The great plane theatre conference
The last week of May at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska I’m doing two things I like to do: teaching and judging. I like to teach, and I like to judge. (The latter, at least when it comes to the comportment of elected officials, the relative merits of something artistic, and the personal habits of people who are breezily late and/or ill-mannered.) The conference begins May 24th, and if you’d like to join us, you should click here. If you’d just like to see what I’m teaching, click here. (I’ll be teaching two days, and serving as a panelist throughout the week. And also, if past writing or theatre conferences are any indication, hanging out at pool halls and clubs ’til closing.)
When, late last year, they sent me a very nice email asking me if I would do this, once I ascertained that this in no way conflicted with the San Diego Comic Con (which is in July), I agreed, then set about rearranging my schedule so I could do so. (Among other things, I’m teaching a new class this summer at USC. More about that in a future post.) I also thought: Hey, maybe I’ll drive. As we all know, I love driving that Mustang convertible. I could see wide open stretches of America with the top down. I did that in 2004 stumping in Arizona for John Kerry (he lost). And also, I would have my car. So I looked again at my schedule, both personal and professional, then went to Google maps where I always go now because Mapquest has made it a habit of giving me the longest, slowest, most aggravating, and most often wrong route, and then I discovered something I did not know: Omaha, Nebraska is 1554 miles away. In my mind, it was two states over. No, it’s four states over — in the middle of the country. Who knew? I won’t have enough time to drive there and back, and the nice people at the conference are providing a plane ticket. And so, the plains conference became the plane conference.
I take all this time to relate this story because for me every day is an adventure in discovering what I don’t know, including, to paraphrase Socrates, what I don’t know that I don’t know. I’m eager to visit Nebraska because it’s one of the few states I haven’t been to, but until that fateful day when I looked at the map online, I never had a fixed idea where it is. Now I know it’s next to Iowa. That state I can fix on because it’s next to Illinois, and I’ve been there plenty of times. But Nebraska? I know Springsteen did an album I never wanted to listen to about it. I know that 20 years ago a guy I grew up with who was then a sometimes-dangerous drop-dead drunk once took off for there on some strange odyssey he never allowed himself to discuss again. And… that’s it. I know nothing else about Nebraska. But I’m looking forward to finding out more.