March 26, 2012


Leaving the house at dawn I startled a young raccoon in Zach’s yard. I took that for a beneficent omen.

I was wondering why I had abandoned Dinosaur Movie, because the first act was dynamite. It was because the second act was crap.

JD’s car battery died so there was no interview on Sunday. I did discover the Battle Cat café on Haywood Road, which I liked, but in which I didn’t feel completely comfortable. I have too many edges just to walk into a place like that. Homey, though, and I’ll go back. Disturbing art on the wall, rhythmic, obsessive, the rough images (often of slices of cake, ice cream cones, alien children, smashed pumpkins) arranged in horizontal lines. I thought they were by a child before whom a sad future was opening up. They were actually, the wall revealed, by “an adult on the autism continuum.”

Email from JB saying they have a Manhattan theater for Memorial Day (cheap on holidays, I suppose) and they want to do a staged reading of The Loves of Mister Lincoln. I do not say “Your option runs out in April.” I do not say, “Hell, you were supposed to do it two years back, but instead slipped in a string of 4th rate musicals.” I do not say anything but “Wonderful! What can I do to help?” It IS wonderful, actually, and though the process has been far more gradual and agonizing than it needed to be, it is still a process, and the part of me that wanted so badly for this to happen is resurrected.

Mother has been dead for thirty-eight years.