PianoFight! Another short play running at ShortLived

My short play "Twice As Bright" is a 3rd-round replacement play at PianoFight Production's ShortLived:

It's running Fridays and Saturdays at the Off-Market Theater at 965 Mission, and (this is brilliant) you can brown-bag your own booze into the theater.

The way ShortLived works is that the audience votes after every show; the lowest-ranked three plays get the boot and are replaced. "Twice As Bright" will be running for at least one more weekend, but after that, it's subject to the whim of the mob...

May 8th - 25th: catch Leo in Best of Playground

My short play 'Leo' is going to be included in this year's Best of Playground festival, from May 8th-25th at the Thick House theater in San Francisco.

The other plays in the show are great; here's the lineup:
"O Happy Dagger" by Crish Barth, directed by Tracy Ward
"The Boy Who Did Not Listen To His Mother" by Cass Brayton, directed by Nancy Carlin
"Three Stories" by Garret Jon Groenveld, directed by Lee Sankowich
"Leo" by Daniel Heath, directed by Jessica Heidt
"Panopticon" by Aaron Loeb, directed by Barbara Oliver
"The Known World" by Geetha Reddy, directed by Chris Smith
"Giving Up The Ghost" by Lauren Yee, directed by Jim Kleinmann



(Hey, are you reading this blog b/c of my article over at Script Frenzy? If you live in the Bay Area, you should check out Playground... it's an amazing program that supports new playwrights, it doesn't cost anything, and you get to work with some incredible people. So, if you're local,
a) come see the festival, and
b) apply for the writers pool next year.)

Grandma's Got a Gun

The valiant men and women of the Office of Letters and Light asked me to write another piece of script-writing advice for this year's Script Frenzy, so I did.

You can check it out here:
Grandma's Got a Gun, or, "Who You Calling a Minor Character, Anyway?"

(And here's the one I wrote last year... that one is all about dialogue.)

Xcalak, Mexico

new pictures up over at TMIAW:

Leo - a short play at the Berkeley rep, Monday, Feb 18th

My fourth play of the season, Leo, is going up at this month's Monday Night Playground staged reading series at the Berkeley Rep. Every year Playground has a mathematics-related topic in February; this year it was 'The Ghosts of Departed Quantities,' a phrase from a famous anti-calculus polemic from the early 18th century. My play is about a dead hamster, naturally.

Sorry About the Hurricanes (Sheherezade 2008)

For those of you who live around the Bay, my short play 'Sorry About the Hurricanes' is running this weekend at Sheherezade 2008 at the Exit Theater in San Francisco:

It's a night of nine short plays about 2007, and 'Hurricanes' closes out the line-up. Because Soumyaa (the director) is a mad genius, the play features a guest appearance by an actual robot. The event is a fund-raiser for PCSF, and there's wine, and you can drink the wine -in the theater- (there should be a state law or something that says that all theater should be that way).

all up in a school bus (a short play about zombies)

I wrote a fake deleted scene from Night of the Living Dead (1968) for
this play-writing contest.

They're doing a staged reading of it this Friday, 1/25, after the production of Speed the Plow at the A.C.T. The play starts like this:

FIRST ZOMBIE
We should get all up in a school bus or something. I'm sick of this nickle-and-dime shit.

SECOND ZOMBIE
School bus. Yeah. And then we can go to space and get a pony and become president. Keep walking.

FIRST ZOMBIE
I'll go right in the front door, you know, it folds, it makes that noise, and everybody's screaming, and when they try to get out the back, you're waiting. It'll be a big yellow box of candy. Only with pigtails.

The play is only three minutes long, so I wouldn't cross any time-zones to see it or anything, but if you're in the neighborhood and you were thinking of going to Speed the Plow anyway...

cenote azul

a few cenote pictures up next door:

I hate summer

It was so hot that summer that the dog went nuts. She took to knocking over furniture for no reason. When it got dark, she would go out back and hunt fruit. You could see her out in the moonlight, pouncing on fallen apples like they were trying to go somewhere.

I was convinced, that summer, that eating salty food made you less thirsty. This is obviously bullshit, but my eleven year-old self took his own opinions very seriously, and tended to make sustained efforts to convince everyone else that they were correct. So there I was, sweating like some kind of Saint's relic in my second-hand Lakers jersey, eating salted peanuts, shell and all, while the dog knocked Aunt Betty out of the hammock and I wondered why nobody paid me any attention.

When it was September and the heat hadn't broke yet, my dad buried four whole chickens, bone in, at the four corners of the yard. He said the earth was angry. Couple days later it finally rained. Too late for the yard, though; it was just wet and dead. But I sat out in the rain anyway, burnt grass sharp and wet under my palms. The dog laid down on the porch as if nothing had even happened, and I thought to myself that maybe eating all those salty foods hadn't helped out after all, and that maybe if I never mentioned it again no one would ever remember anything I'd said about it.

underwater off Cozumel, Mexico

New photos up over at TMIAW.

the fridge

"Can't go in that junkyard." Josie walked with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her puffy red coat.

"Why not?" Paul followed after her eating fries out of a bag, five at a time.

"They got a fridge in there. You suffocate."

"Not if you just stay out of it." He hadn't even wanted to get into the junkyard until Josie told him he couldn't. It was dark, and too cold to even think of climbing a fence.

"They had a whole family suffocate in there."

"You mean the kids."

"I mean the whole family."

"Must be a big fridge."

"It's big all right." Josie laced her fingers behind her head and stared over the rusted barbed wire that spiraled along the top of the fence. "Must be something to look at. Must be beautiful."

Paul stepped up behind her. His breath puffed white in the cold. He was eating as fast as he could, but the fries were cold already, and so were his fingers. "You're full of shit, anyway."

"No," Josie said. "Ask anyone."

Paul gave up on the fries and tried to huck them over the fence, but the bag came open, and the fries just scattered lamely over the grass. "Well, what the hell, then?"

"Maybe they wanted to be found together. In a million years. When archaeologists dig up the junkyard, they wanted all four of them there. It might have worked, even. It was only chance somebody found them, you know--it took a couple of weeks."

"They had to have got rid of it by now," Paul said.

"Or maybe they just thought they could get out again." Josie walked up to the fence and pressed a white hand against the chain. "I think it's kind of romantic."

"No way they still got it in there." He walked to the fence, too, and looked through a gap in the plastic slats that ran through the chain links.

Josie moved behind him and covered his mouth with one cold hand. He couldn't talk because of her hand, or he would've said, 'What the fuck?' She pulled his knit hat down over his eyes and pinched his nose shut.

Paul couldn't see, and he couldn't breathe. He could feel Josie's breath on the back of his neck. He tried to turn away from her but she didn't let go. Finally he brought his hands up, grabbed her hands and pulled them off, and turned to face her. She was close to him, nose almost to his. Her eyes were wide, a strange look in them, and she grabbed his arms and kissed him.

Paul froze like a cat lifted by the scruff. Her lips were cold. She covered his eyes with her fingers. He let them close, eyelashes brushing her palm.

"See?" She whispered, close to his ear. "Romantic."

Paul was in no position to argue, not waiting for her to kiss him again like that. But he told himself that he was going back there the next day to find out if the fridge was still there, and if it was, he was going to tear the lid off that thing himself.

The hands that slid under the back of his coat were cold enough to make him gasp.

cozumel mexico - san gervasio ruins

new pictures over at TMIAW:

Aqua Jesus update - four more days!

thanks to Dad and Grandmother, we've now got some cheery, wrapped presents to adorn the Yule Tub:

And here's a detail of the excitement under the water (but not very far under water anymore!):

san miguel cemetery, cozumel, mexico

new images at TMIAW:

the miracle of Aqua Jesus

when I was growing up, we never lost sight of the reason for the season - the miracle of Aqua Jesus. every year my parents would tell the story of how Jesus would begin to stir at the beginning of December, rising up from the bed of the ocean, and how each and every day he would draw closer and closer to the surface, until on Christmas day he would miraculously spring forth from the bosom of the ocean, reborn once again.

we never got tired of hearing that story. of course, probably all the presents we got on the day when Aqua Jesus burst out of the depths had a lot to do with it, but I like to think that even when we were little, some part of our excitement was spiritual.

anyway, one of my first Christmas memories was our advent calendar, a blue felt ocean, with a little felt Aqua Jesus and sea creatures, and every day you'd move Aqua Jesus one notch closer to the surface, and all the other sea creatures would come out of their specially-marked felt pockets--Eli the Christmas Eel was always my favorite. well, on some move or another that calendar got lost, but this year my mom and my sister got out the old felt and scissors, and made me a new one, just like the one we had when I was growing up. thanks, mom! here it is, on the wall of my apartment.