Likelihood that changing my Twitter picture to green will free the Iranian people (as so many seem to hope): nil.

Along the same lines, I don’t think tying yellow ribbons around trees did anything except perpetuate Tony Orlando’s career.

Here’s a great way the company you work for can beat this recession:  Get you to work for free.

As promised, I’m still watching for the on-sale notice for tickets to the one night of added performances of The Car Plays. So far, they’re still not on sale. But maybe it’s better if you don’t rely on me. Maybe, if you want to get one of those scarce tickets (only 90 more will be available), you’d be better off keeping an eye on the Moving Arts site yourself.

For more info on The Car Plays, here’s a story that ran today in a London (?) newspaper. And no, the cars in our plays will not be parked on the wrong side of the road.

I just got this fundraising email from Jerry Brown, perennial Californian elected-something and former Linda Ronstadt paramour:

Dear Lee,

I have had an unusual opportunity to see California State government and its political process up close for a long, long time. I had my first glimpse – in the fifties – when my father ran for attorney general and then for governor, and again when I was governor. It was profoundly different then. The schools were good, the state wasn’t broke, Republicans talked with Democrats and even voted together when it was important to do so.

The last few years, this has all changed. Acrimony and endless deficits have become the order of the day. And turning it around, especially given the financial meltdown, won’t be easy. But I am trying. I am doing everything I can as your attorney general to make sure that the law is on your side. I sued Countrywide to restructure tens of thousands of mortgages, brought actions against a myriad of scam artists who set up Ponzi schemes or ripped off consumers in various and heartless ways, I sued employers who cheated their workers and vigorously defended California’s environmental laws. Go to Fighting for You for the full story.

I like my current job and truly believe we are getting important things done. Yet, when I see the mess in Sacramento and think about all the people who are suffering as a result, I think seriously about running for governor again. It is rather amazing that the same issues are still front and center: water, energy, prisons, education and, of course, living within our means.

But before I make a final decision, I would like to know if it’s possible to build a large base of supporters from every part of the state and even beyond. Two of the Republican candidates for governor are talking about spending their own wealth on hundred million dollar plus campaigns. To counter this private assault on our democracy, people will have to join together in a grassroots effort by the thousands and then by the tens of thousands. We need to fight back to overcome what will literally be a hostile takeover of the airwaves during the next governor’s campaign.

So would you be willing to join, even at this early date, and donate $25, $50 or $100 to Jerry Brown 2010 and help change the corrosive politics that is destroying our state? Whether I seek re-election as attorney general or the governorship, I intend to do everything I can to turn this state around. But I need your help and your active involvement.

Please forward this e-mail and ask your friends to contribute. Ask them to join our cause, to fundraise, become a supporter on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

This state is desperately in need of creativity and new ideas. The state also needs – just as much and maybe more – the know-how and experience to get this impossible job done.

If you can today, please consider making a contribution of $25, $50, $100 or any amount you are able to give.

I won’t let you down. We can and we will build a movement – of truth, of creativity, of inclusion.

With respect,

Jerry Brown

Dear Jerry:

May I suggest that you decide what you’re running for first, and then ask for money?

Talk about passing the buck!

“The Car Plays” are back, and once again just about nobody’s going to be able to get a ticket. Except, perhaps, you, if you act soon.

What’s “The Car Plays?” It’s an evening of plays, produced by my theatre company Moving Arts, taking place in — you guessed it — cars. For the past two series, the event’s taken place in the parking lot of the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. This year the good people at Woodbury University have made available a large parking lot up in the hills of their beautiful leafy campus in Burbank. The 20 plays are separated into four different rows — this year called Ventura, Figueroa, Ocean, and Hollywood, after some famous L.A. streets — with each ticket getting you one of those rows of five 10-minute plays. What goes on in those cars? In the past we’ve had comedies and dramas featuring adulterous couples, transvestite streetwalkers, pickups, pedestrian accidents, hitmen, marital calamity, parental freakouts and everything else you can imagine might happen in a car. (Including having a dead pedestrian getting thrown througha moon roof.) It’s quite an event, it’s been on every critic’s choice list in L.A., and it’s always an instant sellout — because each showing plays to an audience of two. That’s right, you and your friend are voyeurs inside the car.

The show returns end of this month with mostly new plays. My new car play, “All Dressed Up But Going Nowhere” is a sequel to my previous car play, “All Undressed With Nowhere to Go,” is directed by my designated driver, Trey Nichols. And I’m directing a remount of the wonderful “It’s Not About the Car” by Stephanie Walker, with the same great cast I had last time (Liz Harris and Joe Ochman). The show runs Friday and Saturday June 26th and 27th at 7, 8, and 9 p.m. Here’s where to get tickets. (There’s also a special gala performance on Thursday the 25th that includes a full dinner from the Brazilian steakhouse Picanha, plus a silent auction and some other fun programming. Here’s where to get those tickets. They’re more, but they’re worth it.)

Each play runs at least 48 performances in the regular run — but already almost all those tickets mentioned above are sold out. Ventura, which includes my play, is sold out for the run (but there may be a couple left for the benefit night). But here’s the inside scoop, which I’m sharing with you and other loyal readers of this blog:  We’re about to add performances for Sunday the 28th at 7, 8, and 9 p.m. That means 16 more chances to see each of these plays. All you’ve got to do is keep watching the Moving Arts website for that extension notice. And as soon as I see it, I’ll post an update here, but don’t wait for me. Last time we put tickets on sale, some of the rows sold out in 9 minutes. (That’s even faster than rooms sell out at the San Diego Comic Con.)

A friend I’m visiting back where I grew up told me he has a gift for me. He said it was one of the world’s oldest TV commercials. Which makes me think it’s Bob Dole about erectile dysfunction.

Today while I was playing that Phosphene River CD in my car, my six-year-old son chimed in from the back seat, “Dad, this is the terriblest song I ever heard.”

If the wedding is half as inventive as the invitation, we’ll all be sorry to miss it.

When I ordered the new Unknown Instructors CD, the nice folks at Smog Veil were good enough to send me three other bonus CDs as well. And now I find that I’m falling in love with this one, Phosphene River, which features spoken word artist Dan McGuire slinging Morphine-like words and sounds over a variety of talented and mostly heavy bands.

Here’s the one I cannot get out of my head. I love this. Brace yourself.

Just got home from seeing the one-man show “Loveswell” in Hollywood, where I sat directly behind Michael Emerson, who plays Ben on “Lost.” It seems he got off that island after all. (In 2009, anyway.)

“Loveswell” was wonderfully funny, and at times unsettling in its honesty — unsettling in a dramatically good way, and honest in a dramaturgically complicated way because we’re seeing the husband’s perspective of a courtship and marriage. I wondered what the wife, who seems completely unreasonable in the play, makes of this portrayal of her, which led me to wonder how she might portray him if she chose to do so. From not doing dishes, to send mixed signals about whether to leave the bathroom door open or to close it but leave the light on, to obsessing about toilet paper and his daring to breathe in bed, she seems like a handful. It reminded me of what a well-known poet once told me when I asked how his wife feels about her many unflattering appearances in his work:  “She knows how much I fictionalize.”

Given that my own new play, which runs the last weekend of this month here in Los Angeles, features a wife that I hope no one would confuse for my own, it’s incumbent upon me to dismiss all wifely portraits as straight up fiction.