This is the latest Facebook post from my friend Liesel Kopp. That’s her on the right, and her father Merv on the left.

I don’t post that often, but because Facebook seems to be the best way to reach out to a large number of people all at once, I’m very compelled to post right now.

After a very long and painful battle with cancer, my Dad passed away last Wednesday evening, November 16, 2011. I always loved my Dad, but we had a difficult relationship, and we were very different people. However, his steady decline over these past 3 months afforded me an opportunity I never thought possible: I was able to help my Dad through the most difficult struggle he ever faced, and in doing so, I finally found the dad/daughter relationship I always longed for. I was thrust into a role I never thought I’d have—I became his caregiver/primary health care advocate, and the more I settled into this role, the more fervidly I fought. My Dad also gave me durable power of attorney in his Advanced Directive and named me as Successor Trustee on his trust (two things that every adult on this planet should go create for themselves immediately), and while terrified at first (and then again many times after), I ended up wearing the titles proudly and lovingly. This has become the most important thing I’ve ever done.

— with Merv Kopp.

There’s a great deal of wisdom and empathy here. I’m proud of Liesel, and glad I once got to meet her dad at one of our shows. I also love the photo. It’s a beautiful photo — she’s leaning in to get every last bit of their relationship while she can, and he’s greatly amused by it. The photo tells its own story, as all great photos do. I told Liesel that I’m sorry for her loss, but glad that she can note her gain:  the best sort of final reckoning between a parent and child, one that allows a good transition for each. 

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, in some ways our most obdurate holiday, one in which it’s demanded that we give thanks on at least that day, even when we sometimes don’t want to, even when its founding is shrouded in ironic myth (that of the European-Americans serving a bountiful feast to the natives, when the probable actuality was the natives taking pity on the starving whites). And yet I found myself thinking about Liesel and her father, the wisdom she so obviously showed in taking advantage of the time she had to get what she wanted, and then in giving her father the best going-away present imaginable. And so I found myself  completely grateful for my family and friends who came over, for the wine and food and good times, for the dog who must be let in or out every 60 seconds and who must argue with every other dog on every walk, and for the hours and hours we spent laughing uproariously while eating and playing board games, just grateful for each other’s company. I reminded my wife before bed of my longstanding opinion that Thanksgiving is the dumbest holiday, one where we’re asked to eat too much to prove our good fortune, but then I added that this year it was indeed a feast, filling and satisfying in all ways. And that next year, I’d cook.

When Andre the Giant was a boy, Samuel Beckett used to drive him to school — in the back of his truck because that’s the only place he’d fit. All they would discuss was cricket. The absurdity of this situation — the future professional wrestler and adored star of “The Princess Bride” growing up carted by a future Nobel playwright of the existential — cries out for a play. Maybe I should write it. (I know Ionesco would have, had it occurred to him.)

In which our Olivier, William Shatner, advises all of us this Thanksgiving not to do what he almost did: burn down his house while deep-frying a turkey. Watch all of it so you don’t miss one moment of his holiday-hammy performance, or his Herzogian voiceover. (About turkey fryers, he intones, “But their power is unrelenting… in careless hands.”) Not to be missed (and I better make sure my friend Larry Nemecek knows about this!)

Today someone was telling me that the word she was saying is the past tense for “love” in Italian.

I immediately said, “The past tense of love is usually ‘hate.’ ”

Everyone looked up surprised. I said, “Think about it. Ever meet anyone with an ex-wife, ex-husband, ex-girlfriend?”

Sometimes you can surprise even yourself with the wisdom you accidentally stumble upon.

Here’s something that I can’t imagine I would have said when I was in graduate school:  I like writing to spec.

I do it now for a living — writing all sorts of things for clients with my firm Counterintuity — and I did it for years as a newspaper editor and freelancer. (For the LA Times and others, book reviews had to be a certain length; as an editor, headlines and captions had to be a certain size to fit.)

But for some reason, it never occurred to me how liberating it could be to write plays this way. In the past few years, though, I’ve fallen into the habit and it’s been oddly liberating. Instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering what was on my mind that I didn’t know about, the prompt has become:  “We need a play that fits these requirements, in this timeframe, and works this way. Can you do it?” The parameters in these instances direct you to solutions.

In the most recent example, I was asked to write a short play that was 50% silent and that takes place in a very constrained space. That was fun. I had numerous launching-pad ideas, drilled down into one, started writing it, then my wife called form work and actually happened to give me what I thought was a better idea. I finished it and sent it.

While in that mode of mind,  I happened to be on Facebook and responded to a comment left on my wall that “that sounds like the title of a play. I should write that.” Within minutes, I had an email from an actor friend of 15 years saying, essentially, “Seriously. You should write that. Let’s have lunch.” and linking me to a set of guidelines for a theatre series here in LA where this play might fit.

Now I just got an email about someone else looking for a short play with very specific guidelines. I’m considering writing one. Even if they don’t take it, someone will.

We talk a lot about breaking the rules and going outside the box and coloring outside the lines. I understand why that’s appealing. But many artists far greater than we are forged great work within those rules, that box, those lines.

R.E.M. broke up recently, and not a moment too soon. Now there’s a new anthology album, which I won’t be buying, but which includes this beautiful and haunting song clearly inspired by the mid-60’s, Pet Sounds and Smile era of the Beach Boys. If I can’t have any more Beach Boys sounds from then, I’m happy to have discovered this, just now.

In which Newt Gingrich almost saves us from ourselves, again and again. (And thank God someone at DC Comics finally listened.)

Here’s how I learned at an early age to be skeptical:  by ordering crap advertised in comic books. The novelties were worthless, but the disillusionment proved to be priceless.

I make a point not to buy junk, and not to buy stuff I don’t need. But ironically, I need to buy this book — because I think that just seeing it on my bookshelf every day will serve as a useful reminder.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Jobs’ genius was not as an inventor, but as a tweaker. That, plus some obvious lunacy, made him what he was:  impossible, but brilliant.

Hendrik Hertzberg on the political biopic we unfortunately didn’t get:  Alexander Hamilton, as shown by Francis Ford Coppola. I’d really like to see that.

The only portrayal of Hamilton I recall seeing in a film was of Rufus Sewell, in the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” Ron Chernow’s recent biography of Hamilton was unputdownable, largely because, as Hertzberg notes in the piece above, Hamilton’s life was filled with incident — discrimination; war; a sex scandal; a duel — and his legacy is large. (Including essentially founding American free enterprise.) But somehow Adams gets a miniseries and all Hamilton rates is one scene in that miniseries. Go figure.