Partly Written Yesterday. Partly written today.
Once more they set me loose in NY. This time with a one month unlimited subway card. Rehearsals have been zipping by and tomorrow the whole show will be roughly blocked. A few rewrites have been made and some major changes in the action of certain moments in the script, which are not so much alterations as they are taking what was already there and pushing it past a level that I didn’t have the courage to go to when I first wrote it Freshman year. This is not a PG show, kids.
I went to my director’s LaCucaracha Cabaret somewhere in Brooklyn
And I’m staring at the two chick “twins” with platinum blonde hair that resemble a hot version of a 27 year old Dakota Fanning, fascinated by my present life as I watch my director in his Pierce Brosnan/ Harrison Ford guise with crazy gray Einstein hair sticking out of his black beatnick cap. They’re hitting cowbells and he’s banging bongo drums and I’m surrounded by artsy people in the basement of the Galapogos art space.
I’m on the upper west side now after lugging a suitcase I could easily fit inside of, all through NY in the rain. Jules Feiffer is one floor up and I’m extremely exhausted. I left the Chalfant’s with a Picasso thank you card weighed down by a spork (we’d been discussing useless utensils and he’d never heard of a spork). And Thursday night I dolled myself up in my ballerina Mary-Janes, high ponytail and skirt, ate afghani food and then went swing dancing. I’m extremely amateur but still have some moves from the ballroom dancing class I took and I danced with five plus guys throughout the night. The last one sent me on a rollercoaster dizzying swing spell, where it was almost too much. He had me twirling at loony tune Tazmanian devil intensities.
I will admit that I have had a few morbid moments where I question whether or not I died and am now in heaven because life has never before worked out so well. One of those moments was sitting in Bryant park and reading surrounded by the lovely denizens of NY in their spring dresses sprawled on the grass reading, or lovers holding one another. On a long stretch of grass with a carousel to my left and surrounded on all sides by massive buildings, I realized this was the exact image of what my heaven would be if heaven were more than a manufactured concept by people too afraid to admit that the end is the end (this is my jaded side speaking and I’m allowed to have faith that there is nothing).
I’ve spent a good amount of my time reading a play a day at Dramatist Book Shop. Today I caved and bought “Frozen” and “Closer.”
Then I hit up the Tannen Magic shop. They don’t advertise and to find their location you have to either have been told they exist and looked them up or walked into the sixth floor and down the hall at the random building it’s located in. They’ve been in business since the 1920’s and have sold to the best. I knew about them because I took an honors magic class fall term freshman year. I’ve been reading “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” which is an awesome book, and the character of Joseph Kavalier frequents their shop. So, I thought I’d drop by. I picked up a card trick that cost me $12.50 but was totally worth the eyebrows it’s raised so far. I can now do one coin trick and one card trick. I may purchase a few more tricks before I head back to Philly.
The people I’m staying with right now are wonderful and their son is pleasantly obsessed with public transit systems. Plus they are huge fans of my play Human Adhesive, which they saw as a reading two years ago during the 2004 conference.
BOOM. The head explodes with ego. But not really because I see the reality: Human Adhesive is sitting in a pile of plays collecting dust and totally unproduced.
In other news;
One of the Cohen brothers lives in the building across the street and playwright Tina Howe lives around here as well.
And life continues to be pretty good despite another impending rewrite lurking in the shadows and general exhaustion.