A Taste of Madeleine

Posted 9:13 AM by sean
I think for a lot of us, our emotional shenanigans begin to feel like driving I-80 between the Wyoming/Utah border in late October. You're unprepared for the black ice, you don't dare hit the breaks and you just spend hour after hour creeping along, steering into the skid.

To me the most poignant thing about my own particular swings and spasms is that they have sensual accompaniments, both in terms of taste and sight.

The taste thing is well documented, apparently your sense of taste sits right next to your memory center in your brain and a taste of something can send you flying back. It's no wonder that when you get a sense of something wonderful or something terrible, it can do the same. At moments of physical elation, like when I'm playing a sport or doing something physical that is enormously fun, I can still taste Mountain Dew and overpriced hamburgers from the cabana at the country club where we grew up in Iowa.

More than that, though, is this terrible metal taste I get in my mouth when I'm spinning my wheels a little bit. Fortunately, I got enough years under my belt to recognize it and deal with it. I can fix a lot of problems in my brain by employing a sort of empathy governor, if I read a book or read someone's blog or try to put myself in other life for a while somehow, I actually do get out of my own shit.

But the visual thing is strange. My mood will bring up memories of places, really specific places. For some reason, the only real home-feeling I get is from a house that I moved out of when I was about 7, a house that exists in complete fabrication since my relationship to it is a point-of-view that exists from under four feet tall. It could be that the rooms were great expanses, that the kitchen counters are out of standing view, but my guess is that I got that all wrong.

What is strange is that not all these visual moments are specifically from my childhood. There is a crappy diner which, in my mind, is empty all the time. It's a real diner, it is somewhere in the dessert between LA and St. George, still in California, and not on I-15. The diner is on the outskirts of a military base that exists in the middle of what I thought might be a shortcut.

The day I found out that my marriage was in horrible trouble, I was already packed to go to Utah for a recording session. The girl I was married to was scheduled to go with me. I don't know how I made it through that first night, I don't know how I managed to fight for the lies that began to spiral after the fifth night and the sixth night and on and on. I don't actually know how I survived that time. And I really don't know how she ended up going to Utah with me, the twelve hours in that shitty car I bought her. I can't remember any of the negotiations.

But I remember the diner we stopped at to get dinner. I remember staring at the food, for the first time in my memory I was feeling something so profoundly terrible that I couldn't eat. We sat there for a long time. We had to. That shitty car I bought her would overheat every two hours, we had to stop and re-fill the radiator and wait.

We barely spoke, but what little talking we did, she did. I don't remember any of it, but I do remember the feeling of heart-break. I had a flash in that diner, a complete understanding that my marriage was over. It was a flash that lasted for the hour we sat there, for the next few months I thought we would make it. I fought like crazy, but at that diner I realized that I had finally gotten what I was so desperate to get, and I had no idea how bad it would be.

In my attempt to live a dramatic life full of unfair failure I had chosen this woman. I wanted it to be clear that I was committed to this marriage to a woman that didn't deserve me who ended up treating me badly. I wanted it to be like this, but I hadn't counted on what the reality of it would be. I felt like a skydiver who's parachute didn't open. Duped by my own love of something incredibly stupid.

I remember I smiled at her. Those of you who know me could probably picture this. I smiled at her and said, "I think you've actually broken my heart." She asked me why the hell I was smiling and I just sat there looking at her and yeah, I was crying, but not like, y'know, bawling. It was like my head was leaking. And I said, "I wonder if it's like a kneecap. Y'know?" She didn't, which won't surprize you. "If you break a bone, it ends up healing even stronger than before. You almost never break a bone in the same place. But you don't get any blood to your knee. If it's broken it stays broken."

And, for those of you who wonder why I ever married this girl, the next bit might explain it. She smiled at me and said, "if the knee won't heal because it doesn't get enough blood, your heart should be fine." She was smiling because she knew I was getting what I had wanted, and because I had been a fool for wanting it. To her credit, she never said as much, she never pointed out that she was following the script. It would have wrecked it if she had, but I doubt that's why she did it. That day at the diner, she recognized it somehow, but she let me have what I wanted.

I was wrong about the heart, she was right, and I haven't been that big a douche ever since. I wanted this horrible loss, this staggering blow, and I felt it most keenly at that empty diner. They took away my burger uneaten and we left and the days turned into more days and here I am now. But when I feel that quiet desperation (as if I am ever *quietly* desperate) images of that place come into the back of my head and I get that same taste in my mouth, the taste of not eating the meal in front of me for perhaps the only time in my life.

Tis the Season

Posted 8:52 AM by sean
We have a tentative plan for approaching the coming year as a production company. It's all very interesting.

Our Fleet Week meeting went well, but afterwards one of the people we were meeting with sat and talked a little acting shop shit with me. We talked about our various agents and he said, "Sometimes I'll go weeks without getting sent out at all, and then last week I was sent out about ten times. You gotta just stay on 'em."

Well, I now have five agents working "for" me, and I haven't got an audition yet from any of them. The myth is that it takes some time, but I know they just aren't trying at all. I don't know for a fact, but I'm extremely confident.

So, yesterday, I called all of them, just as I did the beginning of last week. Only yesterday, I was very charming in my instantly deleted voice mails. "Just wanted to let you know that I'm having a particularly fantastic hair day, so if you have an audition for this afternoon, I really should take advantage of it." To another, "I woke up feeling strangely talented this morning, more so than usual, so if you've got something to send me out on, it'd be great!"

I spent about an hour swallowing my own bile. I had to leave the house and go to a grocery store and buy flour. I bought some flour to make myself feel better. Something tangible, a real building block.

But back to the company. We have a series of possible ideas for this year that could end with the company being way ahead of where it is now. We produce two shows between now and the festivals at the end of the summer. One of those shows follows the same model as the rest of our productions, the other will follow the "night of one act" model that so many other companies employ.

When it became clear that so many companies were doing nights of one acts, naturally we asked, "what the hell is the point?" There is no way to transfer three half hour one acts to any larger theater, there is no possibility for future success. And while that is true, what we have learned is that the possibility of success *now* is extremely high. If you get three playwrights from three different theatrical social circles, then cast between 9 and 15 actors, in theory you have just expanded your audience by 10 fold or more. The truth is, actors can generally bring in about ten or twenty (max) audience members, but each playwright can bring in about twice that, and any show we produce can bring in about 150 people without us really trying to promote.

So, we can do the one act evening, maybe sell 400 or 500 tickets (in a perfect world) and as long as we're careful about the quality, the company can make a little money.

The first model is the "inner circle" play. We will only sell about 150 tickets to this show, but that's fine because it will be a show that we have complete and total control over. We would want to do a show that Mac wrote, Jordana either acted in or directed and I acted in. Or, even better, if I sit on stage and throw poop at the audience. Mac and Jordi will never go for it, but you have to admit, it's a great idea.

The "inner circle" play will continue to give us a chance to say what we need to say, and it won't lose money because we reverse budget. What's the least amount of money we'll bring in? Fine, then we spend just shy of that. We *might* make money, but we probably won't. What we definitely won't do is *lose* money.

And then it's the festivals. Fleet Week should go up somewhere. We go whole hog, spend the 15 grand we're allowed to spend, make back half of it, but at least it offers the possibility of getting an extended run somewhere. Another producer picks it up. At the least, we will get reviews, start a paper trail...

After that, we could do another one act night or, as I've suggested, a night of horror plays to go up around Halloween.

How is this related to the bad feelings with my agents? I'll admit this out loud, here on my blog, but in person I will totally fucking deflect this, so don't even bother. But when I brought this idea for the season, the 2005 season, to Jordana and Mac, there was a thirty second pause when Mac said nothing and kind of stared off. I asked him later if he was okay and he said...

"I just saw myself doing an enormous amount of work, all year spent in a panic, only to find myself one year from now, no better off."

I should point out that after September 11, I wanted to cancel our performing space, I wanted to take a few months off and work on the relief effort and Mac said, "We need to produce plays. That's what we do, we make plays, so we need to go ahead and do that." And he was totally right.

But, yeah. So I got a bunch of agents, so I have a show in January and February, and maybe I've got some ideas, good or bad, about how this coming year will go. But I'm tired of waking up every morning no better off than I was a year ago, or ten, or fifteen.

I made less money this year than I did the year I turned twenty. Sure, I'm married to a great person, I have wonderful friends (whom I never see) and I'm a much better artist, but I'd have to be some kind of frickin' buddhist for that to make any difference to me. I am one hand clapping in the woods right now, and there are tiny moments when I think that if I just stopped giving to a life that isn't giving back, I might be a little happier.

I'm wrong, of course. I wouldn't. This is the only thing that makes me happy. But I have small dark moments when I think maybe I should.

I Just Woke Up

Posted 11:57 AM by sean
And it is nearly noon.

There was a time in my life when I really tried to make sure I was well up and out of bed before noon. I had to, because if I didn't try I would sleep until dinner and then be up all night. I don't romanticize those times, those were bad times.

Here's the thing that no-one knew about me and that I never knew about myself during my long tenure in and out of schools. I would rather be working. Yes, I am happy having fun and talking with my friends, sure. And I think I'm probably pretty fun to have at a party, I certainly make the best of it. But there is absolutely nothing that compares to sitting down with a script in front of me, or the "blank page" (although I was born during a time where pages had very little to do with it) and putting in the hours of work.

It was always said of me that I was an underacheiver, that I was lazy. For about two years during my schooling I was in a private school with small class sizes and teachers who, despite their hatred of me, were proud of being teachers and wanted to reach all of their students, even the ones they hated. I certainly didn't succeed there, I had to take three of my finals again in 7th grade or they were going to hold me back, but by the middle of my second year I was actually thriving a bit. I found acting, I was playing in a string quartet that we put together outside of school, I was playing in a band... that kind of thing.

About five weeks before my report card was to come out, I realized I would make honor roll, so I went to my dad and said "Hey, if I make honor roll, will you buy me a guitar" and he laughed and said, "sure". When I brouoght home my report card, he said, "Yeah, I just made that deal because I never thought you'd do it." And that's just the garden variety shit you have to go through as a kid, I tell that story mostly because it cracks me up, and mostly to show just how far my dad has come in the last twenty years.

But, the problem is that, almost in the same voice, he said, "You screwed up, Sean, because now we know you can do it. All these years you just weren't trying." And then when I switched schools and started failing again, the myth was in place. I was lazy, I wasn't trying. Sure, my next school was Morristown High, were we had armed security guards and I was getting my ass kicked bi-weekly, but even I believed that I didn't like to work. I started to embrace my own lies.

When I started at Citrus as a member of the Citrus Singers, I still had the chip on my shoulder, I was still a fuck-up, and I'm sure if you asked any of those people now, they would say that I tried to get away with as much as I could. But I learned just how much I love to work. It took me a couple of years, and by then the politics was so bad I had to leave, but I love getting up at 6 in the morning and going to rehearsal.

So. Today. I just woke up. I've been working on writing this musical, while at the same time starting rehearsals for a different company's musical, while trying to meet with agents and send out headshots, while trying to manage a piece of property for our grandmother, while rehearsing four books worth of songs and scheduling the kids who are supposed to record them, while trying (and failing) to keep the house clean and get dinner on the table...

But I swear, I hate that I slept this late. I wish I had gotten up and started working. I needed the sleep, I slept almost 12 hours, you don't do that if you're lazy. But I love the work. I totally love it.

Baby

Posted 4:57 PM by sean
My friends had a baby over the weekend, by which I mean she spent the entire weekend in labor and then had a baby. I almost don't know what to say about it. These are two of the greatest people I know, independent of being beautiful to one another. I've also known them almost since they started dating 12 years ago, so it's exciting to be even on the periphery.

During rehearsal the other day, I had a run-in with one of the kids and I am so completely not used to disciplining anyone. In my world, kids either behave or they get fired. Sure, they don't learn as much, but I am of the opinion that if you are pursuing art and you have no discipline and no taste for self motivation then you aren't going to be successful anyway. Stopping a kid from pursuing art is better for them and for the world in the long run.

But in this instance, I had to discipline this kid. I couldn't beleive how mad I got and how quickly. I don't know what kind of father I'm going to be, but it's good that I have some time to think it through.

I was just going through some of my old music files for the show I'm writing now and I came across several obtusely marked files. Things like "Coolness in D" and "12/8 thingie". So I opened them and I came across two files that were the infant ideas of the title song we ended up writing for the show. It's a song we're all really proud of, the lyrics are great and the groove really works.

But I stumbled on the embryoes in two different files that ended up being married to one another and for some reason I found it really touching. These little ideas that actually aren't anything alone, we nurtured them, we sorta gave them a chance. We've written a bunch of stuff for this show and I've come up with a *lot* of crap. I've written a lot of music that I never even showed my partners. But this little tune stuck in my craw and I married it to a different little piece of music and brought it out.

Again, I don't know what kind of father I'll be. I'm not sure if I will be overly angry - frustrated and violent, I just don't know. I could be overly sentimental, keeping bad drawings in boxes for years and years. I wonder if I will look back on the smallest accomplishments and attach huge meaning to them the way I do to my own life.

In any case, to those of you just becoming fathers, good on ya. Keep a brave face and let me know what to do when you say, "stop doing that" and they, while still doing it, say, "I'm not doing that." Let me know how to fix the crazy before I have to. I'd appreciate it.