Anniversaries can be scary: You ask yourself, HOW long have I been doing this?!?!?

In 2006, I was doing some consulting for a nice guy who owned a marketing agency, mostly coming up with ideas and pitching them to his clients and prospects, plus writing and editing. One day when I was visiting his office, he, being a good guy, told me that he had kindly set up a personal little website for me, and it included a blog, and I could have it all for free it I wanted it.

And here we are, 20 years to the day since the debut of that blog.

As you can tell from looking at it, I’ve done just about nothing with the design since then. Now that I own a marketing agency of myself (with a terrific partner), an agency celebrating its own 20th anniversary next June 1, I had someone on our team update the headshot some months ago, but that’s about it. The blog’s content, however, gets refreshed regularly; in creative bursts, many times a month, but at other times a couple of times a month.

Here’s what makes having this blog magical for me:

• I think about things all the time, and when I’m doing that thinking, I’m doing it as though I’m writing it. It’s a lifelong affliction: the little writer’s voice in the head. Yes, I keep a journal, and have done so for many years. But posting it here means I can search for it and maybe use it in other writing. (Even so, I have considered starting a Zettelkasten in my copious spare time.)
  
• Posting it here also means that it can be read by other people (unlike my handwritten journals). Every writer you know is an attention whore, and playwrights especially. I love it when I hear an audience react to one of my plays, but when I can’t have that, I love looking at my traffic stats for this blog. (When I’m actively posting, this blog I gets about 3,000 to 8,000 people a month.)
  
• Posting here also means I get comments from readers. In the theatre, that comment is the audience laughing in the right places, or sighing or moaning or gasping in the right places, or angrily pitching a fit. I’ve had all those responses and can remember some quite clearly. One time, a woman literally fell out of her seat laughing. Another time, an outraged Irish man stood up and demanded who could have written this garbage about people — without knowing that the garbage-writer was sitting next to him. (Part of me still loves him.) With the blog, comments fill that need, so I love it when I get comments. The conversation is everything.
  
• Many times now, as I’ve written on arcane topics from my somewhat varied life, I’ve gotten comments from other people who’ve searched on the web and founding nothing about that subject… except my blog post. When I wrote here about The Little Art Theatre that was an independent-film haven out in the woods near my birthplace in Southern New Jersey that my friends and I frequented in the 1980s, the son of the couple who opened it wrote to me with gratitude; he could find no other mention anywhere online. It was gratifying to hear from him. I’ve also heard from people about Bill-Dale Marcinko, an odd but talented fanboy writer and provocateur who bloomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s but evidently fell victim to his own oddness and tragically perished in a house fire. I’ve written here about him, and gotten several comments and emails from people in response, including just last month. It’s nice to find out that I wasn’t the only person the late and obscure Bill-Dale made an impression on.
  
• Posting things here also means that I can stop thinking about them. I can let them go, knowing they’ll be here if or when I want to find them.
  
• On top of that, posting here means that I could gather a bunch of these words I’ve written into something larger, if some day I decide to.

It’s been a thrill to be doing this for 20 years. With any luck, I’ll be doing it another 20 years, and maybe beyond that.

This, by the way, is the 2763rd post since I started. Here’s to the next 2763.

Not Glen Jupin. But close enough.

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I went to a late-night screening of “The House of Dark Shadows,” the first of two movies drawn from the 1960s gothic horror television soap opera, using the same cast and crew (but somehow not most of the continuity). 

The screening was hosted by the comedian and former “Simpsons” writer Dana Gould, who is about the same age as I am and who also grew up watching the show and loving it. I don’t know why some kids grow up running away from scary things while others among us grow up running toward them. When I was a kid, in the top 10 of what I wanted to do any time I could was to go to Brigantine Castle, the haunted-house attraction then on a pier near where I grew up, where minimum-wage kids and would-be actors would enact various scary scenes and jump out at you from darkened corners. Other children, including my two cousins visiting once from Pennsylvania, set a few feet into it and then ran out screaming. Most years, I still go to Knotts Scary Farm or, last year, Universal Horror Nights, but I’ve got to say, I miss Brigantine Castle.

Dana Gould and I continue to be “Dark Shadows” fanboys. After the screening, we compared notes about behind-the-scenes trivia we’d learned over the years. I shared with him how unhappy Jonathan Frid was with the movie because the conflicted vampire he played, Barnabas Collins, was not conflicted on this screen — he was pure evil — and that was why Frid refused to do the sequel. (Instead, it focused on the Collins family’s werewolf.) Dana topped me by sharing his most recent personal conversation with Kathryn Leigh Scott, now 82, who played Maggie Evans. About 30 of us showed up for this screening, which let out just before midnight, and most of us were eager to keep talking about the show and what it meant to us when we were kids.

Thinking about all this reminded me once again of Glen Jupin.

Glen Jupin was the little boy who when we were each about six years old, was the daily impediment to my viewing of “Dark Shadows.” My grandmother would pick us both up from kindergarten or first grade and watch us in the afternoons while our mothers worked. Our television desires could not have been more different. We know what I wanted to watch every day from Monday through Friday at 3:30 p.m. But Glen Jupin wanted to watch middle-aged people do kiddy voices and play around with puppets. Once in a while, I’d get my way, but all too often I was thwarted because he’d complain my show was too scary, and then get my grandmother involved.

Tonight, I wasted about 20 minutes searching online for Glen Jupin. What had happened to him? Had he stayed in southern New Jersey? Had he amounted to anything? Was he somehow now blocking other people from their enjoyment?

In all my searching, I could find only one reference online to Glen Jupin. It turned out to be my own blog. It seems that 14-and-a-half years ago, I was even then complaining about Glen Jupin and his… his… kiddishness.

Some things you just never get over.

And, to a small degree, in an ironic twist straight from an old EC horror comic, I’ve accidentally immortalized Glen Jupin.

Thor, upon getting the news

Like so many others in our country, this American is about to lose his health care.

I speak, of course, of my team member Thor.

Thor has been with us about 10 years. His references were strong, he was quite eager for the position, and his initial interview with our team member Xena went well. Xena has done an excellent job heading up security; we’ve had absolutely no break-ins while she’s been on duty, and no one has entered our location or even come close without her sounding the alarm. Still, we thought she’d perform better with a junior member of the team, one she could mentor and, frankly, lord over — clearly a psychological imperative with her; as is done with many an office bully, we work around her. Sure enough, their partnership has thrived as they’ve divvied up duties well, with Xena warding off strangers in the manner of a warrior princess and Thor, despite being for some reason named after the god of Thunder, serving as a friendly ambassador who sits in on all meetings and smooths the way.

But: Imagine my surprise today when I was informed that our benefits provider is, essentially, kicking Thor off the health insurance policy. They’ve made an adjustment now that he’s over 70 (13 in dog years) and are offering $5,000 in annual coverage, with a $500 deductible, for a robust demand of a $365/month premium. It’s blatant age discrimination, and I’m shocked that it’s legal.

Now, anyone doing the math can see quite readily that we would be spending $4380 a year, plus not recouping the $500 deductible, for a total cost of $4880 — for a potential net benefit of just $120. Sometimes one has to make hard decisions, but this was not one of those times. Only a fool would agree to this (which makes me think that a certain stripe of voter will indeed be signing up for it).

Thor’s health insurance runs out effective end of September. We’re all just glad that he recently completed the extensive dental work he needed (cost: about $1600 had it been without insurance). Although, before he grew accustomed to his new dentition, it was strange to see him with his tongue hanging out — but we don’t judge. We respect everyone.

Will Thor be on his own, now that he joins the ranks of the uninsured? Because an Australian Shepherd who was with us previously once rang up about $1200 in emergency suturing years ago after a nasty run-in with a Rottweiler, I know Thor would never be able to simply turn up at an emergency room without paying his bill. 

I’m soft-hearted. I wish the best for everyone, and I believe that everyone deserves health care. And the particulars in this case pull at me. Here we have someone who’s been on the job for almost his entire life, with nary a complaint, and never a day off. We will see him through right to the end, no matter what any damn insurance company chooses to say about it.

I just hope that his eventual medical bills don’t spell the end of us.

On Sunday, I stopped at the deli counter of my supermarket and asked for two pounds of the blackened peppercorn bacon.

I like this bacon because of the coarse ground pepper and the hickory seasoning.

The guy weighed out a pound and a third, and then there wasn’t any more in the case. But he offered to go inside to the back of the store and get some, then headed inside.

An attractive blonde walked up to the counter and after a bit, said to me, “Is anyone helping you?”

“Yes,” I said, “the guy went into the back to get something for me.” Then after a pause, I added, “But it’s nice of you to look out for my wellbeing.”

She laughed, then said, “You’re cute.”

I said, “My wife thinks so too.”

She said, “You are, with that personality.”

I added, “But other times, she just finds me annoying.”

Good friend Larry Nemecek and me celebrating Comic-Con 2026.

When I was 11 years old, my mother insisted to my father that we needed to move. They sold our house in Devonshire, NJ, along with the house he’d built next door for his mother, and we moved 12 miles away, to Galloway, NJ, then known as Absecon Highlands.

All so that I might have some friends.

Where we’d been, there wasn’t anyone for me to play with. We weren’t close to school (so my grandmother drove me there every day), and no other kids lived around us. In front of our house was a strip of highway, while in back of us were acres and acres of thick woods split briefly by mostly unused railroad tracks. Occasionally, my dad would get together with his best friend Gus, and I’d see Gus’s son Glenn, but Glenn was a few years older and not really a friend.

My true friends were comic books. 

I had inherited a few from my eldest brother (much older than me, and long out of the house), and any chance I got, I’d add more. I lived, breathed, ate, and dreamed comic books.

After we moved, I made friends with the boy across the street, the boy at the end of the street, the boy in the house to the left, and even, occasionally, some kids at school — a school I could walk to. (And I started to realize that actual real-life friendship didn’t quite work the way it did in Marvel comics, where the Thing and the Human Torch were constantly squabbling, and where Spider-Man was a wise-cracking jackass. If you know me in person, you know this is a lesson I still haven’t fully absorbed. Unfortunately.)

Once I had friends, I realized how important friendship is to me. Because now I knew what it meant:  A friend was someone you could do things with together. You could race your dirtbikes out in the woods with friends. You could build a treehouse together. You could go see a movie together. You could dig underground tunnels with a friend. (It collapsed on a third friend. The other two of us frantically dug him out.) You could go camping with friends. You could, on occasion, get into a fistfight with a friend. After a few years, you could talk about girls with your friends. At some point, older friends could sneak you into bars before you’d reached drinking age. The options were endless.

Every year since 1988, I’ve attended San Diego Comic-Con, and from the start, I’ve been doing it with friends. That first year there were two of us. Some years, we’ve had as many as eight of us joining up to attend together, and sometimes I’ve brought my children, when they were actual children, or teens, or even into adulthood. But recently I’ve wondered if maybe this year or that year wouldn’t be my last year. Thirty-eight years is a long time to be doing something; was it time to let it go? I still read comic books, but most of the creators I’d care to see, meet, or listen to have died off, and attending this thing is expensive and quite an effort. Whenever you plop down 150,000-plus people in one constrained area, it’s got to be a bit trying.  To say little of the expense:  easily $1,000 (that’s the hotel room alone). Plus $80 just to park (!), plus the meals, the drinks, and whatever I might buy.

But last night, in our room with two good friends of decades (I’ve known Travis for 30 years, and Larry for 20) who’ve also been coming to this event off and on for decades, as we talked and laughed and joked until two in the morning, and shared how the original “Star Trek” so thoroughly programmed us into believing in the future and shuddering at the recognition of just how far away from the reality of a peace-building, cooperative Federation we are right now, I recalled just why this event is so important to me.

It’s about comic books AND friends.

I was proud of my son when he joined the U.S. Army.

But because his enrollment happened to be during the first presidential term of a man completely unaligned with the actual principles of the nation, I felt compelled to say this to him: “The ideals of the nation are worth defending.”

Those ideals include Liberty, Equality, Democracy, and the Rule of Law.

Which the man currently in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with.

Which means that now, more than ever, on its 250th birthday, the nation needs the support of those of us who realize that.

Do what you can. Don’t give up. There are lots of resources and actions available with a little internet searching.

And don’t despair. Celebrate. Especially today.

As the writer Aurin Squire posted earlier today on Facebook:

“Shocked at all these international World Cup fans making videos about America…and loving it. It’s not everyone, but it’s 90% raves. Ranch dressing, Buc-ee’s, Texas BBQ, and overall hospitality. Apparently, a lot of them think Americans are, on the whole, more optimistic, more friendly, more encouraging, more likely to hustle.

“There’s a saying: if you want to hate America, stay online. If you want to love America, drive across a few states. And I’ve done that a few times…

“I guess these FIFA fans are reminding me of my cross-country road trips and all my small-town excursions over the years. And making me feel proud. Yes, yes, I can go into all my issues with this country. But sometimes it’s good to acknowledge privilege and be grateful. Grateful for what the ancestors built and the threads that keep this weird, wild, enormous thing called the USA together.”

Celebrate the successes — we’ve had many. Celebrate the ideals. Celebrate the opportunity that is America — including, now, the opportunity to once again change it for the better.

The first time I met Mel Brooks was in October of 1995, at Buster Keaton’s 100^th birthday party. Buster, being dead, was not there.

At the time, I was producing a play by a writer named Kevin Barry, of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Kevin was in town, and one evening after rehearsal I invited him to join me for Buster’s birthday celebration, set for the now-shuttered Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood. Kevin, like me, was a big fan of Buster Keaton, so he eagerly joined.

When we got there and bought our tickets and inched into our seats in the middle row, I found myself seated next to an attractive lady of a certain age with a towering faded red updo. I immediately recognized her as Eleanor Keaton, Buster’s widow, who had been a dancer and then Buster’s onstage costar when he returned to doing live performances late in his career. She was happy to be recognized, and happy to share the odd tidbit now and then as a few of Buster’s movies were screened, asides like, “Oh, we did that bit in Paris. The French loved it.” Kevin, meanwhile, was agog that I was seated next to Eleanor Keaton and that she and I were conversing.

After the screening, and after the sold-out audience ate Buster’s birthday cake, Kevin and I were standing outside when someone started talking about Buster’s career. I heard something not quite right, so in a friendly manner, I contributed some information that started with “Actually….”

And that was the first time I met Mel Brooks. The person he was slightly miseducating was his wife — Anne Bancroft. I had been watching Buster Keaton’s work all my life, since my father introduced me to his movies when I was about 6, and had been coming to every Buster screening for a few years at Silent Movie, and had read every available Buster biography there was. Not quite an authority, but certainly an ardent fan. Listening to me for a minute, Mel called out to someone else, “Hey, come listen to this — this guy knows a lot.” And that’s how Dom DeLuise joined the conversation. It was extremely meta to be discussing silent movies in front of the Silent Movie with three of the stars of the film “Silent Movie.” Mel Brooks was gracious, warm, and eager to know more — three traits that seem to come up every time he’s mentioned.

When we got in my car, my playwright from Ohio was thunderstruck, and I gathered from him that he thought this was just another night for my life in Los Angeles. As if.

The next time I met Mel Brooks was in 2003, when the stage version of “The Producers” was set to open in Los Angeles. At the time, I was CEO of the performing arts league, and I had assigned myself the task of writing the story about the show for our magazine. I got to the press junket and spoke to the co-writer of the book, Tom Meehan; and the director and choreographer Susan Stroman; and co-stars Jason Alexander and Martin Short (Jason Alexander was very deeply discoursing on his Acting Method, having confused the situation with performing Brecht, while Martin Short, as a tonic, was loose and funny and knew none of this was that important); and… I kind of ran out of time to speak with Mel Brooks. I’d said hello earlier, but there were still a clutch of people to see him, and I figured I’d gotten enough for my story. So I left.

The next day, I was at my office and on the phone with my friend Doug talking about who-knows-what, when my assistant buzzed in and said, “Mel Brooks is on line 2 for you.”

Which gave me the opportunity to say to Doug, “Gotta go. Mel Brooks is on the other line.”

I still cherish that.

Here was Mel’s opening line on the phone to me:  “How did I miss you?”

Perhaps the funniest person of the past 100 years, as acclaimed recently by The Atlantic and AFI and just about everyone else presenting him with centenary accolades, and a movie star and producer and honestly legendary figure in practically all aspects of entertainment for almost all of those 100 years, was being apologetic. He figured it was his fault. 

I’ve seen him a few other times, too, although not recently (he being, well, 100 years old). I believe I saw him in 2007 at the memorial service for Bill Idelson, a sitcom writer and actor from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (he played Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman) who had doubled as one of my writing professors at USC; I definitely spoke with Carl Reiner there. (It being a small town, Bill’s wife Seemah was also a performer in a play I produced at Moving Arts.)  For a while there, Mel Brooks was someone I kept running into at events and performances and awards shows. Like Tom Hanks, who I saw so frequently at the Taper and the Geffen that his face showed him starting to think he knew me. 

Having met some celebrities in my 38 years here in Los Angeles, here’s what I want you to know about Mel Brooks. In a town where it’s almost required for celebrities to put on airs, to be aloof, to be indifferent while all-knowing, Mel Brooks has always seemed humble but driven, the funniest and cleverest guy at the party — while still an everyday guy (who just happened to marry a beautiful Oscar-winning movie star). 

Maybe his approachability was key to his success.

This spring and summer, I’ve carved out more time than I’ve had recently to work on my other job: being a playwright. This weekend is already serving as a wonderful reminder of why it’s great being a playwright. Oh, you’ll get lots of boo hoo hoos from playwrights (Tony Kushner once complained about how poorly playwrights are paid, even as he was loading a new $10,000 couch into his townhouse), but in many ways, it’s a dream job. Or avocation. Or hobby. Take your pick.

Based upon my experience of being a playwright, dating back a long, long time to my first play getting staged when I was 15 and in high school, here are just a handful of the reasons it’s great.

• Nothing beats hearing people laugh at all of your jokes, in the right place and at the right time, without prompting by your friends or lovers. (In my experience, your family does no prompting. More likely they’ll sit there like Easter Island statues, afraid it’s about them.)
• It can be nice to win an award now and then.
• When you don’t, it’s also comforting to know that the judges were wrong.
• Usually, when you fly in to see your play, everyone there will treat you the way you wish everyone everywhere treated you: with respect and reverence, and enormous admiration for your wit. It’s even better than how your dog does it.
• Sometimes you get to be a visiting artist or teacher or judge or lecturer, usually in a bucolic location that couldn’t quite get Suzan Lori-Parks, but they’re happy to make do with you, and they buy you drinks.
• Whether or not they see it, an actual production helps your family understand “what you’re trying to do.” Maybe.
• You get to work with actors. Sure, some of them are as bad at it as you are (or, inconceivably, even worse), but most of the time you get mostly good people, and the surprisingly good people lift your material up to even greater heights, and you get credit. If you saw a play that really wasn’t much of anything, but you enjoyed the hell out of it — that’s what happened: the actors. And, seriously, there are terrific actors everywhere. I’ve had plays produced in a little town in the interior gold-rush area of California, and in the backwoods hilltops of Arkansas, and both times the locals were great. I salute them!
• Also, the small-town people have a greater tolerance for outlandishness than you think. I think they even expect it, like: “Hey, this is an artist, so we shoulda figured on this.” So just have fun.
• Every time you get a production, you’ve set up a little outpost somewhere on the globe. People there now know you, and you know them! (Remembering their names can be a separate matter.)
• Those people in the outposts? Sometimes they’ll let you crash at their place. Even in pricey places like Manhattan. I’ll say no more.
• You make lifelong friendships with some of the actors and directors and designers. (And lifelong enemies with some of the others.)
• If it’s a production where you live, you’ll get to learn who your true friends are: They’re the ones who bought tickets.
• In your mind, you’re communing with Shakespeare, Brecht, Stoppard, and whoever wrote “Bob’s Holiday Office Party.” What could they learn from you? (You’d love to share with Brecht your better ending for “The Good Person of Szechwan.”)
• As a playwright, you will listen more closely to what other people say. Of course, you’ll need to determine for yourself whether or not this is a benefit.
• After you have even a little playwriting income, it can be surprising what’s tax deductible. I’m pretty sure that cigars qualify as office supplies.
• Big benefit: You can swear off drugs. That audience response is your drug.

This is just the starter list. There are many more delights (such as an entree to meeting famous people you’d like to meet), so I could go on. But I think now I’m going to go on to working on my new play, so that maybe I can add more of them in the coming months and years.

It’s not soda in those cups.

That’s beer that my mother and I are drinking, five or six years ago, she then in her early 90s, while we were awaiting a table at the Clam Bar in Somers Point, NJ.

Mom left this mortal coil two-and-a-half years ago, and I sure miss her. She was tough but fair, an even-tempered German Lutheran woman with a good heart and a strong will and both a ready laugh and at times a bit of an edge.

She would feed anyone and everyone who came over. Feeding people was first nature to Mom. Her first question, always, to everyone, was, “Didja eat yet?” Because she would always feed you. As a child of both the Great Depression in her native Johnstown, Pennsylvania and that city’s Great Flood, both being times when not everyone had enough to eat, she learned early on that you shared. No matter who you were or where you came from, my mother would feed you. Over the years I brought many, many people over, most of them strange artistic types or fans of the outre or quasi-bohemians or just college misfits; she fed them all. She fed my father, we children, her grandchildren, all of our friends, neighbors who dropped by, anyone and everyone. Generally, she kept a tub of fried chicken wings in her refrigerator (these, she said, were “fer snackin’ “) but even if it looked like she had nothing to offer, she somehow whipped up something incredible out of thin air.

Like all good mothers, she knew the difference between real problems and whatever minor annoyances you, as a child, might be complaining about. Complaining and crying were actively discouraged; the lesson was that if you’ve got a problem, you should just deal with it. If you were a child and you fell down and hurt yourself, she offered a mild, “Let’s take a look at you. … Oh, you’re fine.” If you wanted to cry about it, you had to go cry on the steps — and the steps were outside. Where nobody, including her, would have to hear it.

She was a font of hard-earned clear-cut wisdom. When, at age 16, I had been out drinking with some young men several years older than I was, and had had far too much and had been vomiting all around the parking lots of the bars along Margate, New Jersey, one of the guys finally thought he should call my house to see what they should do. My mother answered, and when my friend Kevin told her that Lee had had a bit too much to drink, my mother’s answer was, “You took him out, you keep him.” Kevin wound up with me vomiting in his basement until I sobered up. Lesson learned for both of us.

When I was an oddball teen, reading things I shouldn’t have been reading and writing things just as outrageous and publishing little magazines far above the level of my maturity, and causing all sorts of trouble at school and going to big cities on my own, she had the foresight to just let me be, even when she found what might have looked like very rude cartoons in a zine I was publishing. Some parents would have swooped in, but hovering around wasn’t her style, and I remain grateful. I just wanted out of the constrained life of southern New Jersey and eccentric art seemed like a pathway and certainly an interest, and I guess she knew.

She also provided the very best advice ever given to me: “When you’re going out, always take a jacket, and always use the bathroom, because you never know.” To this day, I follow this, and I’m always glad.

I count myself very lucky to have had her as a mother; if you’re reading this, I hope you were half as lucky. She had a good heart, a strong sense of caring and service, and unmatched personal strength. The only reason she’s no longer with us is because she let go. Most people fear death; she decided it was her time and went toward it in her sleep, still physically well at age 98.

She may be gone, but the example she set lives on in her children and her grandchildren and their children. We’re all the better for it.

I was struck by how well David Thomas was looking:  fit, lively, energetic. The last time I’d seen him he’d been ill, visibly ill, and weakened — but still determined, as ever, to continue on his life’s work, producing remarkably fresh and unexpected music that undermined the expected norms of a rock concert while delivering something powerful and urgent. He had been so debilitated that I couldn’t quite square how healthy he looked, sitting in a deep leather chair and enjoying a dark pint, but I was sure glad to see it.

The venue was a small pub in England, warm and friendly, but featuring a genuine performance space with lights and sounds. Waiting for the band to go on, I ordered a refill and when for some reason the barkeep didn’t fill my pint glass all the way, I gently complained and he topped it off. So I bought another one, for the man next to me, and we fell into conversation, he about how thrilled he was to be here, me about how proud I was to be producing the event.

David went onstage first, which was a massive surprise — I’ve seen Pere Ubu innumerable times, and generally the band came on first, he was generally the last one on stage, and deservedly so, as the front man, as the originator, the visionary. But then it became clear that it would be only David, David and no one else, and I worried if people would feel disappointed, and if they’d want something back, something in return, a make-good, because they’d expected Pere Ubu, I think I had advertised it as being Pere Ubu, but it was just David Thomas. But David, being David, went full thrust on his solo performance, and he was offbeat and brilliant and utterly committed and captivating.

And then I realized:  David is dead. He looks so good! And I’m so glad to see him! But I remember he’s dead.

And Pere Ubu — or, in his absence, the band as it was called two weeks ago in Hove and in London, “The Moon Unit” — isn’t dead. Because I just saw it without him.

And then I felt a hand rubbing my back, that of my fiancée, and I realized I was dreaming, awakening from a dream now, and I was very sad indeed to realize it was a dream, because I so wanted David Thomas to be alive. David Thomas whom I knew and had spent time with on several occasions over the course of 25 years and someone whom I always appreciated, not a friend, not really, but certainly a creative lodestar, someone whose work I had followed for the vast majority of my life, and I didn’t want him gone because I didn’t want the concerts to stop let alone the new music, and also because I wished him well, truly, always, as a thank-you for everything he’s given me for 40 years and more, and because, selfishly, selfishly because I could see the health struggles he’d been suffering, selfishly I just wished him to be alive longer.

But the dream was over, and no, I wasn’t producing a gig by Pere Ubu or by David Thomas, and David was still dead, gone from his mortal plane, and I was still grateful to him but still feeling the hollow space in my core that I’d felt since he died last April 23, a date that I’m unable to forget.

I shared this with K., my dream, and I suppose she could see written on my face what it had meant to me, no matter what I said about it. Science will tell you that when you dream of someone you’ve lost, it’s your brain processing your loss.

But what K. said to me was better: “It’s nice that he came to visit you.”