I’m pleased to report that “The Cowboys” still works as it did 40 years ago, for boys at least.

I was thrilled beyond measure when, after John Wayne’s character Wil Andersen is shot five times by Bruce Dern’s evil cattle rustler,  my son Dietrich said, “He’s not dead.”

I hit pause on the DVR and asked him, “Why do you say that?”

“He can’t be. He’s just faking it so the boys don’t get hurt.”

This was exactly my reading of the movie 40 years ago when I was his age. Somehow, this restored my hope that somehow today’s kids are not utterly jaded. When it was over and I asked Dietrich what he thought of the movie, he told me how much he’d enjoyed it, and that his favorite part was when the boys all had their revenge on the bad guys who killed Mr. Andersen. Of course — as intended.

The movie is compelling filmmaking for 9-year-olds; for the rest of us, from the beginning scene showing what’s clearly a stunt double for a fat old John Wayne taming a breaking a wild horse, to the triumphant scene where 10 kids, mostly preteen, outwit and outshoot a gang of 11 grown men, it’s science fiction. I’m sure I never noticed any of that when I was a kid. Here’s something else that’s changed in my perception:  Now it’s a movie populated by people I’ve known, which makes it harder to focus on purely as a work of fiction. I hadn’t realized that Mark Rydell was the director and producer; some years ago, I co-taught a class with Mark Rydell (although we met in person only once). Now I wish I’d told him what an impact this movie made on me as a child. Lonny Chapman, whom I knew a bit through the Group Repertory Theatre (which is now named the Lonny Chapman Group Repertory Theatre), has a small role as the father of one of the boys. And now whenever I see Bruce Dern in something, where I used to think fondly of the early environmentalist science fiction movie “Silent Running,” now I think of speaking with him a couple of times in recent years, including at his wife’s art opening. (Along similar lines:  I was telling a friend last week that whenever I think of Scott Bakula, all I remember is being surprised seeing him in the audience at my tiny little theatre once when he was in the prime of his career. Whenever something like that happens, it’s like:  “Audience, audience, audience, major TV star, audience, audience….”)

The other thing that I now notice about “The Cowboys,” something that is so transparent to an adult, is that it’s a movie about fathers and sons. Both of Wil Andersen’s boys died before reaching their prime; now he has a chance to serve as a father figure in what will be a life-transforming experience for these boys. There’s a scene where two of them are tempted by prostitutes — my son had no idea what this was about, and I’m sure I didn’t either at his age — and in another scene, Roscoe Lee Browne’s character tells Wes that with these boys he has another chance at fatherhood. I can see why the film resonated then, and now, with boys of a certain age.

Who was the first superhero? Maybe it was Abraham Lincoln.

And here’s another moment of pop-culture history that shook my childhood:  The episode of “Star Trek” where Kirk teams up with Lincoln, and Lincoln gets killed. Again. (And Kirk has to carry on the mandate of fighting for “the good.”) As a kid, it made me sad to see that. As an adult, I have to observe that some people just seem fated to die for a cause.

1. Watch “The Cowboys” with my 9-year-old son. I was that age when my father (and mother) took me to see it. In the movie, John Wayne plays a rancher who is forced to hire a bunch of kids who work for him as real cowboys. Near the end of the movie, John Wayne’s character is killed off and the boys have to complete the cattle drive without him. This was astonishing to me, and I kept waiting for the trick ending, showing that he was actually alive and had been secretly watching over the boys the entire time like a guardian angel. But nope, he was actually dead, and I couldn’t get over it. I’m curious to see what this generation will make of that. Prediction:  nothing. They’re inured to everything now.
2. Stay up really late (or, well, early) writing.
3. Interrupt extended bout of writing with blog posts.We’ll see.

Last night, my friend Jonathan Josephson’s theatre troupe descended unannounced on Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood to perform several poems by Charles Bukowski. You can watch the performance below — and be sure to note the reactions of diners seated in and around the playing area. I understand their constrained response:  I’m not sure I’d want to be eating Barney’s signature chili dog while being accosted by an actor reciting “My Underwear Has Shit Stains Too.”

Last year, I bought my wife a gift and a card on Valentine’s Day. When I brought them home, she said, “Oh. I thought we weren’t celebrating it.”

I spent days pondering what that meant. Especially since I thought everything was fine.

Today was Valentine’s Day again. As we know, I was busy out of town for four days, then utterly jammed the past two. And I had to pick up not just my son, but also two of his friends after school for a sleepover so their mother could have her first date in three years (on Valentine’s Day, no less). So even though on the way home, I thought about it being Valentine’s Day, if I stopped to get something for my wife, it would be not only last-minute and inconvenient — but also unnecessary, because it seemed to have been established last year that we weren’t celebrating it.  I didn’t know why we weren’t celebrating it, or when we had evidently agreed not to, but somehow, the story went, we had. So I drove home with said kids in tow and ordered a pizza and a salad and that was it.

Then my wife came home with a gift and a card for me. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” she said. Then she grew slightly impatient when I didn’t open either item right away.

So I have several theories about this. (As I told someone today, 35 years of writing plays have left me focused on motivation.)

1. She’s toying with me. Then and now.
2. She isn’t toying with me, and this year she’s in a better mood than last year.
3. Last year, I did agree not to celebrate it but then forgot, and this year I was too preoccupied and used last year as an excuse. (If those things are true, I’m the unwitting villain in this piece.)
4. Neither one of us knows what the fuck we’re doing.

By the way, the year before, we celebrated perhaps the best Valentine’s Day ever for us, with a wonderful time before, during and after a fine meal at a fantastic restaurant with romantic live guitar accompaniment. So one thing you can say for us:  After 28 Valentine’s Days together, we’re still not stuck in a rut.

Last night, Paul McCartney closed the Grammy Awards. (An event that I actually watched part of, for once, because it featured the reunion of “The Beach Boys.” Please note the quotation marks, being of the opinion as I am that The Beach Boys died with Carl Wilson.) During his performance, lots of people jumped on Twitter to ask this question:

“Who is Paul McCartney?”

I want to be charitable and assume that most of the people who asked this are children. I like to think that adults, especially adults with access to Twitter and, therefore, the internet, would jump onto said internet and use either Google or Wikipedia or, well, almost anything, and Look It Up. Whereupon they would learn that Paul McCartney is the most successful songwriter in history and that he was a member of something called The Beatles.

But then I think that even if these are children, wouldn’t even children know that if they are holding a device that connects them to unlimited information — then maybe they could use it properly to gather such information as they’re seeking? And that tweeting out the question “Who TF is Paul McCartney” isn’t as good as, again, Google or Wikipedia or, well, almost anything else.

Some years before the recent relaunch of “Star Trek,” I told my friend Larry, who is this universe’s foremost expert on “Star Trek,” that almost none of my grad students knew who Kirk or Spock were, so I’d stopped using them as an example in my lectures. He couldn’t believe it — and it seemed incredible to me as well, I have to admit — but it was true. I would mention Kirk or Spock and get blank stares in return. Their cultural significance had diminished. Now the person who is probably the foremost popular musician of the past 50 years is going unrecognized.

One bright spot:  Maybe at some point, we’ll all be able to forget “The Macarena.”

So I was in San Diego for four days, staying at a very nice hotel, enjoying cigars in the jacuzzi, dancing in trendy nightclubs with largely unclad women ’til 2 a.m., drinking good drinks and savoring fine meals, and between all that, I had to do delegate-things at the California Democratic state convention. So, yes, while there’s internet access in San Diego, somehow or other I didn’t post for four days. That damn convention just didn’t allow time for it.

I’m a partner in a digital marketing firm, Counterintuity. How did I get into this line of work? People asked me to.

Specifically, starting about 20 years ago, they started asking me if I could bring to bear for their organizations those writing / directing / producing / acting skills learned from all those years in theatre. And the banks and the municipalities and the ad agencies paid a lot better than the theatre. So I started doing that.

As Tom Vander Well’s story shows, it looks like I’m not the only one that’s happened to. And here’s why:  working in the theatre is really really good prep for most things. As my good friend (and fellow theatre-builder) Tom Boyle says, if you’re going to be stranded on a desert island, you want to get stranded with theatre people, because they can build or fix anything, and do it from almost nothing. More than that, we tend to have strong behavioral skills.

One difference between Tom Vander Well and myself:  While he was a theatre major; I wasn’t (all my theatre training was on-the-job; my formal training was in writing and criticism). And so because my major was Literature and Language, I wince when he writes that he was “an alumni” of his school, rather than “an alumnus” — unless he’s more than one person.  Further proof that you always carry your past with you.

I’ve got to admit, I’m a sucker for the Shat, whose one-man show comes to Los Angeles in one mere month. Will the show be tongue-in-cheek? Will it be straight-up? Campy? Vainglorious? Exhilarating and a complete bomb? All of the above and at the same time, of course, just like everything about him. I’m checking out tickets now.