Assessment Underway

I sent my script to my friend, Bill. 

I’m very lucky. I can’t imagine how many scripts he’s read—certainly hundreds and hundreds of them; he’s been a professional theatre director since I’ve known him (September 1972). A more apt reader is impossible to imagine. 

Also, I’m not paying him and he’s neutral—he’s not reading it as a potential director or actor or producer. Further, he worked with a dramaturge, Rachel, for many years and she really liked something about my play—the script or the novelty of the dresses or both. She definitely liked something.

I’m very excited to hear what Bill has to say. I cannot lose and I’ve told him so. I’m “at a crossroad” and his advice will help me decide which way to go. If he likes it, great! But then I won’t know what to do or where to go with it. If he doesn’t like it, then the path is clear/ I’ll show the dresses in the gallery here.

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It’s 20° and it feels cold after the recent heat—heat that returns tomorrow. I’ll have more energy today and that’s good because I have a lot of things to do around here.

I have to water all the gardens and I’m sick of doing it. It takes forever. And the place is a dump; Sheba’s hair is a magnet for twigs, moss, seeds and burrs. She goes in and out all day and every time she comes in she brings more garden detritus and the floor in here resembles the forest. 

The sofa is Sheba’s preferred place to relax. When I lifted the cushions off I was appalled by the ounces of evidence she’d left there. And because she also loves my bed, it felt great to take the bed apart and dig out all the twigs and stuff from the frame and to wash all the linen.

When it was all done, however, the uber tidy yard, bed, furniture and floors are supremely satisfying to look at. 

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Wordsworth wote: “The world is too much with us.” I say: “Wordsworth, stick to daffodils.”

I hear people despairing about the shitstorm of environmental and political disasters we’re currently facing and I sympathize. We lie in an age of idiots and greed but I abhor the expression: It’s passive and defeatist; plus I resent his use of the third person. Who is he speaking for? All of us? He hasn’t the right.

It should be: “I am too much with this world.” It’s better in the first person; said this way it sets the action—the power—on the speaker and suggests a solution: To quit (over) communion with “the world.”