To the members of the Mytown Playwrights' Lab: I am so sorry for telling Kris that you simply weren't brilliant enough to surmise my delirious new play, and I thank you for your comments, and muchas gracias to Monstro as well. Baby obliged today, so I took the extra naptime hour to synthesize your many but not, no, never “pigeon-dung stupid” questions about my new play, FIRST DATE, LAST DATE:

• they're both attractive but they have trouble dating: why? She's social to the point where she gets a cheering squad.
• Maybe he should realize that they're not meant for each other. Otherwise they're just small talking.
• why do they think [the first date] is going well? Clearly they're not good together, but there's never a point where he realizes it's not going to work.

Here's why:

JAY: Jay has always been the slow one with the affable personality. Didn’t graduate college. Scrawny as a kid, he now looks fewer than his 40 years, and takes a kind of surprised pride in that. He’s the middle child, eager to please yet underlyingly selfish and attention-hungry. His recent diagnosis and ongoing pharmacological treatment for depression, coupled with his father’s genetic, progressively damaging illness, has pushed Jay to pound the Internet for a girlfriend, or at least someone to make out with.
ELLE: Elle has recently suffered expulsion from her close-knit neighborhood, following her housemate’s addiction to heroin. She is pretty and bubbly but does not suffer fools, having for so long been one herself. She mellows into the first date and is not interested in any grand romance. Currently working toward her MFA at the local California State University, she is happy, but closed. She knows how to get people to like her, when it suits, but she is NOT social. She’s willing to date, on her terms: no intensity, no bullshit; Hence, Internet dating.
TOGETHER: Each belongs to a world the other can't enter and wouldn’t want to. From the start, they realize that it’s not going to work, but they’re both lonely and damaged, and recognize that in one another, so why not give it a shot?

So, now all I gotta do is make sure all that gets added via my typically witty and en·light·en·ing dialogue, and I'm done!

I can't believe it's only been two-plus weeks since our wedding anniversary. After going to CA with baby while Monstro stayed home and built scenery / studied for his Q.E. (which he since has taken, and needs to report), followed by his three-day ICON debacle, capped with a week of Q.E. and my introduction to JMG, I am done. Done done done.

Tomorrow is Communion Sunday and Palm Sunday at my church, all rolled up in one. Have I mentioned I'm the Sunday School Superintendent? Pretty much all I hear about it is complaints that “we don't have Sunday School on Communion Sunday, wahhh.” Well, we used to have seven teachers and now there are four, and one's leaving at the end of this school year, and probably, so am I.

My phone call with Hollywood started well and ended lukewarm. Then effusive e-mail to moi. One line back to him, and now the wait.

In the meanwhile, the first act of my new play has major, but not insurmountable problems, since identified. I'm not going to lie; I expect a certain… *level* from my audience. As such, I underwrite. I'd had a lot of stage directions and interpretations built into the script, but for this reading I took 'em all out and I think the play suffered for it. I believe that the dialogue should fuel the action, though, and I don't want to be directorial, because a stage manager who dissed me for the PACE unstaged readings said I made it all TOO specific.

Ugh.

And in the same underwriting vein, I sent Hollywood my CV and a two-page list of completed/in-process productions, but I didn't include Liz, or the Oscar I'm going to win for that same Tony-award winning dot dot dot with the help of David Cutler, once I can pay him. But you know, for a bio, he's just going to have to read my stuff, which Carlin suggested I let him do after signing his standard non-disclosure pact, and offering a FREE, THIRTY-DAY OPTION on the sole condition that at the end of said period, I'd get the names & contact info for everyone he sent it to.

Jay told me to just wait and be patient. I'm utilizing my time wisely with a complete overhaul of my quin·tes·sen·tial domain name, probably the seventh redesign it's undergone since 1995. I have gone deep background into myself and culled all my Web columns going back to 1993 and beyond. Yesterday I reposed on the new bed and sketched what the pages would look like. There's a LOT of pages, but they can be streamlined.

Basically, I've got the material to fuel a drama army.

And even if he's blowing smoke, hey, *somebody* found *me*, and commented, and asked *me* to call *him*. Which is pretty cool, no matter what happens, and has given me the added boost necessary to start sending my own stuff to agents, if need be. So, either way, it's a win-win. I like those odds. 🙂

ME: “Congratulations on your new firm!” I said. “Striking out on your own. Such an exciting time… you have broken the yoke!”

HIM: “Yes… let's just hope it doesn't end up running all over my hands.”

ME: “No, I meant yoke, like oxen.”

HIM: “I know what you meant.”

ME: “It does work as a double-entendre, now, doesn't it? It's homonym enough.”

We laughed, wished each other a lovely afternoon, and hung up.

Feels like I've been catching up on everything this week — catching up on sleep (in our new bed!), catching up on writing (finished a second draft of the two-act I'm workshopping tonight), catching up on adult responsiblity (meeting with an atty tomorrow to draw up wills, etc), catching up on social life (cocktails at Em and Nick's this Saturday). As soon as Monstro completes his QE, which is scheduled for 1:00 tomorrow, I'll even get to catch up with him!

Oh, and for those of you keeping track, I *did* call the entertainment producer, and I *did* receive a wildly effusive follow-up e-mail from him, and I *will* send him some of my scripts as soon as this most recent one is workshopped. So woo-freakin'-hoo!

This is day nine of my single-mommydom. Technically, day seven shouldn't count, but our mother's helper had to cancel so I watched baby while Monstro prepared for his gaming convention. Tomorrow I am leaving baby with church friends for a couple of hours so I can come home, grade photos, come up with five hours of lecture, wash the dishes and the laundry, and finish clearing out our room so the workmen can assemble our new bed Monday morning.

I will not be talking on the phone until Tuesday afternoon, after the mother's helper arrives. No hard feelings or anything, I just haven't got a head right now. It's better this way for both of us; I assure you.

This blog, which I think is the third of four total blogs authored by Myself, turned two years old this month. I believe that I am one of the first bloggers on the 'net, having started in or around March of 1995, which means I've been blogging for a dozen years now, and doesn't that just make me feel like 12 years isn't such a long time to do something, afterall.

Good day today, apparently… I'm up $315,666 from January 18th, 2006. Just don't tell the taxman.

I am worth $2,222,466 on HumanForSale.com
How much are you worth?

Baby and I have returned and it was great to see Monstro for one day before he left for a gaming convention, where, I've been teasing, he'll “get to hang out with 400 people who are just. like. you.” So I'm single-momming again for three more days, after which I'll go teach. I have unfolded the futon in the family room and shall be camping on Futon Island in front of the TV with twenty bucks worth of magazines.

Wow, I look AWESOME in muttonchops!

I am: Isaac Asimov One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject. Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

I started writing a new play today. My best girlfriend Anne gave me one idea that I was able to merge with one of my own, and then topped it off with a suggestion for part three. I'm four typewritten pages into it right now.

Working title : Anna And…, which I'm afraid is too much like “The Rural Juror” so it might get cut in favor of something else.

And Justin, if it doesn't suck it'll be RIGHT up your alley.