Cat Fight

There's a student up at Northwestern College that might be doing a play a wrote. It was originally going to go up this spring, but now it looks more like the fall. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might not make it up at all, but I'm hopeful.

I went up last weekend to do a workshop reading of the play with some actors for the college.

It'd been a long time since I'd done something like that - playwriting, I mean. I did a lot of it at Iowa State and had a moderate amount of success. I went as far as to look into and apply to a number of grad schools - and if I'd gotten into any, I might have gone.

But they all said the same thing - get some more life experience and come back. Most playwriting grad programs seemed to want their writers to go out and live life for a few years and then start up.

At the time it drove me crazy. I was ready to go on. Oh well.

I took a few years off. While I've written the occassional play over the last ten years, it's been nothing serious. I simply didn't have a venue to perform them, so I switched styles and have been trying my hand at novels, poems, short stories, and jokes.

The reading was a real kick for me. It was easy to see why ten years of life experience can help a lot. It made me eager to work, change, adjust, alter, and tinker with every line that seemed off. It made me humble enough to be open to all kinds of critique that ten years ago I would have probably shaken off.

I realize that what comes out on the paper the first couple times is probably not perfect anymore.

It was the first time in a long time that I felt like I was doing something that just clicked. They had questions, I had answers. I had questions, they had answers. I put some serious time into the play over the last month or two and even if it doesn't get produced, it was worth every second. It was just fun.

It's an old play. It's not very good. Hopefully the reading will make it better. If not, I think I'll write another one anyway.

Did improv with the 88improv guys after the reading in Le Mars, IA. If you want to read about that, you can check the happythedog.com blog. I wrote a bit about it there.

I'm excited to see the Watchmen if it happens to come to Pella.

Andrea leaves for Haiti in a little over 24 hours and I'm dreading it. She'll be gone for ten days, and while I'm really looking forward to a lot of good bonding time with Carson, the house will feel very lonely without her.

Generally when she takes a trip, I try to catch up on a few movie rentals that she would never want to see when she was around - i.e. martials arts action, dramas with sad endings, and anything with Nicholas Cage. She hates Nicholas Cage. I don't really like him either, but he's kind of forbidden fruit when Andrea's around, so every once in a while I get a hankering.

Jason