My new one-act play, “He Said She Said,” goes up next month here in Los Angeles. (Details to follow.) Today was our first table reading. Between that, and a drinks meeting I had with my director just over a week ago, I’m reminded again why it’s better if playwrights don’t direct their own plays. At least, this playwright.

I am a director, and depending upon the rightness of the material for me and whether or not I screw it up, I think I’m a pretty good one. But I don’t think I have the sort of insights into my own plays that good directors have. That’s because, having written the play, I can’t discover it.  In this case, I thought I had written a simple short play in the style of story theatre. Listening to my director talk about it, I realized that what I’d written was closer to a short story narrated in first-person. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s not:  Short stories plant images in your mind for you to conjure, while stage plays put them on stage for you to see. This was going to require more directing that I had realized, and probably some changes in the text to eliminate redundancies. (The narrator telling us something, and the actors then doing it. Which unless done for comic effect would be like hearing a skip in a record. It should be one or the other.) I wonder, had I been directing this, how far into the rehearsal process we would have gotten before I discovered this. With good actors (which I’m lucky to have), pretty quickly, I think, because they would have told me. But I hadn’t discovered it already, and my director had. So he definitely earned my attention early on. When someone is being smarter than you, you should listen.

While this play is in rehearsal, I’m also directing a new one-act in an evening of plays by my good friend and former student EM Lewis. We had our first script meeting last week and I think it was like the meeting above, but now I was in the other chair. The current draft of the play is 18 pages, and the discussion took 2 hours, 17 minutes. She is a fine writer. The play has strong characters and good conflict and wonderful dialogue; all those things I like. But there were things I didn’t understand about the play, and to be able to present a vision of it, I needed to understand it. The fault may have been mine, or the playwright’s, or more likely there may have been no fault but rather a case of things that work and things that don’t work, depending upon your line of attack on the play. With “Hamlet,” is Hamlet deranged, or is he crafty, or both? Making that initial decision determines the playing of everything that follows. It’s always that way with all plays — at least the good ones. Bad plays have no creative ambiguity; they are resolutely what they are.

Next week I start on the other two of the four theatre projects I’m doing this and next month. My friend Trey Nichols has been commissioned to write a one-act play for the same festival; I’ll be helping him shape the material with a small cast (three or four actors) and co-directing with him. And I’m also involved in a project at the Natural History Museum where, if I’m understanding this correctly, six or so of us are writing short environmental scenes that interconnect into a larger play about their new spider exhibit. I know which character I’m writing, and that character’s basic storyline (which I pitched), and the actress playing that role (Liz Harris, a good actor I’ve worked with many times).

In “My Dinner With Andre,” Andre Gregory relates to Wallace Shawn that daily life dulls us to our own existence, and that we need to break our patterns to re-engage. I think that with four theatre projects all at the same time and all with different frameworks, I’ll be very conscious for the next two months.

My son sent me an email asking for my advice on writing a good resume. He’s off at college and wants to go get a part-time job. I’ve been hiring people since I was a teenager and was promoted to classified supervisor at the newspaper where I worked. In the 30 years since, I’ve made some mistakes, but I like to think I’ve learned not to repeat them. Here’s what I told him:

I do read cover letters. Yes, I filter out people who make spelling errors and grammatical errors and punctuation errors. (Anyone who confuses it’s and its, your and you’re, and to and too, is definitely out.) If it’s not relevant, fine, but in almost anything I’m hiring for, it’s relevant. (The exception being visual artists.) Even if it isn’t precisely relevant, I don’t like seeing these mistakes on the page. It hurts my eye. If I had to see it every day from someone I was paying, I would start to feel culpable.
So:  Once someone has passed my close reading of his or her spelling and grammar, I’m looking for relevant skills and character. Character is important; you can teach skills, but you can’t teach character. Both the cover letter and the resume should make character statements. And the resume should list relevant skills.

Beyond that, I don’t think there’s any mysticism at work here. Look at sample resumes and adapt accordingly. A good opening line on a cover letter will almost assuredly help you jump to the top of the pile.

Good luck.

In two short weeks, the new Pere Ubu album, “Love Live Pere Ubu!” comes out. (Its sales will in no way threaten those of 40-year-old “new” Beatles albums released at the same time.)

From that new CD, here’s “Song Of The Grocery Police,” as animated by The Quay Brothers.

In which the film version of The Road gets an early review every bit as devastating as the apocalypse that catalyzes the novel.

Between 1907 and 1915, the photographer of Czar Nicholas II traveled his nation taking photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia. In color. Here are 28 of them — including one of Leo Tolstoy — and they are stunning.

Occasionally you come across something so wonderful on the internet that you must immediately worship it.

In most cases, it involves William Shatner.

This is only the latest example.

(By the way, I’ve worked with many many wonderful actors, and not one of them has had insights anything like those in this video. Now I think they need to get with the program.)

A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting when someone said that a design looked “really powerful, really Marvel Comics.” I turned to the woman next to me, an executive with Warner Brothers, and whispered, “Should I say it looks really ‘DC Comics?’ ” Because after all, Warner Brothers owns DC, and is located right here in beautiful downtown Burbank.

Now, it turns out, Marvel too is owned by a studio headquartered in my hometown. That studio is named Disney.

Although I hadn’t heard anything about this deal in advance — and evidently, just about no one else did either — I’m not surprised. In a world of entertainment agglomeration, where radio stations and television stations and movie studios and newspapers and digital providers and satellites and publishing houses and so forth are all owned ultimately by one company, and that one company is owned by Rupert Murdoch or Steve Jobs or Barry Diller or some combination thereof, it had come to seem increasingly strange that there Marvel was, all by its lonesome, an attractive bauble sitting neglected at the billionaires’ ball. I don’t know how well Ariel, the Little Mermaid, has been feeling lately, but Iron Man and Spider-Man and friends have never been more powerful at the cash register.

While I don’t pine for the moment I spy the Hulk waving glumly alongside Goofy in the Main Street parade, I’m glad the characters have a well-furnished new home backed by unimpeachable credit. Too many characters, and comic-book companies, have found themselves in foreclosure. As Mark Evanier noted on his own blog, I do wish that Jack Kirby were alive to see this day — and, somehow, to financially benefit from it. Although Kirby’s plight pales against that of the creators of Superman (in his declining years, Joe Shuster worked as a deliveryman to make ends meet), he never saw the sort of payday given recently to, say, the creators of RockBand, which has been a persistent money loser but which recently netted a $150 million performance bonus for its creators. For Marvel (or its predecessor, Timely), Kirby co-created Captain America, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Doctor Doom, the Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, and indeed almost all the major characters in the Marvel pantheon. (Spider-Man and Wolverine being the most notable exceptions.) Without Jack Kirby, Marvel wouldn’t have been worth half its $2 billion purchase price today. Just how much would a fair performance bonus have equaled?

This morning I came downstairs to a note from my wife taped over the stove. The top line read, “Alert * Alert * Alert.” In our 25 years together, she has left me many notes, but this was the first that began, “Alert * Alert * Alert.”

The rest of her note said to please stay inside all day with the kids and run the air conditioning because the air quality was so bad that the hospital where she is a respiratory therapist had been jammed the night before with people suffering respiratory distress. So we stayed in the house all day with the air conditioning running except for one 15-minute walkabout in the late afternoon without which my energetic and sometimes crazy dog was guaranteed to bust a dog-shaped hole through the wall in her lust to be outside. The air outside was the color and consistency and taste of some very wan barley soup. While my boy and I couldn’t make out any fires on the ridgeline in the distance, we could see large clouds stuffed with the brown offshoot of flames beyond the crest. We went to the park briefly, where the dog chased around at nothing and I hung upside down from a chinup bar to stretch out my spine, then we headed back in.

It was unusual to be inside the house all day. I remember during college and grad school and for some time afterward, I could stay inside all day either writing or playing games with friends or watching movies, but now I don’t think I’m fit for it. I ended the day with a newfound understanding of how the dog must feel: wondering when will that door to outside open again? Somehow or other I filled the day, reading every editorial inch of the Los Angeles Times (except Sports, which doesn’t count), and reading The New Yorker, and doing a massive online Sudoku puzzle, and lending advice and counsel to my 7-year-old who was engaged in a neverending war against the reviled Queen Elizabeth in Civilization 4 because she wouldn’t trade him the resources what he wanted, and prepping for a dinner I was going to cook for my friend and my kids, and cleaning up the kitchen, and having an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting with a playwright who came by to discuss her new play that I’m directing. But finally at 7:30, with dinner finished and the plates cleared and my son and daughter arguing over who was going to perform which relevant duty in cleaning up the kitchen, my dinner guest and I retired to the back yard for cigars and drinks. It seemed somehow thoughtless and simultaneously apt to sit outside in the ashen air and smoke cigars.

Now my friend has left and my children are asleep and I’m writing this. I’ve poured salts into a hot bath I’m running. Soon I’ll be soaking away the muscle fatigue of sitting around inside pretty much all day, and then I’ll go to sleep, hoping to wake up and learn that these fires encircling the valley are out, and that my many friends who live in those hills, as well as their homes, are safe.

If you’ve been following the news from the San Fernando Valley (which is in Los Angeles county; that’s for our international readers), you’ve noticed that it’s 104 degrees today and that the hills and mountains that surround my city are on fire. It’s hot.

So this morning, of course, the downstairs air conditioning went out. My idea was to stay upstairs in bed all day drinking ice-cold Newcastle and watching obscure foreign silent films from my Netflix queue. My wife had other ideas (something that when I was a kid we called “chores”) so she presented me with a list of things to do. This list required my coming downstairs into the inferno. So, lest we risk melting into Margaret Hamilton-like puddles, she got right onto calling some HVAC repair company that had come out the last time we had truly needed air conditioning. While we were waiting for the repairman, my wife ran down the list of what it couldn’t be that was wrong, because she had gone outside and pried open some panel and looked inside and made some indeterminate determination while I was inside drinking coffee and eating an English muffin while attacking Shaka Zulu in Civilization 4 on my laptop. (These are our usual priorities.) She floated guesstimates of the damage. Here’s the one that caused me to look up and lose a Destroyer to enemy bombardment:

“If it’s the compressor, it could be two thousand dollars.”

Many streams of sweat later, the repairman arrived. He went out back outside to take a look and I played with figures in my head. Would I have to sell one of my copies of “Iron Man” #1 to help pay for this repair job, and if so, which one? And if I were going to sell one, wouldn’t it be better to wait until after the second movie opened? And wouldn’t it make sense to wait until after the recession, too, so that its value would climb? And by then, with the recession over, I probably wouldn’t need to sell it anyway, and besides, by then the multi-thousand-dollar air-conditioning repair would be far in the past, the money long spent. So, good:  No need to sell any copies of “Iron Man” #1. Phew. I went back to pillaging Shaka’s horse pasture.

Eventually, I felt cool air coming back into the house. Valorie came in and said, “Well, he fixed it.”

I said, “How much?”

“He didn’t say.”

Hm. Unauthorized work. If it came to it, that would be the first argument in my haggling. She hung around in the kitchen area for a while doing something for some time, then went outside, then came back in. So I said again, “So, how much?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“What? Where is he?” I was trying to understand why he was still here, why we hadn’t paid anything yet, and why we didn’t know yet how much it was going to be.

“He went out to his van. He’s still there.”

Now we both stood at the front door looking at a white panel van parked across the street with “Air Conditioning Repair”emblazoned along its driver’s side. Nothing seemed to be happening. I still wanted to know how much this repair was. Then I said:

“$260.”

“What?”

“It’s going to cost around $260.”

Valorie wanted to know how I could possibly know this.  She looked at me skeptically. I told her she’d see.

A few minutes later we were called into the back yard where the air-conditioning repairman showed us the burnt-out. It sat in a box that had contained the new one, now installed. I looked at its outer casing and had to agree that it looked, well, dirty. And then he presented us with a bill for … $277. Valorie looked at me with surprise and appreciation.

“How did you know?” she said.

“I figured the time he was here, plus the probable cost of an industrial electronic component like that, plus over. And came up with $260.”

She seemed impressed. But frankly, neither of us cared. We were glad it hadn’t cost thousands of dollars, and we were really really really glad to feel cool air flooding the chambers. I had had visions of being un-air-conditiong in the airless triple-digit smoke-filled heat of Burbank through the rest of the weekend and into next week. Now, like Dante, we had escaped the inferno.

“$260 was the cost,” I said, cracking open a Newcastle anyway. “But the value was a lot more.”

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