It was 20 years ago tonight that we opened Moving Arts. Not all of those 20 years have been easy — it’s never easy keeping any theatre open, let alone one devoted entirely to new plays — and in fact, some of them have been pretty hard. But still, I’m not surprised we’ve hit 20. We’ve got good people running the place; in fact, we’ve always had good people running the place.

Moving Arts began in 1990, on paper, as Acme Performance Group, Inc. Originally, it was going to be a production company called Acme Arts Co., under a different artistic director than me. The concept of the proto artistic director had been that with the name Acme Arts Co., we could do “anything” — we wouldn’t be limited to theatre. Now I know better: that in most cases, it’s better precisely to be limited to just one or two things. Unless your corporate name is Virgin. But it turned out that Acme Arts Co. was a name already registered in the state of California, so the name became Acme Performance Group, Inc. In other words, the name went from bad to worse. But after waiting a seeming eternity for that artistic director to do something, I decided to drive around, find a space we could afford, and call him up and tell him about it, and as politely as I could, to also tell him that I thought I should take the title of artistic director. “I think you should,” he said.

The space I found, 1822 Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, had been a police substation. It was about large enough for two police and maybe their donuts. When the landlord, Bud Plochere, showed it to me and asked me what I wanted to do with it, I said, “I want to turn it into a theatre.” He stood inside and looked around and said, “You can’t open a theatre in here.” But we did. And we’ve been doing theatre there — and elsewhere — for 20 years now.

Over those 20 years, many hundreds of people have contributed their time and energy to Moving Arts and its productions. I do want to name just a relative fraction of them.

The founding board of Acme Performance Group, Inc. was: Eve Kathleen Baker, Julie Briggs, Gary Guidinger, Joe Stafford and myself. We never would’ve started the non-profit without Eve, who much like Johnny Appleseed sowed seeds wherever she went, but her seeds were non-profits; she started a lot of them, including ours. Eve died about five years ago (more, now?) and I still think about her frequently. And a special two-decade tip of the hat to my good friend Joe Stafford, who wrangled all the paperwork down at City Hall in 1992 while I was on the East Coast dealing with the death of my father; Joe made a friend in the bureaucratic maze and somehow navigated us through the other side.

The theatre was opened with $7,500. (!) Those founding funders were: Julie Briggs, her parents, Paul Crist, Joe Stafford, my mother, my wife and I, my brother Michael, and my wife’s grandfather, Frank Senn. Seven of them gave $1,000 each (that was the ask), and one gave $500. I remain grateful to them all.

There were many people who built the theatre, but the primary work crew was Marcy Ross, Tom Boyle, Rodger Gibson, David Krebs (now deceased), Julie, and myself. Rodger was an electrician and wired us throughout; Marcy was an ace carpenter; and Tom, as always, seemed to know how to do everything. I spent a lot of time scraping fake popcorn off the ceiling and inhaling lots of lung sealant in the process.

When it came time for a name for the place (I was damned if it was going to be Acme something), we compiled a sheet with three dozen or more alternatives. I no longer know where that sheet is (and I wish I did), but I do remember two names off it: Theatre X (which I came up with, and liked, but which got vetoed), and Moving Arts, courtesy of Steve Freedman. Nobody vetoed Moving Arts, and the more it stayed on the list, the more it grew on people. Thanks, Steve.

We’ve always had many talented, resourceful people in charge, but here are the true forces to be reckoned with, as I recall them.

Managing Directors: Julie Briggs, Rebecca Rasmussen, Lisa Payne Marschall, Michael Shutt, and especially, especially, our current hard-working (and long-suffering?) managing director Steve Lozier.

Artistic Directors: Julie Briggs again (about five years in, we adjusted titles and made her an equal artistic director with me; essentially, we’d already been producing partners since the founding), Kim Glann, and Paul Stein. (I was the founding artistic director, and I’m currently serving as artistic director again, on an interim basis, but really it’s in title only.)

Our Literary Director of many, many years, Trey Nichols.

Our incredible producer-director people, including Cece Tio, Sara Wagner, Terence Anthony, Mary McGuire, and Jane Sunderland.

And the many board members who’ve truly made a difference: Dan Beck, Jeannine Fairchild, Michael Curry, Mark Kinsey Stephenson, Kevin Scott, J. Hobart, Joe Stafford, Brian Newkirk, Marlene Coleman and Cris D’Annunzio among them.

And, finally, all the talented (and sometimes semi-talented) actors and designers and board ops and directors and playwrights who gave of their time and their energy. Thank you. Enormously.

Originally, my co-founder, Julie Briggs, just wanted to direct a play, one of mine. But I needed a place to work, and I hadn’t had a great time at the other place I’d tried to work. (The now long-closed Burbage Theatre.) And I didn’t like what I was seeing of other small theatres were run at the time. So I drove around and found the place we could afford to open. It was too small, and we had no money, and it was just the two of us. I figured you could do theatre anywhere, so the size wouldn’t stop us, and I knew even then that you can always get more money. But Julie wanted to know how just the two of us were going to do this. “We’ll get other people,” I told her, and that’s precisely what happened. One of the quips I share all the time is attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.” But from day one, Moving Arts was built by other people. We thought we were building a theatre, but really we built a community.

Who “won” the presidential debates is open to conjecture (and what really matters is who wins on November 6th).

But it won’t be spin that determines who wins the Presidential Face Off — that’s up to you.

First round voting is open until October 26.

Yesteday I took my daughter to the Apple Store to get her long-promised iPhone. (The “$99” iPhone, by the way, costs $99, plus a protection plan you’d better get whether or not the user is a 14-year-old girl who keeps the phone in a back pocket, plus the state sales tax that is charged on the “value” of the phone — $648 — and not the sale price, which means that the “$99” iPhone costs $248 plus a 2-year plan that adds $30 to my phone bill, for a grand total of $968. Happy birthday.)

After we were done depositing more fortunes into the Jobs family trust, my two kids got excited. “Look, Dad!” said my son, pointing to a store a few doors down, “A bookstore!”

The two of them were so excited because they hadn’t seen a bookstore in a mall — in fact, a bookstore anywhere — in so long. It was like spotting a unicorn.

“Where?” I said.

“Over there!”

I looked closely at the sign above the distant store. “That says Brookstone. They sell electronic gadgets.”

“Oh,” they both said. Then they went back to playing with their electronics as we walked to the car.

I just asked someone, “What time is it?”

She responded, “Now?”

“No,” I said, “12 minutes ago.” Who would want to know what time it isn’t? (I could guess what time it isn’t, and always be right.) Of course you want to know what time it is now. So why do people so frequently respond with, “Now”?

Here’s Andrew Sullivan on the death of the print edition of Newsweek. Or, as I’ve spelled it for years, Newsweak. Because by the time it was in there, it was over.

Which, for me, raises the salient point: In print or in digital form, who needs Newsweek? It’s not just the format that is dying — and to which Sullivan says good riddance — it’s the underlying concept of a regularly issued magazine intended for cover-to-cover consumption. Sure, I still get The New Yorker, but I’m not reading it front to back. Why not? Because unlike during the heyday of magazines (and newspapers), there’s incredible competition for my time from other information sources — most notably the Internet. Here’s how I’ll read Newsweek onscreen: If I’m searching for something and it comes up, or if something from it comes across to me in another way (through social media, let’s say). Otherwise, I’ll be reading Newsweek online the way I’ve been reading Newsweek in print the past 20 years: not at all.

Finally, here they are.

Felix Baumgartner’s space jump, retold in plastic.

Here’s California Governor Jerry Brown, once known as “Governor Moonbeam,” on what he’s learned. To put it succinctly: He seems to have learned optimism.

Here’s Brian Wilson’s response to Mike Love, also printed in the Los Angeles Times, which must be loving this little controversy. Take a good look at the guys in the photo above. I don’t think we’re going to see them all together soon — and maybe never.

A week ago, I emailed some friends furious about the latest shenanigans of Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Love had unceremoniously called an end to the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour, pulling the plug on an experience that had surprisingly revitalized Brian Wilson and the crew and resulted in an actually pretty good album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio.” Wilson had been looking forward to continuing the tour, and even recording another new Beach Boys record. I couldn’t have been more thrilled — but now this was all off, because Love held the rights to the “Beach Boys” name, and planned to misappropriate that name by resuming his tour of truck stops and juke joints with Bruce Johnston. Here is the story I sent my friends; I’m still pretty animated about it, and was complaining about it against last night when I saw Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl with my wife and some friends.

Evidently, I’m not the only person who felt outraged, because Mike Love felt compelled to respond. This was in yesterday’s LA Times, which I hadn’t seen before foaming at the mouth about this issue last night. Here’s the piece.

It bears reading.

In Mike Love’s view, this contretemps seems mostly not about relationships or even the primacy of the progenitors. (He says in the end “The Beach Boys are bigger than those who created it,” which on the face of it seems true, but which also diminishes the roles of specific members of the band. If “those who created it” aren’t as important as “The Beach Boys,” then I suppose it’s perfectly acceptable to tour with one just one founding member and call it “The Beach Boys.” I look forward to Pete Best’s tour as the Beatles.) No, it’s mostly a business decision:

“Like any good party, no one wanted it [the tour] to end. However, that was impossible, given that we had already set up shows in smaller cities with a different configuration of the band — the configuration that had been touring together every year for the last 13 years. Brian and Al [Jardine] would not be joining us for these small market dates, as was long agreed upon.

“It is not feasible, both logistically and economically, for the 50th anniversary tour to play these markets. It’s vitally important for the smaller markets to experience our live shows, as this is how we’ve maintained a loyal fan base for 50 years. You can’t sustain a fan base on a great catalog alone. You must take your music directly to the people.”

In other words, if the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake, MN, doesn’t get this performance by Mike & Bruce, the Beach Boys’ legacy will succumb.

Mike Love holds the license to the band name, so he can go out with just his baseball cap and a tambourine and call it “The Beach Boys” if he likes. Me, I’m just glad I got to see the real band in Dallas in April. It was a great show, and a cherished experience — and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another one like it.