Archives for July 31, 2012

In three hours I’ll be sitting in a rehearsal studio in Lenox, Massachusetts, watching John Douglas Thompson give the first reading of the latest revision of Satchmo at the Waldorf, the one that I wrote last month at the MacDowell Colony. I’ve never seen this version of the play or heard it read out loud. John, Gordon Edelstein, and I feel pretty good about it, but hard experience has taught me that you never know whether a show works, or how well it works, until you see it done. All I know is that we have three weeks to get it right.
Send some friendly thoughts my way this afternoon–and tonight.

From 2004:

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn’t meet until after I’d figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull….

Read the whole thing here.

“Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude