It’s refreshing to once in a while say “over my dead body,” especially when you truly mean it. So here goes:

Over my dead body is my daughter going to get an experimental new drug cocktail just because Merck has succeeded in lobbying some state government to mandate it.

My priorities in life are simple. Here they are:

1. My family’s health
2. Everything else

Given this perspective, you can understand my immediate reaction: Here’s a huge pharmaceutical company looking to enrich its bottom line under the guise of “protecting” my daughter’s health. (No, they didn’t single her out — but keeping her front of mind creates a certain governing perspective as far as I’m concerned.)

By the way, in case you missed it, here’s what this is really about: Merck has been searching for a new drug market that it can completely own with its own patented drug. Click here to see the latest story about their 58-percent profitability plunge. Connect the dots and you get the suddenly pressing issue of immunizing pre-teen girls.

Will any of the presidential candidates stand up to big pharma? Because that’s who I’m newly interested in supporting.

Did you miss me? I’m back. Actually, I haven’t been away — haven’t been anywhere, actually, except up to Santa Barbara and back yesterday (more about that in a few seconds) — but I’ve been swamped. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I read and write and teach a lot, and every once in a while my Normandy-invasion scheduling collides and the Allies don’t win. (Where exactly was this metaphor going?) In any event, now that rehearsals and my play reading of last weekend are over, and the semester is well under way (meaning I’ve caught up on reading for my own courses) and some things have moved off my desk, I’m back.

What was the highlight of the Santa Barbara day trip? Getting up to 90 mph each way, and boosting my mileage to 15.7 mpg. Still nowhere near the advertised lie, but closer.

That’s the old joke for what “F.O.R.D.” stands for, and given the continuing catastrophe of their sales slump and their mismanagement, it may soon come all too true for the company itself.

As MSNBC.com reports today, Ford lost $12.7 billion last year. That’s almost as much I spent last year filling up my Ford.

What could Ford do about this before it is, indeed, Found On Road Dead?

For starters, it could stop LYING to its customers. As regular readers of this blog know, I just leased a new Mustang convertible. I’ve had it about three weeks and I have to tell you, I absolutely love it. It’s a load of fun to drive, it represents a significant upgrade in every way from the former model (and I’ve had three of those former models), and every morning when I drop my daughter off at school, it wows all the 10-year-old boys out front. (If you can’t wow the all-important pre-teen market in any way, you have zero cool, and I’m trying to hang onto what little I’ve got.) But here’s the one — the one! — thing about the car:

So far, it’s getting 14.7 miles to the gallon.

That’s not only insulting and unconscionable — to me and to the planet — it represents a LIE that I bought. I say that because Ford advertises MPG on this car as 19 for City and 24 for Highway. If Los Angeles isn’t a City with Highways, I don’t know where we’d find one. If anything, my mileage should be in the middle at 21 or 22 MPG, not a full 25% lower than their lowest estimate.

The Ford Bold Moves campaign was all about being upfront with where the company has gone wrong and what it’s doing to fix that.

Misrepresenting its gas mileage makes roadkill of the entire message.

Adrian Belew — legendary studio and touring guitarist for David Bowie, Talking Heads and Frank Zappa, fondly loved (at my house) frontman of King Crimson (especially since Robert Fripp insists on sitting upstage in the dark) — is selling his old effects boxes on eBay.

One minute I’m listening to a podcast from almost- and shoulda-been- rock star Cush about drinking and bad behavior in Hollywood with Belew in full rock-star regalia and entourage, the next I’m looking at boxes that may have been used to record, say, “Once in a Lifetime” up for bid in the thirty-dollar range.

Either Belew has someone else putting these auctions up, or he’s seriously wasting his time. (He could eclipse his scant eBay earnings in about 1/1000th of a second via his guitar.) Or he’s newly pathetic.

In an interview on Salon, notorious word-twister Frank Luntz, whose past counsel has been to push for “tax relief” rather than “tax cuts” and who proposed substituting “personalizing” Social Security over “privatizing” it (and whose biggest success was in repositioning estate taxes as “the death tax”) has bold advice for the quote unquote president with regard to the State of the Union: Be believable.

I realize that when it comes to believability I’m old-fashioned. For the most part I like my believability to be linked to facts, particularly ones I can believe. Only occasionally do I fall back on pure belief, belief unsupported by facts, as with my belief in the inherent redemptive nature of art — even though Picasso was a thoroughly unpleasant person, Hitler was a scenic artist who later got up to some very mean business, and Francis Bacon painted grotesqueries like this. Irrespective of this blind spot — and it looks like one I’m filling in — I like belief to be based on facts.

The quote unquote has never needed the facts. His belief has been pure. God talks to him. I wish He told him better — or truer — things, but there it is. I wonder if now Luntz wants the quote unquote to be “believable” in a factual way. If that’s what he’s prescribing, both men would be better saving their breath, except Luntz is no doubt thrilled for this media opportunity. I’m betting the quote unquote, though, will wish he were somewhere else tonight, like under the covers. At least, that’s what I believe.

If the republic needs him, Newt Gingrich says he’s willing to ride in and save it.

You just don’t see this sort of selflessness every day.

Driving home today from the rehearsal of my new play I was scanning Sirius satellite radio and came across a program I hadn’t heard before. The voice, though, was instantly recognizable. “How nice,” I thought, “that they gave Carol Channing a radio show!” There was no mistaking the voice, and she sounded just terrific — every bit as energetic, charming, and daffy as she ever was. I thought, “At 86 years old, maybe having a radio show has given her a new lease on life!”

Then what I thought was a show turned out to be a plug for the show and not the show itself, and it turned out the show and the voice didn’t belong to Carol Channing. It was Richard Simmons.

Find my confusion unconvincing?

Here’s an mp3 of Carol Channing (in an enconium to Modesto!).
Here’s an mp3 of Richard Simmons.

Imagine them without the horns and backup singers. (And please — imagine Simmons with a better song.)

Another day, another death learned of via the internet, this time of Ensemble Studio Theatre founding artistic director Curt Dempster, who died yesterday at age 71. Here’s the story as published by Playbill.

Dempster’s life work was new work by emerging writers, and he and his theatre have certainly helped a number of them emerge. As Playbill notes, Richard Greenberg, John Patrick Shanley, Arthur Giron, Jose Rivera, Eduardo Machado, and Leslie Ayvazian all got there start there. It has also been an important home for David Mamet, the late John Belluso, Christopher Durang and others. Ensemble Studio Theatre has never had a lot of what we often call “resources” (a euphemism for money) — the building itself is a crumbling eyesore too close to the water and therefore overrun outside by rats — but it has a lot of heart.

I met him only twice, and then briefly. The first was in July 1990 when my friend Shawn Garrett and I were thespian Johnny Appleseeds, traversing the entirety of Manhattan in hundred-degree heat and hundred-percent humidity on a mission to drop my scripts at every theatre in town. At the Public, Joe Papp looked at me as though I was a cockroach (a reaction I understood better in the years to follow as I grew to recognize the incompetence of my approach). At EST, Curt Dempster looked up from the overflowing stacks on his desk in a sort of nod while I left the scripts with someone else. Years later when my play “Anapest” was getting a workshop production, I was reintroduced to him.

Neither of those brief encounters matters, but given the legacy he’s left I can’t help saying I met him however briefly, and that I’m grateful for what he created.

A memorial service is being planned; watch the EST website for details. The home page has a simple but tasteful tribute, which says that at EST he built “the premier developmental theatre of the United States of America.” It’s hard to argue with.

For the second year in a row, I have discovered through the wonders of the internet that someone I was once close to has died.

It’s a bizarre feeling.

In this case, it’s Bill-Dale Marcinko, whose name will mean absolutely nothing to just about anyone reading this. And when I say I was once “close” to him, I guess what I mean is this: Back in the 1970’s long before the birth of the world wide web and the ways in which it interconnected everyone, when I was trapped in the backwoods of southern New Jersey with no transportation and a fervent desire to be elsewhere, when most of the people I knew and was close to were people I corresponded with and never met, I knew Bill-Dale Marcinko. Like me, he was a guy who published fanzines. I read his, he read mine, we found something to argue about via the mail — if you weren’t in a fan feud, you really weren’t anyone — we sniped at a then-seemingly-important group called The Fans of Central Jersey, and we actually met up once or twice at conventions. That sort of thing ended for me when I got more involved with women (not girls), and graduated from fanzines to “real” zines (like The Comics Journal), and became a reporter, and adorned myself with the outward trappings of growing up without ever fully growing up inside.

Now I find out that Bill-Dale was burned to a crisp in his house in late 2005. He was 46. In reading the various notices — and here’s one and here’s another — it sounds as though college was the high point for him, and that afterward it was a long slow slide that left him living alone in the house of his deceased parents, taking daily deliveries of pop culture ephemera from UPS, and building a Collyer-esque clutter that ultimately barred firefighters from saving his life.

Is this tragedy? I don’t know. Historically, tragedies concern a fall from great heights (one of the reasons “Death of a Salesman,” which concerned an everyman yet called itself “a tragedy” was revolutionary — much as I don’t care for it). Think Oedipus, or Macbeth. Marcinko’s height was putting out three issues of a xeroxed fanzine densely packed with text, one with an actual raisin hand-taped into each copy. Did he have writing skill? No less so than whoever is behind TMZ.com or Entertainment Weekly. But it didn’t lead anywhere larger for him.

In one of the zines I was producing during this period, I ran cartoons from a friend of my good friend and mentor Richard C. Roesberg. (Who sometimes comments on this blog.) His friend was a phenomenal artist (and I don’t use the adjective lightly) and a clever wit; I got two 3-panel samples of a strip he was going to do about Albert Einstein and his wife and I published them both, but no more came, no matter my cajoling. His friend was also someone who daily became more and more unhinged, until for some reason he moved out of the interior rooms of his house in Philadelphia and moved into the spaces behind the walls where the closets connected up. And then he killed himself.

I don’t know anything more about Bill-Dale Marcinko’s life since 1980 or thereabouts, but I will say this: Last winter in my mother’s basement I came across my copies of the three issues he put out of his fanzine and during a purge of accumulated junk from my early life I couldn’t throw them into the refuse pile. I shipped them back to California, where I now live, and where I still have them, and where I will keep them.

Three of these plays I don’t really know, and so can’t talk about.

I don’t know “Girl, 20” by Ellen Fairey, or “Lost Nation” by Tira Palmquist, although I’m planning to attend and learn about them.

I also don’t know this play “Safehouse” by, well, me. I’ve read it — heck, I’ve even written it — but I don’t know it very well. I for sure don’t know it as well as literary pal Trey Nichols who put this series together with the powers that be at Moving Arts and was part of graciously picking the play. Trey called me today and talked about my play in such an energetic smart way that he almost talked me into believing the play was that good; at the very least, it sounded interesting. Given the actors he’s talking about enlisting for the production, I could get very excited about this. In the meantime, I feel more aware of what’s missing from the play than of what’s there.

The play that I do know is “One Damn Thing” by Michael David. It’s a play about Edna St. Vincent Millay, long past her peak, struggling to write one more poem but constantly pulled back into the incandescence of her past when she was indeed able to burn her candle at both ends and still be luminous. I find this play entertaining, inventive in its staging, funny and tragic. Millay has the bad grace to die long after her powers had faded, and I can tell you from previous readings of this play when it was a work in progress that it is deeply moving to see the contrast between her highs and her lows. Please come and be part of the audience and part of launching this play into the wider world.