Tag Archives: Northwestern College

The Kitchen Sink Post

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(The weather has drifted down into the cooler temperatures, slowing everything down a little bit more each day — including this this blog post, which I’ve rewritten and added to three or four six times to reflect the changing reality over the past couple of weeks month. And so, I’m hurrying to post it before anything else happens again to force another rewrite.)

Sharing your work with people online produces a variety of outcomes. One of my favorites is waking up to fan mail from someone on the other side of the world. One of my least favorites is waking up to rejection notices, like I did a few mornings ago.

In related news, my “Chimera” project is on the market for anyone looking for a good science-fiction/action series. Otherwise, it’s going back in the file cabinet and will likely serve as raw material for the novel I’ll write after I finish the one I’m going to write after I finish the one I’m writing now.

Go ahead and try diagramming that last sentence, kids. But don’t blame me if your head explodes.

Speaking of recursive oddities: The advertising agency I work for specializes in differentiation — that is, helping our clients identify and promote the things that make them stand out in the marketplace. Our corporate tagline is “Exactly Like Nobody Else” and the company bought all of us very nice Land’s End shirts with the logo and tagline embroidered on them. The irony of everyone here having the same shirt reading “Exactly Like Nobody Else” wasn’t immediately apparent, but it’s now impossible to ignore — particularly on days like today, when seven out of the ten employees all wore our shirts. The atomic weight of such recursive irony could collapse around us and form a black hole. Of shirts.

In my last post, I mentioned I was finishing up a new play called “Drawing Away”. Well, it’s all done and you can find out more about it (and download a copy) on the Works page. If you do give it a look, let me know what you think.

The poster for the original production, designer unknown.With that out of the way, the next revision on my list was some long-overdue refinements to my adaptation of “The Odyssey”. A week or so back, someone who worked on the original production at Northwestern College contacted me to see if the script was available for production at a theatre in Illinois . . . which put just the right amount of heat under my efforts to get things cleaned up. I got everything done just in time to send it off to their selection committee last week and I’ve also put up a copy here for everyone else. As always, let me know what you think.

It was interesting, coming back to those scripts after such a long time. As I said in my post last week, “Drawing Away” is a reboot of the first play I ever wrote — taking the basic premise and reworking it around a slightly different plot and cast of characters. I ended up using much more of the original dialogue than I’d planned; through no grand planning on my part, it just seemed to fit better into the plot than I expected. All in all, I like this version better. But check back in another twenty years.

Tightening up “The Odyssey” presented a different set of challenges. By the time it got to the rehearsal process, I’d done nearly fifteen drafts on the script. The original text, of course, is a massive and wandering story — and I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to do it justice without getting lost forever among the twist and turns. Coming back to it now, I was pleasantly surprised at how well I’d managed on the whole thing. Here’s hoping the selection committee agrees.

(The production at Northwestern was a lot of fun. The music in particular has stayed with me. The composer did an excellent job with the score and I’ve always regretted losing touch with him before I could get a copy of it for myself. Reading back through the script again, I could still hear the haunting voices singing . . . fortunately, I have a DVD of a brush-up rehearsal and was able to pull the scene out and share it here. These, of course, are the sirens…)

sirens
…deur’ ag’ iôn, poluain’ Oduseu,
mega kudos Achaiônn, nêa katastêson,
hina nôiterên op akousêis.
ou gar pô tis têide parêlase nêi melainêi,
prin g’ hêmeôn meligêrun
apo stomatôn op’ akousai,
all’ ho ge terpsamenos
neitai kai pleiona eidôs…



The next major revision will probably be an adaptation I did of Calderon’s “Life is a Dream” from a few years back. Once I catch my breath, I mean.

It seems strange to think of it now, but there was a time when I was convinced that I was only a playwright. With the exception of the occasional poem or short story, everything I wrote was meant to be performed by live human beings in front of live human beings. This wasn’t by design or even preference, however. Everything that took shape in my head naturally seemed to gravitate towards the stage. There were a couple of odd things here and there — good ideas I still haven’t figured out how to write in any form — but it was overwhelmingly obvious that I was a playwright, first and foremost. For whatever reason that was where my creative energy naturally flowed (some people have offered their theories about this but I won’t get into those here).

Somewhere along the way and 30+ plays later, the tide has shifted . . . well, broadened might be a better way to describe it. There are a lot of different tributaries branching off of that flow now. If anything, it’s the theatre branch that’s the weakest these days (the same theories mentioned above provide a compelling reason for this as well).

I’m not complaining. But it does leave me with a lot of work that’s never seen the light of day . . . yet.

Recently I went through my files and cleaned everything up, reorganizing forty years of detritus as best I could. There were lots of fun discoveries — plays and stories and poems I’d forgotten about, most of which were forgotten for a good reason. And there were plenty of little scraps from past lives that left me cringing — but like the bad writing, it’s all just prelude to where I am now. And here is good.

But there was some good stuff, too. As well as a surprising number of things that I just flat out don’t remember writing at all.

Which has left me wondering what to do with it all. Apparently I’m not the only one. My colleague Tony Delgrosso recently posted he was gathering up all his oddments at The Half Empty Moleskine and it’s pieces like this one that make me glad he is.

The Gospel of ThomasThe regular (and patient) readers of this blog know I’ve been making noises for a while about a new podcast. The good news (pun intended) is that it’s out there and now you can hear some of those literary orphans that have been hiding in the back of the file cabinet.

There are a few episodes already, ready for download. If you want the fancy .M4V iTunes version, click here to subscribe. If you’re more interested in the RSS feed, you can get that here. If you want to get your grubby little mitts on the individual files or an MP3 version, they’re right here waiting for you. And if you want me to come to your house each week and perform it live in front of your closest friends and/or housepets, then make me an offer. No freaks.

Just for fun, each show comes with a free PDF download of the readings from that week — just in case you’d prefer not to have to listen to me all the damn time.

And if that weren’t enough…

A few days back I was sorting through a number of things and realized that I’d never been “between projects” during National Novel Writing Month before. Usually when NaNoWriMo rolls around, I’m balls elbows deep in something and can’t stop what I’m doing to participate. And although I’m currently hard at work on my next novel entitled “Pantheon” (at least, that’s what my bio says), the truth of the matter is that I’ve allowed myself to get distracted by too many side projects over the past few months and “Pantheon” hasn’t really gotten the attention it deserves.


Which leaves me at a crossroads. Do I keep “Pantheon” on the back burner and fire up NaNoWriMo? Or do I use November to work on the thing that I was already planning on doing, which was going to leave “Pantheon” out anyways?

Very difficult decision. I’ve got a couple of good concepts that could fit nicely into NaNoWritMo. But then there’s the matter of the other November project I’d been planning.

Who know . . . maybe I’ll do both. It’s certainly possible but, either way, it seems that poor little “Pantheon” might just be getting short shrift once again. At least until November has come and gone.

As I said above, winter is here. We haven’t seen snow yet, but I’m told by Girija that in Hindu culture you sacrifice two goats and leave their heads at the gates of the temple, making a stew to serve to the first two strangers who happen through the gate.

As much of a fan as I am of snow, it seems rather hard luck for the goats.

And besides, the snow will be here soon enough.

*******************

boy-in-playground-0709-lgWhen I’m this busy, the first thing that invariably gets cut down is sleep. Next is reading. I can do without the first one but not the second.

I don’t get a lot of magazines (apart from the comics, of course) but a few years back I discovered Esquire at my older brother’s house and have been hooked ever since. Usually I spend thirty minutes or so with each issue some afternoon and then set it aside. But lately I haven’t had time enough for that. I finally caught up to the June issue and this photo accompanying the Stephen King story ‘Morality‘ took me aback.

I sat there staring at the page for a few minutes with an odd feeling at the back of my head, like someone’d snuck in during the night and burgled a few things and I’d just noticed.

I showed the photo to my wife and asked her what came to mind. She got it on the first try. It was like someone had taken a snapshot of the opening of my play ‘The Red Boy’ and I thought for a moment that my citizenship in Alan Moore’s IdeaSpace had been revoked.

However, once I got up the guts to read King’s story I was relieved. Not a bad story, overall. But from a completely different territory than ‘The Red Boy’ fortunately for my sanity.

But, boy oh boy, take a look at this picture and then go read the first few pages of this play. You’ll see what I mean.


zeroFreeHaving a long daily commute has made it easier to listen to books, fortunately. I just finished listening to Scott Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” and, I have to say, I found it to be a fascinating (and inspiring) study. Highly recommended.

On the strength of a footnote in Anderson’s book, I picked up a copy of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and am enjoying it a great deal as well.




And, here and there, I’m reading another book by my wife’s grandfather — the inestimable Ken Jones, that original Mad Men character I’ve mentioned here before. Like the last one of his I read, this one involves the Advertising business. Only this time around, it’s set in Singapore and somebody’s been murdered.

Ken just turned 90 this past weekend. Still writing every day, too.

I should be so lucky.

Released

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Well, although it was being considered by the committee, Northwestern’s production of ‘The Odyssey’ was not invited to participate in the ACTF regional festival this year.

Taking a show to the festival is a big task — you have to remount the show, go through rehearsals again, move costumes and actors and sets to the festival. It’s all a delightful hassle.

So, while there are some disappointed people out there, there are some relieved ones too.

So that’s okay.

Talkback

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Early on, when I was still in college, I was fortunately to have one of my plays produced. There was a talkback afterwards and someone in the audience asked me what the play meant.

I’d been prepared for this and, because I was exactly that kind of writer, responded by asking what they thought it meant?

They said “I think you were just trying to be as weird as possible.”

After a long moment I said, “Well, right now I’m just trying to be as polite as possible.”

I’ve always had a kind of love-hate relationship with talkbacks. There’s always one person out there intent on asking questions just to show how smart they are. There’s usually someone who has an axe to grind about something. But there are also plenty of people who like what they saw and were interested enough in it to want to talk about it.

The talkback for ‘The Odyssey’ is the best I’ve even been involved with, either as a performer, writer, or audience member. The whole thing is moderated by the exceptionally capable Jeff Barker who has come well-prepared with very good questions.

As usual, I talk too much. Hopefully I avoid putting my foot in it, but there was that one question…

“Tell me, T.M. — I’m interested to hear more about how the world of the play bumps up against your own world view. Particularly in relation to the role of women.”

Pause. Look at the audience. Stand up. Remove coat and hang it on the back of the chair. Roll up sleeves. Loosen tie. And say: “Well, how much time do we have?”

All in all, a good evening for everyone. One of those nights where you wish your mom and dad were there, because you know they’d just love it so much to see you doing what you do.

Argh. I realize afterwards that I forgot to record it.

Teetering on the cusp of collapse, I head over to the Director’s house for the cast party. I say hello to people, eat some snacky treats, and say thank you to a lot of people . . . but not nearly so much as they deserve.

The long slow drift of fatigue and too much coping-with-my-natural-introversion-by-being-an-extrovert-and-talking-to-lots-of-people-too-much has taken it’s toll on me. We make our good nights and head back to our hotel rooms to collapse.

I fall asleep, very happy — mostly because I get to see the play one more time.

Morning and the Maze

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I spend about two hours in the morning trying to figure out what time it is and if I’m late for my breakfast with the Director. Because it’s so early, most of this is done if the dark, fumbling with various clocks and laptops set for EST and CST.

The phone rings — My wake up call arranged the night before. Only, I can’t remember what time I told them to call. So I have no idea what time it is.

I’m not this stupid in real life. Traveling has made me this way.

Eventually I decide to subtract an hour and hope for the best. When the clock says 9:00, I head upstairs, hoping I’m not an hour late.

In the lounge of the Dutch Colony Hotel, the Director is watching a ‘Dukes of Hazard’ rerun.

“Looking for some last minute inspiration?” I ask.

We swipe a quick continental breakfast from the hotel and discuss the day’s events. Bob, the Director, is worried about the response to the show — not the sexuality so much as the darkness, particularly in the Underworld sequence. I say that the best we can hope for are questions, a chance to have a dialogue.

He agrees and heads off to teach.

I and my entourage repair to Nederlander’s diner up the street to eat a proper breakfast and discuss Bob’s concerns about the Underworld scene. As usual, Keeley has more insight into the solution than I could ever hope to find on my own and so I rehearse a few answers on the off-chance that a fundamentalist Christian might show up to the talkback later in the evening. If they’re Reformed, they’ll want to talk . . . if not, it’ll be letters to the President and Board of Trustees.

I highly recommend Nederlander’s, if you’re ever in Orange City. Great service, warm and hospitable staff, and a most excellent cup of coffee.

After breakfast, we head over to the school to get a tour of the facility and theatre. I get to see tables of masks and props for a show I started writing almost five years ago. Everything looks amazing and inert and I can’t quite put it together with what I’ve been seeing in my mind all this time while I’ve been writing.

IMG_0010There are Barbie dolls on the table, cut in half and joined by a circlet of elastic. Bob won’t tell me what they are for. I am not sure I want to know.

But it’s a relief to see that someone put a giant teddy bear in there. That makes me happy.

Keeley holds up one of the masks — Hermes — and suddenly I can see him there, bobbing and babbling.

IMG_0025The set is gorgeous. A beautiful swooping rake painted like a vase with these finely textured nets hanging around it. I get to walk around on it and all I can think is . . . well . . . I’m very lucky.

Eventually I (gulp) get ready for my lecture to the Theatre as Arts class. Bob, the Director, tells me that he postponed a quiz due to my visit . . . I figure I can say something worth testing them on later.

When he introduces me, they applaud.

Gulp, bob my head in gratitude, start talking…

IMG_0014Stealing heavily from the process at work, I babble about my process, taking the notes I wrote three weeks earlier and adapting them into something mildly coherent. Apparently, do a fairly good job of keeping everyone engaged . . . except for a girl in the third row who obviously isn’t buying it at all.

The best bit was Stan Greene’s story about The Maze…

Do you know the one foolproof way to get through a maze? You close your eyes, put out your left hand, and lay it on the wall. Then walk, following the wall. Eventually you will get out.

If you open your eyes, you’ll start to doubt where you are. You’ll want to find a shortcut. You’ll take your hand off the wall and follow your eyes instead. And then you’ll be lost.

Stan Greene is a really smart man.

When you’re adapting something, the original text is the maze. If you take you hand off it, you’re lost.

They get it. They ask me questions. Some of them are in the Playwriting class and, although they haven’t seen the play yet, they have studied the script.

I’m staggered by the thought. Students have been studying my work, writing papers about it.

There is nothing better than this.

I survive. I enjoy it. I do a fairly good job lecturing about something I barely know anything about. And I think I avoid most of the visiting-pretentious-writer pitfalls (although the girl in the third row might disagree) and most everyone laughs at my jokes and, for the second time, they applaud.

Afterwards I realize that, although I went out of my way to purchase a microphone specifically for the trip, I completely forget to record the lecture.

All my wisdom and clever jokes are lost to the mists of time.

Which means, fortunately, I cannot post them here for download.

And then we head off to lunch.Odyssey, stage

Lockput

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I escape with my life after the afternoon writing workshop and head back over to the hotel to primp and prepare for opening night.

No jitters, not worried at all.

The faculty potluck is a bigger concern than the show, oddly enough. I shouldn’t have worried. Everyone is very hospitable and kind and in a way I wish I’d gone to grad school. I could have ended up teaching at a small college somewhere, talking about writing all day.

But, hey, I’m using my major. Which is more than what I can say for most people.

The food is good and everyone is terrific but I end up doing what I’ve typically done at faculty parties for the past fifteen years. I find a little kid and start talking about comic books. Daniel is just a year older than my son and he tells me he’s working on something. He shows it to me and I’m more or less blown away. It’s got drama, good writing, nice page composition . . . I mean, it’s not Jack Kirby or anything, but it’s amazing that an eleven year old kid put it together when he’d only seen for or five comic books in his life.

Seriously. There’s no comic book store in Orange City. The kid found some comics at a garage sale and, apparently, figured it out from there.

Warming up to his subject, Daniel gets started on how he wants to hire some more writers and artists and start a company of his own and I realize I’m talking to a young Stan Lee — which is impressive and scary all at once.

Spiritus Interruptus

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Eventually, I head off from the potluck full of homemade Indian food. The Director asked us to show up early at the theatre to join in with the cast’s pre-show prayer and I don’t want to disappoint him. It’s all of two blocks away and parking is easy, but I have no idea where I’m going so we wander around looking for landmarks.

There’s a hallway at the back of the stage with these huge roll-down doors made of corrugated iron or something. When you walk through the hallway, the doors rattle. When the lights are off, it sounds like you’re being stalked by clumsy skeletons. It’s creepy and we’re turned around and don’t know where we’re going and we’re late but we take a moment for ourselves before heading on to the Green Room where everyone is in various stages of makeup and costume, holding hands in a circle and, mortified, we try to sneak in.

Amen.

A few minutes later, the curtain goes up.

Performance

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The show is terrific. The performers are on it and the Director has done a huge amount of work.

It’s amazing what they put together in four weeks of rehearsal.

I had no idea how funny the play was. I sent them a script that had some jokes here and there, but they’ve transformed it into a comedy and, not surprisingly, it’s a thousand times better than what I wrote.

The audience loves it. Keeley loves it. I love it.

I’m really quite lucky.

At intermission I prowl around the lobby (quite inconspicuous in my black suit, thank you very much) and eavesdrop on conversations. No one’s talking about the show, near as I can tell. But most of them head back in for the second round.

Ah. This is a lot easier than I thought. The performers are working their hearts out and making me look far better than I deserve. The Direction is a huge and incredibly pleasant surprise, Bob found so much in such a short amount of time.

I wrote one sentence: “The sailors silently plot to kill the cyclops.”

Bob directs (and the actors perform) a ten minute sequence straight out of a silent movie, so funny in so many different ways that my stomach hurts from holding the laughter in (I realize, afterwards, that I was afraid of waking the monster, just like the sailors).

And it isn’t everyone who can take something like a giant teddy bear (which I thought was a kind of funny little detail in the script) and turn it into a one of the funniest things I have ever seen on stage.

The show is terrific. The ending moves me more than I realize. I didn’t for a second imagine that so much of my personal life had ended up in the script. It’s all jumbled together, messy and noisy and hurting — just like the past year or so of my life — but it’s there and it hurts a little to watch.

But it’s a good show. The performers do a great job with it and it’s obvious that they had a terrific Director with vision.

Everyone stands up and yells at the end.

Again, lucky lucky lucky me.

From the stage, the performers gesture to the booth . . . and then to me.

My cover is blown but that was going to happen soon enough. The audience has been invited to stick around for a talkback with the Director and myself.

Two hundred people, free to ask questions…

No problem.

Casting Call

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We follow Bob, the Director, through a maze of students, hallways, paths, across streets. Students are everywhere and I come down from my post-lecture giddiness to feel a bit old. College was a long, long time ago.

We have lunch with the cast and, once again, I forget to record the conversation. People keep showing up throughout the meal and Bob introduces them to me: “This is Telemachus, this is the Merchant, this is…” It’s hard to reconcile the faces, the street clothes, with the characters I’ve been carrying around in my head for almost five years.

We eat, they ask questions — some very pointed ones, actually — and I realize that they’re the ones who have had to do all the heavy lifting on this project. It all comes back to me from my college theatre days, how In The Dark you are when you sit down with a script for the first time, trying to find a character in there.

I didn’t give them much help, I’m afraid. The script was written in a near-vacuum with Bob breathing some fresh air into it every once in a while. I wrote it for his eyes. It never occurred to me that actors might be looking at it.

I eat lunch, I answer their questions as best I can, I tell stories, I hope I’m not repeating myself too much.

“I have a question.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Have you seen the costumes? The masks and the set?”

“I have. Bob gave me a sneak peek backstage.”

“What do you think?”

“I think they look great. They’re wonderful.”

“Do they look like what you pictured in your head?”

It’s a good question, one that I’m going to have to answer four or five times before I leave.

I realize, answering it, that they don’t in fact look like what I had in my head. But that’s because I didn’t have a play in my head while I was writing. I didn’t see a stage and actors and mask . . . I saw Hermes arguing with Calypso in her cave two steps ahead and half a day late . . . I saw Athena — pale and owl-like, almost luminous — nagging her father, Zeus, sculpted from living marble — I saw Poseidon, streaming green rage, riding on the clouds, pursuing Odysseus…

I didn’t see any of them and I feel a little embarrassed about that. They’re there, obviously. They’ve done the work. They’re the ones who deserve the applause (and they will get applause) and I didn’t write one line thinking about them.

It occurs to me that I never have. When I write plays, I don’t see a set. I don’t see actors. I see the characters and the place itself — am I the only one who does this?

At any rate, we finish lunch. I manage to hide my ignorance (I hope) and they manage to hide their disappointment.

They must be disappointed. I’m not nearly a real capital-W Writer at all. Just a guy willing to dare to wear black in Northwestern Iowa.

Back through the maze of buildings and hallways after lunch. The most excellent Jonathan tracks me down and hands me a sheaf of papers explaining how to connect to the wireless network in the theatre building. For a PC, it takes sixteen pages to explain. It takes two sentences for a Mac. Case closed.

Bob heads off to grade papers and, I assume, get some relief from my delighted babbling. I check e-mail, relieved to be able to do so but also annoyed that none of my e-mail is worth reading. I fire off a few of my own to coworkers and clients and even one to my attorney (it’s almost like being a grown up, folks) and I’m grinding my teeth over a late-night drunken rant that someone sent me the night before when the Director walks by with an envelope and says “Oh, hey, I’ve been carrying this around all day and almost forgot to give you your royalty check.”

Oh. Um. Yes. Thank you.

I’m so shocked to be paid that I forget to even open the envelope — something I’ll forget to do until after I’ve been home for three days, so it’s not like we do it for the money or anything.

But still . . . to be paid to tell stories?

It’s a good job, if you can find it.

I abandon the e-mail and go wandering through the building, worrying over the next class I’ll be teaching — well, facillitating. It’s not a class, more of a workshop really. A writing workshop that either four people or forty will show up for.

I start wishing I’d brought some hand puppets with me.

Keeley and I prowl through the lobby, looking over the lobby display. There are costume and make-up renderings, a model of the set, and this article that appeared a week earlier in the student newspaper…

Vaughnahue’s Top Ten Reasons to see “The Odyssey”
by Vaughn Donahue

Homer’s “Odyssey” is a classic. I’m going to bet that most of you read it in high school. I know that this ancient script might not be among the best of your memories, but I aim to convince you to give it another shot. In honor of Northwestern’s department of theatre and speech, I give you the Top Ten Reasons to see “The Odyssey!”

10. Enough livestock to make an Iowan blush – If the Greek gods and goddesses had a favorite punishment, it would be transforming their disloyal subjects into pigs, goats, cows—you name it. It makes you think about what (or who) that hamburger you ate at dinner might be made of.

9. Penelope, the slap-wench – When you’ve been waiting for years for your husband to return, and all you do all day is weave, weep and stay wary of the men seeking to take his place, you tend to become less than amiable. Penelope, played by junior Nicky Dutt, is not a happy camper. She slaps her way through the production, thus earning her character the title “slap-wench.”

8. The most convincing cow ever – Have you ever seen a darn good cow impression ? Senior Gavin Baker has the petulant “moo” down to a pat.

7. Solomon Davis topless – Doesn’t do much for me, but take it for what it’s worth.

6. Hermes with a Cockney accent – You’ve heard of Hermes, the god with the wings on his boots. In case you hadn’t caught on, this means he’s fast. In this production, he’s also a hilarious character hailing from the not-so-posh parts of London. He will take your breath away—literally.

5. Learn the best way to defeat a cyclops without saying a single word – Be prepared for this lesson, and learn these cyclops-killing techniques from the men who did it themselves! You might want to take notes.

4. Richard Moore on a power trip – Junior Richard Moore lives in West Hall, and I find him a pretty humble guy. But call him Zeus, give him a lighting bolt and humility goes right out the window. Life doesn’t get much better when you can spit out one-liners like, “I can do whatever I please, girl. I am Zeus.”

3. Seduction and lust – Oh how naughty those Greek goddesses are! They make seduction their business, and lust their tool. Boys, these probably are not the type of girls you’d marry because they remind you of your mom. No, I’m sure your reasons would be immensely different.

2. Rated PG-13 – You might be thinking, “seduction and lust at NW? No! Surely not!” Well, you’re wrong; this production may be just a tad too hot for NW to handle.

1. A brand new adaptation – Homer’s epic in its original form is not an easy read. While this might be a major reason for being wary of the play, have no fear! The script has been adapted by playwright T.M. Camp into a hilarious and pleasing modern masterpiece.
So despite what you remember from high school English class, this play is actually about love, murder, sex, revenge and redemption. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

Ahem.

You gotta love a preview that’s got a Your Mom joke in it.

The director walks by and hands me a copy of the latest edition of the student newspaper, which has a yet another preview of the show.

It’s opening night. I have a writing workshop to give. I collapse onto a small, um, divan in the lobby and talk to Keeley and wish I were taking a nap.

I have a writing workshop to give in a half-hour. I assume that my subconscious mind is working on how to take the two or three things I know about writing and extend them into a meaningful hour or so of workshoppy things.

After a while I go and buy two cans of Mountain Dew and go in to get ready for class. This mainly consists of playing Tom Waits on my laptop and shotgunning the two cans of Mountain Dew while Keeley assures me it will all work out.

Then student start to come in, some of them I recognize from the morning class. And from lunch. My repertoire is suddenly very limited.

Bob, the Director, introduces me and then leaves me in charge of thirty-plus students (and a few faculty members).

I am John’s spastic colon.

We muddle our way through. I do a few exercises which, it becomes painfully apparent, they already know inside and out — at least most of them — and I read a few somethings from one of my own exercises which, even more painfully, sound flat and stale.

When all else fails, change the rules.

We split up into groups, writing together, one line back and forth.

A few minutes go by and it suddenly feels like there’s something happening. Keeley and I slide a pad of paper back and forth, the sheets dripping with my own fear and flop sweat.

Eventually I call time and a few groups read what they came up with. Some of it is very good and, yet again, I miss that Writer’s Group I used to meet with.

I end off by reading “The Face Game” and asking for a response.

Everyone confirms what I have know since college: You can hide a lot behind a good performance.

The truth is, I love reading my work out loud.

All in all, not too bad a way to spend an afternoon in Iowa.

Afterwards, I realize that I completely forgot to record the afternoon session, too.

Then it’s off to the hotel to primp and get ready for a department potluck followed by (!) Opening Night.