October 19, 2019

Turns out that I have a tiny fan club in LA, made up of directors and actors and the like who have grazed a little on my work, obtaining more nourishment from it than I could have realized. They stopped me at the door as I was trying to get into “Short and Sweet Hollywood” at the Lee Strasberg Theater and talked, for the most part, long enough that I could figure out who they were. It is nice for people to think–or to attest to thinking–one is touched with genius. Doesn’t happen enough back home. The danger is that I might believe it.

Everyone said that the distance from the Montrose to the theater is walkable, and I suppose, since I did walk it, it is, but it was a tribulation. Anemia breathlessness is back, and dogged me at every slight upward incline. The whole of it was along Santa Monica Blvd, which is rainbowy and happy and glorious, a gay Eden, and had I not been anxious about the evening I would have reveled in every sight. Gay men walked their little dogs. Straight women walked their big dogs. Boy trans kids cursed invisible adversaries.

The plays themselves were, for the most part, bad. You come to Hollywood and you expect an elevation in quality in every regard, but my evaluation was that the same show down in Asheville would have been pretty much the same. Some outstanding performances, but you have those here too. The badness of seven of the nine plays is what struck one first. Would LA not be full of playwrights with time on their hands? My bit was one of the not bad bits, but it was also grossly out of place, being serious and “large” in an evening dedicated to what was essentially sketch comedy. On the program when each play had a little blurb written about itself, our space was blank, just my name and Pavel’s. Had he neglected to send something in? Anyway, maybe two or three people on Planet Earth would have known what was going on without that note, and only one of them was in the house. The applause when it ended sounded like it was for a brave effort. Pavel warned me he had Tourette’s, which manifests as uncontrollable sniffing, and there he was beside me sniffing away, sometime muttering “shit” when something went wrong onstage. It was a contest. I can’t imagine that we weren’t eliminated in the first round.

The walk home seemed half as long as the walk out. I must have shed my sheath of anxiety. Stood at the door and looked into the famous Viper Room. The bouncer motioned for me to come in, but I demurred.