My plan for this weekend:  write (my new play), play (Oblivion on the xBox, and poker in real life), shop (household things).

It’s not Eat, Pray, Love, but it’s less nauseating.

Who’s funding the “populist” Tea Party? Billionaires.

My good friend Rich Roesberg turned me onto this story in May and I’m only now getting around to posting it. It’s still a good story. It seems that during a recent rehearsal for Waiting for Godot in Melbourne, one of the stars, Sir Ian McKellen, took a break outside on a bench. Whereupon one of the passersby, thinking him homeless, tossed him a dollar coin.

McKellen is holding onto the coin as a good luck charm but offers his benefactor something for his money, “If that man would like to identify himself, we would like to invite him to come and see Waiting For Godot. And if he insists on paying, we’ll knock a dollar off the ticket price.”

I have three further thoughts about this:

1. I have no doubt that this theatre’s publicist leapt on the opportunity to put this story out. A tip of the hat to that theatre professional for a job well-done. The story got reported widely — even down to southern New Jersey, where said good friend Roesberg lives. A good theatre publicist is always worth his keep.
2. My favorite comment to the story on this newspaper’s site:  “Round in Yarraville and Seddon we have got heaps of these types. I never give them money, just a kick in the pants and yell get a job you bum.” So the confusion that Sir Ian was a bum continues even onto the news coverage.
3. In theatre circles, Sir Ian is known as a real gentleman and a bit of a cut-up. When he did his show “A Knight out” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1997, he was prone to taking over the box office and answering the phone himself in ways such as this:  “Oh, so you’d like to come see my show would you? And where would you like to sit? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit further down where you can see me better? Now, it will cost you a little more, but I’m sure you’ll agree it will be worth it.” And so forth. He charmed everyone who called and everyone who worked there.

Last week, I was mentioned (briefly) in the Burbank Leader’s coverage of a forum that I agreed to moderate about developments within our fair city’s police department. Click here if you’d like to read it. Public response so far, on some blogs, is that no doubt I was paid to intentionally get some people’s names wrong. Good theory — and I wish I’d thought of that.

Also in the Burbank Leader comes news that Gun World is closing.  For those of you who’ve seen my play “About the Deep Woods Killer,” this may strike a chord. Here’s Scene Three, in which Jack, the son of the Deep Woods Killer, struggles to stay on a good path:

 

 

                                                (Scene Three: Testimony.)

           

(Spotlight on Jack. He stands alone, addressing us as though we were a group. He holds his baseball cap in his hands and fidgets with it, at times twisting and turning it.)

 

                        JACK

My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic. But you know that. I had a tough week. Well, a tough day. The same thing happened at work, again, the thing that happens every time I think it’s okay. They hired this new girl, woman, Alice, and somebody told her. About me. Well, about my father. I know you all already know, so what’s the point. It’s about honesty in here. So at work, nobody said anything to me but I could tell. Monday morning Alice was filling out paperwork while I was in the breakroom and she smiled and said hello. I didn’t want to talk to her, I wasn’t trying to talk to her, I wasn’t even trying to look at her, but I did like her hair, it was red, pulled up behind. She talked to me and I looked up and looked up at her hair, that was when I saw it, and she smiled again. And after lunch she wouldn’t look at me. She came into the breakroom and I was there again and she acted like she didn’t mean to come in there and turned and left, and I knew what that was. I was… I was really down after that. The whole day that feeling was back, it felt like there was something on me, something heavy I couldn’t get off and the drive home took me past the Dew Drop Inn, and the Rustic Inn, and the Pitney Tavern, and the Stop and Go Liquor – I don’t know why we have so many of these places, it’s like they build ‘em right where I’m going to drive by, that’s what I was thinking – then I stopped at the light at Leeds Road and there was Gun World. And I looked at myself in the rearview and I just looked tired, real tired. The light changed… and after a bit I drove home and I got inside and I –

(He starts to choke up.)

–  I called Tony. I got through it all, I got home, but I might not’ve gotten further ‘cept for Tony. He saved me. So I thank him and I praise God for him. I am a strong person, a strong man, but sometimes everybody needs a little help, and I had Tony. Thank you.

 

This play was performed in the Moving Arts one-act festival two years ago here in Los Angeles. One of the actors was walking down Magnolia Boulevard and did a double-take. He called our producer, Steve, to say, “You’re not going to believe this… but I’m standing in front of Gun World.” He later told me how very strange it felt to one moment be leading his normal life, and the next moment to feel that he’d entered the world of the play. For this reason alone, I’m sad that Gun World is closing.

Finally,  the current issue of Inc. magazine has a profile of my company, Counterintuity. Counterintuity is the place where I write those other things that blur the lines between reality and fantasy (we call that marketing copy). Click here if you’d like to read it and use my image for target practice.

I’m fascinated with Danielle Sacks’ profile of former ad man Alex Bogusky in the current issue of Fast Company. I think you should click here and read it.

While at Crispin Porter Bogusky, Bogusky was the creative director behind relaunching Burger King’s King (and the viral hit “Subservient Chicken”) as well as the terrific campaign against teen drinking and drugs,  and the very gimmicky magazine inserts for Mini. One of the magazines I get had a punch-out-and-assemble cardboard Mini on one page, and little punch-out traffic cones on the opposite page. Yes, I popped out both and played with them. During his tenure, CP+B became the hot, hip agency, and for good reason:  their work was clever, and they delivered a lot of sales for clients. In 2009, Ad Agency named it the agency of the decade.

In this profile, Bogusky now makes himself out to be a man transformed. He’s left advertising and discovered soul-searching. With about $45 million now in hand, he’s hanging out all day writing or playing or doing finger paints in a cottage he calls FearLess, and handing out keycards to the cottage to other cool people he thinks can help change the world. I read all this and thought about Alfred Nobel, who suffered the accidental indignity of reading his own obituary, which condemned him for inventing dynamite; Nobel set out to redeem himself by creating the Nobel Prizes. Bogusky devoted a lot of his life to getting people to consume more from Burger King, Coke, Domino’s, Jose Cuervo, and Kraft, and now he regrets it. Because — and please don’t think I’m cynical — he can now afford it. Easily. Stylishly. It doesn’t seem that these self-doubts plagued him while he was devising those campaigns.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one starting to wonder a thing or two about Bogusky’s transformation, because  Sacks then goes and talks to a lot of Bogusky’s former employees. A far different picture emerges. What Sacks thinks she finds isn’t interesting (news alert:  creative types can be narcissistic). What’s more interesting is the theory that Bogusky had manipulated Sacks into getting exactly the kind of profile he wanted — until she figured that out and turned on him for the back half of the piece. This is the biggest such reversal I’ve ever seen in a profile. It’s like the last few minutes of “The Sixth Sense,” which has you revisiting everything you just saw, but now from a completely different angle.

Days later, I’m still trying to figure out why this is newsworthy:  Martin Short’s wife has died.

I mean no ill intent to her surviving family members, including Mr. Short, whom I had a very pleasant half-hour press interview with once.  But why was this newsworthy enough to be covered by  CNN, Entertainment Weekly, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and by my Google count at least 500 other news sources?

If I’m reading her biography correctly, her last and most noteworthy acting appearance, as a supporting player on the sitcom “Soap,” was in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan became president. The year “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened. The year Britney Spears was born. Since then, she’s been a housewife and mother. These are good and important things. But housewives die all the time, with little notice by the media.

The greatest clue we get is the headline from the LA Times: ” ‘Three Amigos’ and ‘Father of the Bride’ funnyman Martin Short’s wife dies.” So what we have is an obit in which the subject of the obit is mentioned after the names of two films in which she didn’t appear, and after her husband, an obit in which she is mentioned in the next-to-last word, and not by name, but by title:  “wife.”

This has me asking:

When Phil Silvers’ wife died, whoever she was, was it reported?

Who is Jason Alexander’s wife? Wikipedia tells me they’ve been married almost 30 years, like the Shorts. If she dies, of natural causes, will there be an obit?

How is the health of Billy Crystal’s wife? Would she get an obit?

Small-town papers run obits of all the locals. (Or, at least, they used to. Now unless the local is notable, they run a death notice — which is a paid service offered to the family.) But with mainstream media, obits are restricted to notable people. The late Mrs. Short is notable solely for having been married to Mr. Short. While understandably, her demise is newsworthy to him and to their children, and perhaps to people in the entertainment industry who knew the couple, why is this important to outside mainstream media? I honestly can’t figure this out. She died of natural causes. What is the news angle? The fact that this is being reported at all makes me wonder if there’s some aspect that is not being reported (yet?). As it is, it seems to be a dog bites man story:  a not-well-known person died after a lengthy illness.

I am sorry for the Short family’s loss.

Few people are more miserable than closet cases. My gay friends told me this years ago, and it seems truer and truer. Case in point:  Bush campaign chief Ken Mehlman who has now announced that he’s gay. Evidently, he’s only recently come to this conclusion, and now must bear the agony of helping Karl Rove fan the flames of homophobia for fun and profit. In previous off-the-record interviews, it’s revealed that Mehlman “often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called ‘the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.'” Theory for you Ken:  Maybe it was all the hatred you and your pals were stirring up against, well, your own kind.

Not sure how to spot closeted gays? I understand. I have poor gaydar. I’m someone who’s still unsure that all the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” were gay. Sure, they were knowledgeable about hair products and where the couch should go, but that doesn’t always translate into “gay.” But now I’ve locked into one surefire tell-tale clue. You should just assume that any Republican opposed to gays and gay marriage is himself a self-loathing closeted gay person. That would explain Congressman Mark Foley, Ken Mehlman, Senator Larry Craig, Pastor Ted Haggard, Congressman Bob Allen, California State Senator Roy Ashburn and so many others. Now I understand whom they hate, and why.

The other night my daughter and I watched the movie “Unbreakable.” This is one of my favorite movies. I respond to its central message — that if you don’t express who you really are, you will be lost — and to its driving metaphor:  that comic books reflect inner truths about us as a species. I was thrilled at her interest in watching his movie. When it was over, I asked her if she liked it. She said, “No. It was boring.”

A night or two later, I invited her to watch an episode of “Wonders of the Solar System” with me. When it was over she insisted that we never watch that together again, because it was boring.

Then on Sunday we were in my car when she suddenly perked up to a song playing on my stereo. “What is this?” she asked. “Raygun Suitcase,” I said, “by Pere Ubu.” “I don’t like the way he sings this,” she announced, adding, “I don’t like the way he sings ‘Kathleen’ or ‘Oh, Catherine, in fact, I just don’t like the way he sings.” In this way, she overturned 15 years of universal agreement in our household that these are wonderful songs, brilliantly delivered.

Did I mention that she just turned 12?

Back here I noted that I had taken a two-week break from this blog and hoped to finally explain why that night. That was on August 9th, and I still haven’t done it. Why not? Because I have struggled for a month to figure out what to say about this, with no resolution. So now I’m just going to say it.

Someone I know killed himself.

On July 26th, the day after I came back from Comic-Con, during the middle of a day with many other delights and joys in it, I got an email that this colleague had died suddenly. It didn’t take long for me to piece together what had happened from a couple of calls and  some investigation on the Internet. I knew, as many of us did, that he had risen to a position of local prominence, then suffered a major career setback. After struggling with the aftermath of that for many months, months during which many of us still saw him on a regular basis, he one day parked his car at the end of a bridge, walked to the middle, and jumped to his death, a fall of 255 feet, farther than from the Golden Gate Bridge, in a descent that must have seemed an hour long to the man taking it. Pedestrians and bicyclists are protected from falls on that bridge by a 54-inch-tall concrete and metal safety rail.  An accidental slip off the side would be impossible.

I have a lot more to add to this story, but I don’t think I can add it here (at least not now). That’s what I was struggling with for weeks. This incident was foremost in my thoughts, and I did discuss it with my family and close friends, but I didn’t think it seemed appropriate to go on the Internet right now with my feelings about this.

I wasn’t close to this man, but we did serve on a board and on a committee together, and I saw him at many other civic and private functions. Over the course of the past year, I probably saw him three dozen times. That’s more often than I saw some of the people I consider my closest friends (especially those on the east coast). I had a lunch with him that left me very impressed with his intelligence and his ideas and his passion for his field, and I told him after that how glad I was that I’d gotten to know him better. We exchanged several emails following up on our discussion. I’m glad I got that opportunity.

Seven years ago, another man I knew killed himself. This man was a  close friend. He was one of the founders of my theatre company, and a regular guest to my house for holiday celebrations and parties. He was enormously talented and funny and strange, and generous with his time and his skills, but one day he just got tired of battling the mental illness he was always on guard against, and so he drank an entire bottle of whiskey while talking all his prescription pills. We did a lot of things together over the course of almost 15 years, and I have many, many fond memories, but here’s my last memory of that friend:  that one night four of us went to see a show together at La Mirada Theatre, two of us to a car, him riding with someone else, and before the show and after the show I don’t think I took much notice of him or said much to him, not willfully, but in a sort of blind ignorance because I was wrapped up in my own thoughts, and that was the last time I saw him. I doubt I could’ve changed anything (although I know I would have tried). But I do wish I could go back in time and pay a little more attention on that last night I was ever going to see him alive.

If you commit a sex offense, do not try to Friend the victim on Facebook.