Hello friends!

I'm trying something new, dictating this into my phone as I hike through the neighborhood instead of drafting longhand on Ye Olde Yellow Legal Pad. 

We got rain last night, the first rain in… I can't remember. It's been a long time. So I'm forcing myself to go for a hike, enjoy the fresh air before I get in the car and drive to Hollywood, to Theatre of NOTE where I've been spending every evening in rehearsal.

I'm fried. I'd forgotten, somehow, that directing a play is a full time job, even if I'm mostly only in rehearsal for three or four hours at a time.

So the draft of the new thing I'd intended to finish by October 15? That didn't happen. And the just write for an hour a day, Laramie hasn't happened either. Nor has the just get a little bit of writing done.

On the bright side, look at me, out for a hike! It does feel good to get some exercise.

And we're barreling along with this play. This weird, brilliant play, garrulously titled A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes.

My cast is terrific. Though they're semi-terrified, some of them, to be told, "Just do the thing you're doing, without actually doing it." Actual words that came out of my mouth the other day. Chris Neiman, who is playing a sportscaster named #, keeps quoting me. He contends that those words sum up the entire process so far.

You see, my weird, brilliant playwright, Kate Benson, has written a play about a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving, replete with turkey and gravy and Green Frosty Punch, and she has specified—firmly—that there be no props and no mime.

So what are my actors  d o i n g  while I strand them up there on stage for 80 minutes? That is the burning question.