THE READING and Sodom and Gomorrah.....

Okay. It's official. The reading is a "go" for next Monday. Here's the email...




We're gonna have snacks and programs and I get to invite eight people. More on that in a minute. The eight people, I mean.

For the program, they want a bio, so I stuck in some stuff about being a "Fed" and about being the great-grandson of Hans Christian Andersen.



They asked for a pic. They said "be creative." So I sent them a pic of me when I was one-year-old in a stroller at the Miyake house.



Now, regarding the eight people...

I used to belong to an Orange County writers' group. We'd meet in the back room of a library and read our plays out loud. Sometimes the people from the local theatres (Rude Guerrilla, The Chance, etc) would come and we'd always ask them about producing our plays and they'd always say "send 'em along." We did but nothing ever happened.

One time when I was in a South Coast Repertory playwrighting class, Jennifer Kiger, the Literary Manager there, came in and spoke to us. Someone asked her if the SCR was a good place to send our plays. "Oh yes," She said with a perfectly straight face. "We're always looking for plays by Orange County writers." She told us to "send them along."

After she left, one writer in the class, a good ole boy who'd been around the block a few times, leaned across the table, grinned and said, "That girl's got a bucket with a hole in it. It'd be easier growin' barley and hops in a Florida swamp than gettin' the SCR to do one of your plays."

He was right.

You know the story of Sodom & Gomorrah. God tells Abraham he's about to rain fire and brimstone on the two cities because of their consummate wickedness. Abraham argues with him (he has kinfolk living in Sodom). He "jews him down," as they used to say, and he gets the Big Guy to agree to spare the cities if ten righteous men can be found living there.

Stay with me. This is going somewhere.

So I sent out emails to every theatre in the OC, excluding the community theatres and dinner theatres which do only musicals and light comedy. Here's the list....

Grove Theater Center
The Chance Theater
The Hunger Artists Theater
Rogue Artists Ensemble
Theatre Out
STAGEStheatre
Rude Guerrilla
Laguna Playhouse
South Coast Repertory
California State Long Beach Theatre Arts
UC Irvine Drama Department
Fullerton College Theatre Arts
Cal State Fullerton Department of Theatre

Here's the email I sent them...



A polite, not-too-formal "please come" missive, don't you think? Informative, but not wordy. Striking just the right balance. Neither too fawning nor too arch.

Oh yeah. One last thing. I struck a bargain with the Theatre God. If even one of the above deigns to make an appearance at my reading, He will not rain fire and brimstone on the next Shakespeare-By-The-Sea production and, as a bonus incentive, He will forgive the South Coast Rep for not apologizing for naming a stage after a slumlord's wife...