As I recounted here, in January I was elected as member of the California State Democratic Central Committee. Specifically, I’m a member of the Assembly District 43 delegation. This two-year position makes me a delegate to the state convention this and next year. And that’s where I was just over a week ago: at the convention in San Diego.

While there, I got a close look at all the major Democratic presidential candidates except one, Joe Biden, who didn’t come — although he did have people working a table in the exhibit area. These people seemed abashed that he wasn’t there and gave queasy explanations having to do with the sudden change of the California primary (it’s now much, much earlier), making this convention more important but only after Biden had already planned to stay in South Carolina. (Also the site of a convention in the same timeframe, and also a state with an early primary.) We already have a “president” (please note the quote marks) who doesn’t adapt quickly to change and we don’t need another, so I won’t be supporting Biden.

Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson all made it. In fact, even former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel made it — and his last campaign statement showed net assets of only $458, so I’m not  even sure how he swung airfare. So again, why not Biden?

Over the next few days I’m going to upload some photos and share some thoughts about these candidates, as well as overall impressions of the convention. In fact, I’m going to start with the very next post.

As I watched “Spider-Man 3” yesterday morning patently bored by endless scenes concerning Mary Jane’s acting-career frustrations or Aunt May’s rheumatic recountings of her idyllic past with dead Uncle Ben, I began to recall that as a boy I was not a regular reader of Spider-Man comics. In fifth grade I did do a trade with a boy named Chris and got a slew of Spider-Man comics from issue 70-something to issue 90-something, but I never spent my own money to buy one even as I paid for dozens of other titles. This web of memory spun on as, on the big screen, Harry Osborn lost his memory again and then regained it again, and an action scene was interupted for a too-long and unclever pas de deux between J. Jonah Jameson and a little girl in a crowd — and then I hit on it.

Spider-Man is a neurotic loser whose gift of incredible power never eclipses his character flaws. And on many levels, those character flaws are ones we mostly associate with gawky high-schoolers. He is somehow trapped in a failed adolescence.

The Fantastic Four are science adventurers, amalgamatic representations of Shackleton and Einstein. They explore the limits of space and time to broaden our understanding and enrich the human race.

Somehow at age eight I must have realized this:

Spider-Man comics were for boys who wanted to be someone else. Fantastic Four comics were for boys who wanted to be somewhere else.

Okay, in the past week, I’ve:

• Attended the California Democratic Convention as a delegate
• Mounted a one-act festival on a professional level at a mid-size house
• Read something like 1900 pages of student plays and turned in grades
• Had meetings and communications about next semester
• Started reading samples from playwrights interested in joining my workshop
• Worked on a merger with my company
• Did some transition work for my theatre company
• And just cleared 616 spam emails (!) from this blog

That’s why the blog hasn’t been updated in a week.

Tomorrow I’m going to start posting my thoughts on the convention and all the presidential candidates who showed up, including naming the one I signed up to volunteer for, and the one who scared the pants off me.  And I’ll be putting up at least one unflattering photo of Hillary Clinton, who just doesn’t photograph well and who unfortunately faces a different level of photography judgment because she’s a woman.

Stay tuned.

That’s what Bokonon calls most people’s busy-work plans (according to Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” which I reread this weekend). Except I really have been busy:

• I attended the state Democratic convention this past weekend as a delegate. (More on that soon.)
• It’s the end of the semester, so I have eleventy billion pages of script to read.
• I’m producing this little one-act festival for USC.

Just as soon as the smoke starts to clear I’ll be back with insights into Obama and Hillary, thoughts about playwriting, and fantasies about the vacation I won’t be taking.

I haven’t been a fan of Roger Ebert. Until now. He’s been sick with cancer — and hopes he’s getting better — and has had ugly, deforming surgery. But nothing is going to keep him from his film festival.

I like to think that if something like this happened to me, I’d still go to the San Diego Comic Con. Unlike Ebert, all the media wouldn’t turn out to photograph me in my post-surgical state.

Good for him. Character before beauty.

I’m of two minds about critic Charles McNulty’s piece in today’s LA Times in which he bemoans — but not quite — David Lindsay-Abaire’s upset win of a Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole.”

McNulty wishes there were more support for cutting-edge theatre. Me, I wish there were more support for good plays, whether they’re cutting edge or not. I also think that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire was, until recently and with this play, somewhat edgy, at least in the eyes of most. Here’s how Wikipedia valiantly summarizes “Fuddy Meers,” a play I greatly enjoyed in a terrific production at the Colony Theatre a couple of years ago:

Fuddy Meers is an American play by David Lindsay-Abaire. It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life. One morning Claire is abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims her husband wants to kill her. The audience views the ensuing mayhem through the kaleidoscope of Claire’s world. The play culminates in a cacophony of revelations, proving that everything is not what it appears to be.

Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and “anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.” Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.”

I’m willing to bet that that list of influences would lure most of us into the theatre. It just sounds like fun. Quality fun.

“Rabbit Hole,” which concerns a family struggling to recover from the death of a child, is not in the same vein. In addition to his obvious talents, it turns out that Lindsay-Abaire has range.  He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t care how he won the Pulitzer (in a decision that overruled the panel recommendations), he’s just glad he won.

McNulty seemingly wants us to support playwrights because they are daring.  I have seen those sorts of plays — lots of them — and their unconventionality often translates into a conventional dullness. I became a playwright because of the lure of theatre of the absurd, but somehow experimentation led to an alternative theatre movement split largely between “language plays” that are ironically devoid of meaning, and camp theatre revolving solely around one meaning. Neither provides the shock of the new.

There are theatres (mostly small ones) doing new plays that shock and entertain; he’s listed a few of them. I hope that if any of those playwrights goes on to write a good, strong play that happens to win a Pulitzer, we don’t condemn it for being too conventional.

Janeane Garofalo, Henry Rollins, and Marc Maron doing non-standup at The Silent Movie Theatre (?).

I would go see this if a) it weren’t tech week for that one-act festival you’re invited to, and  b) I weren’t then out of town at the state Democratic convention.

Life in comics may be hard for comic-book characters such as Captain America and Thor (both currently “dead,” both sure to return at some point). But as evidenced by the good health of Cap co-creator Joe Simon, 93 years old and still going very very strong, and the long lives of many other Golden Age greats, doing funnybooks keeps you going.

Pirate con in New Orleans.

For one thing, it seems that the city has already been raped and pillaged.

Thank God we won’t have to wait for another election!