My friend Larry Eisenberg writes about trying to put a live hen into his new production. Ultimately, he was too chicken (and so was she).

Here’s something that’s never going to get old:  that little lancet of joy when I learn that something I’ve written has been accepted. I just had a short play chosen for a festival in San Diego in February. (More about the particulars of it another time.)

Let’s be honest:  most successes, when you dig deeper, are countervailed by many, many failures. If I’ve never been quite as dogged as Thomas Edison (“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”), I nevertheless got used to rejection early on. At age 11, I started sending short stories off to magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s, Analog, Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the like, and just as quickly, they’d come back, but even then my response was akin to: “Wow! They wrote back!” I was thrilled when some assistant would scribble a note onto the form rejection letter, as the time some kind woman wrote, “But thank you.” I still think about her. (Thank you, unnamed kind woman.) I never got rejected at school dances, because I just liked to dance, and would dance with all the girls — the big ones, the small ones, the pretty ones, the homely ones, the popular ones, the shy ones — in sixth grade, it just seemed wrong to leave any out. When I started actually dating, girls felt freer to reject me if they liked, and that seemed fine because there were others to ask. I wasn’t emotionally invested in it; I just wanted to go out with a girl and see how far I could get. (Results varied.)

When I started to get published, first in fan publications, and then with non-fiction and fiction in magazines and newspapers, it was thrilling. I liked opening a newspaper and seeing my byline. I liked getting some obscure little magazine in the mail and seeing my story (or, gasp, poem!) in there. Then I fell into the theatre and here’s what I discovered:  that live audience response trumped printed byline. How could seeing my name in print in a magazine — perhaps read, perhaps not, by unnamed and unknown people far away — possibly compare with actually being there when a live audience laughed out loud or was visibly moved by my play? One night, during a performance of my play Happy Fun Family, a woman literally Fell Out Of Her Seat laughing. To this day, I love her. Night after night, when women would sob at the end of About the Deep Woods Killer, I felt golden.

Rejection has never really bothered me. If it stings, it subsides almost instantly. I’m fortunate all around:  I’ve got a strong family, terrific friends, and the trappings of a pretty interesting life that I’ve snared and dragged back into my den. But acceptance is obviously preferable, especially acceptance of a play, which means that there’s going to be another audience experience with one of my plays, and if I’m even luckier, I can be there for it.

When Andre the Giant was a boy, Samuel Beckett used to drive him to school — in the back of his truck because that’s the only place he’d fit. All they would discuss was cricket. The absurdity of this situation — the future professional wrestler and adored star of “The Princess Bride” growing up carted by a future Nobel playwright of the existential — cries out for a play. Maybe I should write it. (I know Ionesco would have, had it occurred to him.)

In which our Olivier, William Shatner, advises all of us this Thanksgiving not to do what he almost did: burn down his house while deep-frying a turkey. Watch all of it so you don’t miss one moment of his holiday-hammy performance, or his Herzogian voiceover. (About turkey fryers, he intones, “But their power is unrelenting… in careless hands.”) Not to be missed (and I better make sure my friend Larry Nemecek knows about this!)

My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.

So how was that 24-hour-long Mike Daisey show anyway?

Judging from this (written by my pal Mead Hunter!), pretty good.

My friend Kim Gambino is in rehearsal for a play in Omaha, NE — but she lives in New York. So how has she been attending rehearsal? Via Skype. Another triumph for the marriage of technology and the arts.

(To the tune of “Gotta Share!”)

A friend sent this to me.
Said this is for you, Lee.
I told him it was fun
Not a home run
But worth seeing up here.

It means a lot that he shared
Shows that he cared
That he dared
To break out of the mold…
Of the old…

Mike Daisey’s new monologue piece is 24 hours long. Not 24 minutes, not an hour and 24 minutes, not 2.4 hours — 24 hours. I would like to see that (so long as there are bathroom breaks — for my sake and for his).

Unfortunately, I can’t. It’s in Portland, OR ( that seems easily overcome, with a plane ticket). But, also, I’ve got tickets for a different show, one that is conveniently located closer than Portland, OR. In fact, it’s right here in my town of Burbank, CA. But what is it about September 17th anyway? That’s when Daisey’s piece is, but it’s also when my friends the Burglars of Hamm are putting on their new show for — you guessed it — one night only. Where were these other events before  I landed these other tickets? Or is it that the very act of booking something somehow ensures that other opportunities crop up for that very same date?

By the way, I’m on Mike Daisey’s email list. Here’s what he had to say about why one would want to do a 24-hour-long show. I admire his pluck.

Hello All,

We’ve been quiet this summer, preparing for the largest show of our lives. This is the culmination of years of work, and the fulfillment of an insane dream. ALL THE HOURS IN THE DAY is a 24 hour monologue which I will perform for the first time next month as the finale of the T:BA Festival in Portland.

Answers to a few FAQs: Yes, this is real. No, it is not a stunt. Yes, it really is 24 hours long. No, I am not kidding.

When people learn the show will be a full day in length, they often express shock and incredulity. Some, in the context of an arts festival, experience a feeling of loss…they exclaim, “But how can I watch a twenty-four hour show!” in a surprised tone, almost pleading, a tone that speaks of collecting and owning and coveting. Because we have been trained to possess the art we see.

I saw Star Wars at a movie theater as a child–it was the first indelible mark a work of art made inside me. I can still remember Luke staring out at the double sunset, and when I remember it, I see it now as a prism–I remember seeing it as a child, I remember seeing it again and again on laserdisc, betamax, VHS, late night screenings in college, pirated DVDs, back in the theaters scarred by Lucas’ digital fuckery, in hi-def, via bittorrent. I have just now gone to the net and watched that scene again…it is always at my fingertips. There is a version where the keyboard cat plays Luke off the screen. There is a version where someone has dubbed in terrible dance music. There is every version we can imagine.

What we long for is the version lost to us–the original story, the story that is larger than ourselves. The way a movie stops playing at the theater, and can only be resurrected by retelling until it is finally our own. A story so large that we struggle to contain it, and in that struggle remember that the point of this exercise, this theater, was to create a charged circumstance where we come together to create a community, a ritual that cracks open the boundaries of our life and lets the light in from outside. That sense of wonder. That awe. Two suns turning red against the fall of night.

If you are reading this, I can not know you. But I know you live on this earth, and have spent several thousand days doing so. None of us knows how many days we will have, how the hours are marked for each of us, what that merciless terminator line swinging from day into night holds in its hands. What could one day mean for any of us? What could we learn together if we cracked that door?

Scheherazade told her stories for the same reason we all do–to save her life.

Please join us for what I hope will be a remarkable day.

Be seeing you,

md

* * * 

There are two phrases that mean nothing to almost anyone else, but which have stuck with me most of my life: “Glx sptzl glaah!” and “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

The former is the baby-speak cry of Sugar and Spike in the comics of the same name by Sheldon Mayer. When the babies talk, all the parents hear is gibberish. But we lucky readers are privy to the rather sophisticated notions and outlandish schemes of these toddlers. If you’re wondering if this was unacknowledged source material for “Rugrats,” I suspect so. The first season of “Rugrats,” before rampant commercial needs overwhelmed creative impulses, was often wonderful. “Sugar and Spike” was consistently wonderful; even as an adolescent reader of mainstream superhero comics who groaned when some relative would mistakenly give him a “Richie Rich” or, God forbid, “Archie” comic, I was devoted to “Sugar and Spike.” And soon, very soon, you too will be able to share the joy:  an archive edition will finally be released by DC Comics next month.

(By the way, I bought the issue above right off the stands in 1970. I was 8.)

“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that I first read almost 30 years ago. It concerns a massive conspiracy by intellectuals to plant the false idea that there is a secret world called Tlon, with a nation called Uqbar. Inserting this false information into encyclopedias and referencing it elsewhere helps to, in essence, create the actuality — just as the creation of fiction implants ideas in readers that sometimes become reality. (Who invented the satellite? Well, the notion came from Arthur C. Clarke.) The fact that this phrase has stuck with me for 30 years proves the point.

In other words, both phrases are about imaginary languages and secret meanings.

Which takes me to today’s Google Logo (shown above). I was thrilled beyond measure to see that it was an homage to Borges, born 112 years ago today. More about that Google doodle, and how  Borges’ thinking led to the creation of hypertext links, can be found via this hypertext link.

To some degree, we are all of us privy to secret languages all around us every day, even when spoken in languages we purport to speak:  the thrum of jargon and subtext and obscure reference. It’s amazing we can understand anything. To some degree, this is what all of Harold Pinter’s plays are about:  that we understand nothing, while understanding everything all too well.