Saturday, October 09, 2010

business, art, mousies, etc

What a day Friday was - I took off from work to deal with Internet problems and business issues.

But first I woke up to find I was spooning a dead mouse, resting in peace under the covers. I made exactly the same sound that Jack Woltz made on finding a horse head in his bed:

aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!

OK OK Mr Fuzz! I will put Johnny Fontane in my next motion picture! Just don't do it again!

Unlike the horse head, the mouse wasn't bleeding at all. And this was the second dead bloodless mouse I've found. I don't know how they end up dead, but I strongly suspect that Mr. Fuzz (and Miss Willow if she can get a chance) just plays with them until they keel over dead from exhaustion. My cats normally have to be content to play with fake mousies who don't move on their own. The excitement of a real live moving "toy" must be overwhelming for them - no poor mousie stands a chance with my cats.

So after that tsuris I had to go all the way to City Hall in Jamaica (Queens) to deal with some business things. It's so far away - even further than god-forsaken Kew Gardens. It took forever to get there.

You can't say they aren't cordial in Jamaica though - there was only a block and a half between the subway station and City Hall, but even in that short distance I had an offer from a gentleman loafing in front of the deli & legal forms store to do me right if I sat on his face.

Then I had to deal with NYC and NY state bureaucracy, which was much less cordial. I got home hours later and a block from my apartment I cut my leg on one of those little low fences they put around trees - nice rusty iron fences and now I'll have to get a tetanus shot.

Oy.

Time for the solace of art. I didn't ask for feedback after the reading of JULIA & BUDDY, but three people since then have said to me how much they liked it. A new member of the group emailed me: "By the way I never got to tell you how much I appreciated the INTELLIGENCE in your play!"

This was nice to hear, although I'm worried that it's too intellectual, with all the Schopenhauer. But I've been pretty careful about focusing on the relationship between the two characters, and keeping Schopenhauer as mainly a bone of contention between them. I was surprised that Buddy got a big laugh at this line: "Hey, go to Germany and dig up Schopenhauer and marry him." Which tells me that the audience wanted a little more direct struggle over S. I will have to see about this...

JBIIb