It’s Halloween, and this year for Halloween what we got was rain. And thus only a total of five trick-or-treaters. I took my dogs out for a walk in that rain and they weren’t happy about it either.

So instead of the joy of getting up every couple of minutes and oohing and aahing over the clever costumes showing up at my front door and trying to scare small children, I set about preparing for the final Thanksgiving in my current house. Last year I cooked everything from scratch,  including several exotic sides, but while that was certainly a triumph, it was also an ordeal. I’ve already got enough going on this year, as related earlier, so I figured I’d preorder a “Fully Prepared Holiday Meal,” so that’s what I started to do.

Or, at least, tried to.

Tried to because very quickly I saw that things are very very different than where they were last year. Instant sticker shock.

Yes, I’ve grown accustomed to the shrinkflation in chewing gum. The flavor I like, Trident Mint Bliss, once upon a time had 20 sticks in its little case, in two rows of 10. Then it became 16 sticks. Last night, opening a new pack while my wife and I were waiting for a play to start, I pointed out to her that it now contains seven sticks in each row. That’s 14. Down from 20. “You’re kidding!” she gasped, taking a look for herself.

One night last month after leaving the gym, I had a hankering for some cereal. I’m not normally a cereal eater, but I do have decades of buying cereal for my children. This right here put a stop to my hankering. 

Yes, that’s $8.49 for a box of cereal. Did I have $8.49? Sure. But was I going to spend it on what’s mostly a box of air? No.

So of course I drove over to another supermarket and found this, but it was still beyond the price I was willing to pay. And meanwhile I’d probably spent a dollar’s worth of gasoline.

But it turned out that my biggest shock would wait until tonight.

Because tonight, I discovered that the Fully Prepared Holiday Meal that I was fully prepared to preorder and heat up and serve is no longer the Fully Prepared Holiday Meal I remember. It used to cost $89 and come with

And if I’m not mistaken, the turkey is smaller. This one, they say, serves 6. Well, the one I bought two years served eight and we had leftovers. So I would have to buy two of these, or add a beef roast or something, and that’s going to further drive up the price.

• a turkey
• a cannister of gravy
• stuffing
• mashed potatoes
• a spinach casserole
• a large side dish of green beans
• a tub of cranberry sauce
• and rolls

Now it’s $129.99 (need those 99 cents!), and it comes with the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the cranberry sauce… and that’s it. No casserole, no green beans, no rolls. 

So then I started looking for other places to order a Fully Prepared Holiday Meal. The pricing on those was alarming, with most running $300-$400. I’m sorely tempted to get the Smoked Turkey Combo from a barbecue place near me, but I’m not sure my guests are going to like the sides (collard greens, sweet potato mash, and cornbread stuffing). At least the turkey will be large enough.

I can’t see shelling out $350 for a Fully Prepared Holiday Meal when instead I could cook it all up myself while day drinking. But I may change my mind just before the day, being back from two weeks overseas and doing things like riding camels in one country and dodging rioters in the other. We’ll have to see.

This Halloween season, the scary thing is how much stuff I’ve accumulated in 30 years of living in the same house.

And in two decades before that.

And what to do with it.

Much of this stuff results from having done a lot of writing since I was, oh, eight years old or so, and long before the age of easy digital storage. This photo is of 23 boxes of my writing and correspondence, dating back to the 1970s. And there are another 10 banker’s boxes with similar material still in my home office.

As well as 13 bookcases of books.

And 10 boxes of documents and press clips related to my nonprofit career.

And 50 long boxes of comic books.

And all my musical equipment.

And 31 pairs of shoes. (The latest pair arrived today, and I love them. Here’s what they look like.)

And about three dozen tour shirts from bands I’ve seen, and another 40 t-shirts, and a couple dozen dress shirts, and five or six suits, and my ski jacket and ski pants, and about 30 polos… and all of that is AFTER pruning. Yes, the “yard sale” pile is piling up.

Much more of it has to go, because I’m putting my house up for sale in February. I have a new wife, and I stay with her four nights a week (sometimes five), but it’s just not enough. When I’m over in my house rather than in her house, I miss her. So I’m working on moving in with her full-time, and figuring out how much of my stuff can go with me.

My good friend Claude has been a big help. I gave Claude a list of all my stuff, plus the timeframe I’m working from, plus the layout of my intended new home office with my extremely cherished and attractive new wife, and Claude has been just the sort of tough-talking friend you would hope for, telling me:  Here’s what’s moving with you; here’s what needs to be sold or gifted; and here’s what needs to go into storage.

Having to rent a storage unit presents a painful reality. Renting storage is one of the worst financial decisions one can make. Sure, not paying your full credit-card balance is higher on the list (love that 29% interest rate), but I never do that. Spending $300/month for coffee at Starbucks is another (and I never do that either). But having a storage unit is pretty dumb, too. I have, at times, talked friends out of their storage units by saying this:  “You’ll spend $4,000 a year just storing junk you should have gotten rid of. You’ll probably do it for three years. You could buy that stuff all over again if you ever missed it, and for a lot less than $12,000. Just get rid of it all.” Smart words. I somehow like to think they’re not applicable to me.

Now, I am indeed working on deaccessioning many of the books  (ouch!), and I can sell 80% of the comic books (ouch again!) later. But, Claude, as well as my friends Doug and Dennis, pointed out that I’m not storing furniture and the like — it’s all of those personal documents, which are irreplaceable artifacts from my life and career. Theoretically, I could digitize them — but I have no time to do that between now and the end of the year, especially with my overseas two-week honeymoon starting in six days. So now I’ll be the guy paying for storage. Depending on what I’m looking for in a setup, and the overall size, I’ll be spending between $174 and $400 a month. Maybe part of why I’m posting this is so that I can publicize the dumbness of this and get it all resolved more quickly and the storage space de-rented sooner.

As for planning out my upcoming destination, Claude has done a floor plan for me, and placed my desk and the desk return, and the three bookcases I can accommodate, and the file cabinets I can take, all in what looks like a reasonable and sensible fashion. My new home office will be tidier — honest! — and more sensibly and neatly kitted out. 

Next, I just need Claude’s help writing a plan for what I’m going to do with all the books and comics and clothes and shoes I’m going to acquire over the next 30 years.

Anniversaries can be scary: You ask yourself, HOW long have I been doing this?!?!?

In 2006, I was doing some consulting for a nice guy who owned a marketing agency, mostly coming up with ideas and pitching them to his clients and prospects, plus writing and editing. One day when I was visiting his office, he, being a good guy, told me that he had kindly set up a personal little website for me, and it included a blog, and I could have it all for free it I wanted it.

And here we are, 20 years to the day since the debut of that blog.

As you can tell from looking at it, I’ve done just about nothing with the design since then. Now that I own a marketing agency of myself (with a terrific partner), an agency celebrating its own 20th anniversary next June 1, I had someone on our team update the headshot some months ago, but that’s about it. The blog’s content, however, gets refreshed regularly; in creative bursts, many times a month, but at other times a couple of times a month.

Here’s what makes having this blog magical for me:

• I think about things all the time, and when I’m doing that thinking, I’m doing it as though I’m writing it. It’s a lifelong affliction: the little writer’s voice in the head. Yes, I keep a journal, and have done so for many years. But posting it here means I can search for it and maybe use it in other writing. (Even so, I have considered starting a Zettelkasten in my copious spare time.)
  
• Posting it here also means that it can be read by other people (unlike my handwritten journals). Every writer you know is an attention whore, and playwrights especially. I love it when I hear an audience react to one of my plays, but when I can’t have that, I love looking at my traffic stats for this blog. (When I’m actively posting, this blog I gets about 3,000 to 8,000 people a month.)
  
• Posting here also means I get comments from readers. In the theatre, that comment is the audience laughing in the right places, or sighing or moaning or gasping in the right places, or angrily pitching a fit. I’ve had all those responses and can remember some quite clearly. One time, a woman literally fell out of her seat laughing. Another time, an outraged Irish man stood up and demanded who could have written this garbage about people — without knowing that the garbage-writer was sitting next to him. (Part of me still loves him.) With the blog, comments fill that need, so I love it when I get comments. The conversation is everything.
  
• Many times now, as I’ve written on arcane topics from my somewhat varied life, I’ve gotten comments from other people who’ve searched on the web and founding nothing about that subject… except my blog post. When I wrote here about The Little Art Theatre that was an independent-film haven out in the woods near my birthplace in Southern New Jersey that my friends and I frequented in the 1980s, the son of the couple who opened it wrote to me with gratitude; he could find no other mention anywhere online. It was gratifying to hear from him. I’ve also heard from people about Bill-Dale Marcinko, an odd but talented fanboy writer and provocateur who bloomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s but evidently fell victim to his own oddness and tragically perished in a house fire. I’ve written here about him, and gotten several comments and emails from people in response, including just last month. It’s nice to find out that I wasn’t the only person the late and obscure Bill-Dale made an impression on.
  
• Posting things here also means that I can stop thinking about them. I can let them go, knowing they’ll be here if or when I want to find them.
  
• On top of that, posting here means that I could gather a bunch of these words I’ve written into something larger, if some day I decide to.

It’s been a thrill to be doing this for 20 years. With any luck, I’ll be doing it another 20 years, and maybe beyond that.

This, by the way, is the 2763rd post since I started. Here’s to the next 2763.

Not Glen Jupin. But close enough.

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I went to a late-night screening of “The House of Dark Shadows,” the first of two movies drawn from the 1960s gothic horror television soap opera, using the same cast and crew (but somehow not most of the continuity). 

The screening was hosted by the comedian and former “Simpsons” writer Dana Gould, who is about the same age as I am and who also grew up watching the show and loving it. I don’t know why some kids grow up running away from scary things while others among us grow up running toward them. When I was a kid, in the top 10 of what I wanted to do any time I could was to go to Brigantine Castle, the haunted-house attraction then on a pier near where I grew up, where minimum-wage kids and would-be actors would enact various scary scenes and jump out at you from darkened corners. Other children, including my two cousins visiting once from Pennsylvania, set a few feet into it and then ran out screaming. Most years, I still go to Knotts Scary Farm or, last year, Universal Horror Nights, but I’ve got to say, I miss Brigantine Castle.

Dana Gould and I continue to be “Dark Shadows” fanboys. After the screening, we compared notes about behind-the-scenes trivia we’d learned over the years. I shared with him how unhappy Jonathan Frid was with the movie because the conflicted vampire he played, Barnabas Collins, was not conflicted on this screen — he was pure evil — and that was why Frid refused to do the sequel. (Instead, it focused on the Collins family’s werewolf.) Dana topped me by sharing his most recent personal conversation with Kathryn Leigh Scott, now 82, who played Maggie Evans. About 30 of us showed up for this screening, which let out just before midnight, and most of us were eager to keep talking about the show and what it meant to us when we were kids.

Thinking about all this reminded me once again of Glen Jupin.

Glen Jupin was the little boy who when we were each about six years old, was the daily impediment to my viewing of “Dark Shadows.” My grandmother would pick us both up from kindergarten or first grade and watch us in the afternoons while our mothers worked. Our television desires could not have been more different. We know what I wanted to watch every day from Monday through Friday at 3:30 p.m. But Glen Jupin wanted to watch middle-aged people do kiddy voices and play around with puppets. Once in a while, I’d get my way, but all too often I was thwarted because he’d complain my show was too scary, and then get my grandmother involved.

Tonight, I wasted about 20 minutes searching online for Glen Jupin. What had happened to him? Had he stayed in southern New Jersey? Had he amounted to anything? Was he somehow now blocking other people from their enjoyment?

In all my searching, I could find only one reference online to Glen Jupin. It turned out to be my own blog. It seems that 14-and-a-half years ago, I was even then complaining about Glen Jupin and his… his… kiddishness.

Some things you just never get over.

And, to a small degree, in an ironic twist straight from an old EC horror comic, I’ve accidentally immortalized Glen Jupin.

Thor, upon getting the news

Like so many others in our country, this American is about to lose his health care.

I speak, of course, of my team member Thor.

Thor has been with us about 10 years. His references were strong, he was quite eager for the position, and his initial interview with our team member Xena went well. Xena has done an excellent job heading up security; we’ve had absolutely no break-ins while she’s been on duty, and no one has entered our location or even come close without her sounding the alarm. Still, we thought she’d perform better with a junior member of the team, one she could mentor and, frankly, lord over — clearly a psychological imperative with her; as is done with many an office bully, we work around her. Sure enough, their partnership has thrived as they’ve divvied up duties well, with Xena warding off strangers in the manner of a warrior princess and Thor, despite being for some reason named after the god of Thunder, serving as a friendly ambassador who sits in on all meetings and smooths the way.

But: Imagine my surprise today when I was informed that our benefits provider is, essentially, kicking Thor off the health insurance policy. They’ve made an adjustment now that he’s over 70 (13 in dog years) and are offering $5,000 in annual coverage, with a $500 deductible, for a robust demand of a $365/month premium. It’s blatant age discrimination, and I’m shocked that it’s legal.

Now, anyone doing the math can see quite readily that we would be spending $4380 a year, plus not recouping the $500 deductible, for a total cost of $4880 — for a potential net benefit of just $120. Sometimes one has to make hard decisions, but this was not one of those times. Only a fool would agree to this (which makes me think that a certain stripe of voter will indeed be signing up for it).

Thor’s health insurance runs out effective end of September. We’re all just glad that he recently completed the extensive dental work he needed (cost: about $1600 had it been without insurance). Although, before he grew accustomed to his new dentition, it was strange to see him with his tongue hanging out — but we don’t judge. We respect everyone.

Will Thor be on his own, now that he joins the ranks of the uninsured? Because an Australian Shepherd who was with us previously once rang up about $1200 in emergency suturing years ago after a nasty run-in with a Rottweiler, I know Thor would never be able to simply turn up at an emergency room without paying his bill. 

I’m soft-hearted. I wish the best for everyone, and I believe that everyone deserves health care. And the particulars in this case pull at me. Here we have someone who’s been on the job for almost his entire life, with nary a complaint, and never a day off. We will see him through right to the end, no matter what any damn insurance company chooses to say about it.

I just hope that his eventual medical bills don’t spell the end of us.

On Sunday, I stopped at the deli counter of my supermarket and asked for two pounds of the blackened peppercorn bacon.

I like this bacon because of the coarse ground pepper and the hickory seasoning.

The guy weighed out a pound and a third, and then there wasn’t any more in the case. But he offered to go inside to the back of the store and get some, then headed inside.

An attractive blonde walked up to the counter and after a bit, said to me, “Is anyone helping you?”

“Yes,” I said, “the guy went into the back to get something for me.” Then after a pause, I added, “But it’s nice of you to look out for my wellbeing.”

She laughed, then said, “You’re cute.”

I said, “My wife thinks so too.”

She said, “You are, with that personality.”

I added, “But other times, she just finds me annoying.”

Good friend Larry Nemecek and me celebrating Comic-Con 2026.

When I was 11 years old, my mother insisted to my father that we needed to move. They sold our house in Devonshire, NJ, along with the house he’d built next door for his mother, and we moved 12 miles away, to Galloway, NJ, then known as Absecon Highlands.

All so that I might have some friends.

Where we’d been, there wasn’t anyone for me to play with. We weren’t close to school (so my grandmother drove me there every day), and no other kids lived around us. In front of our house was a strip of highway, while in back of us were acres and acres of thick woods split briefly by mostly unused railroad tracks. Occasionally, my dad would get together with his best friend Gus, and I’d see Gus’s son Glenn, but Glenn was a few years older and not really a friend.

My true friends were comic books. 

I had inherited a few from my eldest brother (much older than me, and long out of the house), and any chance I got, I’d add more. I lived, breathed, ate, and dreamed comic books.

After we moved, I made friends with the boy across the street, the boy at the end of the street, the boy in the house to the left, and even, occasionally, some kids at school — a school I could walk to. (And I started to realize that actual real-life friendship didn’t quite work the way it did in Marvel comics, where the Thing and the Human Torch were constantly squabbling, and where Spider-Man was a wise-cracking jackass. If you know me in person, you know this is a lesson I still haven’t fully absorbed. Unfortunately.)

Once I had friends, I realized how important friendship is to me. Because now I knew what it meant:  A friend was someone you could do things with together. You could race your dirtbikes out in the woods with friends. You could build a treehouse together. You could go see a movie together. You could dig underground tunnels with a friend. (It collapsed on a third friend. The other two of us frantically dug him out.) You could go camping with friends. You could, on occasion, get into a fistfight with a friend. After a few years, you could talk about girls with your friends. At some point, older friends could sneak you into bars before you’d reached drinking age. The options were endless.

Every year since 1988, I’ve attended San Diego Comic-Con, and from the start, I’ve been doing it with friends. That first year there were two of us. Some years, we’ve had as many as eight of us joining up to attend together, and sometimes I’ve brought my children, when they were actual children, or teens, or even into adulthood. But recently I’ve wondered if maybe this year or that year wouldn’t be my last year. Thirty-eight years is a long time to be doing something; was it time to let it go? I still read comic books, but most of the creators I’d care to see, meet, or listen to have died off, and attending this thing is expensive and quite an effort. Whenever you plop down 150,000-plus people in one constrained area, it’s got to be a bit trying.  To say little of the expense:  easily $1,000 (that’s the hotel room alone). Plus $80 just to park (!), plus the meals, the drinks, and whatever I might buy.

But last night, in our room with two good friends of decades (I’ve known Travis for 30 years, and Larry for 20) who’ve also been coming to this event off and on for decades, as we talked and laughed and joked until two in the morning, and shared how the original “Star Trek” so thoroughly programmed us into believing in the future and shuddering at the recognition of just how far away from the reality of a peace-building, cooperative Federation we are right now, I recalled just why this event is so important to me.

It’s about comic books AND friends.

I was proud of my son when he joined the U.S. Army.

But because his enrollment happened to be during the first presidential term of a man completely unaligned with the actual principles of the nation, I felt compelled to say this to him: “The ideals of the nation are worth defending.”

Those ideals include Liberty, Equality, Democracy, and the Rule of Law.

Which the man currently in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with.

Which means that now, more than ever, on its 250th birthday, the nation needs the support of those of us who realize that.

Do what you can. Don’t give up. There are lots of resources and actions available with a little internet searching.

And don’t despair. Celebrate. Especially today.

As the writer Aurin Squire posted earlier today on Facebook:

“Shocked at all these international World Cup fans making videos about America…and loving it. It’s not everyone, but it’s 90% raves. Ranch dressing, Buc-ee’s, Texas BBQ, and overall hospitality. Apparently, a lot of them think Americans are, on the whole, more optimistic, more friendly, more encouraging, more likely to hustle.

“There’s a saying: if you want to hate America, stay online. If you want to love America, drive across a few states. And I’ve done that a few times…

“I guess these FIFA fans are reminding me of my cross-country road trips and all my small-town excursions over the years. And making me feel proud. Yes, yes, I can go into all my issues with this country. But sometimes it’s good to acknowledge privilege and be grateful. Grateful for what the ancestors built and the threads that keep this weird, wild, enormous thing called the USA together.”

Celebrate the successes — we’ve had many. Celebrate the ideals. Celebrate the opportunity that is America — including, now, the opportunity to once again change it for the better.

The first time I met Mel Brooks was in October of 1995, at Buster Keaton’s 100^th birthday party. Buster, being dead, was not there.

At the time, I was producing a play by a writer named Kevin Barry, of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Kevin was in town, and one evening after rehearsal I invited him to join me for Buster’s birthday celebration, set for the now-shuttered Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood. Kevin, like me, was a big fan of Buster Keaton, so he eagerly joined.

When we got there and bought our tickets and inched into our seats in the middle row, I found myself seated next to an attractive lady of a certain age with a towering faded red updo. I immediately recognized her as Eleanor Keaton, Buster’s widow, who had been a dancer and then Buster’s onstage costar when he returned to doing live performances late in his career. She was happy to be recognized, and happy to share the odd tidbit now and then as a few of Buster’s movies were screened, asides like, “Oh, we did that bit in Paris. The French loved it.” Kevin, meanwhile, was agog that I was seated next to Eleanor Keaton and that she and I were conversing.

After the screening, and after the sold-out audience ate Buster’s birthday cake, Kevin and I were standing outside when someone started talking about Buster’s career. I heard something not quite right, so in a friendly manner, I contributed some information that started with “Actually….”

And that was the first time I met Mel Brooks. The person he was slightly miseducating was his wife — Anne Bancroft. I had been watching Buster Keaton’s work all my life, since my father introduced me to his movies when I was about 6, and had been coming to every Buster screening for a few years at Silent Movie, and had read every available Buster biography there was. Not quite an authority, but certainly an ardent fan. Listening to me for a minute, Mel called out to someone else, “Hey, come listen to this — this guy knows a lot.” And that’s how Dom DeLuise joined the conversation. It was extremely meta to be discussing silent movies in front of the Silent Movie with three of the stars of the film “Silent Movie.” Mel Brooks was gracious, warm, and eager to know more — three traits that seem to come up every time he’s mentioned.

When we got in my car, my playwright from Ohio was thunderstruck, and I gathered from him that he thought this was just another night for my life in Los Angeles. As if.

The next time I met Mel Brooks was in 2003, when the stage version of “The Producers” was set to open in Los Angeles. At the time, I was CEO of the performing arts league, and I had assigned myself the task of writing the story about the show for our magazine. I got to the press junket and spoke to the co-writer of the book, Tom Meehan; and the director and choreographer Susan Stroman; and co-stars Jason Alexander and Martin Short (Jason Alexander was very deeply discoursing on his Acting Method, having confused the situation with performing Brecht, while Martin Short, as a tonic, was loose and funny and knew none of this was that important); and… I kind of ran out of time to speak with Mel Brooks. I’d said hello earlier, but there were still a clutch of people to see him, and I figured I’d gotten enough for my story. So I left.

The next day, I was at my office and on the phone with my friend Doug talking about who-knows-what, when my assistant buzzed in and said, “Mel Brooks is on line 2 for you.”

Which gave me the opportunity to say to Doug, “Gotta go. Mel Brooks is on the other line.”

I still cherish that.

Here was Mel’s opening line on the phone to me:  “How did I miss you?”

Perhaps the funniest person of the past 100 years, as acclaimed recently by The Atlantic and AFI and just about everyone else presenting him with centenary accolades, and a movie star and producer and honestly legendary figure in practically all aspects of entertainment for almost all of those 100 years, was being apologetic. He figured it was his fault. 

I’ve seen him a few other times, too, although not recently (he being, well, 100 years old). I believe I saw him in 2007 at the memorial service for Bill Idelson, a sitcom writer and actor from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (he played Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman) who had doubled as one of my writing professors at USC; I definitely spoke with Carl Reiner there. (It being a small town, Bill’s wife Seemah was also a performer in a play I produced at Moving Arts.)  For a while there, Mel Brooks was someone I kept running into at events and performances and awards shows. Like Tom Hanks, who I saw so frequently at the Taper and the Geffen that his face showed him starting to think he knew me. 

Having met some celebrities in my 38 years here in Los Angeles, here’s what I want you to know about Mel Brooks. In a town where it’s almost required for celebrities to put on airs, to be aloof, to be indifferent while all-knowing, Mel Brooks has always seemed humble but driven, the funniest and cleverest guy at the party — while still an everyday guy (who just happened to marry a beautiful Oscar-winning movie star). 

Maybe his approachability was key to his success.

This spring and summer, I’ve carved out more time than I’ve had recently to work on my other job: being a playwright. This weekend is already serving as a wonderful reminder of why it’s great being a playwright. Oh, you’ll get lots of boo hoo hoos from playwrights (Tony Kushner once complained about how poorly playwrights are paid, even as he was loading a new $10,000 couch into his townhouse), but in many ways, it’s a dream job. Or avocation. Or hobby. Take your pick.

Based upon my experience of being a playwright, dating back a long, long time to my first play getting staged when I was 15 and in high school, here are just a handful of the reasons it’s great.

• Nothing beats hearing people laugh at all of your jokes, in the right place and at the right time, without prompting by your friends or lovers. (In my experience, your family does no prompting. More likely they’ll sit there like Easter Island statues, afraid it’s about them.)
• It can be nice to win an award now and then.
• When you don’t, it’s also comforting to know that the judges were wrong.
• Usually, when you fly in to see your play, everyone there will treat you the way you wish everyone everywhere treated you: with respect and reverence, and enormous admiration for your wit. It’s even better than how your dog does it.
• Sometimes you get to be a visiting artist or teacher or judge or lecturer, usually in a bucolic location that couldn’t quite get Suzan Lori-Parks, but they’re happy to make do with you, and they buy you drinks.
• Whether or not they see it, an actual production helps your family understand “what you’re trying to do.” Maybe.
• You get to work with actors. Sure, some of them are as bad at it as you are (or, inconceivably, even worse), but most of the time you get mostly good people, and the surprisingly good people lift your material up to even greater heights, and you get credit. If you saw a play that really wasn’t much of anything, but you enjoyed the hell out of it — that’s what happened: the actors. And, seriously, there are terrific actors everywhere. I’ve had plays produced in a little town in the interior gold-rush area of California, and in the backwoods hilltops of Arkansas, and both times the locals were great. I salute them!
• Also, the small-town people have a greater tolerance for outlandishness than you think. I think they even expect it, like: “Hey, this is an artist, so we shoulda figured on this.” So just have fun.
• Every time you get a production, you’ve set up a little outpost somewhere on the globe. People there now know you, and you know them! (Remembering their names can be a separate matter.)
• Those people in the outposts? Sometimes they’ll let you crash at their place. Even in pricey places like Manhattan. I’ll say no more.
• You make lifelong friendships with some of the actors and directors and designers. (And lifelong enemies with some of the others.)
• If it’s a production where you live, you’ll get to learn who your true friends are: They’re the ones who bought tickets.
• In your mind, you’re communing with Shakespeare, Brecht, Stoppard, and whoever wrote “Bob’s Holiday Office Party.” What could they learn from you? (You’d love to share with Brecht your better ending for “The Good Person of Szechwan.”)
• As a playwright, you will listen more closely to what other people say. Of course, you’ll need to determine for yourself whether or not this is a benefit.
• After you have even a little playwriting income, it can be surprising what’s tax deductible. I’m pretty sure that cigars qualify as office supplies.
• Big benefit: You can swear off drugs. That audience response is your drug.

This is just the starter list. There are many more delights (such as an entree to meeting famous people you’d like to meet), so I could go on. But I think now I’m going to go on to working on my new play, so that maybe I can add more of them in the coming months and years.