Through the Black Gate
 
People have such a habit of asking, “So, what’s new?” but this harmless act of generosity often becomes a genuine puzzler, as it leaves one having to determine just how sincere is the question––Is it something weightier than mere social graces?––and how much information does the questioner really want?  Amongst good but geographically distant friends who see each other only infrequently, a lengthy, spare-no-detail response is not only acceptable, it’s a requirement.  For others, even those with more than a passing interest in your life and/or what you do, ferreting out the appropriate bon mot is a sort of social high-wire act.
 
About twenty-four hours ago, I was asked the question in question by actor Carrie Preston (HBO’s “True Blood,” among many others) and by playwright Jim Leonard (The Diviners, Battle Hymn of the Republic, both of whom I know slightly (Jim much better).  
 
So having been asked, what to tell?
 
Does either Jim or Carrie really care to know all the many personal or professional things going on in my tiny life?
 
The calculus becomes all the murkier when one stops to consider that their stars burn a great deal more brightly than mine.  Whatever I have to offer, it would be unwise to compete.
 
Still, it has been a fertile period, professionally.
 
Black Gate has accepted not merely one story but three, the complete line-up of my trilogy of tales involving Gemen the Antiques Dealer.  I am already working on edits for stories two and three.  If you follow the link, you can still find two on-line reviews I wrote for Black Gate last year.   (You’ll also likely discover that prolific novelist Robert Jordan, R.I.P., was using a pen name all these years; his real surname was Rigney.)
 
I now bear the official title of Guest Resident Writer for Tales & Scales, a theater for young audiences troupe billing themselves as “musictellers.”  Why?  Because each of the four troupe members are conservatory-quality classical musicians.  My job is to make sure they have a story worth the telling––to audiences aged K-5.  Obviously a far cry from Gemen at Black Gate.
 
And then there’s Norm’s Fish Camp, which my wife and I will lately be invading for a six-day workshop of Roots in a Grey Garden, the interview-based play we have been co-writing since (gasp) 2007.  This time we have professional actors roped into the mix, and four hours of rehearsal per day.  Kudos and endless thanks to Liz Engelman for helping us set it all up.  
 
And in the very near future, Escape Clause will be up and running.  When it is, it will contain my story “Robbie’s Zona Cero,” the saddest rock and roll chronicle ever written.  Maybe.  Well.  Escape Clause will run the story; the question remains as to its relative tear quotient.
 
Getting back to my original stumper, the screenwriters of Silverado hand Kevin Kline some nice lines, where, upon meeting Scott Glenn’s itinerant cowboy, he says, “The way I figure it, you can either treat everyone as your friend, or nobody.”  Or something to that effect.  It’s a bit of dialogue I’ve turned round and round on the potter’s wheel of my mind so often that it has probably warped a bit from the original, but that’s a compliment, not a complaint: It suggests there’s meat on them bones.
 
So when someone asks me, “What’s new?” I tend to err on the side of sharing in depth.  Everyone is my friend, after all.
 
Until proven otherwise.
 
 
My Blog
Monday, June 1, 2009