Driving home from auditions for my play in Hollywood today, I passed Darth Vader and Elmo walking together down Highland Blvd.  Darth Vader had his helmet off and was carrying R2D2. Elmo waved to me. This was not a pairing I expected to see, but at the same time, none of it seemed unusual. So I guess I really have been out here for almost 25 years.

Please watch.

I just found out about a great new music podcast, Sound Opinions, in which two very knowledgeable taste-makers bring a lot of insight to an hour-long discussion about music. Their range is wide and their taste is informed. On the most recent show, they discuss music with economist Paul Krugman, who notes that given the dire state of the world economy he needs music more than ever. Other discussions cover the music of Bob Dylan, R.E.M., Neil Young, and others.

Here’s a link to the page about their recent show with Brian Eno. Eno, it should be noted, is not in the studio with them — they’re in the U.S., and he’s speaking with them from England — but these guys are so natural, so comfortable, that it sounds like they’re all sitting together talking over tea. In this particular interview, Eno is given just credit as an early pioneer of important musical trends (new wave; sampling; spoken word over music; ambient music; using the synthesizer as an instrument; and many more), and is asked smart questions about how he chooses collaborators (David Bowie; David Byrne with or without Talking Heads; Robert Fripp; Devo; Bryan Ferry with or without Roxy Music; as well as a couple of bands I don’t care about, such as U2 and Coldplay). The interview is played against the backdrop of music they discuss, from Eno’s vast repertoire, in such a way that every bit creates a new and better understanding of connections and influences across his 40-year career. (In the process, teaching me something new about “America is Waiting,” a song of his with David Byrne that I’ve been listening to with great appreciation for 30 years.) If you’re at all interested in music — and musical trends — of the past 40 years, I highly recommend this interview.

Here’s something that’s never going to get old:  that little lancet of joy when I learn that something I’ve written has been accepted. I just had a short play chosen for a festival in San Diego in February. (More about the particulars of it another time.)

Let’s be honest:  most successes, when you dig deeper, are countervailed by many, many failures. If I’ve never been quite as dogged as Thomas Edison (“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”), I nevertheless got used to rejection early on. At age 11, I started sending short stories off to magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s, Analog, Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the like, and just as quickly, they’d come back, but even then my response was akin to: “Wow! They wrote back!” I was thrilled when some assistant would scribble a note onto the form rejection letter, as the time some kind woman wrote, “But thank you.” I still think about her. (Thank you, unnamed kind woman.) I never got rejected at school dances, because I just liked to dance, and would dance with all the girls — the big ones, the small ones, the pretty ones, the homely ones, the popular ones, the shy ones — in sixth grade, it just seemed wrong to leave any out. When I started actually dating, girls felt freer to reject me if they liked, and that seemed fine because there were others to ask. I wasn’t emotionally invested in it; I just wanted to go out with a girl and see how far I could get. (Results varied.)

When I started to get published, first in fan publications, and then with non-fiction and fiction in magazines and newspapers, it was thrilling. I liked opening a newspaper and seeing my byline. I liked getting some obscure little magazine in the mail and seeing my story (or, gasp, poem!) in there. Then I fell into the theatre and here’s what I discovered:  that live audience response trumped printed byline. How could seeing my name in print in a magazine — perhaps read, perhaps not, by unnamed and unknown people far away — possibly compare with actually being there when a live audience laughed out loud or was visibly moved by my play? One night, during a performance of my play Happy Fun Family, a woman literally Fell Out Of Her Seat laughing. To this day, I love her. Night after night, when women would sob at the end of About the Deep Woods Killer, I felt golden.

Rejection has never really bothered me. If it stings, it subsides almost instantly. I’m fortunate all around:  I’ve got a strong family, terrific friends, and the trappings of a pretty interesting life that I’ve snared and dragged back into my den. But acceptance is obviously preferable, especially acceptance of a play, which means that there’s going to be another audience experience with one of my plays, and if I’m even luckier, I can be there for it.

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.