Tonight in class one of my students looked up and announced, “Oh, Kurt Vonnegut died. A friend texted me.”

And so he had.

Vonnegut was an early and lasting hero to me. My brother introduced me to his books starting when I was 11 and I was quickly hooked. In fact, the first book I ever bought myself was a Vonnegut book. I had read “Cat’s Cradle” and one or two others already, including probably “Sirens of Titan,” when David Evans, one of my teachers at Arthur Rann Middle School, noticed my interest and started talking about “Breakfast of Champions.” I asked if I could borrow it. (That one didn’t appear to be in my brother Ray’s library.) The teacher agreed. Later that day, though, there was a call at home from Mr. Evans asking to speak with my father. I put my father on, then ran upstairs and listened in on the other line. Mr. Evans said something like this: “Your son is very bright and he’s reading books by a man named Kurt Vonnegut. Lee would like to borrow his new book, and I would lend it to him, but I wanted to check with you first because it has adult themes.” Mr. Evans stressed that I was already reading things along these lines. My father had a question or two about the adult themes, Mr. Evans filled in some additional information, and finally my father said, and I’ll never forget these words, “Don’t lend it to him.” I hung up the phone, went downstairs, got my bicycle out of the garage, rode a mile through the woods to Goetsch’s Market, and bought “Breakfast of Champions” for myself. I took it home and read it cover to cover, outraged that my father was trying to ban it, and eager to find the adult themes. When I was done I couldn’t imagine what the objectionable part was, unless it was the little line drawing of what looked like conjoined parantheses and which was clearly identified as “a cunt.”

(And let that be a lesson to all would-be censors everywhere: Your actions only foment demand.)

Vonnegut taught me early lessons in thinking for myself, both in this example and in his actual writing. Being of a pragmatic bent, I don’t share his dour view — I always think we can make life even just a little bit better, and in the meantime there is much that is glorious. One of the glorious things was his string of bitingly funny and wise books.

A couple of years ago when my son Lex was between books I plucked “Cat’s Cradle,” a book that for some years I reread every year, and handed it to him. He liked it a lot and moved on to “Slaughterhouse Five.” In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Billy Pilgrim famously “comes unstuck in time.” Similarly, other characters throughout Vonnegut’s oeuvre find themselves transported to distant times and places, whether on Earth, Trafalmadore, or elsewhere. One thing that will not be coming unstuck and leaving us is Vonnegut’s body of work.

Word back from my authorized Apple repair site:  Yep, the hard drive is toast. Good thing my data was backed up.

Three questions:

1. No matter whether they like it or not, why are people shocked about what the shock jock said?
2. With regard to the following interview, has Senator Obama (and others) ever tuned in to Fox News? Ann Coulter isn’t one iota more pleasant than Mr. Imus, but I don’t hear about any boycott over there.
3. Again with regard to the following interview — and not to pick on Senator Obama, whom I generally like and respect — given that he and his wife are very well-off, shouldn’t these scholarships he’s scoping out for his daughters be reserved for other kids who actually need them?

From MSNBC.com:

Before the announcement was made, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had appeared on the MSNBC program “Hardball,” where host David Gregory asked the senator and presidential candidate if he thought Imus should be fired.

“I don’t think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day,” Obama said.

He went on to note that he and his wife have “two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope, at some point, are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships. … I don’t want them to be getting a bunch of information that, somehow, they’re less than anybody else. And I don’t think MSNBC should want to promote that kind of language.”

Obama went on to say that he would not be a guest on Imus’ show in the future.

My wife said to me this afternoon, “Do you think you’re too reliant on technology?”

I thought about that for a moment, picturing myself 20 years ago hanging out in the woods with good friends, drinking beer and smoking cigars and playing poker and playing practical jokes — a fond memory, utterly free of tech enslavement because we wouldn’t allow phones let alone any other real tech up there (whatever existed in 1985 or so) — and much as that memory continues to tantalize, I said, “Actually, without this technology I couldn’t get done even a small fraction of what I do.” (And yes, I do speak in complex sentences.)

I love the tech for the working freedom it’s given me. And when next I’m able to be someplace like those woods, I’ll turn it off.

You may have noticed that the Google Adwords listings have disappeared from the right column. That’s because I upgraded to a  newer version of WordPress (which powers this blog). Some of the new functionality is helpful, especially with images, and it was free. The downside:  In reloading one of the pages, new version swapped out the code and dumped my Adwords html. (And just when I had earned almost eight dollars, too!) So now I need to find the relevant page and repair it. Given the other tech issue of the past day, it hasn’t seemed like a priority.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t backed up your computer system(s), do it today. I have a backup system, and I’m glad I do.

Yesterday during a curriculum meeting at USC, I used my MacBook Pro to refer to some documents and websites for the meeting, as well as keep an eye on email related to the one-act fest I’m producing there. Everything was fine. Two hours later during a break from my class, I discovered that the computer wouldn’t boot:  It opened to the much-feared white screen (meaning a hard disk problem), and then the widely lamented flashing folder with a question mark. Given that all my data is backed up, I decided I could afford not to be unnerved and checked all my email from home later.

Today at my office I ran some diagnostics and they confirmed my fears. (As did a phone conference with Mac tech consulting ace Alan Potashnick, who was good enough to call me back immediately even though he’s at the hospital with his wife, who is having a baby. It’s good to work with people who have the right priorities.) No amount of software wizardry was going to correct what is a hard drive problem (evidenced by the spinning clackety-clack sound).

I pulled out another laptop — a 12″ G4 that I still love — dropped the MacBook Pro off at Melrose Mac where it’ll be fixed under warranty, and went home and restored necessary files onto this other laptop. I have a 340GB Maxtor backup drive at home. My thinking:  If the house burns down or blows away, everything is on a computer. If the office burns down or blows away, everything is backed up at home. It’s good to have two separate storage locations. And I have a third:  my most important files (documents, including Quickbooks backups) are also backed up to the internet via .Mac.

If Melrose Mac returns my MacBook Pro fixed, and with all its data restored, hooray. If it comes back fixed but without the data, it’ll be a bit of an inconvenience but at least I’ll have my data and I can restore it. If I didn’t already have the data — all my plays, all my other writing, all my photos and songs and movies, etc. — I would be having a real conniption.

Last year a very good friend had his laptop stolen. He had thought his laptop was getting backed up at work through the office system, but somehow or other that wasn’t working. On New Year’s Eve he told us how horrible losing all his data was. I was just glad he hadn’t lost his plays.

Again, some friendly advice:  If you haven’t backed up your data, do it today.

My good friend, actor-playwright-director Trey Nichols, is written up in this week’s LA Weekly, in a special issue devoted to the perils and pitfalls of doing theatre in LA.  I’m always happy to see talented colleagues get noticed, although perhaps not in this light:

Employee of the Month

In the summer of 1996 at Moving Arts’ Silver Lake venue, playwright Trey Nichols was on the frontlines, by himself, in his first assignment as box-office/house manager. The audience was due to start arriving in minutes. After using the theater’s one lobby toilet, Nichols observed to his dismay that a blockage by his own fecal matter threatened an immediate overflow after a weak flush. With little time for rumination, Nichols was faced with one of two difficult choices: to walk away and deny all knowledge of what he had done, or to take corrective action. This was just between Nichols and his conscience. Our protagonist explains what happened next:

“I grabbed a big handful of my own excrement to clear the blockage. I had seconds to act, and it was the only thing I could do. The performance proceeded without a hitch, though I didn’t shake any hands that night.”

Nichols has been too modest to speak of his heroism until now. If the Weekly had been aware of his actions in 1996, he surely would have received one of this publication’s Special Recognition awards. The play, by the way, was a work by Nat Colley, aptly named A Sensitive Man.

When something similar happened to me once with our theatre’s notoriously weak plumbing, I… used the plunger.

There is something alarming about this picture.

Children, be careful whom and what you follow. Even if — especially if! — it’s holiday-themed.

I wrote my first play almost 30 years ago when I was 14. I was attending a high school I strongly disliked that provided early lessons in how to rebel; that’s how the play came to be called “Too Long.” The “teacher” — I use the word loosely; he was assigned to in some way oversee my play production at a student event while I did my best to subvert his authority without losing the production — said that the script was “too long.” So that’s what I named it.

How did I come to write this play? I was asked by some of the other kids if I would appear in their play — a jury-trial play of some sort — and I agreed; I was thrilled to be asked. But then I noticed that most of my close friends — the odd, the inept, the ungainly and ill-kempt, the losers and stragglers, the self-conscious and left-out, in other words, people like me — weren’t invited. I kept making pitches for them to be involved in the jury-trial play, but the kids putting that on just couldn’t find any way for them to be involved, even though, unsurprisingly, there was a role for everyone on the soccer team. I understood. Kids aren’t dumb about societies of people. So I decided I’d write my own play, a comedy, with only one parameter: If you wanted to be in my play, I would write you a role. It was an equal-opportunity production. I had a lot of fun with playing off the perceived notion of my friends’ identities — I made my best friend, a seemingly weak and withdrawn boy with glasses, into a serial killer who had strangled 29 people with one hand; I turned into a femme fatale the odd girl who never turned her head lest her perfectly straight hair wrinkle; I gave great gobs of dialogue to my stammering friend with full confidence that not only could he deliver those lines, he would. And of course, in keeping with the nature of such theatrical origin stories, it all came off as a huge success. The play got big laughs and for one night everyone involved was a star. And without knowing how to do anything, with no formal training except trial and error, I became a playwright and director without realizing it.

Not much has changed. Hundreds of productions and readings and workshops later, I still have no formal training in the theatre. Instead, like an apprentice or a magpie, I’ve just adopted what works for others when I find it also works for me. Moreover, I’m still working within mini societies much like the one in school: the society of actors and directors and playwrights at my theatre company Moving Arts, the extended society of such folk locally and across the nation, the society of students and colleagues at USC. I do have some formal training in playwriting, courtesy of David Scott Milton (who shaped my career and still teaches in the MPW program at USC) and the late and much-missed Jerome Lawrence. Dave and Jerry were part of theatrical communities as well and talked about them at length and did what they could to introduce their students to those societies; that’s an inspiration and an example that I work to pass on.

On Friday night I saw the world premiere of EM Lewis’ “Infinite Black Suitcase.” (Here’s a link to the theatre company, The SpyAnts, who are producing it.) Ellen Lewis was my student at USC, then my assistant director at Moving Arts, and a member of my playwriting workshop, and now she’s out and about and inspiring other people. Ellen is both strong and compassionate, qualities that don’t always intermingle and that one doesn’t always find in writers. On Saturday morning, after her opening night and its ongoing opening-night party and toasts from many well-wishers both blood-related and not, Ellen came to workshop (of course; she’s nothing if not dedicated). In talking about the pages of her new play, “Song of Extinction,” I said that the common thread in Ellen’s plays is “being strong, and going on.” She corrected me: while they may be about being strong and going on, she felt that “going on” is possible because other people help, both in the plays and in her life. And then she turned to the workshop and generously — probably too generously — thanked all of us for what is truly her success.

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of why I’m a playwright and not a novelist. This was another instance. I never wanted to be alone in a room writing for weeks and months at a time. I wanted to be working with a group, and that was one of my earliest writing experiences. No matter how much we might complain about it at times — about the directors who misinterpret the play, the actors who bungle the lines, the producer who didn’t market the play, and on and on — every working playwright I know is here because we need these other people and secretly hope they will be as committed and as talented, as inspirational, as other committed, talented, inspirational theatre people we’ve worked for. We love the actors and the audience members and the directors and producers and everyone else, sometimes in theory, but sometimes in practice.

Almost 10 years ago now I was fortunate to be in the audience one night for one of my comedies when a woman literally fell out of her seat laughing. The moment has passed, but it’s burned into my brain and I still love her wherever she is now. I’m still writing for that woman and other people like her, and still counting on theatre people to help me do it.

A big chunk of Hollywood hillside is for sale — and it happens to include the Magic Castle.

This doesn’t mean that the Castle is closing (necessarily). It doesn’t even mean that the land will sell. (Although this is prime real estate, one block away from the Hollywood and Highland complex that includes the Kodak Theatre, which hosts the Academy Awards.) But it does mean that the owners are interested in seeing just how big the rabbits will be that bidders pull out of their hats.