Cottage 14

New over old

2011-06-22T07:15:00.001-04:00

Lowell is refreshing and renewing some neglected factory streets just south of the downtown core. They have ripped up old road surface and the trolley lines that were under them, so they can lay down a broad sidewalk with shade trees.

I was glad to spot even older structures deeper down, like the brick arch you can see in the attached photo. The old Lowell will never completely go away.

What country is this?

2011-05-27T08:54:00.000-04:00

Here's a map of my favorite country:

Actually, it's a "cartogram" of the results of the recent Canadian election. Every electoral district is proportionately represented, so it really shows how the Canadian population is packed into southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, Vancouver. It also shows that the Liberal party (red), although much diminished, is still a significant presence in the land--that fact is obscured using a traditional map to show the results of the election.

The article this cartogram comes from, "Two Maps One Election", is here.

Goalscape to the rescue!

2011-05-26T11:45:00.001-04:00

I am co-producing a monthly television show for a couple of local public-access stations in Massachusetts. The show, "Live from Studio A", will feature staged readings of short plays by local playwrights, so as you can imagine, it is a herding-cats sort of project.

So of course I reached for Goalscape. I have one Goalscape for tracking general start-up tasks (design logo; set rehearsal schedule...). Here is my other Goalscape, covering the specifics of the first six episodes:

I'll be living by this for the next little while...will let you know how it goes. The episodes will eventually be available as streaming media, and I will link to them when that comes to pass (in the fall of 2011).

Done, but not finished

2011-04-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

My script grew over 100 pages during the month of April, so I have "won" Script Frenzy. I even have the badge to prove it:

The Script Frenzy site has a nice chart that tracked how many pages I added each day during April, and it shows that, due to a very busy month, I was lucky to make my century:

The script is not done--I still have some cool scenes to write. Then I get to set it aside for a little while to cool before I go back to do the second draft. But it's been a really good month for writing.

Playing God

2011-04-25T16:01:00.000-04:00

This Easter season I have been thinking about the biggest writing project I have ever done -- 15,000 script pages, in English and Spanish, and still counting. It is the dramatized performance of the entire Old and New Testaments: the first attempt won Audio Book of the Year in 2007, and featured hundreds of Hollywood stars and religious leaders.

Along with converting the text into audio scripts (the chapters and chapters about boundary issues and dimensions of the Temple are particularly stunning, I am sure you would agree), I had to create character packs for the actors. The actor, or voice talent, in an audio production generally gets a character pack that includes just the lines he or she has to record, not the whole script. It also includes a bit of a description of the character to help the actor and the director along.

God's character pack for The Bible Experience is about 500 pages long, which is pretty divine in itself. This is what I wrote as hints to the voice talent who would play God:

God is so powerful, so all-knowing, so essential to our being, that it is important to underplay him a fair bit. It is what God does himself, of course: he underplays about 99% of himself whenever he walks the earth and talks with humans.

CS Lewis has a great image of angels taking human form. It is so hard to contain themselves into merely three dimensions that they sort of shimmer, and their hair stands out in all directions. God does a better job: we do not sense any tension, stress, or pressure in God.

God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God knows all and sees all, and supports us in our doings. In the book of Job, God even supports the devil in his attempt to tempt a good man.

However, for the sake of relating with us and making us part of his ongoing creation of the universe, God takes on certain conversational forms. He expresses wrath. He allows himself to be outbargained, to be wrangled with, to be yelled at. He asks rhetorical questions of Jonah, and shows his backside to Moses because Moses cannot tolerate seeing God’s face.

God is not petty, mean, forgetful, capricious, lazy, annoyed, frustrated, or at a loss. Those emotions are not available to you in your performance. God delights in his creation, and delights in his people; he agonizes in their agonies, and resolves to destroy them for their naughtiness in order to let himself be argued out of it.

The trickiest part, perhaps, is that God, although immeasurably far beyond us in all ways, does not treat us as we, say, treat ants. He engages with us to draw us to him, while giving us the will to choose to come closer or turn our backs.

Script Frenzy - finally under way

2011-04-05T11:11:00.001-04:00

I had a slow start on my screenplay for Script Frenzy. Should have started April 1, but I had other deadline-driven writing to complete. Then we spent the weekend helping catalog my mother's artworks from the past 40 years (material for some future play).

But now we're rolling. Here's a view of my screenplay Goalscape. This shows just Act 1, and you can see that I have tinted the first two scenes to indicate that they are WRITTEN!

The characters are speaking to me faster than I can transcribe what they say, and that is an excellent sign so early in a script. For instance, it turns out that the cartoony boss of one of the lead characters actually has a sense of humor. I didn't know that!

Stay tuned: Act 1 should be finished before the end of the week.

Goalscaping a script

2011-03-28T21:24:00.001-04:00

Less than a week now before I start writing my screenplay during Script Frenzy, and I feel much more prepared than I was the last time I took part in the month of writing. One of the reasons is that I am doing most of my planning using Goalscape.

With Goalscape, you lay out your tasks, project elements, or whatever, in a circle. Traditionally, the size of each task 'wedge' indicates its importance; however, there is a cute coincidence with a screenwriting Goalscape. A script for a movie is roughly 100 pages long, so a page of my script takes 1% of the way around the Goalscape circle. This shows me right away that, at this stage in my plans, I have far too much in act 2:

A new feature in the latest release of Goalscape lets you filter the chart by tags, due dates, people responsible for the task's accomplishment, or whatever. For the script, I have created a tag for each member of the cast. Katie is a major character, and if I filter the Goalscape to highlight just her scenes, it looks like she gets lost for a while a couple of times.

It is very exciting to see the balance of the script this way, and not have to sort of fumble around while writing and wonder whether I have left Katie offstage for too long.

If you look back in the blog for other Goalscape entries, you will see I used it when learning lines for a production of Titus Andronicus. As I did then, you can register graphically how much of each task is completed, and make sure you can make your deadlines.

I will post a progress report in ten days or so, unless the wheels really fall off the wagon. Really looking forward to April!

Script Frenzy - writing with your hair on fire

2011-03-17T14:48:00.000-04:00

Script Frenzy challenges you to write a script (screen play, stage play, radio play...) of 100 pages during the 30 days of April. It is no coincidence that it starts on April Fool's Day: several thousand creative people spend a month playing a joke on themselves.

It's actually a great experience to finish a script, even if it is a somewhat fuzzy and shaky one. A huge number of would-be writers never ever get to the last page of anything, so doing that from time to time is a great confidence builder...like having the next belt color in your preferred martial art.

Not so many days to go before Screnzy 2011 starts. Unless the outside world brings surprises that keep me too busy to write, I hope to create a romantic comedy ("romcom") currently called Seven Ways. Coming soon to a theater-of-the-mind near you...

If I have learned anything from last time, it is to do a lot of preparing. I am writing lots of notes, organizing the order of scenes, trying to figure out how the story lines weave together...trying to understand what, if anything, I have in the way of a conclusion.

Fortunately, my characters are already starting to come to life. They whisper pithy little dialog snippets in my ear when I am supposed to be attending to other things, and then I have to hurry to scribble down the gist of what they said. Four voices have appeared so far: the two main characters, an opponent to one of them, and a member of the 'crew' of the other one. I am going from dreading the prospect of 100 blank pages to fill, to wondering how I will squeeze their interesting stories into a single script..

I started capturing my notes in Mindomo, a good mind mapping program. But the map has gotten a bit out of hand:

(I know it's too small to read. I just want to give you a hint of how this goes, not give away all the surprises in the script. Not yet, anyhow...)

So I have opened up a Goalscape as well. I keep the undigested notes in the mindmap, and will use the Goalscape to organize what happens in each scene in the script. This is the first pass on the Goalscape; I will post it again just before Script Frenzy starts. Once the script is done, I will post part of the script and the Goalscape behind it so we can compare and contrast what I planned and what really happened..

Even at this point in planning, when I don't even know the names of half the key characters, I am starting to feel a lot more confident. These planning tools reduce my chances of getting totally lost and discouraged. Once the framework is in place, I can let the characters loose and, with luck, mainly just record what they say and do to each other.

Can't hardly wait!

All dressed up with nothin' to say

2011-03-15T11:22:00.002-04:00

In the FemNoire festival of women's plays, performed in Lowell this past weekend, I had fun directing Debbie Roy's "And So it Goes". Two people mind their own business on a park bench while their alter egos rise up and get pretty wild. It's a short play that I can see going into the festival repertory all across the country.

My two bench-sitting actors (Rob Nason and Maria Bela Soares, below) each had one (ONE) line. But they had the great challenge of playing to the audience with slight sideways glances of the eyes, sighs, and judicious use of props (oh, that banana).

The (sold-out) audiences loved them. Sometimes saying a lot less allows for saying a lot more. Just sayin'.

Perspective

2011-03-03T22:04:00.001-05:00

I was at a company meeting today and heard about the amazing things planned for this year, and the truly amazing amounts of money that are on the table. It put the challenges and occasional victories of my work there in perspective. I mean, if the corporate enterprise is like a vast ship muscling through the high seas, my pals and I in documentation are hunched on a lower deck, crocheting the life jackets. Management knows the ship needs the life jackets in case of an emergency, but they really really hope never to have to use them. Sigh.

No such thing as bad publicity

2011-03-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

I remind myself that any publicity is better than none whenever I have to write a press release. I sweat over these 500-word compositions as much as I do over a full-length script. Here is one I did for the next show at The Loading Dock Gallery, the best art gallery in Lowell, MA:

http://www.richardhowe.com/2011/03/01/loading-dock-gallery-exhibit-opening-tomorrow/

Richard Howe kindly reproduced it in (almost) its entirety on his site.

The gallery site is www.theloadingdockgallery.com.

Local Theater

2011-02-23T06:32:00.000-05:00

In our town there is a great semi-pro theater company, Image Theater. I have the good fortune to be able to work with them from time to time, and I enjoy it not least for the logistics. It is generally a short stroll from home to wherever we are rehearsing (the theater does not yet have a permanent home) rather than a long commute.

Last night we started rehearsals on a play in the Fem Noire festival:

I am directing a sweet cast in a cute play that, if the producer doesn't change his mind again, will be the upbeat ending for the first half of the evening. We rehearse in the basement of a local market (the co-owner is in the cast), and it was one of those rehearsals conducted amid peals of laughter and, as far as I could tell, no anxiety at all. Not all plays start (or end) this way, but this experience so far reminds me of all the good parts of putting on plays.

Nobody makes a living doing shows like this: the performance space can only seat 70, and the ticket prices are modest. But--for author, actors, and director--it contributes to making a life.

Dotty ready to launch

2011-02-16T13:35:00.000-05:00

This is a little movie of Dotty, the app to help families redistribute household goods, as in the situation where the parents are moving into a smaller house. Two components are still (and stubbornly) not ready, but I am pretty pleased with the general work flow.

You can find a larger version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA2zRNCmagw

Gallery daze

2011-02-05T17:43:00.001-05:00

I belong to Lowell's Loading Dock Gallery, the only playwright among more than 40 visual artists. The artists are inspiring and challenging, as much for their supportive and encouraging attitude as for what they produce. As I write this, the group is going over needful left-brain stuff like budgets and blog maintenance...artists are notoriously bad at tasks like marketing and suchlike, but so far nobody has crumpled up the agenda and flung it at anyone. If course, for a playwright, having more angst to observe might be useful...

Just one last feature to add...

2011-02-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

So I'm working on this application called Dotty, and it is almost ready to go. There's just this one last tiny feature I have to throw in, a feature that isn't even needed at the start of the application's use. Should be no trouble at all.

So this afternoon I sketched out the feature's flow, and made notes about the various functions I'll have to write to support it. Came out like this:

Someone please remind me next time about the perils of 'feature creep'...preferably with a whack to the head.

Blog on hand

2011-02-03T18:27:00.001-05:00

Google has released its Android Blogger gadget and I threw it onto my cute new Android phone right away. Watch for new posts arriving from traffic jams, movie queues, and the back row of groups enduring a PowerPoint assault,

A Canadian validation

2011-01-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

So I wanted to switch the name on the billing account for our cottage electricity in Nova Scotia. Had a surprisingly-pleasant customer-service experience with Nicole at NS Power. We chatted about her new office on Water Street in Halifax, where the noisy old power station used to be (back in the 1970's they would open the big windows on the power station at around 3 am on summer nights to reduce the heat on the machines, also letting out the bang-bang-bang sound effects that would galvanize us out of bed, one block over on Barrington Street).

Nicole just sent an email confirming the various changes we made, and adding this note: 'I have waived the $24.00 standard connection charge as a courtesy, basically because you were such a pleasant person to deal with!'

Oh, Canada...

A Dotty Prezi

2010-12-18T09:25:00.000-05:00

I endure a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and my heart goes out to the people who make them, and have to try to make them interesting and eye-catching, but still readable. I mean, how many legitimate things can you do with a title and a stack of bullet points?

So I was delighted to stumble upon Prezi, an alternative method for making engaging presentations. In half an hour I whipped up this not-yet-finished presentation on Dotty, the application I am building:

How to empty a storage unit on Prezi

This is a lot of fun! I'll be making more of these things...

going dotty

2010-12-07T12:06:00.000-05:00

The problem: we have two storage units full of stuff from my mother's house. She is now in an assisted-living facility, and there is no chance she will need the stuff in the storage units again. There are five of us siblings, and among us we have 11 children, and we don't all live in close proximity to the stored stuff. So how are we going to get the stuff divided out, with a minimum of hassles, so everyone is as happy as the circumstances allow?

I have been working on a solution, called Dotty. It's an online tool that lets each of us log in, review the stuff from storage, and put colored dots (a different dot for each of us) on the things we would like in our households. I have just opened the site for testing with a couple of my sisters, and still have a few bells and whistles to hook up; but overall I am very happy with the app. I built in in FlashBuilder, using Flex 4, with ColdFusion 8 pages to provide access to the MySQL database--and it could hardly have worked better.

I will post a movie soon of Dotty in action. Nice addition to the old portfolio...

Odd props

2010-11-29T16:48:00.001-05:00

A few months ago I noted that I had a script in progress that had been stuck at a certain point for months and months. I am happy to report that that play, and two others, got themselves finished by October and had their first reading at a playwrights' crit group in November. I am a slower writer than I would wish to be, dawdling and delaying for weeks and then turning out page after page in unexpected writing surges. If I could harness them...I guess I would be a different person than I am.

One of these new plays takes place on a stalled Ferris wheel, with a couple rocking in each of the cars we can see and a repair man clambering over the structure of the wheel. Another is the famous police-lineup play, in a town too small to have enough people for a lineup. I tend to put ordinary people in proximity to odd props or odd situations, and often good plays come out of it.

For the next couple of months I am concentrating on some software projects I am building, little apps for tiny niche audiences. But if they work out they will make nice additions to my resume. For sure, I am learning all the ways in which Flex 4 is different from Flex 3...

But rustling at the back of my mind there are a couple more script ideas. I have the idea backlog of a member of the leisure class, and at the end of a long day of not-leisure work I can barely stand the sight of all those little nuggets of inspiration. Until I can't stand not to work on them, and we are off to the races again.

Your feedback is very important to us

2010-08-12T09:29:00.000-04:00

So I was riding on the commuter train from Boston to Lowell, and the wifi kept cutting out. I am by now inured to losing the Internet connection once or twice during the 40-minute trip (there is a black hole near North Chelmsford), but nine times?

So I found the customer comment form to let them know that the service is deteriorating from 'okay' through 'annoying' to 'why even pretend it's a service?' And I could not submit my feedback on the form they supply. There is a required field called "Topic" with a pulldown menu and the instruction "Please select a Type of Feedback". And there are no options available. Nothing to choose. I clicked "view source" to double check. Hahaha up your nose, Mr. Customer.

So I called them today and waited for an hour to talk to a customer service rep who didn't have a clue what I was talking about, or why I was telling her. But she carefully took down what I said and promised to pass it on.

I guess I'll plan to do only offline work on the train from now on.

Speaking so as to be heard

2010-08-05T16:23:00.000-04:00

One of my great goals when I was growing up was to be able to speak at least the second language of everyone I was likely to meet. This is a valid and highly laudable goal for a Canadian, but it quickly spins into difficulties if you live in a metropolitan area.

And then I compounded my troubles by spending several years in the Canadian Arctic, where I learned and used Inuktitut and Cree. They are wonderful languages, but they don't travel all that well unless (as Rebekah and I are known to do) you want to discuss something in a Muenster restaurant with a fair degree of confidence that other diners will not know what you are saying.

I live right now north of Boston, and my English, French, and Spanish would seem likely to cover most of the people I run into. But I didn't realize until I moved there that Lowell, MA, is 20% Cambodian.

I have tried learning Khmer. I got several chapters along, so I could thank shop clerks and so on. And then I met the chapter that laid out the 29 ways you can say "you" in Khmer, and how deploying the right word is important to respect the other person's years/status/relationship to you. I have not gone further.

Oh, and did I mention that the building we live in is about 20% folks from Brazil? I just learned today that Portuguese is in the top 10 of world languages:

Mandarin (over a billion speakers)
English (about a billion)
Spanish (500 million)
Hindi (490)
Russian (277)
Arabic (255)
Portuguese (240)
Bengali (215)
French (200)
Malay / Indonesian (175)

As a kid, I figured that the imperialist languages were the ones to follow, as they would have left speakers of their languages in all their former colonies. Works great for English and Spanish.

What now? I guess the sensible next-language decision these days would be the next biggest trade/commerce/Internet language that I don't now have. So if I'm being sensible, it's off to Mandarin lessons...

Three graces

2010-08-03T12:09:00.001-04:00

Our granddaughter Etta, at lower right, communes with two of her cousins at a family gathering in Ottawa.

image caught by Etta's dad, Terry.

On the Concord River

2010-08-01T14:08:00.000-04:00

We went out for a bike ride today through a part of Lowell we don't know all that well, Fort Hill Park, Shedd Park, and the Lowell Cemetery area. We spent some time hanging out with the late Senator Paul Tsongas, where he rests on a bluff above an extremely paintable stretch of the Concord River.

Spent some time thinking about people who give theirs lives to public service, and people who use the benefits of their position to benefit others as well as themselves. Case in point is Freeman Shedd, who deeded 30 acres of his land to Lowell for a recreation park about a hundred years ago. He seems to have made his fortune in cologne, among other enterprises, and certainly lived in a grand house on Andover Street as a reward for his success. Nobody said he had to give anything back to the city of his birth, yet he did. I don't know whether he was a pleasant man, or a deeply thoughtful one; but I am grateful to him.

Playing in Midgard

2010-07-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

My old favorite role-playing game, Midgard, is becoming active again after a long time of sleep. Turns are being processed and new adventures are beginning!

It's a measured sort of excitement, of course, because this is a moderated, turn-based game. You send in your turn, and then wait and wait to see what turns out. The last time I was active, I spent months, at a rate of a turn every three or four weeks, getting my clans into position to help with the assault on a city--and then the game master died.

One of the challenges for new players (for old players, too) is that the turn sheet is quite complicated. Up to 30 actions, and each action having as many as five arguments, and the arguments have to be in the right syntax. So I have been building the Midgard Turn Builder to help players with their task:

I'm building it in Flex 4 (Flash Builder), and having a lot of fun learning and using the new functions in that tool.

I have just let the player community know that the Turn Builder is ready for testing. Will let you know how it goes.

Oh, about the gore

2010-07-08T12:08:00.000-04:00

And there was sufficient gore in Titus to satisfy any vampires in the audience.

Beyond gore

2010-06-20T10:10:00.001-04:00

This production of Titus Andronicus, wrapping up tonight, is light on the gore and shock effects, and wrestles with the core of the conflicts between the Roman factions, the vengeful Goth queen, and wild cards like her advisor and lover, Aaron.

Spouse and I were talking this morning about how Titus is all about love of children. Titus, Tamora, Aaron all make their key decisions based on their perceptions of what their children need or what they expect of them. Maybe that's why the characters who have neither parents nor children in the play (Saturnine, Marcus, Bassianus) seem less substantial to me.

Shallow breathing

2010-06-18T13:28:00.000-04:00

I am reminded, by my stance for the last few minutes of the current production of Titus Andronicus, of the importance of planning for one's death, since it may come suddenly. In this case I receive a dinner fork to the spinal column, and it does more damage than you would think likely. It's important to die in character, of course, but there are some more mundane considerations: don't fall across the leading lady in such away that you cut off blood circulation to any of her body parts, come to rest in a way that you can stay at rest without your knees or knuckles screaming at you and trying to make you writhe, and find a position that lets you go on with the standard actorly business of breathing without distracting the audience by the rhythmic rise and fall of your chest.

I am sure there are the elements of an e-book in this: Sorrow is an Enemy: Leadership Principles of the Andronici. I will send it to the staff at BP immediately.

open-ended

2010-06-12T09:35:00.001-04:00

I have a short play part-way done. It has been part-way done since November, when my big writing project that lasted until this month got really busy. But it's also part-way done because it has been evolving in surprising ways, and I'm a little scared of it.

The complainant who does not really have a complaint is about to view a lineup of suspects that is not really a lineup. Is the hard-bitten police lieutenant not really hard-bitten? Or perhaps not a lieutenant? Stay tuned...

learning learning

2010-06-11T10:06:00.000-04:00

When I learn lines, I try to subdivide long scenes into meaningful and manageable chunks of a page or less of script. Then I learn the first chunk of the scene, and then the last chunk. This gives me confidence that I will be able to enter and leave the scene strong, even if I rattle around a lot in the middle. Similarly, I usually learn first my last scene in a play, and may even work backwards, scene by scene, depending on the rehearsal schedule.

What bumps into this is the debt I owe my other actors to provide them, as early as possible, with an energized performance that is somewhere in the neighborhood of what I hope to do in front of our audience. I don't much like surprising people with new business or a new emotional level when they are struggling with their own lines and characterizations. So scenes where I might not have much to say, but where other people's performances rely on my informed response to them, get high priority, too.

We ran through Act 2 last night pretty well; as you can see, the gaps are closing. By Sunday's rehearsal I hope to not have to call 'Line!' to the stage manager at all.

Just one week to go!

Act 2, Scene 3

2010-06-08T09:02:00.000-04:00

This is a power scene. Titus is rejected by the tribunes as he pleads for his condemned sons' lives, and is reduced to preaching to the paving stones. Then his daughter Lavinia is brought in, having been deprived of her hands and tongue. Then he learns he may be able to save his sons' lives by chopping of his left hand and sending it to the emperor. What is a loving father to do?

As you can see from my Goalscape, I worked on 2:3 a LOT yesterday and today. About halfway through the scene during the rehearsal tonight, I will have to whip the script out of my pocket. I could in theory have learned more lines last night; but the passions in the scene are pretty intense and I was exhausted as if I had been boxing.

The lines, the lines!

2010-06-07T06:05:00.000-04:00

Titus rehearsals are going well. On Sunday we had a morning of combat training for all those moments when bodies go flying or sharp objects zip quickly past earnest actors' body parts. In the afternoon we ran--well, staggered--through the entire show, and not too badly.

With two weeks to go, here is my updated Goalscape of the lines I have to learn. The light-colored areas are where I still have work to do:

Those two big scenes at the bottom of the chart are obviously where I have to put my energies. I have left them until now because they are full of long speeches by me with relatively little interaction with other actors. I did the other scenes first so I could give my fellow cast members some lively and appropriate interaction, to feed energy back to them. In Act 2, scene 3, I do a lot of talking to paving stones, which have not minded the neglect so far.

Drawback of getting older, that I had not noted until now, is that my eyesight has changed so that, when I lie down to talk intimately with said stones, I am too close to my script to read the words. Good stimulus to learning them, I guess.

Taking on Titus

2010-06-03T10:23:00.000-04:00

About twenty years ago I wrote short versions of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens for the Hampshire Shakespeare Company, and they went really well. Last week I agreed to step into an almost-full-length version of Titus, as the actor playing Titus had to withdraw for personal reasons. I had my first rehearsal Tuesday, and the show opens June 18, and I am remembering why I enjoyed the twenty-minute version so much. There are so many lines...!

Fortunately, the cast and director are kind and patient, and I think it will turn out to be a great show for Ghostlight Theater. Hands chopped off here, tongues torn out there...and excellent grammar.

I made myself a Goalscape of the script, to keep track of the scenes I have to learn. As you can see, I have about a third of the lines down and a LONG way to go (the "pp" numbers are Titus' pages; the whole script is about 75 pages long:

I'll let you know how it goes...

Coding coding coding

2010-05-25T09:47:00.002-04:00

I am building a turn-builder tool for a role-playing game called Midgard. Each turn has up to 30 actions. Each action has up to six values, and up to now a big problem has been players submitting turnsheets with tons of mistakes (values in the wrong fields, missing required values...). The turn-builder only shows you valid options for the choice you made in the first field, and then only valid options for what you chose in the second field, and so on, until you have enough valid stuff for the action to be ready to submit.

The second through sixth values for an action may need a text box, a number stepper, a picklist, a combo box (that's a picklist where you can add something you don't find in the list), or a checkbox. That's a max of 3125 combinations of controls, and then sometimes the values are required and sometimes they are optional.

I need to say this from time to time to remind myself why I need to write so MANY lines of code. Thank you for listening.

Getting a useful view of a project

2010-05-17T16:19:00.001-04:00

I am a big fan of mind mapping. I usually start working out what's going to be involved in a project in a mind-mapping tool like Mindomo. I have even tried to track a project (what is complete, who owns what needs to be done, how done is it) using a mind map...with pretty poor success. A mind map node doesn't know anything about the state of its children, except that they are there, so there was a lot of repetitive bookkeeping for me in updating how done things were.

I am working on a project right now for a great old turn-based game called Midgard. It's a sort of medieval-with-some-magic political-struggle game where you start out with a couple of friends and a couple hundred retainers and try to make something of yourself in a huge and often hostile world. You are asking, why play a game when I can get that at home for free, and it's a valid question. Which I can't really answer right now, but I will return to it in a future post.

Anyhow, one of the painful aspects of Midgard is entering your actions on the turn sheet in the correct syntax. You can use as many as 30 actions per turn, and each action can have as many as five arguments. "City - Warehouse - Load - [warehouse #] - [quantity] - [item]" and actions like it are very easy to set down in the wrong order.

So I am building the Midgard Turn Builder. Basically, what you choose as the first part of each action governs what the Turn Builder will let you choose or enter for all the other arguments. When this finally gets working, it should reduce blood pressure readings all across the player community, and probably cut the turn processing time dramatically.

I will post again about the Turn Builder as it develops (you are free to go visit now, but the turnsheet screen is only partially hooked up. Come back June 1), but right now I want to show you how I am keeping track of everything I have to do.

I started with a mind map, as is my wont. Here is what it looked like at an early stage:

All the little branches represented things I thought of and tried to organize by some sort of logical method. But how to track what was done, and what needed doing next?

I recently found Goalscape, and it is proving a huge help in tracking the project. Goalscape displays the project as circles within circles. The innermost circles are the general categories, and their 'children' are the tasks within those categories:

The parents know about the status of their children, so as you record progress on a child task, the parent task gets proportionately colored in.

See that orange little thing? I can zoom in on it and see all those little children in a readable way:

Looks like I have some work to do on the code that handles the action arguments!

There are features I am not using yet, because this is a one-person project; however, Goalscape lets you assign deadlines and task owners. It is a young tool, so I bet cool additions are coming soon.

If you have a tangled project, consider flattening it out with Goalscape.

Problematic penitence

2010-03-16T15:57:00.000-04:00

My Lenten penance so far this year has been to listen to the spring training games of the Washington Nationals. I follow this team because they used to be the Montreal Expos, and I was living in Montreal when that franchise began playing, back at Jarry Park. I have hardly ever been in Washington, and have never seen a Nationals game live, but they are my team.

And this spring they have started off with 11 straight losses, following the tradition of the last two full seasons when they have lost more than 100 games each time.

Ah, but now, today, they played two split-squad games and won both of them. Will I have to root for single-payer health-care reform from now on?

Harsh realities

2010-03-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

The less I pay attention to Canadian politics, the pleasanter my memories of it. We have been out of Canada for five years on this current stint (just got the notice saying we are being dropped from the voting lists because of prolonged absence), which has allowed me to pretend that Canadian politicians, base their fervent disagreements and maneuverings on high principles and a shared concern for the well-being of all citizens.
But I have been following events a little more closely over the last few months, and my rose-coloured lenses need to be set aside.
The Conservative government shut down Parliament around Christmas time to choke off an investigation into mishandling of prisoners in Afghanistan, and to try to defuse a confrontation where the government is refusing to provide documents which Parliament claims it has the right to see. The shut-down in itself was cheesy and petty, and underscored that the dispute over the documents seems to be because they would be embarrassing to the government, not because they would reveal matters damaging to national security.
And this week the government's budget proposals came out (Summary article by a former Conservative staffer: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ericmang/2010/03/conservatism-and-economic-incompetence). More tax cuts for those who have already had tax cuts. Retrenchment on efforts to help people out of the disastrous recession. A more militant military. Much much less for the arts.
The government has the principles of its dogmatic base at heart, but not the needs of the generality of Candians. Why, they are almost acting American (Bush-era) in their arrogance and disdain.
I much preferred the rosier view I had built up. Wish I was in a position to do anything about the current situation.

Tribal knowledge

2010-02-17T13:34:00.000-05:00

At my day job, I keep running into word-walls, where the evident meaning of the words is not what the text is trying to convey. So, we have an "application accelerator" that does not accelerate the application. Evidently, it accelerates the process of creating the application, and what happens after that is up to the developer. We have an "autogenerated" modal window that turns out not to be autogenerated, or not in the sense I would understand that term. I still have to tell it what I want in the window and how I want it to look.

Probably what I am running up against is the speed of development of our product. It had its cranky places in times past, and you had to have a large chunk of "tribal knowledge" in order to make it work at all. And now it is much more simple and straightforward for anyone who ever used the older versions. But I did not. I am only seven months here, so my baseline is what everyone else things of as this huge advance over the past. What they want to trumpet as wonderful improvements, I see normal or almost-normal software behavior.

This would be funny if it did result in my wasting so much time tracking down where my understanding does not match the expectations of the team with good tribal knowledge.

Ugly face

2010-02-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

Jack Layton is the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party, has been for the past seven years. He is an energetic fighter for his party's position, and also a stylish leader who does a good job of eviscerating opponents' positions and actions without sticking knives into their guts.

Jack announced on Friday that he has prostate cancer, which is scary but likely treatable. His dad had prostate cancer almost 20 years ago and fought it successfully. I am a great Jack Layton fan, but even if I were not I would wish him the greatest success in this battle. As Gilles Duceppe, leader of the rival Bloc Quebecois, tweeted, "Cher Jack, ton dynamisme et ta détermination viendront à bout de cette épreuve. Bon courage."

I found remarkable, though the quality of comments left on Canadian news sites as the rumor mill churned before Mr Layton's press conference...and even after. People found the most hateful, irrelevant things to say about someone they probably have never met and who arguably thinks benevolently of them. I understand that people who don't get out much and can't keep friends tend to lurk and the world of comment-posting, but still I have clung to a romantic image that this would be Something Canadians Just Don't Do.

I am wrong, of course. Canadians are as trashy as are any other people, and ever have been. I remember now sitting as a poll observer for the NDP in a Halifax riding where the great Muriel Duckworth was our candidate, the first woman to run for a seat in the Nova Scotia legislature. Observing for one of the other parties was a college-aged troll who kept up a non-stop flow of disparaging commentary of all things that were not of his party. But he didn't really know all that much, so his commentary was mainly about how ugly or stupid or lame various prominent figures looked--his chief target was Stanley Knowles, MP, labor activist, and clergyman (who, even his friends would agree, could look a bit like a long-legged bird). I remember wondering at the time, "What planet does this kid think he is on? Why does he think what he's saying has merit?"

It didn't have merit, of course; but as these past decades have shown us, meritless speech poured through a megaphone can have great power. So I guess he was a harbinger of what we now experience.

Speedy healing, Jack!

Home on the prairie

2010-02-05T11:43:00.000-05:00

I dashed home from work last night and went off to the nearest AMC theater complex to see a simulcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion". I thought I might be all alone in the theater, but the audience eventually got up to about 150 folks. Most of us were geezers, but not all.
Do you know this show? It has been broadcasting almost forever on Saturday nights on public radio: two hours blending inane skits, local acts, big-name stars, a classy house orchestra, and news from the imaginary town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.
The concession booth had no Powder Milk Biscuits or ketchup, two of the supposed sponsors for the show, but aside from that the evening was perfect. We laughed and applauded and held our breaths at the virtuoso music and sound effects. Elvis Costello was the big name of the night, but he had good company.

That was some fun. I hope they broadcast the radio show this way at regular intervals. I will never get to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota; but this was almost as good.

Swoled

2010-02-03T22:10:00.000-05:00

I wish that my lip, after I have once bit it solidly enough to leave visible damage, would not develop a kinky attraction to the teeth chomping down next to it. But it seems to swell towards the danger zone and get itself bitten again and again and again. Even when I wasn't eating anything, just talking on a conference call with some suddenly-startled folks in India. "What was that?" they said. "Must be something with the connection," I enunciated.

On the way to the train

2010-02-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

So we had a train to catch on Sunday morning in Albany. About two weeks ago I started to think about winter storms and icy early-morning highways, and we opted to book a bed and breakfast for Saturday night in Troy, NY. One of my rare bursts of genius.

The Old Judge Mansion bed and breakfast is so large that the old judge himself maybe be lurking in one of the many upper rooms. There is one parlor given over to the playing of Texas Hold'em poker tournaments on Sunday nights. There are downstairs public rooms that I saw, but hardly had time to inspect. Kindly hosts; firm beds; off-street parking; ample breakfast.

Oh, and good directions to several restaurants nearby. The first one we went to was booked until late April, so we went to another one, Loporto's, which was also very busy. But they squeezed us in at the bar and fed us mountains of food while the barman (who has worked at various jobs in the building since he was twelve) put on a show of pouring, mixing, shaking, and serving.

Troy and I had had a benevolent ignorance of each other before this past weekend, but now I am happy to have made the acquaintance. It's a former 'Richest Town in America' that looks through much of its downtown as though great old structures had been leveled without much thought to replacing them. But we very much enjoyed what is still standing. And we made the train on time on Sunday morning.

Back to Midgard

2010-01-27T16:07:00.000-05:00

Oh, so long ago there was a hand-moderated game called "Midgard". You mailed in your turns and they dealt with them and some weeks later the results came back and you knew if you had found the gold mine or walked into a trap. I have played in a handful of versions and variants of Midgard, usually as a minor character on the lawful side. The game had a major hiccup when the owner of one version died and the owner of the other was overwhelmed by technical issues and sold off the game.

But now Midgard is almost ready to go again. I have my turns for my two clans, and my computer wallpaper is a 30,000-foot view of the land and oceans of Midgard. I can't wait to go exploring again!

Too good to set aside

2010-01-25T12:54:00.000-05:00

In the fall I went on a little sprint of writing short plays. Completed four; have as many as seven more in the pipeline. But I had to put that aside for the next few months while I work on a huge (8,000 pages or so) project with a tight deadline.

I have been worrying that when I finally get back to the short plays I will find that they have become dusty and uninteresting. But not so. I just visited one of the unfinished short plays, where it sits in my project space on Celtx. It is very funny, sort of crazy, and is either almost done (if it turns one way) or still in the opening scene (if it flowers a different way). I am so totally tempted to put the big project aside and work on this little baby. Must. resist. cute. script.

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

2010-01-22T08:51:00.001-05:00

Really useful slaps upside the head for screenwriting:

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

Old Fogey

2010-01-20T21:33:00.001-05:00

I have a bit of a reputation in my family for going to the video store (that's how long ago I developed this reputation) and bringing home what we came to call "Boffo European Comedies". As in, "they may be funny to the people who hate these people, but they sure ain't funny to us." The foundation stone of this series was I Even Met Happy Gypsies, of which the most memorable scenes were the repeated repossession of the family television and attempts to push the body of the dead man through a hole in the frozen river.

Well, I did it again today, although I was mine only victim, with a German romantic comedy which starts with a horrid German gentleman in Turkey running over a hitchhiker with a car that has a dead body in the trunk. A dead body which we begin to suspect is the body of the hitchhiker's true love. I can't say for sure, because my old fogey meter hit red and the movie is on its way back to Netflix.

I don't understand. And get off my lawn.

A tiring book

2010-01-20T11:32:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading a brick-thick mystery novel set in the west of England. Had all the elements that should normally attract and entice me: interesting locale, feisty vicar, headstrong teen, slumbering mystery about to awaken.

Yet I only finished the thing because I am sick at home and was too weak to get it off my chest once I started reading it in bed. It was so relentlessly busy, so filled with collisions and unlikely discoveries, that I just had to dawdle along after each page rather than really keeping up with the plot. It didn't help that I have been a feisty vicar myself, back in the day, and I am pretty sure that no feisty vicar who wants to go on collecting paychecks would keep the proper authorities so in the dark as the main character does in this book.

A book like this makes me yearn for the novels of Patrick O'Brian, with their rich, glowing balance of event and introspection, tense drama and low comedy. Oh, and lots and lots of nautical tehnobabble. Double coaked sister-blocks forever!

Accentuated

2010-01-19T08:44:00.000-05:00

I am on a conference call right now with a room-full of folks in India, plus some folks in North America. Can barely understand what is being said--I wonder how much is because I barely understand the topic, and how much because I am not all that used to pronounced Indian accents. Of course, I am afraid to ask.

My ear seems to be getting stiffer as I get older: I can't pick up very much at all from Radio Canada talk shows in Quebec French, and tried out a very frustrating first lesson in Mandarin where I just could not hear the difference between the essential four pronunciation tones. Maybe I should stick to printed text...

Jump rope

2010-01-17T13:31:00.002-05:00

There is a long list of skills that I somehow overlooked learning as a young person. I don't think I ever hung by my knees from a parallel bar, or learned to make music, a la Bobby McFarrin, by thumping my chest and belly in various ways with my hands. I dance like an old white guy. Don't let me put a foot on a skateboard.

So, when I say that our new jumpropes arrived yesterday you will understand the trepidation I feel. Jumproping is good for the body in all sorts of ways, if not so good for the downstairs neighbor. And there is a gratifying skills progression you can set yourself to.

Or you can tangle your ankles every five or six passes of the rope (supposedly) under your feet, and stagger toward some sharp-edged piece of furniture, and try again with a mounting debit balance of dread.

This should be easier.

Bells and whistles

2010-01-15T08:51:00.002-05:00

On my commute most weekdays I pass a Boston hotel on the edge of the Charles River. Well, separated from the river by a highway, and bordered by an access road that runs up onto the bridge across the river that takes the traffic, the trolley, and pedestrians like me to and from Cambridge.

It's a classy hotel, I guess. It has a doorman in a long coat, and this doorman gets taxis for hotel residents. Well, I guess he does, since he has a whistle and plies it at five second intervals while waving imperiously at the highway and the access road. But I have never seen a taxi swerve out of its course in response to his calls; in fact I have never seen a taxi in front of the hotel.

There is a subway stop just across the street, but maybe the visitors are too classy for that, or are going to odd locations. But as far as I can see, they aren't going anywhere.

I can ignore the gestures, but the whistle is very demanding. Maybe I should design him a little Android application for his smart phone that will summon taxis when he needs them. And another one to play the whistle noise so the residents will know he is hard at work.

This sort of thinking gets me across the bridge in spite of the stiff northern wind.

Pocket diaries

2010-01-15T07:52:00.002-05:00

I used to keep a record of what I was up to in little pocket appointment books. My dad gave me one every Christmas for many years, and I filled up a fair number of them with summaries of my works and days in tiny mouse writing.

The surviving books live in a bureau drawer and nobody will attend much to them until and unless my fifteen minutes of fame become truly remarkable. However, when I turn the pages they evoke the rhythms and even the smells of those days very clearly, in a way that Twitter and Facebook entries do not do for me. I follow the diary entries of John Quincy Adams from 200 years ago that the Massachusetts Historical Society posts on Twitter every day, but I know these entries are just faint reminders of the diary volumes that I could go visit in the museum at Quincy, if I chose to.

I am going to try to be a more consistent blogger this year, even though my laptop does not have gilt edges or the faint smell of leather and sweat.

Blocking blocking

2009-03-26T13:36:00.002-04:00

We are working through the first rehearsals of the play, setting the blocking. "Blocking" means who goes where, when, and how they get there. We set aside character development and voice production, and stumble around the stage trying to figure out how to get the available actors from one interesting and compelling visual arrangement into the next one, with the least fuss possible.

My script has a series of mysterious pencil glyphs down the right margin. They are, mainly, the first initials of the characters currently on stage, arranged as from an overhead view. And then there are scrawled arcing arrows and musical notes to try to remind me what I want the speed and feel of an action to be like. I am very impressed that the actors are picking up so quickly and smoothly what I am throwing at them from this hen-scrawl.

Our stage is small and the main entrance for the actors is through the audience. There is one other exit that only one actor gets to use, so there are some real traffic issues as people come and go. However, I think this is going to come together nicely.

I think we will finish blocking act 2 tonight, a day ahead of my schedule. Then we can start going crazy with voices, characterizations, and finding the noisy and quiet, the fast and the slow bits in every scene.

More than a month to go, still. Pleeeenty of time...

Table reading

2009-03-17T12:21:00.005-04:00

We had a table reading of 'The Straight Line' last night at a local coffee shop after it closed for the day (April, part of the cast and pictured below, works in the cafe). Jerry, the author, read the part of Jim as I haven't found the right actor for that part yet.

The reading went far, far better than I had thought it might--often, first read-throughs are slack in energy and suffer from technical issues (more actors than you would think possible have reading difficulties). I enjoyed myself a lot, and look forward to the start of rehearsals. I have started a Facebook site to track the progress of the show. If you are on Facebook, search 'groups' for

Image Theater's "The Straight Line"

and get the latest news shortly after it happens.

Five and holding

2009-03-16T07:13:00.002-04:00

So the actor I auditioned on Friday can't do the show. We have options, but it does mean we go into tonight's first meeting, the read-through, one actor short.

This is not the worst of all possible worlds. A few years ago we were doing John Bowen's Fall and Redemption of Man, with a cast of twelve playing 58 parts. The night before we were to open, one of the cast was arrested for non-appearance in some court case somewhere, and disappeared from our universe. So now we had eleven actors to play 58 parts.

We canceled the first performance, and after a fevered day of reassignments I had the parts re-parceled so that nobody had to talk to himself, and we opened the show. It was exhausting, but people loved it and we toured it here and there in western Massachusetts. It's a show I would love to do again, but without the sheriffs.

What the characters say

2009-03-13T16:34:00.006-04:00

I am trying to understand "The Straight Line", the new play I am directing. This is the world premiere, so I don't have any other interpretations or body of performances to go on. So I am using all sorts of tools to see what they tell me.

As an exercise, I took the text of the play, removed the characters' names, and passed it through Wordle. The result is this visualization of the text:

The prominence of the word "know" was a surprise, that's for sure.

(Click on the image to see it in a larger and clearer format)

Five out of six

2009-03-12T19:22:00.000-04:00

Got the other actress I wanted. So now it's down to the tomorrow guy...

Four out of Six

2009-03-12T19:12:00.002-04:00

Okay, so now I am painting myself in a corner by settling on actor four for the fourth part without seeing the guy who will audition tomorrow. But I am hoping for him for one of the two remaining open parts. Hoping hoping hoping.

Didn't want to let actor four slip away into some other production while I was dithering.

Three out of six

2009-03-12T08:54:00.003-04:00

The play I'm directing has six characters. I'd like to start rehearsals with a table reading early next week, but at this point I've only cast three of the parts. There are a couple of good actors who want to audition, but I won't see them until Friday. In the meantime, will one of the good actors I already saw get cast in something else and become unavailable?

One of the really strong signs that I am gaining wisdom as I get older is that it has only once so far occurred to me that I could simplify the process by playing one of the parts myself. As well as directing. I used to do this a lot, back in the days of blind ambition.

Hand quandary

2009-03-11T18:30:00.003-04:00

So I have this meeting on Friday with people I have never met before and with whom I would like to have a continuing relationship. And I have spent the last several days crawling around on a former factory floor, hauling nails and trashing old carpet and laying down a couple of layers of paint so it can turn into my wife's new painting studio (she has an existing studio on the fifth floor of the same old factory building, but is moving down to the second floor, nearer to the gallery and just a long reach above the canal that runs beside the building).

From all that crawling and hauling and painting, my hands are a mess. I think I can get them to lose the very odd color (sort of a faded yellow) they are now exhibiting, without scrubbing the skin clear off. But do I decorate myself in band-aids to cover all the nicks and gashes, so I look like I just got out of Outpatients? Or do I leave the nicks and gashes on display (manly stoicism) and hope I don't run into someone who hates the sight of blood?

I could wear opera gloves...

Audition Scenes

2009-03-09T16:35:00.003-04:00

I'm directing a new play, and auditions are tonight. The play had a well-received staged reading in New Hampshire a few months ago, but aside from the folks who attended that, nobody has ever seen this thing on stage in any way. And over the last week the playwright heroically rewrote several sections to address some logic issues that had come up, so what people are auditioning for tonight is something nobody has ever auditioned for before.

I spent part of the day printing out excerpts, bits of scenes that will allow us to focus on, say, an actor and actress presenting Jeff and Bridget in a tense romantic/combative scene, without having other people on stage holding scripts and feeling useless. I have a coded master document so I can keep track of my 9 audition scenes, and someone else has promised to bring copies of the standard form the actors will fill out (previous experience, days when you can't rehearse, what you've acted in recently).

By Thursday, with any luck, we will have a cast. Then we will have until opening night, May 1, to put it all together and rock the house.

I'll keep you posted.

Pausing for the President

2009-02-25T08:02:00.003-05:00

I have not been able to listen to more than a couple of sentences of a Presidential address over the past eight years without changing the channel or leaving the room. The smarmy mendacity of the previous incumbent was just too much to take.

This new guy, though. I'll turn off the dishwasher so I can hear him better. When it turns out he's on the air instead of the tv show I tuned in for--wow! Super! Can't wait for it to start.

Now when are they going to end the terms of some of the idiot commentators who are so wired in to the old right-wing orthodoxy that they don't even realize what they're doing when they recycle press releases as objective analysis? In the coverage going in to Mr. Obama's address to Congress last night, all the talk was about what this Republican and that Republican might think about what the President might say. Like who cares?

And after the speech, the Republican governor of Louisiana attempted a rebuttal that was lame and weary. Probably the big winners within the little Republican camp were the potential future candidates who did not have to give the rebuttal.

The rehearsal schedule

2009-02-24T13:05:00.003-05:00

A friend has asked me to direct his new play, and I just spent a jolly hour creating a proposed rehearsal schedule. I can visualize how it will go (it will not go exactly that way, but still...). I think there will be 22 rehearsals, and my next job is to subdivide the script into sub-scenes so I can rehearse a small part of the cast in a focused way without making the rest of the cast stand around doing nothing.

I can feel the weight of actors' needs, script rewrites, set building, lighting plot, all more comfortably and confidently than I can feel the balance of forces for anything in any of my "real" jobs this decade.

Good skills, but not for this era, I guess.

Self documenting code

2009-02-22T17:24:00.003-05:00

I have been struggling all day with an odd Flash template for a website. The website owner wants to change the text (not a bad idea, since right now it is just variations on good old "Lorem Ipsum"), and that's what I am trying to do: write new text and then make the site display it where it belongs.

Except this is a funky template. There are almost no comments in the code, or in the XML file I am trying to work with. The functions I have been trying to figure out do not seem to accept variables in the standard way.

I know part of the problem is that I sometimes don't see the obvious. But a LOT of the problem is that the klutz who wrote the template couldn't be bothered to provide any instructions for it. Not any.

I remember interviewing a candidate for a job one time, and I asked what his opinion was on documenting his code, and he said, "I like to think that my code documents itself." Well. I'd like to think that, too; and it would be nice if my code gave me a back massage from time to time. But it generally doesn't do either: it just lies there waiting for you to grok the secrets of its functioning. And if you are not the author (and even if you ARE the author, six months later), it may never reveal its secrets.

How hard would it be to put together a little instruction that says, "Here's the three things you probably want to do with the text. Oh, and before you do them, make a backup copy of everything,"?

Too hard, I guess, for this guy. So he is off sipping his mint julep purchased with the avails of the sale of his crap template, and here I am a day older and not much further ahead.

Dramaturgitating

2009-02-20T09:04:00.003-05:00

A colleague from Playwrights' Platform asked me to look over her new script the other day. She wanted me to take a part in a staged reading, which I won't be able to do, and to give her any thoughts I might have on the script.

This is work I love doing, even though it sometimes feels at times like pointing out a child's missing toes and teeth to a doting parent. Having acted, directed, produced, and written a ton of plays, I can usually visualize how a script will run, or stagger, in a production.

I printed out the script and read through it, scrawling huge, fierce circles around offending words and phrases. The ?? and !! marks mounted up in the margin. Then I went back over the script and wrote out an analysis (line-by-line comments, followed by notes on stagecraft, scriptcraft, character development, language, and logic), tearing it up in way that I hoped the author would find useful.

Great fun. And she says she is grateful, and exactly what we wanted, and that it will help immensely with the next draft.

But if she never, ever speaks to me again, we will know the real truth of it.

Sitting on a woodpile

2009-02-19T14:34:00.004-05:00

My siblings and I gathered last Sunday to talk about stuff, and although there were enough chairs I chose to site on a wooden box by the door. I dunno what it holds, but it made a good perch.

This reminded my older siblings of our Uncle Burton, and how when the family gathered in my grandmother's back yard in Hampton, New Brunswick, he used to spurn chairs and benches and perch himself on the woodpile. I don't know if he actually enjoyed sitting there; perhaps after enough people had made a big deal of it, he didn't see a way to stop.

Monday I heard from one of my cousins that Uncle Burton had died recently. He was getting along in years, of course, but what really put the stamp on it was his falling on ice somewhere on the farm and having to lie there in the cold, unable to get up, until he was found hours later. He lived for nearly a year after that, but evidently he was never the same.

That was one tough guy (not mean tough, sturdy tough). I haven't seen him in perhaps 40 years. But when I sit not on the softest chair, it's usually not out of humility, or to let others take their ease: it's to honor Uncle Burton.

Everything Must Go

2009-02-17T14:09:00.002-05:00

Look at that bookshelf. There are books there that I have not opened for so long that the dust on them has incorporated right into the edges of the pages. There are books there that I have meant to read for perhaps 30 years, but have not yet gotten around to them. There are books on that shelf that the shelf probably relies on for stability, so I dare not move them.

Every two years or so I engage in an orgy of simplifying my life. I am a mild sort of person, so the orgy usually works out to filling a rather small cardboard box with some books, broken flashlights, and shrunken-sleeved shirts; then leaving the box by the front door for long enough for one or two second-thought treasures to be retrieved; then consigning the box and its remaining contents to the outer darkness.

I coordinate the FreeCycle group where I live, but often I am ashamed to list this stuff. If it has gotten through the rejection process, including the retrieval-incubation time by the door, I figure it has achieved resignation and no longer cares to be saved. To force it to start a new life with new owners almost seems cruel.

Looking at the bookshelf, I feel the ecstasy of the simplification orgy coming upon me. The backup French dictionary is on the bubble; so is the instruction manual for the camera that is no longer with us.

If only I had not thrown away the cardboard box.

Playlist

2009-02-17T07:31:00.004-05:00

Had a longish drive on Monday, and spent part of it pondering what my playlist would be if all other options fall through and my best bet in this economy would be to take the banjo and the tin cup out to a street corner somewhere.

I started thinking through the pieces I can play pretty well. Stephen Foster's "Hard Times"? Stan Rogers' "The Mary Ellen Carter"? I am not sure you want to remind passing folks that times are hard or their ship has sunk when you are trying to pull money out of their pockets. Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid", or "Red Wing" if it's just an instrumental? I am surprised at the number of people who claim to know the dirty lyrics that go with that tune, and that leads me to think that you have to be careful about the thought process you set off in your audience.

A streetcorner musician who hopes to avoid being pelted with rotten fruit by the grocer on the corner is going to need a larger playlist than I have right now. I saw in The Banjo Newsletter once a list of the 100 tunes any banjo player needs to know if he is planning to play with or in front of others. Guess that would be the place to start.

When I have 90 of them down pat, I will go find the tin cup.

The more things change

2009-02-14T17:44:00.005-05:00

I got a chance to see a great production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal the other day, at a Waldorf high school in a suburb of Boston. I have a fondness for this script, as I got to play Sir Peter twice back when I still thought I had a chance at a career in theater.

The play premiered back in 1777, but I found myself thinking how little in human nature has changed since then, and how the worst pressures of human society keep reasserting themselves.

One thread in the story is the corrupting effect, not so much of money, but of the distance between the money one has and the money one feels one should have. Joseph Surface latches on slimy piety to recommend himself to his distant patron, in hopes of a huge inheritance and marriage to an heiress. Lovely Lady Teazle marries Sir Peter six parts for love...but at least four parts to get out of the country in and among the glittering baubles of the city.

Another thread concerns the perils of idleness. The 'school' at Lady Sneerwell's house are mostly clever people, even if they think far more of themselves than they really should. But they have nothing to do, nothing with which to occupy their active and questing minds, except speculate and gossip about their acquaintances. Oh, yes, and have affairs with them when the occasion arises.

But there is a third thread, touching on the enduring virtues of friendship, honesty, and duty (in this story, the test case is whether to offer charity to a distant relative who can do nothing for you in return). That he exhibits these traits redeems the otherwise-dubious character of Charles Surface, the wastral brother.

As I watch the US economy lurch away (perhaps) from governance by greed and better things (perhaps) raise their heads, I find in Sheridan's writing a very modern tale in which the good guys came out on top. A hopeful tale, then.

Getting inspiration

2009-01-12T18:07:00.002-05:00

One good byproduct of this current dry time for me is that I get to spend a lot of time at my wife's painting studio. I get to watch her tackling very complicated projects and coming up with some impressive paintings. She can do this. An ordinary human being who drinks green tea and plays Crayon Physics can do this.

Therefore, in my field, I can embrace great challenges and come up with good results, too.

The ideal New Year's party

2008-12-30T09:56:00.005-05:00

For New Year's we have been invited to Small's Hotel on Small's Island in Bolotomy Bay, Babbington, Long Island. We will drive down in the Studebaker and bring along clam cakes--although bringing clam anything to Babbington is a bit redundant.

If you don't know Small's, you can read about it in this book:

But be warned: once you step into Babbington, as chronicled by Eric Kraft, you will find yourself devouring everything he has written.

Here is Eric's page in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kraft

And here's his website: http://www.erickraft.com

And here's the party page on Facebook: New Year's Eve at Small's Hotel

Brainiac with the kids for Christmas

2008-12-28T21:53:00.003-05:00

We spent Christmas at a rented house on the shores of Seneca Lake in New York state with the children and grandchildren. One of the games available was Brainiac, as you can see here.

and here...

It was a great location, with lots of bedrooms upstairs and lots of open space to be family together in. The lake was very pretty when rain and fog were not obscuring it, and a howling wind one night was comforting in that it bothered the house not at all.

First snow

2008-12-17T11:06:00.000-05:00

Some snow has finally arrived: just enough to mess around with the commute, not enough to build much of a snowperson with.

We were looking the other night at some soapstone carvings we collected while we lived in the Arctic, and remembering the conditions under which the carvers worked. They were head to foot in dust, sitting in little "heated" work tents not far from their houses, each with a little rosebud of non-dusty lips where the cigarettes went in and out.

And then today I had an email exchange with someone who wanted me to read a part in her new play. She is off to Vienna tomorrow for the first time since 1956. The big difference on this trip is that she will not be homeless or starving, she said.

So I guess sitting at a table with lights and heat, connected to the Internet and with plenty of things to learn and jobs to apply for, is not the worst situation I could find myself in.