My good friend, actor-playwright-director Trey Nichols, is written up in this week’s LA Weekly, in a special issue devoted to the perils and pitfalls of doing theatre in LA.  I’m always happy to see talented colleagues get noticed, although perhaps not in this light:

Employee of the Month

In the summer of 1996 at Moving Arts’ Silver Lake venue, playwright Trey Nichols was on the frontlines, by himself, in his first assignment as box-office/house manager. The audience was due to start arriving in minutes. After using the theater’s one lobby toilet, Nichols observed to his dismay that a blockage by his own fecal matter threatened an immediate overflow after a weak flush. With little time for rumination, Nichols was faced with one of two difficult choices: to walk away and deny all knowledge of what he had done, or to take corrective action. This was just between Nichols and his conscience. Our protagonist explains what happened next:

“I grabbed a big handful of my own excrement to clear the blockage. I had seconds to act, and it was the only thing I could do. The performance proceeded without a hitch, though I didn’t shake any hands that night.”

Nichols has been too modest to speak of his heroism until now. If the Weekly had been aware of his actions in 1996, he surely would have received one of this publication’s Special Recognition awards. The play, by the way, was a work by Nat Colley, aptly named A Sensitive Man.

When something similar happened to me once with our theatre’s notoriously weak plumbing, I… used the plunger.

Newsweek is painting the Brigham Young protest against Dick Cheney’s speech as a further rebuke of the Bush presidency and a sign of ebbing support. Here’s a sample:

Is there any place left where the vice president can be sure of a friendly welcome? Dick Cheney is traveling later this month to Utah, the reddest of Red States, to deliver the commencement address at the Mormon Church’s Brigham Young University. But even there, support is ebbing for George W. Bush and Cheney. The university has approved a rare campus protest this week against Cheney’s visit, and is considering a second on commencement day. One online petition asking BYU to rescind the invitation has gathered more than 2,000 signatures, many from students and professors as well as alumni. The university says such criticism is normal.

Calling this a political protest — or a reflection of sagging poll numbers — is unfair. It’s unfair to the students and to the university. The Chicago Sun-Times gets it right:

Cheney is target of rare protest at Brigham Young

April 3, 2007

PROVO, Utah — Some students and faculty on one of the nation’s most conservative campuses want Brigham Young University to withdraw an invitation for Vice President Dick Cheney to speak at commencement this month.Critics at the school question whether Cheney sets a good example for graduates, citing his promotion of faulty intelligence before the Iraq war and his role in the CIA leak scandal.

The university, which is owned by the Mormon church, has “a heavy emphasis on personal honesty and integrity in all we do,” said Professor Warner Woodworth.

“Cheney just doesn’t measure up,” he said.

It’s not a political protest. It’s a moral protest. It’s an important distinction.

Over on Slate, Joshua Green urges Democrats to adopt the mythologizing tactics of the GOP.

I understand — and agree with — the advice not to be boring. (And not to remain stuck in the 60s.) And I well recognize the power of myth. After all, that’s what got us into Iraq.

…that:

a. Thanks to the internet, the written word lives forever

b. My opinions are long-lasting and strongly held. (Phew!)

Yesterday I was grousing to a friend about DC’s yearlong weekly comic, “52,” which purported to be of cosmic significance yet changed nothing.

Today I found this posting on the internet.

My good friend, actor-writer-director and crank Mark Chaet, has joined the blogosphere.

If “crank” implies a criticism, it shouldn’t. There’s lots to be cranky about. And Mark is a smart, funny, cranky guy.

And, as I noted here, Mark is a famous guy.

Yes, The Screw Iran Coloring Book is in the collection of the Michigan State University libraries.

And no, I have no idea how it got there.

One of my favorite people, Kim Glann, has joined the blogosphere. Her blog, The Eco-Urbanite, reflects her environmental conscience, especially after bringing a baby into the world.

I’m with her on some of her remedies, such as using compact fluorescents and cloth bags. When it comes to mess transit, though, it just doesn’t work for most of us. At least not yet.

Didn’t quite believe me when I said the U.S. auto industry plays games (and sometimes flat-out lies) about mileage?

Read up.

Here’s my favorite ironic quote of the day (and again, please bear in mind that in this context “favorite” means I actually don’t like it, except for its irony), and it’s from this piece:

“If you want to reduce gasoline usage—like I believe we need to do so for national-security reasons as well as for environmental concerns—the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice,” said a beaming Bush.

Uh, yeah. That’s why you shouldn’t allow automakers to LIE about it.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a staccato shredding sound outside my office here in Burbank, opened the door to look out, and saw that we had a sudden hailstorm. Actually, it looked like hail, rain, and snow. And that’s what it was. (Here’s a report about it.) From nowhere, on what had been just previously a crisp clear Los Angeles day. Five minutes later it was gone and the day became crisp and clear again. Deciding that this was a warning from God to free the Israelites, I went back into my office and awaited the plague of locusts and the rain of frogs.

All night long last night the wind howled outside my bedroom window at home and I wondered what the state of our trees, both long-standing and recently planted, would be. This morning revealed various small branches and bits of shrubbery blown into odd piles, but no major damage. There will be figs this summer.

But here was my truly favorite part of this unseasonable — and ungeographical — weather, and please note that in the classically American sarcastic style when I say “favorite,” I mean the opposite. Today when driving my youngest child to his preschool we came across a gardener clearing a residential corner. What was he using to clear the sidewalk? A leaf blower. And as quickly as he was blowing the leaves and other small debris into the street, using the large fume-spewing gasoline motor strapped onto himself, the wind was blowing it all back. When I see things like this I actually relish a real energy crisis that would force everyone to reconsider his true energy needs.

When I was a kid, we had state-of-the-art machinery that handled this sort of job quickly, efficiently, and with little to no use of fossil-fuel energy. We called these tools:

• a rake
• a bag

I was at Lowe’s just this past Sunday, and these implements are still available. I wish more people used them.

While I’m on a roundup of “internet death” (finding out through the internet that people you know have died), I should mention the demise of Jay Kennedy, a comics historian and comic-strip editor of major importance who, among other claims to fame, helped launch both “Mutts” (my friend Paul’s favorite strip) and “Zits,” my son Lex’s favorite. Kennedy died recently during a riptide incident while vacationing in Costa Rica. His obit is here.

While I’m not sure I ever met him in person, I do know I spoke with him on the phone in what had to have been late 1981. He was compiling the information for the book at left, “The Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide,” and having decided for some reason that my self-published masterpiece “The Screw Iran Coloring Book” was an “underground,” he had tracked me down for information.

About “The Screw Iran Coloring Book” (and yes, of course I still have copies for sale. Email me.):

In 1980 as the Iran hostage crisis went on and on, I hit upon a great idea: a coloring book, modeled after Neal Adam’s Jimmy Carter coloring book, to be called “The Screw Iran Coloring Book.” Every page would be something rip-snorting fun about the hostage drama, making the ayatollah and the captors look bad, and lining our own pockets with the immense sales prospects. A friend and I set out to execute this plan, hiring an artist, conceptualizing the jokes and writing the captions. As with many things done in youth, this project now seems like a very bad idea — so bad that even Rolling Stone magazine, where we had envisioned advertising and securing the bulk of our sales, a magazine that found ways to advertise drug paraphernalia, sex aids, nudist colonies, and God knows what else, wouldn’t take our ad. In fact, they sent us a terse note advising us that the idea of profiteering off hostages was not cool. And although we hadn’t realized, in our late teenage years, that this could be construed as profiteering off hostages, they were right. I just thought that bad taste was in, and given what was going on in National Lampoon and all and sundry “Newave” and underground comix, that was most definitely the case.

In any event, no one would take our ads and no matter how we tried I don’t think we sold more than 10 copies of “The Screw Iran Coloring Book.” I have no idea how Jay Kennedy heard of it, and I believe that was one of my questions to him, but I can’t remember the answer. Given that he grew up in New Jersey (as did I), maybe he saw or heard of it at a convention in that period when I was a comic-book dealer and was trying to unload them. The fact that he tracked me down to Ocean City where I had moved in September 1981 after the coloring-book debacle, and somehow got my home phone number is a testament to his diligence. You can imagine that I was initially skeptical — someone who was doing a “price guide” of underground comics must have been an unrepentant hippie, right? — and then flat-out thrilled that my printed offering, no matter how pathetic a failure, would be enshrined in history. (Like most writers, I love all my literary children, even the deformed ones.) Kennedy asked me a few questions for his records, and then said he needed a copy of the coloring book to attest that it did indeed exist. I offered to mail him one and he insisted on paying for it. He may have been our fifth sale. Or first — I may have given away the other four.

I enjoy “Mutts” and “Zits” and I’m grateful that a long time ago someone for some reason decided to include my wrong-headed little satire in his book. That makes it all the more real. Even at the time, I felt that having it listed as item “1754. SCREW IRAN COLORING BOOK, THE.” added to its value. If in no other way than this: The coloring book had a published value of 50¢. Kennedy listed it as being worth 50¢ — but he had actually paid for it. And you cannot imagine the joy it gave me to see my own name listed in the “Underground and Newave Artist Index” in the back; to someone whose entire world revolved around comic books it felt like I had some tiny personal share of history. I remain grateful to Mr. Kennedy.