Today in my playwriting workshop there were a couple of scenes that didn’t (yet) convey enough character desperation. Ideally, characters want things, and the more badly they want them, the more desperate they become, and the greater the impact. Just like real life.

At one point I heard myself talking about how desperation colors one’s perceptions. My example came from an experience I had last night.

After seeing the musical “The Dead” at Open Fist Theatre Company, I took my wife to Amoeba Music in Hollywood. I say “took,” because Valorie had never been there. When I told her where we were going, she asked, “Can we buy the new Gnarls Barkley CD?” And I said, “That’s why we’re going there.”

We parked in the underground lot and as we ascended a dank stairwell liberally spattered with band stickers and strewn with giveaway music rags, that feeling came over me again, that feeling I always get when I go to Amoeba. I was instantly reunited with the 16-year-old me who was desperate to get to places like this but had no way to get there. That feeling of my adolescence returned: that feeling that other, far more interesting things were nearly within reach — 60 miles away, in Philadelphia — but so far away, and that already I was missing interesting conversations about important things. I was desperate to get there, or to New York City, and looking back I’m surprised how often I was about to wheedle some way to get there. (Including getting on a bus by myself when I was about 12, for which I’ll always be grateful to my father.)

So last night I said to Valorie, “Isn’t this great? Just look at this!” As far as you could see, there was music — aisle upon aisle of CD’s, new and used, and LPs, and even, as Valorie pointed out, 45s — rock, hip hop, punk, soundtracks, wide swaths of everything from the popular to the obscure. I picked up the out-of-print “Datapanik in the Year Zero” Pere Ubu boxed set, new and unopened, for fifty bucks, as well as a David Bowie disk I’d never heard of, “The Buddha of Suburbia.” Discovering a “new” non-compilation Bowie album seemed astonishing. In fact, all of Amoeba seems astonishing to me. Paul McCartney recently played in the store, and Michael Eisner had to wait in line along with everyone else.

Valorie was less impressed. She was amazed by the presence of vinyl, especially 45’s, but to her it’s a music store. To me it’s something else: a personal achievement, a promise to myself that was delivered. I can go to Amoeba any time I want. I rarely do — perhaps twice a year — but it’s always there. It’s valuable to me because long ago I was so desperate to have it and things like it (book stores, and museums, and speaking tours, and art galleries, and music clubs, and concert venues, and theatres, and conversations with people who read books).

One day last week I left my office to come home in the middle of the day for an hour and sit on my lawn in the back yard with my shoes and socks off and my toes in the grass and drink a glass of chardonnay and eat a salad and read a magazine. It wasn’t the best use of my time, but it was. That also felt like a promise paid, the promise I made to myself when young that that I wasn’t the traditional job-holding sort and I wasn’t the routine 9-to-5 sort either. The flip side is that I couldn’t tell you what my schedule is without checking my Treo because it varies so greatly from day to day, but it isn’t routine.

There are lots of ill-defined goals of my youth that I haven’t achieved, and several things I have achieved that I didn’t set out to. But I still deeply feel the presence of that 14, 15, 16-year-old who wanted to be somewhere else, doing something else. He’s with me most days.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.