Once upon a time, I wrote book reviews for the Los Angeles Times — including for the holiday book section, which made recommendations for Christmas gifts. (Remember book sections?) Each review had to be 100 words or fewer.

So, while I’ve written in 100-word spaces before, and even shorter (winning awards for captions and headlines in a previous life), I never thought to sum up my entire life in 100 words.

But that’s the challenge issued to me by longtime pal Mike Folie, who is a talented and heartfelt playwright and writer whose work I’ve always admired. (His one-man show about his sadly departed wife was breathtaking. Seriously. I gasped at the end.)

Mike shared with me that Garrison Keillor did this exercise:  Tell your life story in 100 words or less.Here’s Keillor’s example, shared by Mike:

My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.

And here’s mine:

I grew up woods-adjacent, with a barren stretch of highway for frontage and endless forest and train tracks and no people behind me. Comics and books became my only friends, and I switched schools a lot. Accordingly, I became a writer. In my teens, I started getting published and started my first business, and discovered theatre in high school. I married a good woman and had three good children and after a long long while married a different good woman. I also did a lot of teaching, some of which I’m proud to say stuck on some writers.

Mine may require an update or appendix in years to come — and I certainly hope so.

What’s yours?

In a paradox worthy of Schrodinger and his cat, I’ve now seen the film “Eno” twice — except really I have seen, once each, two films named “Eno.” 

That’s because “Eno,” a documentary about the brilliant music producer and musician of sorts Brian Eno, is constructed anew on every viewing. Yes, every single time it is screened, a computer with the name Brain One (you’ll easily figure out the anagram) pulls from 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive to assemble this latest version of the movie. 

(For more about all this, click here.) 

Meaning that what two friends and I saw in Glendale in March and what I saw with one of those friends, plus my fiancée and my son, two weeks ago here in Los Angeles, are related but different. They’re cousins of the same film.

They were also both fascinating, enjoyable… and uplifting. Because while most of the press has been about the process, the true star is Eno himself:  his disruptive creative process, his interest in both nature and electronics, and his pragmatic optimism. 

My friend Trey and I are decades-long fans of Brian Eno and his work, as a founding member of Roxy Music, as a solo artist, as a collaborator with David Byrne, John Cale and others, and as a producer for Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Ultravox, and countless others. We also, some years ago, went to see Eno’s installation at California State University Long Beach  of “77 Million Paintings,” which featured endlessly randomly generated paintings with endlessly randomly generated music by Eno himself. We also caught his talk about that and other things (like his Long Now movement).

So we are fans. Big fans.

After seeing “Eno” a second time, we both walked out saying we’d like to see it again. Unfortunately, it usually involves getting to the right place at the right time — because Brain One has to be onsite to work its magic.

Until now.

Now we, and you, and everyone, can see “Eno” thanks to this special showing:

On January 24^th, there will be a global streaming event, “Eno 24.”  Anyone, anywhere in the world, including viewers in any time zone on the planet will be able to watch multiple iterations of the film and much more.

Here’s the link:  https://www.ohyouprettythings.com/new-products/eno24

Ready to start off feeling energized and productive with your writing?

Come join us when we reconvene the Words That Speak playwriting workshop just six weeks from now!

Come join us for 3 hours a week, every Saturday from 9:30 to 12:30 IN PERSON at a real theatre as we share pages and fellowship and have a lot of laughs and learn and grow together.

Every week you’ll bring about 7 pages of your new play, hear them read out loud, and gain helpful, positive feedback from other writers committed to your success.

• It’s a community.
• It’s a friendship group.
• It’s supportive.
• It’s proven to work. (For 32 years now, resulting in many, many productions.)

Just $345 gets you a weekly session with a circle of writer friends – plus outings together. (We’ll pick some plays to see together and discuss afterward.)

Questions? Let’s talk. Email me or text me at 818-288-2417 and we’ll have a call.

Best,

Lee

Workshop details:

• Saturdays, 9:30 to 12:30, 1/18 to 3/8.
• Location: Moving Arts theatre, 3191 Casitas Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90039 (Atwater Village).
  • There’s a huge, FREE parking lot
• Every week we bring a set of about 7 pages for each playwright, including me and you
  • If you don’t have something you’re already working on, it’d be great to start something and bring it
  • But if not, please feel free to just show up for week one and we’ll do a writing exercise to get you going
• Fee: $345

How to sign up: 

• Email me at lee@leewochner.com

First, always get a good cut. Most supermarkets allow dogs in, but they don’t offer it themselves in the meat department. Not a problem, though:  If you aren’t fattening one up yourself at home, you can usually pick up a stray, and your local pound has plenty of dogs for the taking at very reasonable prices. One way or another, every dog has its day.

Once you’ve procured some dog, shave off all the hair. You do not want the hair of a dog that bit you. Sure, it would burn off in the grill, but you want to season the meat.

Dog is quite fatty and extremely fragrant, like a cross between beef and mutton. You can lean into that by sticking with kosher salt, rosemary and thyme, or a good lemon marinade will have you barking up a different tree. It depends on your individual taste.

Make sure you remove the giblets. You can roast those for breakfast or snacking later, or feed them to other dogs as part of fattening them up. It truly is a dog eat dog world.

As for cooking, roast it like a side of lamb, or section it for the grill. Don’t deepfry. Even if your cut was mean as a junkyard dog, you want it tender on the plate.

Serve it with red wine (a nice burgundy should do) and potatoes and invite some friends. This is a doggone good dinner that’ll leave your guests howling.

I’m staying solo at what seems like a motel campground, the sort with separate little bungalows and maybe a play area for kids and a firepit where all the bikers and meth heads gather ‘round.

In my room, I notice water coming out of the wall outlet flush with the nightstand. At first it’s a trickle. I start gently brushing away my pocket detritus – notes, receipts, dental picks, gum, a few coins. Then the water begins to surge, then shoot out of the outlet. I can’t figure out how this is happening. Is someone playing a trick of some sort? Is there someone on the other side of the wall with a hose or even a power washer? Water is flying across the room, bombarding the opposite wall. 

I go outside and walk around and see that my room is, like the others, a standalone — there is no one playing a trick, because there is no adjoining room behind mine. The little utility shed, which might include the water works, is far off. This really is a mystery.

So I go back into the room, avoid all the water, and call the front desk. Whatever is happening isn’t affecting the phone. They promise to send someone over. When he arrives at the door, I’m surprised to see it’s raining outside. We’re having massive fires (again) in southern California right now, and rain would be welcome. He’s wearing tie-dye, and is someone I’d been hanging out with at the firepit. (Of course I was hanging out at the firepit. No meth for me, though.) He looks at this situation with mild interest, making me think this has happened before, and says I can ask the front desk if they can give me another room. This, because I think he doesn’t know what’s happening here, let alone how to fix it.

Then I woke up.

It took a full minute to realize that that had been a dream and that no, I didn’t need to deal with water gushing into my room.

Throughout my school career, I could never get my locker to open, at any of those schools. Oh, I always knew the combination to my combination lock, but just could never get the lock to work. In my second high school (yes, I went to two — and didn’t like either), my friend Tyndall would just unlock the damn thing for me and save me the aggravation of the struggle and him the irritation of having to hear about it. Finally, in my adulthood, I wised up and started buying locks that work off letters and that don’t need some dial to be turned; you just rotate the letters into position to spell out your secret word.

Proving yet again that I’m more of a word guy.

I share my background intentionally before relating this anecdote.

Not too long ago at the gym I belong to, there was a young guy in the locker room struggling with his lock. Trying the combination on the lock again and again, then spinning the dial to start over, and still not getting it. I could see he was about an inch away from heading to the front desk to ask them to get the bolt cutters.

Then he yelled out, “I got it! I got it!”

Then he added — and you’ll see I noted this — “I got it! 41-12-36! It opened!”

The good news: Well, next time he has this problem everybody who was there will be able to help.

The bad news: Well, we’ll see if they help themselves sometime he’s not there.

With apologies to the band Oasis for paraphrasing one of their album titles, I will definitely maybe (not) be seeing them on their reunion tour.

That’s because I saw one of the two Gallagher brothers in the band, the far less talented one, Liam, five years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, as the opener for The Who.

I wrote about that experience — including paying forty-eight dollars for two pretzels and two beers! — back here, but figure I’ll quote my appraisal then of Liam:

Let me just say, whoever booked Liam Gallagher to open is a genius, because he and his band are so terrible that they make The Who look all the more brilliant! Large barnyard animals sing better than Gallagher and bring more to a stage presence as well, and his band did nothing to hide this fact. He seemed to have two drummers on stage — one of them also named Gallagher, so I’m assuming that particular drummer isn’t on the tour purely on talent — and I’m reasonably certain I can play drums better than they… and I don’t play the drums.

I’m shocked that, ten years after the final death knell of Oasis, Liam still has a career. Of sorts.

I well remember enduring Liam’s off-key (well, flat) delivery and his utter lack of stage presence (him bent over unmoving like a broken-winged crow for the entire 45 minutes) until finally my friend Bridget and I just started laughing about it. I’ve seen many bad acts in my life (have I mentioned late-stage Meat Loaf lately?), but Liam is the only one of them mounting a mega-reunion under the false pretense that he can hit a note.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, I saw (Jeff Lynne’s) E(lectric) L(ight) O(rchestra) on Saturday night, and having just seen that phenomenal show that was Well Worth The Fee I Put Out For It (for two tickets rather close up on the floor), I have no intention of squandering any ducats on Oasis, no matter how much I happen to admire a song or two despite Liam Gallagher’s undeserved high self-regard.

To those who admire Oasis, have at it, especially my friends in the UK and Ireland and Europe; I have no judgment. I honestly hope you enjoy your champagne supernova.

Meanwhile, I’m mystified that the far superior Blur, arch-nemeses to Oasis, were reduced to playing the Glass House in Pomona, California recently, capacity 800. It’s perhaps best to remember, Don’t look back in anger.

With drive-through fast-food joints, it’s like it’s their way or the highway.

I don’t go through a lot of these, but in just the past three weeks I’ve gone through two of them at night neither one of them got things right.

A couple of weeks ago, my fiancée K. and I were coming home from Orange County at about 8 o’clock on a weekend. We’d had a glorious time in the pool and the jacuzzi with her sister and some friends at a private club down there, and lunch now seemed like a long time ago, so we went through the drive-through of a nearby McDonald’s. I ordered a plain cheeseburger with mustard, a small fries, and a small Coke with lots of ice.

I was a block away when I took my first sip of the soda and identified it as diet Coke. Plus, it was medium-sized.

Drove back around and took it inside (seemed quicker) and politely told the young man behind the counter that this was diet and not — and before I could continue, he just thrust an empty cup at me.

Okay, so I filled it with Coke and ice and dropped the other into the trash.

Got back into the car, sipped it a bit, drove a mile or two, dug into the sandwich and discovered that it was some sort of burger with everything on it. I figured I’d just eat it because now I was onto the freeway. Where my fiancée asked, reaching into the bag, “Did you order Chicken McNuggets too?” 

So: I’d been given the entirely wrong order. Somewhere, someone was unhappy with a small Coke and a plain cheeseburger with extra mustard and no fries while I was gnawing away at Chicken McNuggets I hadn’t ordered.

Last night, we were heading back to the hotel from seeing  Electric Light Orchestra or ELO or Jeff Lynne’s ELO or whatever name they’re going by these days in the Palm Desert opening night performance of their tour in what I tell you was an absolutely stunning, phenomenal performance of great songs sung and played very well indeed and accompanied by a fantastic video- and-laser show. Just incredible, and one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. 

Having had just a bit of salmon and salad for dinner, I was pretty hungry by 11 p.m. when the show ended. So I found a nearby Wendy’s and went through the drive-through. Given my earlier experience (different franchise, different town, but, as with the toddler touching the hot stove, the experience was seared into my brain) I would have gone in, but at 11 p.m. only the drive-through was open. I ordered a plain single but with lots of mustard, a small fries, and whatever they call their little chocolate shake that’s actually just soft-serve ice cream.

The voice at the drive-through says back to me, “Plain single with extra mustard, small fry, medium chocolate Frosty.”

“Yes,” I say, noting that it’s called a “Frosty.” I hear the amount, pull up, and pay.

After a bit, I’m handed back the medium chocolate soft-serve Frosty, then a bag. I look the youngish woman in the window in the eye. “This is a plain single but with lots of mustard, right?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Plain but extra mustard?” I say again.

“Yes.”

“Okay, thanks.”

I drive a mile down the road and when I get to a traffic light I bite into the burger. It’s a double with cheese and no mustard. Zero.

Meanwhile, in the passenger seat, K. is thrilled that I’ve gotten ice cream, or what passes for ice cream. “You know ice cream is my favorite!” she squeals. 

I’m glad someone is happy.

For this year’s Comic-Con, our group was damn lucky to find a place to stay.

Oh, it’s always an ordeal. Which is understandable when you’re bringing more than 150,000 people to San Diego for five days:  They all need a place to stay. But this year seemed even harder than usual, with every single hotel on the Comic-Con reservation site booked, including the regrettable hostels (had to pick one of those once; not pleasant), and even every Airbnb within 15 miles booked. The hotel rooms that were available outside the Comic-Con block were either too small for a party of five or too pricey, or both, with rents of $800/night or more.

So, yes, I was giddy when an availability opened up at the Hacienda Best Western in Old Town. We’d stayed there a few times before over the past 36 years and liked it, rooms are relatively large with two queen beds, it has the requisite hot tub, there are good dining options within walking distance, and it’s a short walk off the train line that stops right across from the convention center. I booked it instantly, and we were all delighted at the news.

Every hotel booking you make is an accommodation you’re making based upon your preferences and your budget. So I went into booking this property knowing that it was in no way comparable with the Marriott suites that my fiancée has accustomed me to, or even the smaller Hiltons (such as Garden Inns) that are perfectly suitable, and that while more than $2,000 for four nights at a Best Western might seem extravagant, given the circumstances it was a deal. (My business partner tells me that at Bottle Rock they lay down $800 a night — but she’s running with a different crowd than fanboys pawing through boxes of moldering old comics and abandoned action figures.) 

We try to keep the Comic-Con trip as low-rent as possible so that our regulars (sometimes five, but usually six or seven of us) can join in. This means approaching the hotel room like a campsite, like you’re camping out with friends. If there are two beds and five people, welp, two people are going to get beds each night and three people are going to camp out on the floor, with the arrangement shifting night by night. You just make sure you take sleeping bags, or you order extra comforters and pillows, or otherwise figure it out. I’ve been doing this since I was 15 or so, one time sharing a room at a convention in New Jersey with three other comics fans and five actual-to-gosh professional comic book artists in 1977, an experience in which one of the esteemed Filipino artists took the bed of the host without paying anything, while I slept under a table and kicked in, I think, five dollars. Ah, good times. The fact that I’m now 62 should make no difference in this sort of arrangement. In fact, even more than it recreating the sense of being a kid again, and camping out, this arrangement helps you stay young at heart, even if it now comes with bourbon poured neat.

The only downside to this annual scenario is the bathroom. Which I will leave to your imagination. We often bark out requests/demands: “I need to be first in there in the morning to make it to my panel!” or “Oh God! Is he already in the shower? I need to GO!!!!” or “Call housekeeping! We’re out of towels!”

In an age of privation, when so many mourn the decline of reliable customer service whether by airlines that leave you stranded in airless airports, restaurants that slip bogus charges such as “kitchen fees” onto your check, and mobile carriers that now make you accept that they will throttle your speed if you use whatever they deem “too much” of their service, we now come to yet another instance:  housekeeping that doesn’t keep house. Under the guise of both the pandemic and “saving the Earth,” the housekeeping at some stayover establishments is even worse than my own at home.

The first two nights, I agreed to sleep on the floor, surrendering one of the beds to my good friend Larry, who is as they say a gentleman and a scholar (specifically of the “Star Trek” universe), who requested it for the first night and then received a boon when I gave it to him for the second night as well. For the third night and fourth nights, it was going to be mine. Other shifting-arounds in the room would take place as well with the remaining queen-size bed and the bonus sofabed, but they were of no import, others having made their own deals. Sleeping on the floor between the two beds like a dog made me feel humble and happy and, I admit, a bit like a martyr (“Look, ye children, upon the sacrifices I will make for friends!”) and, again, took me back to being 15, but with older joints.

Wednesday and Thursday nights, Larry slept in the bed. On Friday morning, I ordered housekeeping. I called the front desk and asked them to please come clean the room, and also asked when I came across housekeeping staff in the walkway outside, and dropped in at the front desk later to remind them. All good. And so when I came back from the Con at some point late-ish on Friday and checked, the beds were made and the bathroom was restocked with towels and what the supermarket politely calls “bath tissue.” Great. I climbed into bed and started reading “Palestine,” a “documentary comic” by Joe Sacco, before finally drifting off to sleep with a new appreciation for the invention of the mattress and box spring.

In the morning after my shower, I brushed my teeth in the little adjoining anteroom so someone else could use the bathroom. There I noticed that the towel hanging there from yesterday, that day of housekeeping, had a little black smudge on it. I recognized it instantly:  a bit of eyeliner courtesy of my daughter, who was a member of our party. She shared that she’d used that towel on Thursday. This was now Friday. And I got a sinking feeling. I climbed back into bed just to read for a bit when I felt something in the sheets, grabbed hold of it, and produced a half-eaten cookie. 

Dread rising, I said, “Larry, did you eat a cookie in bed two nights ago?” 

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Is this it?”

“Looks like it.”

The housekeeping staff had added towels, left in place at least that one used hand towel, and… remade the beds with the same sheets.

With nearly 20 years of adventures together, Larry is a close friend — but sleeping in his soiled sheets? Perhaps too close.

But our friend Paul, a sage who bears two masters degrees in hospitality management, advised us there was one bright side:  “Be glad Larry said that was his cookie. If not, it would’ve been from the guests before us.”

Back in my college days, we had a drinking game called “Hi, Bob.” You would turn on The Bob Newhart Show, and every time a character said, “Hi, Bob!” you’d have to do a shot. Given the number of entrances on that show, I don’t recommend this if you’re no longer college age.

Today being the day that Bob Newhart died, today is yet another time I wish I did a better job of keeping a journal.

Oh, I keep a journal. But I don’t write in it every day, and so I frequently miss the days and details of when something noteworthy happens. 

Like: the evening I met Bob Newhart and had a little conversation with him.

Wish I could remember more of what it was about.

Twenty years ago this October, I was a guest at the 10^th anniversary event for the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. Bob Newhart opened with a 20-minute set in which he was pretty damn funny, and then Richard Carpenter played and sometimes sang, accompanied by a 15-piece band, and different singers from the extended Carpenter family, doing lots of Carpenters songs.

Afterward, everybody lined up onstage for food, served buffet-style. I wound up right behind Mr. Newhart. The line was long and slow, so I think we actually talked for 15 minutes or so as we crept along, plates in hand. As I recall, we mostly talked about the food on the buffet line, with him eyeing the ham steaks with appreciation.

So, I can say I met him. Which is the sort of thing that happens a lot in Los Angeles and environs:  You just meet people. Some of them you just run into and wind up talking to, like Keanu Reeves and Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston (in line at plays), others you’re doing something with (Giancarlo Esposito, Tim Robbins, William H. Macy). Sometimes you’re at the supermarket and you realize you’re talking to James Karen, who appeared in Samuel Beckett’s only movie but who people living on the East Coast from the 1970s through 1990s remember as “the Pathmark Shopping guy.” 

While my association with Bob Newhart was obviously fleeting and unremarkable, in another way my association was longer, that is, about 10 years. That’s because there was another standup comic from that era whom I knew better:  Shelley Berman. Shelley and I both taught in the master’s program in writing at USC. In the late 1950s, Shelley’s standup routine caught fire with a telephone routine:  Just him, on a stool, engaged in a telephone conversation, with us hearing only his side of it. Some years later, Bob Newhart did a bit like that, just him on a stool with a one-sided telephone conversation, but Newhart got more famous for it — and, to be fair, for records that were built out of quite different routines, and for two sitcoms that had nothing to do with that. But for years, Shelley would say, “He stole that from me.” Mentioning Newhart was not a good idea.

I don’t have any opinion about whether or not one can “own” an act with a one-sided telephone, and I should note that I also know a gentleman who absolutely swears that the idea for “The Terminator” was stolen from him by James Cameron. It’s that kind of town.

I just know that Bob Newhart made me laugh a lot for many years, with his standup routines, with his two sitcoms, with his brilliantly funny role in “Elf” and, for 20 minutes, at the Carpenter Center. Even when we were picking up our dinners, he made me laugh. I just wish I could remember in what way.