Doubt

I don’t really have anything to blog about today. Let me see what I can ramble on about, shall we? We shall.

It is now officially the middle of December. I haven’t really gotten much closer to accepting that it actually is December. But I have accepted that it is the month to get together with people and eat food. That much I’m on board with. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have to even get together with people to eat the food. I’m that holly and jolly, I just eat the holiday food whenever, wherever.

Christmas is in like a week. Maybe I should like wrap a present or something. Or buy a present. That might be a good first step. All I’ve really done is unwrap the gift bags of chocolate I made. This is not a step in the right direction.

I saw a play the other day. It was called “Doubt”. It was in San Francisco. It ran on Broadway for quite awhile and the lead actress, Cherry Jones, who won a Tony on Broadway for her role, came out here to be in the SF production. I really enjoyed the play. It was simple in staging, only four actors, minimal sets. But it was far from simple in story. As a writer I tend to relish the words of things, whether they are lyrics to a song or dialogue in a movie or play. I thought the words of this play were amazing.

So I looked up the playwright’s information in the playbill. In his bio John Patrick Shanley was sarcastic about his background and seemed to not take himself too seriously. He also included an e-mail address, which seemed random. So I thought, what the hell. I e-mailed him and said that I enjoyed his play, that it made me want to write drama, that someday I would do something amazing and he should know that at one point he inspired me to want to be a better writer. I also said that it was a good possibility that I was sending an e-mail to a made-up address, and I hope he got a kick out of the fact that I apparently have quite a bit of time on my hands.

And he wrote me back. This man, who won has won a Tony, the Pulitzer and an Academy Award (not to mention he directed Joe Versus the Volcano(he’d probably rather I not mention it)), wrote me back to say thanks for the comments and that he looked forward to seeing my name in lights someday. How cool is John Patrick Shanley? Very cool. And how sad is it that a Tony/Pulitzer/Academy award winner can safely put his e-mail in a playbill because no one probably even bothers to look at his info?

It’s an interesting thing.

Someday, when my name is in those lights, I’ll do the same. And I too will write back to the one random wannabe who relished my words and realized the actors didn’t just make them up right there on the stage.