.

She thinks I'm still (or was ever) a playwright, so she sent me an email. It shouldn't have sent me through a loop, but it did. It shouldn't be taken as a guilt-trip, but it was. It shouldn't have made me feel bad, but it did. I don't know where that part of me went-- that desire to make up people and situations and move them about a tape-marked flat, black floor as if they were chess pieces and I Kasparov. I don't know where that went. Maybe it will come back some day. Maybe it won't. Who knows? I'm reasonably certain I'm never going to be mentioned in the same breath as Edward Albee or Tom Stoppard or Sam Shepard. But I've got my little red flashing light on my phone, which means I'm important. And I'll get back to you at once.

*** POSTSCRPIT ***

And, after all that horseshit: I wrote the fucking play.

Moo.

Almost Sane

I like to joke that, when I’m bored, I either masturbate or try to get something published.

“The two, of course,” I said to my wife a few nights ago, “are very similar pursuits.”

Clearly, I don’t just masturbate or try to get something published when I’m bored. I also do dishes and blog. Aren’t you bummed you can’t take this winner home?

A few days ago, I sat down at the computer and (after I’d masturbated, of course) sifted through the vast collection of my unpublished work, this time, I reviewed my work for the stage, and I surveyed it, for the most part, disapprovingly. A slap-dash collection of obscene, off-my-nut, angst-ridden one-acts filled with characters who are thinly-and-not-so-even-thinly representations of yours truly, engaging in a variety of farcical acts, meant to send the audience into spasms of laughter. Meant to mask spasms of pain.

Clearly, nobody needs that.

Then, one peculiar play caught my eye again. A play I started in (EEP!) 2006, the year I (SNART!) got married!!!! A play that I have picked up at least once every year since then to do major facelifts on. I play I have sent to playwriting festivals and directors and playhouses, a play that has gotten little but lukewarm praise and a kind rebuff (“not right for us at this time”) such business. What’s it about? The international investigation into a major airline crash.

What. Is wrong. With me?

? ? ?

Seriously, I need a very ambitious therapist and super-strength, gold-plated insurance card.

So, because I’ve been obsessing over this thing (when I get tired of masturbating and the dishes are all done and I’ve blogged for tomorrow) I dusted this tired old motherfucker off and re-read the most recent draft.

I liked it.

And maybe that’s the first sign of trouble.

It’s funny. At my job, I work with delusional people every hour of every day. One of them thinks I am personally responsible for bringing the slaves back from Africa (“WHY DO YOU PUT CHAINS AROUND THEIR NECKS AND BRING THEM BACK HERE TO DO THE WHITE MAN’S WORK?!”), another one thinks there is a baby trying to slice open her belly so it can get out and kill cops. Another patient is convinced that we put poison in the water cooler and we’re trying to kill everyone in the hospital. A surprising number of them believe there are microchips or radios implanted in their bodies. Delusions like that are pretty easy to identify (though I really did bring back slaves from Africa—but it was only a couple, and my hedges really do need frequent attention) and we laugh about it in the chart room.

“Don’t feel bad, dude,” one of the nurses said to me yesterday about a particularly delusional patient who has negatively fixated on me of late, “she thinks I’m bombing the Vietnamese and so she refuses to take the yellow pill from me.”

But, as I sat there, re-reading my airplane accident investigation play for the manyth time, I suddenly got the shivers a little bit. Am I delusional? Continuing to work on this absurd little probable non-drama, sending it to legitimate, though small and indie-ish theatres in the hopes that they will take kindly to an ambitious, fledgling Philadelphia-area playwright?

Ambitious. Or delusional?

And then it hit me: Oh. Right. It’s all about the perceptions of others.

If some Artistic Director opening up my email with that query letter and that attachment and reads it saying, “Man, this guy’s nucking futs,” well, then, I guess, to him, I am. If another one reads it and says, “Hmpf, this thing isn’t half bad,” then, to her, I’m not. As far as my own self-perception: I’m not sure. I suppose we’re all a little ambitious and we’re all a little delusional, or teetering on the edge, until we’re given a pink slip or an award or a kiss on the forehead or a kick in the balls.

That’s what the rest of the world is for: to let us know where we stand.

To See the Stars

When I got the email, I admit that I got a little tingly in the trousers. And, no, it wasn't an email offering a way to get a "BIGGER PEN!S"

The e-mail touted half-price tickets to the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” It’s easily one of my favorite musicals, wedged somewhere in between “Into the Woods” and “Assassins,” also by Sondheim (no, I’m not gay) and Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World.” Now, if you’re saying to yourself, “Wait—- what about all that G&S shit,” honey—those are operettas, not musicals. Jesus Beezus, have I taught you nothing?

Anyway, the reason folks were being offered half-price tickets is because Catherine Zeta Jones, who was appearing in the run as Desiree Armfeldt, was unable to perform on said weekend, and so the theatre management resorted to slashing box office prices to fill the house in her absence.

And I thought to myself, “Well, she’s hot and everything—but I just want to see the show. I can ogle moving and/or still images of Catherine Zeta Jones online at any time and besides, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, I would have to keep my trousers on.

Now, I know I think too much about things that probably shouldn’t require such exertion of my admittedly limited brain power, but the notion of selling half-price tickets to a Broadway show just because the big, hot-shit actress is in Maui getting her nipples repinkified kind of rubbed me the wrong way—even though my wife and I were the beneficiaries of a wonderful show. Doesn’t it devalue the importance and significance of the rest of the cast by saying, “Well, you’re all not good enough to justify people shelling out the full coinage to see your sorry asses unless Catherine Zeta-Jones is present in all of her Welsh yet ambiguously Asian glory to behold”?

I mean, if I were the twitchy d-bag playing Henrik, I’d be kind of pissed. N’yah mean?

It speaks, I think, to one of the problems that I see with live theatre, at least in America. It has gotten to the point where producers and other affiliated shittynecks are saying to themselves, “Well, the only way we can get these stupid motherfucker Americans into a theatre to see a play is to cram as many A-list celebrities onto the stage as humanly possible because, if we don’t, why the hell would people come see a play?”

I mean, why not just stay at home and Netflix Catherine Zeta-Jones? Much cheaper than seeing a Broadway play, yes?

I don’t know what happened to seeing a play for the sake of the play—its story, its plot construction, the complexity of its characters, the wit and wisdom of the writing, the subtle nuances that you just don’t get in a film or a TV show. I don’t know why we have to get our tussies tickled by the notion that Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl are in “Prisoner of Second Avenue.” Why can’t we just see it because it’s a Neil Simon play and because we’ll laugh our balls off (if we’re Jewish).

What’s funny is that there’s a totload of super talented performers out there who are professionally trained stage actors—that is what they do and that is all they do—and they are consistently beaten out for sexcellent roles by Hollywood fartstarts because they have big names (and pricetags) and the classically-trained stage actors are waiting tables, living in cardboard boxes, or sitting in waiting rooms reading “Good Housekeeping” in the background of Celebrex commercials.

Why can’t TV actors do fucking TV, film actors do fucking films, and stage actors do fucking plays? Believe me, I know that live theatre needs to be saved, but putting Helen Hunt in as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” isn’t going to get Broadway off its ventilator and breathing on its own.