And I don’t mean for you to use in a bar.

No, I mean great opening lines in drama.

Tonight in one of my classes at USC I invested half an hour in discussing what I think is the best opening line in all of contemporary drama, this one from “True West” by Sam Shepard:

“So, Mom took off for Alaska, huh?”

(More about that — and the 13 things it tells you — tomorrow.)

Shepard grabs us and pulls us right into the play. Too many plays – including too many of his own plays – start long after they start. When I’m rereading my plays with an eye toward production, one of the questions I ask is, “Is this really the opening line?” Or, is that opening line buried somewhere on page 3? If it truly is on page 3, your play probably should be two pages shorter.

How do you know if you’ve got the right opening line? Some questions that help:

1. Does it say something about the speaker?
2. Does it say something about the setting?
3. Does it say something about the play, helping us understand why we’re here?
4. Most importantly, does it help start the play by grabbing the audience in some way?

You’ve really got only a few minutes to enlist the aid of your audience. If it’s a comedy, you’ve got less than that – audiences need permission to laugh. (Nobody wants to be the only person laughing – they’re afraid to be wrong and look foolish.)

It’s best to get your play started right away.

This morning I went to vote, as I have done without fail in every election since I came of voting age.

There was a polling place directly across the street from our house at the Burbank Adult School, so naturally I walked over there. They couldn’t find my name on the list, though, and so told me that my polling place was “the school.”

So I got into my car and drove to Luther Burbank Middle School, where I have voted a few times. I parked and walked all around and could see that it wasn’t a polling place.

Then I decided that by “the school,” perhaps they meant Bret Harte Elementary School. So I got back into the car and drove over there. By now, I was about a mile away from my house — notably farther away than, say, the polling place across the street from my house.

I walked in and a, well, let’s put it charitably, hippie, said, “Are you here to vote at the Green table?” This sort of electioneering is illegal — and whether or not I’m going to vote Green (which I’m not), it’s none of his business. So I said, “I’m here to vote.”

He asks my name and address, I tell him, and he scans the rolls and says, “You’re not registered to vote.”

I said, “WHAT?!?!?!?!” What I should have said is: Tell that to the 1000 prerecorded callers who have bombarded our home phone and my cellphone, let alone the seemingly hundreds of organizations that have emailed me, all of them seeking money and my vote. They all sure think I’m registered to vote.

He said, “Are you sure of your address?”

I said, “Given that I live there, yes.”

At this point, an older man came over and said, “You have the wrong polling place.” I said, “This is my third one.” (Counting “the school” that was no longer a polling place.) He takes me outside to look at a map taped on the exterior wall. It is a zigzag of district lines, with rarely a street name or number. He says, “Where do you live?”

I give him my address and he says, “Where is that on this map?”

Looking again at the map, which looks like a spectrographic survey of the Earth’s core and nothing like a map of Burbank, I say, “If you can’t find it, I sure can’t.” Then I spot the Burbank Adult School on the map. (Big letters: “BURBANK ADULT SCHOOL.” The one thing on the map that seems to deserve being named.) “Wait,” I say, “I live across from that.”

Now he’s staring at the map quizzically again and trying to determine just which polling place would cover that. Then someone from inside the building yells, “Wait! We found him!”

A woman comes outside and tells me that I should be voting at the ORANGE table. Evidently, there’s a “green” table and an “orange” table, hence the hippie’s question. I forestall the obvious question: What the Hell is this, and why are there “green” and “orange” tables at the same polling place, what could that possibly mean, and how is someone expected to know that?

A little background here: I have lots of education, I am a local political activist, vote in every election, and read lots of newspapers and magazines. So it’s not like I’m uninformed.

Now I enter the school’s auditorium just in time to hear the woman admonish the hippie: “You have to check the master list.” (Oh, of course: The master list. Don’t check the junior list, or slave list — whatever he’s got.) How many people have already been sent away?

Sure enough down front at the apron of the stage there is another table area set up, this one manned by someone I know: Lisa, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends. Since I know her, I take the opportunity to vent, making it plain that I’m not holding her personally responsible.

“In the past three years, I have voted at Bret Harte, Luther Burbank, the White Chapel church, the Burbank Adult School, someone’s home, another church, and, most recently before today, an auto body shop,” I say. “Why is my polling place constantly moved? Why is there a polling place ACROSS THE STREET FROM ME that is NOT MY POLLING PLACE? A suspicious person would reason that a game is being played here! This isn’t Florida and I’m not black, but I’m starting to think there’s active disenfranchisement at work here!”

She seeks to reassure me by saying, “You work here just once as a poll worker and you see how things can go wrong.” This in no way reassures me.

I get my ballot and go vote. Then I see — wait for it — that the little inking stamper is not correctly blotting out every circle I choose. In most cases, I have to stamp it two or three times for it to work.

I go back to Lisa. “The inking stamper isn’t working properly. I had to do it two or three times. It doesn’t work.”

“Oh, I know,” she says. “The same thing happened to me.”

Now, she’s been there all day. I can only assume she voted four or five hours before me. So… how many ballots didn’t get marked? How many people noticed?

By the end of all this, I felt like I’d been polled all right — right where it hurts.

Is it really this complicated to vote?

And while we’re busy “exporting Democracy,” are we exporting this voting system?

Re the Paul McCartney divorce saga:

If you had assets worth $1.5 billion and you wanted to marry a model, couldn’t you find one with two legs? And couldn’t you get her to sign a prenup limiting her to, say, $50 million in benefits for her three years of hard work?

I guess John was “the smart Beatle.”

A couple of weeks ago I went to see “Doubt” at the Ahmanson Theatre with two friends. The play was well-written, funny, surprising — and a bit of a cheat.

I say that because it purports to be a play about… well, doubt… but it never gives you enough information to truly feed doubts or build convictions. The play should be called “Intuition,” because it is largely built around a nun’s intuition that a priest is molesting a young boy. She confronts the priest, who denies it, and that is somewhat the extent of the plot. She confronts, he denies, she makes up a lie, he (and this is just to ruin the play for you if you haven’t seen it) finally sees there’s going to be no end to her accusations and gains a transfer to another church, and now that he’s gained what turns out to be a promotion to another parish and this time in a role that includes heading the school she turns to the audience and says, “I’m filled with such doubts.”

I guess because rather than punish him, God promoted him.

The entirety of the “evidence” against the priest is this: We learn in an early scene that Sister Aloysius saw Father Flynn place a consoling hand atop a boy’s wrist and the boy flinch. (If at age 12 I had felt the church pastor place a hand on my wrist in an open assembly, I would have flinched too. And he never molested me. For the most part, twelve-year-old boys don’t want to be touched by anyone.)

Maybe the play should have been called “Persecution,” because again, barring any scenes with additional fact, what we’ve got is a play in which a one person’s determination that she is right succeeds in driving another person out. In fact, one of my compatriots thought well into the play that that was precisely the theme of the play; he compared it to “The Crucible.”

The playwright, John Patrick Shanley, has a gift for dialogue. After a day of dealing with petty nonsense, it was an absolute treat to hear people discourse on a higher level. The sermons written for the priest are particularly strong, built around delightful metaphors that work as parables. But I don’t think the play is about what it’s advertised as. Of course, my father-in-law brought home a bag of Brach’s chocolate-covered blueberries that says “Harvest Fresh.” I said, “This is a lie. Blueberries in the orchard don’t have chocolate on them. So they can’t be ‘harvest fresh.'”

You always have to ask “Really?” To do otherwise is to believe that blueberries grow with chocolate, that “Doubt” is about doubt, and that Dick Cheney is keeping America safe.

Last week in my Saturday playwriting workshop we were talking about how to identify the protagonist. Ellen immediately piped up: “I usually look at who wants something.”

That’s exactly right.

But I added, “In a good play, everyone wants something.”

See? This is what I’m talking about!

Too often we think everything is getting worse. Here’s one thing that is getting better: Halloween.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see that Halloween has become more and more of a holiday and a celebration. (And if it could just knock Christmas off the shelves I’d be truly delighted.)

What do I like about Halloween? I like the inventiveness it opens up in people. I like that both kids and adults participate. I love how neighbors’ houses become spooky showplaces just for one night, with many people hosting theatrical events. And truly — why wouldn’t theatre people love it?

My wife and I got married on Halloween. (At first she was a theatre person and I wasn’t, then we trended into my being a theatre person and her not. Change happens.) It was a full-on costume party — all 200 guests had to come in costume. The wedding party wore 18th century royal ballroom clothes. My mother was a witch, my father was a clown. (That was their costumes — not their true identities.) My good friend the endlessly silly Joe came as a court jester — truly the most appropos attire of the evening. My brother came as a butler and was too convincing: All night long people who thought he was waitstaff sent him to fetch drinks. The person I know who could most easily pass for Groucho Marx in making endlessly bad asides came as Groucho Marx, while his wife was a very convincing Mae West. And someone we didn’t know, the guest of a guest, came mostly naked under a long trench coat: whenever he opened the coat, a flash would go off and the costume automatically took a photo.

This year it’s plain that I’ve worked too much. I’ve been too busy. How do I know? Because I don’t have a costume. I’m still going to take the kids around, and we’ve decorated the house a little bit, but I don’t have a costume. One year I went as the Gulf War. (The original — 1991.) I glued sand all over my fatigues, painted on a geotopical map with placenames, and glued down army men and little planes and rocket launchers, several of which would actually fire. Another year I went as Howard Hughes — glued on an ugly wandering grey-white beard, drew fake broken hypodermic needles onto my arm and shuffled around with a tissue box and a bottle of fake urine specimen. (And wound up drinking so much alcohol that I accidentally  swallowed half the beard, complete with sandwich matter stuck in it.) I’ve been Forbush Man. I’ve been a (female) streetwalker, and cut my legs shaving so badly that the tub filled with copious amounts of blood.

And this year I don’t have a costume.

This is a real wakeup call.

I still have a little time. I’ve got to figure something out.

The other night my son Lex and I went to see “The Prestige,” which we enjoyed greatly. On the way to the movie, I said to him, “It was written by Christopher Priest, a comic-book writer.” I recounted for him some of Priest’s comic books, most notably Black Panther.

When the credits rolled on the movie, I was surprised to see that Priest had not in fact written the script; rather, the film is based on the novel by Christopher Priest. Hm. I didn’t know that he was a novelist, but he most certainly was a scriptwriter, so why hadn’t he scripted it? And when had he become a novelist?

At home, still puzzling this over, I jumped on the internet and found Priest’s website. The site seems equally devoted to three areas: comic books, beautiful nude black women, and a religion he has joined. I share his interest in two of these things and, because my tastes are catholic I am completely nondenominational. It doesn’t matter if you’re focusing on Marvel or DC, or Asian or caucasian or Latino, etc. They all have their place.

(And I’m sure that right now every friend I have is clicking through to that website.)

In reading Priest’s lengthy bio, which stretches back into the 1970’s at Marvel, I started to feel that something was odd. After all, who was Christopher Priest? In my mind he was a guy who had started writing comics just over 10 years ago — that’s when I first noticed him anyway, and I’ve been reading Marvel comics since Stan Lee was personally writing them. How could he have been writing all these Marvel comics without my having noticed?

Then I come to this paragraph: “It was about this time Jim Owsley became Christopher Priest. He never discusses the true reasons behind his name change, but insists every story you may have heard about it is absolutely true.”

Then, after Googling “Owsley changes name to Priest,” I discovered that there was another Christopher Priest, also a writer, and also a writer in genre (science fiction). I read a bit about the controversy, then found this, from a guest-of-honor speech to WorldCon in August, 2005, written by the “original” Christopher Priest:

A few years ago I discovered that a young comics writer called James Owsley had changed his name to mine. It was a deliberate act, and he knew of my existence. The only reason he’s ever given in public for this irrational act is his belief that the name “Christopher Priest” is cool. In fact, he said “co-o-ol.” At first I thought it was a joke, then I thought it must be an error, and then at last I thought it was time for me to do something. When I contacted his publisher, an Owsley enthusiast called Brian Augustyn, I was told that the decision was made. It wouldn’t now be reversed, and it was “Chris”‘s inalienable right to call himself anything he liked. I should, in fact, praise the Lord for the good fortune of being born with such a co-o-ol name. When I pointed out, with good reason, that the worlds of science fiction and comics are perilously close to each other, and often confused with each other in the minds of certain people, I was told that the sheer excellence of Chris’s writing would permanently set him apart from everyone else. Including, presumably, me.

Since then, “Chris” and I have been regularly and routinely muddled up with each other. Enter my name in Amazon.com and you’ll see what I mean. A search in Google, or any other search engine, produces the same result. I often receive e-mails intended for him — I assume he often receives mine.

So without much effort this impostor has been not only irritating but seriously annoying. For several years I tried to take a tolerant, amused line on the problem, thinking that he’d get tired of the gag after a bit, but he shows no sign of it. Now, twice in the last twelve months, I have heard comments that publishers have had unpleasant experiences working with “Christopher Priest” and don’t want to work with “me” again. So as well as him being irritating and annoying, his professional incompetence is damaging me.

I’m not amused any more. My message is this. If you hear my name mentioned in any context, please remember what I’ve said and ask yourself if you’re sure which one of us it is. Beyond that, if anyone here has the least influence on him, please use it.

I don’t bear him any ill-will. All I want him to do is change his name back. He’s done it once, so there’s no great difficulty in doing it again. In fact, I suggested this during my conversation with his publisher. I even proposed a new by-line for him. I said, “Why doesn’t he call himself … ‘Harlan Ellison’?”

Mr Augustyn said, “That’s not a co-o-ol name.”

Then I went to bed.

In the morning, wanting to learn a bit more about “The Prestige,” I dropped “Christopher Priest” into Google again and found this site. And as soon as the photo of a blue-eyed white man came up, I finally discovered that “The Prestige” was written not by the comic-book writer but was based upon a novel by the British author — and that said British author is entirely correct: People are going to confuse the two of them. I had — for days.

The photo on the left of the comic-book writer Christopher Priest is the only one I can find on the web. The photo on the right of the rather haunted-looking Christopher Priest is liberally applied — perhaps in an effort to distinguish himself from the other Christopher Priest.

If you were a somewhat unknown writer who had struggled all his life to make a name for himself and had lately seen it coming to fruition, gaining guest of honor status at the world’s foremost science fiction convention, having your novel turned into a film as good as “The Prestige,” how would it feel to find yourself being confused with another genre writer who had taken the same name as you, and seemingly while knowing of your existence?

Years ago I discovered another Lee Wochner on the web. This Lee Wochner was Leland P. Wochner, he lived in Illinois, he was 70 years old — and he was a plumber. Not a writer. I remember the relief in discovering this.

My whole life I have been someone who runs to get the mail. In it I might find checks or magazines or submission acceptances (or submission rejections) or misdelivered mail of someone else’s that I can look at with conjecture. (“Hm. The people one street over get Sanitation Monthly. What does this say about them?”)

Now, even though I’ve had a postal meter for years and generally use email or the internet rather than snailmail, I might actually use more stamps — just so that I can further share my love of these delightful images, which the Post Awful is releasing in 2007.

I do have some quibbles about the selections. In fact, they’re more than quibbles. I’m thrilled to see John Buscema represented with that beautiful and iconic Sub-Mariner #1 cover, and Gene Colan with Iron Man #1. And I’m actually just glad to have this set of stamps to begin with.

But… where’s Thor? When did Thor become a less important Marvel character than Sub-Mariner or, for Pete’s sake, SPIDER-WOMAN? If it’s about diversity — in this case showing a female superhero or two — then why not a black superhero? A case could certainly be made for Black Panther or Blade. Where is Dr. Strange? Certainly he’s a more important character than Spider-woman, and Steve Ditko did stunning visionary other-worldly work on that character — any number of covers or scenes would have made for a terrific scene. Ditko is represented solely by the cover of “Amazing Spider-Man” #1, and that’s in concert with Jack Kirby. Why not a purely Ditko cover to give Spider-Man’s co-creator his due? Or, again, a Doctor Strange cover?

The Daredevil cover selected is nothing special — and clearly was chosen because of the appearance of Elektra; when did Daredevil become secondary to Elektra? I guess when his movie did even worse than hers. And while the Hulk portrait depicted is in what I’ll call “The Trimpe Style,” it’s by Rich Buckler and (according to Mark Evanier) John Romita. I grew up on Trimpe’s work and I think the guy got a raw deal from the industry. (After 29 years with Marvel, and at age 56, he got summarily dumped.) It would have been a nice touch to finally give him a stamp of approval.

Mark Chaet sent this in. Make me wonder just what he was looking for that led him to this….

It also makes me realize:  these zombies are seeking the essential one thing they don’t have (a fully functioning brain — which doubles as housing of the soul, life force, personality, and so forth). Now, they say they want to eat them — so once they get what they seek, they’re using it for impure purposes. They don’t realize that their expressed desire (to get brains to eat) does not reflect their true desire (to be alive again).

So what is this? Another good example of subtext.