5 Things I Learned Upon Being Freshly Pressed

This blog recently got “Freshly Pressed” by our host, WordPress. That means an editor stumbled in and decided to feature a particular post of mine, underlining its existence to the whole WordPress “community,” which is god knows how many bloggers. The net effect over three days or so was a ton of new readers of my “Adventures in Editing” series, many of whom sampled other posts as well, to my immense satisfaction. (Though still not as many in aggregate as showed up one single day in 2011 when I posted the first “Editing” installment, and it got noticed, then tweeted, then re-tweeted, etc. The viral deal is still the most effective method of rapid transmission. In olden days, we used to call this word of mouth.) Nevertheless, Fresh Pressing brought in lots of new eyeballs, so thank you, WordPress. For my take on my Pressing experience, look directly to the right. One may display the “widget” at the top of the column only upon WP’s award. It ain’t exactly a medical degree for the office wall, but still, I’m not complaining, I’m bragging.

I have been floating in a tiny WordPress backwater since I started this journal in 2009: in general, only people who already know me have tended to tune in, which is OK with me too. I’m fine with anyone who wants to “follow,” but the many curious newbies I’ve managed to Freshly Impress in the past few days may be only interested in one or two topics, and I’m not sure I can satisfy them every time. I’m really glad they’re here, but I’d rather roam instead. So let’s see how many hang on for the long haul.

Now the stallions have turned back into mice and my daily page views are gradually reverting to the mean. But being a WordPress soopahstah for a few days has shown me a few things that I never would have guessed otherwise, and when you, the WordPress blogger, accept a Fresh Pressing, you should remember them:

1. There are lots of spam “followers,” despite WordPress’s generally great spam filter, and some aren’t so easy to spot. Once you get Freshly Pressed, the gates open. You get “comments” written in perfect English, but they’re robocall-ish, and a peek at the sender reveals all. You get people who are following you only because they hope you’ll click back: for example, I just now got a notice that I’m being followed by a blogger called “qualitydiabeticsocks.” I have sent the obvious dross to spamland, so good riddance, and I don’t mind if “qualitydiabeticsocks” gets an email every time I post – but I didn’t know such begging even existed until I got Pressed. (There have always been obvious spammers who aren’t fluent in English, like those sad-making, emailing “Nigerian princes” who want to “give you money,” but this is another level of sophistication.) Fortunately, nobody can post on this site without first being approved by me. But get Pressed and you’ll soon encounter an entirely different class of spammer.
2. There’s a 14-year-old kid out there who thinks he’s Lenny Bruce. (I take him at his word on the age.) He likes to riff on the titles of Freshly Pressed posts, which often give him great ammunition when taken out of context. If you get Pressed, you’re probably gonna get mocked too. Sometimes his stuff is indeed funny, but not as often as he imagines it is. Keep plugging, kid, say I, and one day you too might be in the SNL writers’ room wishing you were anywhere else on the goddam planet.
3. WordPress bloggers are more likely to talk back than is the general public. I love that. I’ve always wanted the dialogue (that’s what the name of my blog means, after all), and these are mostly people who are sending out their own blog posts for the same reason, to get some two-way going. I hip my Facebook friends to each new post, and lately most of the back-and-forth has unfortunately been over there, where it’s ephemeral, rather than here, where it sticks around. The bloggers who have gravitated my way in the past few days tend to feel the same way, and are much more willing to endure the moderation process, which may be annoying but is also quick and permanent — you only need my thumbs up for your first post; after that, your comments go straight onto the site. (Unless you suddenly decide to start selling quality diabetic socks, that is.) I’m every bit as gratified when you talk back as when you read in the first place, and bloggers tend to be chatters, so thanks, WordPress, for bringin ‘em on.
4. There are many, many writers on WP. We’re all crawling, scratching, etching our thoughts into some verbal sculpture that others might recognize as notable. Dudes and dudettes, I know the feeling. You don’t need payment. You just need the rush. Many of you are super-inventive, and I have been constantly amazed at how many permutations there actually are. I was once an editor, which is what “Adventures in Editing” is all about, which is probably what helped Press me in the first place. But I’ve been inundated in the last few days by what I judge to be talented writers (yep, even the sophomoric Lenny Bruce kid!), who are dying to find a proper forum. Your biggest hurdle will be to forget about writing like somebody else and start carving out your own niche. They always say write about what you know. That’s still damn good advice: to seek reality (even if you’re writing about ETs or dragons) by working outward from what you can see and smell and taste and feel every day. I’ll call to the witness stand, oh, Scott Nicholson. Read this guy. He plugs and plugs. He’s innately good – as are quite an impressive few of you! – but his best stuff doesn’t issue from what he learned reading King and Matheson and Poe and Lovecraft and all the rest. It comes from what he experiences on a typical North Carolina day. And you have just as much raw material as Scott does, if you’ll only use it. Thus endeth today’s sermon. By the way: if you don’t read, don’t write.
5. You need a “round number” like 5 or 10 or 25 to constitute one of these come-hither blog headlines, so here’s the last one. Sorry if you think I’m imploding at the end and cheating you out of something, but hey, that’s postmodernism. Meanwhile, I loved being a WordPress princess for a few days, and I invite you all to stick around, keep posting, talk back whenever you like, and above all, take care of each other.

Adventures In Editing, Part V

One day, Bantam publisher Irwyn Applebaum summoned me into his office and asked, “How do you respond when I say, ‘Tom Robbins’?” Without even thinking, I said, “one of the great prose stylists of his generation.” He said, “That’s what I thought. I want you to go out to Seattle and meet him. You might become his editor.” (Spoiler Alert: I did, and I did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

In past pieces in this series, I’ve tried to give you some idea of what life is really like from the editor’s point of view. I began writing “Adventures In Editing” because I rarely read about that aspect of the publishing business, and the little I did read described only a cookie-cutter, stereotypical, author-v.-editor relationship that tended to come from the author’s side of the negotiating desk: much of it seemed to emanate from Writer’s Digest habitues who had never faced a pile of unsolicited submissions in their lives. I wanted to show prospective writers that editors are human beings too, enumerate the very real contributions the “suits” can make, and maybe impart some insights that could help them along in their dealings with what will continue to be a vital function, even in this DIY book-publishing age. But this time, I can’t send out any useful career advice. I can only tell you what it was like to deal with some tremendously cool outliers – all of it by the seat of my pants. The point is not that I’m some sort of editorial savant: trust me, I ain’t. The point is that each and every author requires an individually different editorial hand, and if you can suss that much out, on either side of the table, you’re on your way to a better product than you would have had beforehand.

OK, let’s go to Seattle and meet Tom Robbins, so the measure of the man can be taken. It was clear that the man being measured was not Tom R., but your humble obedient servant, Tom D. His former editor had left the company, and it was known around Bantam that I was a fan. That means nothing more than familiarity with the author’s work, but I’m also part of that same generation of which he’s such a great prose stylist, so what the hell: let’s buy the kid a plane ticket and throw him out West.

One tiny prob. Most of my Robbins reading — I’d never, ever, missed a TR book — had occurred a long time ago. I believe I had all of three days to prepare for my trip, so I unwisely decided to use every spare moment to re-read every single novel: ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER, JITTERBUG PERFUME, and SKINNY LEGS AND ALL, which Mr. Robbins had inscribed to a trembling me at a Bantam pub-celebration throwdown back in our cozy New York offices. This much Robbins, ingested in such a short period of time, can seriously damage your brain, and it’s something I would never recommend to anyone, as I told the author to his face when we finally met. Tom Robbins loves ladies, laughter and language, and his beautiful work is best savored slowly, like the cigars he puffs while idling through his beloved stack of magazines. But no: I took an OD-quantity dose directly into a vein and nearly went nuts, because I was unable to separate specific images within the cascade fighting for life among my various synapses. The bravura rumination on the pack of Camels in STILL LIFE, yep, that’s on the cover, isn’t it? But much further and I was suddenly stymied. It was like being in Pepperland, or that wild Porky Pig cartoon where every being looks like a psychotic’s nightmare. Only this was real life. The Tom Robbins high was precisely as the author intended; I had simply erred and done the shit uncut. (The experience did help me later when I picked out some excerpts for a limited-edition TR reader we produced for booksellers, but I couldn’t know that while I was still literarily tripping.)

I think he thought I might work out. His squeeze (now his wife), Alexa, did a reading on me and said OK too. His agent, Phoebe Larmore, seemed amicable as well. But I’m sure it was Tom himself who cut through it all and answered his own question: “Does he get me?” We spent the rest of the weekend sharing mundanities, like shlepping a painting out to the Bainbridge Island home of film director Alan Rudolph (Tom was a well-respected art critic, with that same funky voice, before he ever turned to fiction), and by the time I went home, we were on the same team. The red-eye flight back to New York stopped in Chicago, and that’s where George McGovern plopped into the seat next to me. Bro, I woke up immediately. An amazing few days, that, the kind that make you glad you’re alive.

Tom Robbins is sui generis, and so is the way you “edit” him, or fail to. Back then, he produced a novel every five years: three years composing in longhand on a legal pad, one year tidying up and promoting, and one year chilling and thinking about the next one. He had his own trusted longtime copy editor, so that part was not your problem. Every year, he would meet with his “editor” and show some freshly typed pages, which he hired somebody to transpose. You couldn’t take them back with you. You’d go off and read, then come back and have a discussion. He was interested in finding out if his intended meaning was clear to a (presumably) thinking human. He had specific questions: what did you think when thus-and-so happened? Making the whole thing super-strange was that the book I worked on, HALF ASLEEP IN FROG PAJAMAS, was written entirely in second person present tense: “You do this. You see that.” An amazing feat that receded after a few pages; as the story took hold, you read past it until the unusual point of view was just an eerie echo in the background. Oh: did I mention that “you” are a Filipina stockbroker? Yes, working with Tom Robbins was every bit as much fun as I’d hoped it would be. He recently signed to write a memoir for Ecco, and I can’t wait to read it.

Tom probably wouldn’t call himself a “comic novelist.” He’s a novelist whose stuff is often funny, always playful. Later, at another publishing house, I fell in with a couple other guys who also wrote novels that were funny. I did three and a half books with the lovely and talented Bill Fitzhugh. As it happens, we both grew up in Jackson, Mississippi (I didn’t realize that at first) and it turns out we knew lots of the same people, though not each other. Bill had been a jock on Jackson’s legendary WZZQ, one of the country’s best progressive rock stations in the great FM era, and I was an avid listener (and a rockcrit in Georgia when Bill was actually on the air), so we had both laughter and rock & roll in common. (Bill’s late, lamented show for Sirius XM radio was produced with vinyl records in a studio out back of his L.A. home. The set lists alone can make you cry.) An unusual series of circumstances made me the third editor on Bill’s second novel, THE ORGAN GRINDERS, and by the time I came aboard the poor guy had already struggled through two sets of notes. That’s why I call that a half. Starting with his next book, CROSS DRESSING, I was there the whole time.

Bill wanted a more traditional hand. He’s a confident writer, bursting with ideas, but he’ll listen to suggestions from anywhere. An editorial dreamboat. CROSS DRESSING – about an adman who’s forced to impersonate a priest – is still my favorite, maybe because I come from advertising myself. It was one of the most gratifying editorial experiences I’ve ever had, because when it was done I could honestly say, this is a damn good book, and I helped make it that way. This is how an editor really gets paid: in satisfaction. You don’t get rich except for inner wealth. Bill and I connected creatively (in Kurt Vonnegut terms, we discovered we were in the same karass), and maintained that wonderful relationship on the subsequent books. He’s still a good friend of mine.

Then there was Christopher Moore, who I inherited about the same time as Bill. Chris has a wonderfully inventive but ever-comic mind. We at Avon loved every word he wrote, but he was supremely wacky: the books were about prehistoric beasts attempting congress with oil tankers, etc. One day his agent, Nick Ellison, told me, “Chris is ready to step up, and he wants to know that you, his publisher, will too.” Everybody knew he was great, but now he wanted to get on the bestseller lists and ratchet up his audience. “Can you do it?” I said hay-ell yes, and bought two prospective Chris Moore books on the basis of what he was now proposing: a Chris-invented early life of Christ.

The Holy Bible doesn’t tell you much about Jesus’s life between the money-changing and the Sermon on the Mount, so Chris supplies the filled-in stuff in a book called LAMB: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BIFF, CHRIST’S CHILDHOOD PAL. There was no outpouring of Christian angst, even though I tried to provoke it by sending LAMB galleys out to every burgeoning right-wing evangelical I could find. Evidently, they hadn’t all gotten together just yet (this was post-Limbaugh but pre-Fox-News-as-wallpaper). Nevertheless, LAMB – our book! – was Chris’s breakout, a solid NYT bestseller, and he just kept going from there: in other words, we wound up fulfilling our promise to Nick. This great, funky, joyful, inventive artist is now in the very capable editorial hands of Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow, who also helps bring you Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson and Joe Hill. (See, folks, editorial work ain’t no accident.)

I want all aspiring authors to know that when I was at Bantam, I was forced to decline the reprint rights to Chris’s brilliant novel BLOODSUCKING FIENDS. We already had Tom Robbins on our list (and thank god for that!). So when you get a rejection letter that says something like “it’s not right for us at present,” that may actually be the literal truth. In Chris’s case, back then, it certainly was, because airbody could see the fun and affability in his voice: we just didn’t have room for him in the grand scheme of things. Thank god I migrated to Avon, where the reprint rights had eventually landed, so to make creative amends and help Chris on his richly deserved climb to the next rung.

You never know. Never. But most any schlub can recognize real talent when it’s shoved in hisser face: that doesn’t take a genius. Now: what if the talent has already been glorified in another medium besides books? Ah, that’s for next time. See you soon.

Previous Adventures:

Part I   Part II   Part III   Part IV

10 Reasons Why I Still Read Rolling Stone

1)    I used to write for the paper a long time ago, back when it was based in San Francisco and was a tabloid that folded over once for the newsstand. You tend to like your hometown, no matter what happens to it after you move away.

2)    My droogie Andrew Dansby joined the RS Online posse early in its digital incarnation, and occasionally even got some notes pubbed in the print edition. I subbed and read the mag in solidarity, often with widely incredulous eyes. (AD’s now a poobah at the Houston Chronicle, and the RS Online staff back in NY are still postin their little asses off.)

3)    I’m too old for VICE.

4)    And, truth be told, for RS, tho it helps me pretend.

5)    Almost ten years ago, I got a letter from the RS sub dept. Would you like a LIFETIME sub to our mag? Send us $49.95 and it’s yours. I did, and they popped me an extra fifty years. I think the marketing department somehow knew how old I was (yeah, ya dumb boomer: THE REST OF YER PITIFUL LITTLE LIFETIME! HAW HAW HAW!), but still coveted my zipcode to help offset their vanishing youthquake demos. Anyway, I’m at least gonna receive the mag until I die, unless I live to 104, and by that time I hope I don’t even remember what Rolling Stone frickin is.

6)     Matt Taibbi.

7)     David Browne.

8)     THE 10,000 GREATEST ROCK RECORDS. I’ll be there, dawgs: I’m witchoo for the lawng hawl.

9)     The Rolling Stones, who outlasted airfrickinbody and are smilin on the cov of RS #1183, which dropped today.

10)   Jann Wenner – who, like Lorne Michaels, is a survivor.

Just For Openers

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That’s one of the greatest opening lines in literary history, for my money. It has stuck with me for nearly thirty years. In fact, I just quoted it by heart (double-checking only to make sure I got the comma right: I did). As everybody else who has encountered it also doubtless remembers, William Gibson’s brilliant novel NEUROMANCER begins with this sentence. I haven’t read the book since it was first published in 1984, but I still remember this line perfectly, because it smacked me like an open hand.

We know instinctively that a musical melody can get under our skins. Even a tune we had had quite enough of remains inside us, in some primal part of our brains that can whisk us back to the moment when it was contemporary and conjure long-forgotten emotions, both fond and regretful, whether we like it or not. Those of you who are old enough: start thinking of the melody of Kenny Loggins’s “Danny’s Song” – you know the one, “Even though we ain’t got money / I’m so in love with you honey…” Got it? Okay, now try to STOP thinking of it. Both my mother and grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease late in their lives, and even at the point where they could only speak in gibberish syllables (except very rarely, when a perfectly formed sentence would come out, chilling me to the bone and forcing me to wonder if they’d been making sense to themselves all along. Alzheimer’s is one king-hell bitch, friends), they could still remember musical notes and put them together into a recognizable melody. This strongly suggests that we experience and file musical tones in some other sector from wherever we store and retrieve language. I would guess visual cues are handled differently as well. I don’t have the medical background to be sure, but that’s what I’ve observed, and it makes common sense to me.

But what is it about a string of letters that creates a profundity or emotional tug? I can only explain my own reactions, and I’m not suggesting that I have the last word as an academician might. In the case of NEUROMANCER, part of the key is that date: 1984. It was the beginning of the personal computer revolution, still largely confined to hobbyists. The Apple Macintosh, which billed itself as “the computer for the rest of us,” had only just appeared. But with that bold sentence, Bill Gibson announced that he was speaking to a new generation of science fiction readers – heck, a new generation of readers, period. The original thundercrack of 20^th century science fiction – Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and colleagues – had given way to a more socially conscious, taboo-smashing New Wave – Spinrad, Ellison, Disch, LeGuin, and so on – who were audacious enough to question the very existence of this or that genre. But that had happened twenty or so years before. Unlike the slow but miraculous race to the moon, when science-based writers could still kind of keep up, the pace of technological and societal change was increasing. It became folly to predict the future, because the future now arrived before your ink was even dry.

Bill Gibson was 35 when he wrote NEUROMANCER; he was born in the same year George Orwell published NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. He was on the leading edge of the first generation that grew up with television as a casual aspect of their entire lives. So when he described a sickly gray color that resembled a ”dead channel,” everybody his age and younger understood instantly, and they knew they were being addressed by a peer. These people had never gathered around a radio drama when they were kids, like elder writers had. They couldn’t really remember pulp magazines or movie serials, at least not in their heydays. But they were old enough to recall what it was like before tv channels blared around the clock, the days when your local station actually signed off the air at midnight or so…and became a dead channel until the following morning. In this instant, Gibson had announced the arrival of an emerging digital point of view. This attitude, combined with often breathless views of an over-teched future dystopia, came to be called “cyberpunk,” and lots of people, including me, got their very first taste in NEUROMANCER. Simply rotate the “C” ninety degrees to form a “U,” and you’ve changed everything. Maybe creativity is that simple. (Spoiler Alert: it is, but only for those who can manage to make that unnatural turn, which eliminates nearly all the rest of us.)

I wasn’t alone in my adoration. NEUROMANCER won every award the field had to give, and William Gibson became something grander than a science fiction writer, the same thing that had happened to Kurt Vonnegut a generation before. Anybody who really likes spaceships and lasers can remember the frisson produced by the first shot of STAR WARS, the 1977 original, as the massive Imperial ship chases the smaller one, death-rays blazing. You thought, oh, wow, I think I’m gonna enjoy this. Well, that’s also what I thought upon reading that now-famous sentence – and in both cases, the creators delivered on the promise of their great curtain-raisers.

Call me Ishmael.

This opening sentence resonates because of the tremendous sense of foreshadowed drama it portends. Perhaps the NEUROMANCER opening will do the same, once we give it the requisite, say, fifty more years so it will fall inexorably into history.

Every snot-nosed kid who dutifully tried Herman Melville’s titanic work MOBY-DICK back in grade school discovered that, to get here, you first have to wade through an abysmal, seemingly unending section of definition, etymology, etc. We get it, sir: whales are badasses. But, as with the satirical Onion item about the Titanic being struck by the world’s largest metaphor, so we understand from the first words that this is more than a story about a fishing expedition.

In the John Huston film, written by Ray Bradbury – who definitely loved him some metaphor – the Richard Basehart voiceover includes a pregnant pause. The actor says, “Call me…Ishmael,” as if he were trying to come up with some pseudonym on the spot. That pause isn’t written in Melville, but this subtext definitely is: call me whatever you want. I don’t care. I’m going to tell you something that’s almost beyond belief, but it happened, pal, I saw it with my own eyes, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. That last bit is from the book of Job – which Melville’s readership had studied much closer in 1851 than we do today – so, to coin a phrase, we know dude be serious. Biblical scholars tell us the name “Ishmael” connotes an outcast, a wanderer. As we say in the enlightened new millennium, whatev.

By the way, kids, don’t give up on this great tale just because of all the lousy pre-show variety acts. Skip the front parts and go directly to “Chapter 1: LOOMINGS.” Trust me. Don’t wait for your teacher to “interpret”: this looming business is spelled out for you on page one, but I am not responsible for any blowback if you happen to point this out in class. (Yes, that is indeed experience speaking.)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Did you recognize that sentence? Bet you did. It opens George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. It’s so sly that it jerks us around without even seeming to. After all, the military operates on a 24-hour clock, for understandable precision: “The cap’n said drop the nuke at 12: did he mean noon or midnight?” There does actually exist a concept known as thirteen o’clock. No, wait: the military knows 1:00 pm as “1300 hours.” So why are the clocks striking thirteen? Is it because we’re under martial law? (Spoiler Alert: in a way, yes.) Is it because all civilians have been forced to observe these same rules of precision for the good of the body politic? (You‘re getting warmer, unlike the bright April day – it really should be warm by now!)

Fourteen words, a comma and a period. That’s all it took to thrust us into a disturbing new paradigm, to shift reality. Orwell’s immortal story works not only because of its invention or prescience, but also because he was able to knock us off kilter within seconds. Now consider a longer lead-in.

It was a perfect 72 degrees the December morning the Marshalls’ home computer arrived, and the sky was set to a soaring azure, but it was flickering, which was the whole problem.

Recognize that? No? I’m not surprised. It’s the opening sentence – and paragraph – from the 2006 short story “Installation Day.” It appeared in an anthology called GOLDEN AGE SF, for which contemporary authors were invited to pretend they were working in science fiction’s “Golden Age” – that is, the 30s through the 50s – with no knowledge of what actually came later. Sort of retro-futurism. I’ve postponed it for a couple minutes, but I guess the time has come to reveal that the author is none other than me. (Judging only from this sentence, sharp eyes might suss that I’d long since consumed the Gibson and the Orwell.)

I did hobble myself by setting this sentence against three of the greatest openings ever, but I do have a kind of explanation. Still, you can see what happens when a child attempts to do a grown person’s job. My opening is by far the longest, clunkiest, most info-packed but nevertheless least interesting of the four you see. How one could/would “set” the sky and why it was “flickering” get explained in the story, as you assume they will, and a 72-degree December morning isn’t uncommon to those who live in the Sunbelt. But look at all I failed to do in twice, thrice, the words, compared to the greatest. In fairness, I must add that I deliberately wrote this story to read like an old pulp magazine piece, and bombastic opening sentences like mine were almost obligatory. I’m not beating myself up for your amusement; I’m actually quite pleased with how the story turned out anent the commission. (I think I might also be speaking for my editor, Eric T. Reynolds, who first improved my story and then bought it, as do many editors of short fiction, in that order.)

But these magical moments don’t happen by accident. Or maybe they do. The sliver of our minds that great literature manages to touch can fire in a split-second. But as William Gibson showed me, that blinding spark can last a lifetime.

The Big Four-Oh (K)

We have just turned over the odometer. We [um, I] have now received more than 40,000 page views since YOU AND ME, DUPREE debuted in summer 2009. We, I, recognize that this figure is nothing more than a slow moming at the biggest baddest blogs, but I’m good with connecting to somebody almost a thousand times every month. That’s nice.

You can’t count on me for any particular topic. Book publishing has been my most popular subject by far, probably because aspiring authors don’t often get to read about life on the other side of the editorial desk, but that’s been a small fraction of my scribbling here. A short piece on Jackson, Mississippi’s delicious “kumback” salad dressing is my second most visited post ever, possibly because there’s a Wikipedia entry that refers back to this blog, and I’m just as gobsmacked about that as you are.

I occasionally review works of art in several media, but long ago I decided not to waste my time writing about anything I couldn’t recommend heartily (the sole exception is my reports on the Sundance Film Festival, where I calls em as I screens em, but there’s nevertheless been something to love every year). Otherwise, life’s too short, and there’s already plenty of snark out there on the Internets. So Y&M,D veterans know that if they see a post on a book, stage show, flick or whatever, that must mean I loved it. You keep on reading only if you want to know why. I’ll probably break this rule sometime, but that necessity hasn’t come up after four whole years of reading, hearing and watching. So far, nobody or their publicists have ever suggested that I review something (that used to be a badge of honor back when I was a rockcrit in the vinyl era, and it even caused me some trouble a couple times, but that’s another story, with which I may one day burden you), but I’ve shared a glowing post with maybe four or five content creators now, and each of them has returned a wonderfully kind and frank response.

My sort of free-form thither-and-thathering is counterindicated for a blog that’s determined to collect hits. You also can’t count on me to whip myself into a froth like an insanely partisan geek, with which the Web is already well crammed. I definitely have a moral and political point of view, but I try to mold these essays a tad more reasonably than that, even when I’m Just Mad About Something. You really have no frickin way to predict what next shiny thing is going to be dangled before my eyes. Such (to be kind) eclecticism may inhibit bloggy faithfulness unless you simply like the sound of my voice (as I do, say, Harlan Ellison’s or Stephen King’s). My brother John says reading my blog is just like talking to me in person, except you get this wonderful button that makes me STOP!

I do fine-tune the entries. (As David Crosby once told an impatient Tonight Show audience, “We tune because we care.”) Those of you who receive new-post notices via email or WordPress get pointed to the very first draft that I’m willing to loose into the wild. But I go back and improve every single one. Even an editor needs an editor, and for me that sage is simply the passage of time. I see so many missed opportunities in short stories I wrote fifteen years ago, but I can’t go back inside a printed book to fix them. Here I can. The “for keeps” version has usually emerged within three or four days, and it’s always better than the one I originally posted. So if you really hate an entry, young man or lady, maybe you ought to take a time-out and come back a little bit later, hmmm?

I kid because I love. Really. Thanks for hangin, or whatever else the heck it is you do here. I’m gonna keep on poundin while my mind wanders (I just got a cool keyboard that looks, feels and sounds like a 1980s Apple…you know, it makes that same clicking noise you hear in any computer scene in any 80s movie, from TRON to WARGAMES…oops, sorry, there I go again). Your job is to keep talkin back, and to take care of each other.

Disco Rules! (For One Night)

Like many guys, I’m not much of a dancer. I feel self-conscious. I can’t help it. Intellectually, I know others don’t care, they’re too busy having a good time to stop and stare at my geeky moves, but in that primitive fight-or-flight territory of my brain, dancing in public probably qualifies as a near phobia, what public speaking means to some people. You do it only when you have to. I’ve tried to avoid dances all my life except when it was socially necessary, such as a school prom or a fraternity party. (Not a kegger, a dance!) Dancing in a stage musical, for which you have to memorize and repeat the choreography, is somehow different for me, and I’ve done that several times without any anxiety beyond the normal butterflies. But I still have a little improv-dancing-in-public prob.

So it was that I absorbed many warning signals about the immersive theatrical experience HERE LIES LOVE as it prepared for its world premiere engagement at the Public Theater. You’ll stand for an hour and a half, on a set that’s made to look like a disco (I hate disco). You’ll be encouraged to dance. Wear comfortable shoes. If you really have to sit down, tell us in advance so we can scoosh you into a spot where you can. As the ticket date approached, even despite glowing reviews (I don’t read the details beforehand, just try to suss the general opinion), I was apprehensive enough that I suggested my wife invite another friend in my place. It didn’t work out, so I reluctantly trudged down to Astor Place last night. An hour and a half later, I realized what a close call it was. If I had turned down the chance to see this show, it would have been the most colossal mistake of my theatergoing life.

More indications that this one was Different appeared as we walked up the stairs to the third floor of the Public complex. Signs reading, we really think you should check your coats and bags, trust us. No theater program upon entering; you and I’m guessing 150 others are just in this disco with blinking lights and a pumping beat, a DJ gyrating on a balcony level above your head. There are a few seated people peeking over the edge, but since the action darts around, the only way to see the entire show is to be on the dance floor: there will be occasional obstructions from any balcony seat, just as most of the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE audience, encircling the stage one level above, can’t see everything that’s happening on the Studio 8H floor.

There was a raised horizontal stage in the center of the room, the people milling about all around it. When it came time to start, the DJ pointed out a few stagehands in light orange jumpsuits, standing among us. When they want to move the stage around, he said, they’ll herd you to make room, so go wherever they point you. For a practice run, they rotated the stage as we followed them in a wide circle. From then on, the set crew would work nearly as hard as the actors, transforming the performing space into two room-ending stages, a horizontal walk-through ramp, all the permutations in between, and finally a huge stairway like the one in Duffy Square, where the two-thirds of the audience that had accepted the offer to come up on stage themselves could sit down for the finale. (So it’s no spoiler to say if they invite you on stage, by all means GO.) The DJ also asked us to shut off our cell phones, but anyone dumb enough to ignore him would have been unable to hear their call anyway, and trying to text on an active dance floor is, let’s just say, counterindicated.

The piece itself is a mostly sung-through operetta about the origin and brutal reign of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 through 1986 (under martial law beginning in 1972) and its public face, his wife Imelda. It’s also about the spirit and resilience of the Filipino people, who finally took back their country after four days of intense but nonviolent protest. This sounds (a) grim, and (b) kind of like EVITA II, but nope, it’s neither one.

The disco setting is used as a metaphor for the motivating power of celebrity as wielded on the masses, and also because that’s pretty much the kind of life Imelda Marcos lived. You’re swept up in the excitement, which literally, physically, carries you along. One minute you’re in the back of the crowd watching the soloist from forty feet away, the next minute everything has moved around and she’s right in front of you – or even next to you. When Imelda comes down into the audience to meet her adoring public – played now by us — a video camera follows her and the images are projected on all four walls as smitten audience members take her hand and smile beatifically. When her husband first runs for office, he’s surrounded by Men In Black Ray-Banned bodyguard types, who walk down the ramp all the way across the room, leaning down to shake hands and bark, “Vote for Marcos!” One of the goons grabbed my hand, and it was all I could do to keep from saying, “I will!”

David Byrne dreamed all this up and wrote the lyrics, and collaborated with Fatboy Slim on the music. It’s not exactly disco, not that droning metronomic vibe. Not exactly hip-hop, though it feels fresh and new. Not exactly show tunes, either, though several performers get rare quieter belters that garner applause. It’s mostly smart, melodic dance music, but the intimate setting lets the thirteen billed performers – if they’re not all Filipino, they can sure play it – engage the audience more viscerally than anything I’ve seen since the heyday of the Living Theater. And that includes rock stars who numbly order you to “clap yo hands!”

David Byrne is probably the “sell” on the show – that’s certainly why we bought our tickets – but for my money the guy who deserves just as much credit is the genius director, Alex Timbers. He co-wrote and staged the fiercely entertaining BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON a couple years ago; directed PETER & THE STARCATCHER, a charming piece that uses low-tech theatrical effects to beguile its audience with the Peter Pan backstory; and won the Obie a while ago for directing A VERY MERRY UNAUTHORIZED CHILDREN’S SCIENTOLOGY PAGEANT. I adored them all. This summer, he’ll be reunited with ANDREW JACKSON collaborator Michael Friedman for a new musical version of LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST as the second Shakespeare in the Park show at the Delacorte. In the dictionary, that’s his picture beside the word “creative.” From now on, if Timbers’s name’s on the show, I’m there. Here, as in STARCATCHER, he uses “hand-rolled” theatrical moves (most big set changes on Broadway are done by computer now, along little tracks just under the stage) to down-tech the show, dunk the audience in it (I’d like to meet the guy who manages to fall asleep!), and lift their heads up while it’s still refreshing. I also want to send props out to sound designers M. L. Dogg and Cody Spencer: even above the dance-club din, we made out more of Byrne’s brainy lyrics than we had during the “state-of-the-art” production of MATILDA (which is a scream, by the way).

The dancing? Oversold. You can stand there like a potted plant if you want to, but the music is just too much to resist, so you’re moving around, there’s that. Then they show you how to jump, clap, left, right, in unison, like Imelda. The moves were pretty easy, but I still sucked, yet I didn’t care, and that went double for everybody else standing near me. How close I came to missing all this. Note to self: listen to wife all the time from now on! We got the Playbill upon leaving, and my one and only beef was with two female dweebs who’d retained their backpacks despite the quite reasonable pre-show suggestion and, like nearly every other urban backpack carrier on earth, were oblivious to whatever they’re swatting from behind. One Trendora whirled toward me in irritation at feeling a bit of resistance, thus swatting somebody else! A pox on all backpackers who aren’t climbing mountains, on safari, or attending grade school.

After a long time seeing uninspired cookie-cutter musicals, and sadly noting that too often the best dramas on Broadway are revivals, it feels great when something comes up behind you and smacks you with a 2×4. The last time was probably GATZ, also here at the Public. Anyhow, if you can get a ticket, do it. They have held this show over twice, and now it runs through the end of June. It can’t move to a big Broadway theater (as, recently, did the Public’s ANDREW JACKSON and its Central Park productions of HAIR and THE MERCHANT OF VENICE). This piece has to happen in a room just like this one. But if you get the chance – can L.A. be far behind? – DO NOT MISS. Oh, and wear comfortable shoes.

P.S.: If it’s been more than, say, nine months since you’ve been to the Public Theater facility in the historic Astor Library (a New York City Landmark in its own right), you will find it transformed, particularly the gorgeous lobby area, after a $40 million renovation of which we were happy to be a small part. We had a light dinner beforehand in the new lounge The Library, a great addition that helps you cut it much closer to curtain time.

Serendipity At Pinehurst

My Aunt Ellen (c.), surrounded by Dupree dames: Regina (l.) and Diana.

My brother John and I, along with our brides, flew down to Seven Lakes, North Carolina last weekend to participate in the memorial for our beloved Aunt Ellen. She passed away two weeks ago, far too young, from unforeseen complications following stints in chemo for breast cancer. Her husband, our Uncle Buddy, has sort of defined the word “avuncular” all our lives (“Golf? I shoot in the low 70s.” Me: REALLY? “Yep, any hotter than that, I don’t even go out!”), but Ellen was everything to him, and we hated to have to help Buddy send her off.

The service on Saturday afternoon went fine, though my heart lurched as I saw my uncle, sitting right in front of me, just loose his shoulders and slump a little as the homilies began: he had busied himself for days by taking care of all the little details, and now there was nothing left to do but mourn. John and I had met Ellen’s grown daughter Tammy for the first time the night before. She looks and sounds exactly like her mom (they’ve even fooled Buddy once or twice on the phone), which turned out to be eerie and comforting at the same time, at least for me. The service hit Tammy the hardest (she was close enough to her mom to call her on the phone every day), and it broke our hearts to see it.

Ellen (l.), my brother Rick, and my Uncle Buddy, who looks like he’s about to order a hit on somebody.

There was a reception afterward, during which I received a brand new kind of compliment (I’d clambered up to say a few words for the family). “That was a WONDERFUL speech,” a longtime parishioner told me. As I was gearing up to say how easy it had been to praise Ellen, she elaborated. “You spoke so SLOWLY and CLEARLY. I can’t UNDERSTAND most of the families at these services.” For English teachers: this lovely lady was a fan of form, not content, but I’ll still cherish those heartfelt props until it’s time for my memorial service.

We went back to Buddy’s for more food – provided by neighbors, the church, etc. – but we were just noshing. Our emotional fuel was spent. After a while, the group began to dissipate; some of them had five, six-hour drives back home. The four of us – John, his wife Regina, my wife Linda and me – decided to caravan back toward our hotel, stop at the nearby village of Pinehurst (yep, the storied golfing spot; next year Pinehurst’s fabled No. 2 course will become the first venue in history to host both the U.S. Open and the U.S. Women’s Open, back-to-back), and have a beer or something at a little pub to wind down.

The Carolina-Pinehurst Resort.

We waited in the charming town square’s parking lot, but it took John & Reg a few minutes to pull up. They’d taken a wrong turn and found themselves driving by the magnificent Carolina Hotel at the Pinehurst Resort. You gotta see it, they said. The azaleas are out, this place is way Old South. So we paused for a second and said, let’s have our drinks there. After all, we’re already dressed for it. So we hopped in John’s car and drove over.

Inside the breathtaking lobby.

They weren’t kidding. We strolled down a spectacular azalea-studded pathway at dusk on a perfect late-spring evening. Everything, even the temperature, was gorgeous. Just being there lifted our spirits. We walked into the main house, grand enough to impress Scarlett O’Hara, and passed through a sumptuous lobby. It’s all about golf: memorabilia all over the place. The bar is the “Ryder Cup,” get it? I ambled up to the dining room entrance and caught a sidelong glance at the menu. I later confessed that I didn’t read the selections on the left, only the numbers on the right, just to make sure we weren’t out of our league. Then I said, let’s not blow this chance. Let’s have dinner here. (Like the Omega Mus in REVENGE OF THE NERDS, we were being spontaneous.) The maitre d’ stepped on a pet peeve of my brother’s by asking, “Do you have a reservation?” while crickets were chirping in the nearly deserted room over his shoulder. He allowed as how he might be able to squeeze us in. “When would you like to dine?” Um, let me think: how about right now?

Your humble obedient blogger (l.) and bride Linda in the dining room, seconds before I gave my brother the stink-eye and said “ut-pay the amera-cay OWN-DAY.”

Turns out we were overdressed, which was a brand new sartorial experience for me, as any of my friends can assure you. See, we had neckties on. As the well-heeled golfers began to trudge in (they filled up many more tables, but, miraculously, ours was not needed!), the drill became evident: blazer, slacks, dress shirt, no tie. We ordered drinks and scanned the menu. Our server, a Wilford Brimley lookalike, was named Ted. The immense room was right out of GRAND HOTEL. John got us started properly after we told Ted why we were in town, we’d just wandered in serendipitously, etc. He expressed his sympathy, then John sprung the trap: “…so if you have a bereavement discount, that would make it perfect.” Funny guy, a real sit-down comic.

For the next two hours, the four of us had the most wonderful time together, talking about everything under the sun. GAME OF THRONES. John’s company, Sprint, and which suitor was more likely to win its hand. Texas politics (that’s where they live). Whazzup on Broadway. Cabbages. Kings. We have such chitchats at our annual family reunion, but generally in larger groups. This was different. The weight of Ellen’s passing was mitigated by the warmth of the company: gradually, organically. The only thing which would have really made it perfect would have been having my youngest brother Rick and his wife Diana there too, but he had a huge professional obligation he just couldn’t get out of.

A parting view.

It was still lovely outside as we walked back to the car. It had been really rewarding to do something we hadn’t planned on, just when we needed it most. If we hadn’t already been dressed for a memorial service, we might have spent a desultory hour in some pub instead. But that’s life. You never know what you’re missing. You just never know.