Enjoy This EP | BorderLight 2026

With book, music and lyrics by Paige Scott, Enjoy This EP is a one-hour play from Indianapolis that chronicles the lyrical annihilation of a twit. Zachariah Stonerock is the picture perfect embodiment of a critic, specifically a music critic. 

But this isn't Sideways, the white male snob slouching towards middle age does not charm the attractive younger woman in spite of his many unpleasant attributes. At least, not for long. Not only does Lisa M. (gorgeously voiced by Hannah Boswell) put up with very little of his shit, unbeknownst to him she is an artist, a musician, a good one, and she does not require his validation. 

Not that she wouldn't like it. She just doesn't need it. Or him. It's a really great takedown of the myth of the put-upon, self-styled intellectual snob who really, really deserves love, a character that Paul Giamatti has played several times, actually.

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

Secret New Year's Getaway (part one)

It all started early this November when my wife read something somewhere about the play The Lehman Trilogy, written by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power. She has been researching the subprime mortgage crisis and the financial collapse of the late aughts, and thought this was a play we should see. I spotted an ad in the Times that said it closes January 2 and we both decided that’s that. There were no weekends we could pop off to New York to see a play between then and when we were planning to visit London in mid-December. 

“What if we went for New Year’s Eve?” she suggested. Now that was an idea. New Year’s is our special night, we met on a New Year's Eve and have spent every NYE together since. Even if we have nothing special planned, it is special for us. We’d never spent one in New York City, though, and why not? After all of this not going anywhere. We’d come home from England after seeing my brother and his family, and a few days later jet off to New York, all on our own.

We got tickets; to a show, on a plane, she found a hotel. And then Omicron arrived.

Library Walk in the rain.

England was a non-starter, and most of those arrangements we were not penalized for. That was before our son contracted a pre-Christmas Covid. But what about New York? Would it be foolish to go? Maybe our fate would be decided for us, but our flight was not canceled, and this show, which used only three actors, had not yet been suspended due to an outbreak.

Surely we had a responsibility to go to the city and spend ridiculous amounts of money. Not because we “deserved it” or anything as immature as that. Just because … well … I have no idea. Because we’d made plans. Because we wanted to. Because no one stopped us. Still, we decided not to tell anyone until it was over, and we were home safe and well. And so we are.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Though we have visited New York several times with the children, and other times on our own, my wife and I had not visited the city together alone for almost twenty years. In May 2002 we visited, specifically to see Urinetown, but also just to go. Since she moved to Cleveland in 1995 we’d always made a trip more or less once a year. We drove that year, and it was the first time she had taken in the skyline without the Twin Towers. She's the one of us who lived in NYC, in the late 80s and early 90s, but hadn't been back now for over five years.

This weekend, she’d booked us a room at the Library Hotel, up the street from the main public library, and it is a hoot. Our room, 500.001, was of course the Mathematics room (look it up, as they say) and there were shelves stacked with a variety of books on the subject.

For your information, room 800.001 is the Erotic Fiction room but I imagine that is a suite.

Having several hours to kill before an 8 PM dinner reservation on the LES, we walked forty blocks up to the Met. This is where things began to feel weird. We would go maskless when space permitted, but Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, these streets are crowded with tourists (of whom, yes, we were two) probably biding their time before heading to Times Square by midnight. When we were among the throng, we would put the masks back on.

So strange, people queuing along the avenue to enter the Lego Store, the Nike NYC, two at a time. They were waiting in line to shop. For Legos.

Before Yesterday We Could Fly

Desiring a light lunch before we reached the Met, we dunked into Viand, an old school New York diner. At first the wife did not wish to enter, thinking it would be too close, but there were few occupied tables and we were very pleased with the uncomplicated surroundings. We knew we would get fancy later.

It reminded me of my several visits before she moved to Cleveland, this cozy, claustrophobic basic joint. In those days everyone would be smoking. We’d be smoking, too.

At the Met we got our bearings as we usually do, at the Temple of Dendur, before seeking new sights. The heart of the museum includes a new Afrofuturist exhibit, and I wanted to see that.

In the mid 19th century, the African American community Seneca Village was seized by the city to make way for the proposed Central Park, it’s citizens forced to relocate. The Met acknowledges those who previously occupied land (these people, and the Lenape before them) where the museum now rests in the exhibit Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. It is a collection of wild and colorful beaded items, photographs, prints, ceramics, a video installation.

A narrow walkway surrounds the collection, another opportunity to be a little too close to others. I found it jarringly symbolic when a gang of young, white dopes entered the space, spreading out to occupy as much of the available room as possible. One of them, either their leader or that guy who thinks he is, mocking announced, “This is not art.”

Where do these people come from, and why are they in an art museum on New Year’s Eve?

Back at the hotel we dressed all fancy, and headed to the Lower East Side for dinner at Ladybird. So queer as in strange, a block or so from where our son and I spent an extended weekend only a couple months before. Like, we spent most of our time downtown for four days and it was odd to just pop back in for a few hours. Because this was such an LES joint, tiny and close, appointed with mirrors and murals to provide the illusion of space.

The wife is vegetarian, and this place is a highly esteemed vegan restaurant, serving a five-course, prix fixe meal for the holiday. I chose an odd cocktail to begin, they offered something called a Smoking Lady Bishop. A traditional Smoking Bishop is referenced in A Christmas Carol, and for several years I concocted the Victorian era beverage for the staff holiday party. I’ve never had anyone serve one to me before.

My beautiful date.

The regular is basically a wine mulled with citrus, cloves and sugar. In this case, spices included cardamom, peppercorn, cinnamon and allspice. It was rich and warm and I took my time with it. We took our time with everything.

One of the standouts of the meal were the vegan “escargot” which were morels that had been steeped in seaweed brine, providing the rich, musky flavor you would expect from snails.

Our dinner reservation included an invitation to a masquerade ball, somewhere close by, but having spent several hours maskless in an intimate setting with dozens of other diners, we decided not to press our luck, and headed instead to the rooftop bar at our hotel.

We arrived shortly before midnight, had a glass of Veuve Clicquot, and toasted the new year the same way we had met seconds before January 1, 1990 – out of doors, in the cold, with a light rain.

To be continued.

Process XXXI

"Music for Airports"
Brian Eno

Achievement always makes me feel like I am getting away with something. I was stressed out about my poetry assignment all week, turning it in after midnight Saturday (Sunday morning). And what do you know? Actually working hard on something can be rewarding, even if you don’t realize it at the time.

Started re-reading Still Life With Woodpecker a week ago, but I am finding it demoralizing. When I mentioned it online, a number of people over a certain age, many of them women, expressed their long-felt affection for the book, and for others by Robbins. But particularly this one.

And yet, while my twenty year-old self was tickled by his near abusive use of metaphor and his liberated approach to sexual desire, I feel that centering the narrative on a progessive young woman is a trick, and very dated. His fetishization of Leigh-Cheri (is it lee-sheree or lay-cherry, her name is a sexual pun) seems creepy and I know how the story goes, as she will be seduced and radicalized by a man.

"One From the Heart"
Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle

What is interesting is that, like many books, this one was recommended to me by a woman I was infatuated with, the same woman who never wore a watch because she didn’t want to be bound by the arbitrary strictures of time and besides, asking people the time, when necessary, means not being afraid of others. Because of her, for a year I did not wear a watch and as a result I was late for everything. Robbins should write a book about that relationship.

Huh. Maybe I will write a play about it. Hmn. Notes.

Okay. So. This is my bye week in poetry, I need to keep up with my reading but no assignment due today. Well-timed, as we are throwing a party for the graduate tomorrow. Summer in full effect. I feel like it's all gonna happen now.

Play a Day: I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet

Andrew Rincón

For Saturday, I read I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet by Andrew Rincón and posted at New Play Exchange.

Come on, girls -- do you believe in love? Because Andrew Rincón has got something to say about it, and it goes something like this. A poet (the stage directions) tells a story of love between two (or three) shepherded by a god of love and a Catholic saint.

It’s a story of the ending of relationships, and also the beginnings, from Heaven to Hackensack. And even if Kanye and Kim have broken up since this script was written (sorry, Valentine) it remains a touching, hopeful and hilarious examination of love and why it matters. 

Who should I read tomorrow?

The Short Play Project: Romantic Series

My last day in the office was Monday, March 16. That, for us, was the beginning of quarantine.

The night before I posted the first video in the Short Play Project. I had put out a request for interested parties who would like to create art through (or in spite of) social distance.

Since then folks in Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere have created over forty-five short films from my brief play scripts.

What is remarklable to me is how many, written before the onset of COVID-19, have taken on additional significance, recorded as they are over conferencing platforms, cellphones, or even in makeshift tents.

Here are three romantic short plays.


"Hands"
Performed by Adam Graber & Vince Williams


"First Kiss"
Performed by Bobby Coyne & Valerie C. Kilmer


"Worlds"
Performed by Laura Burnett & Joe Tanjai

You can watch the entire Short Play Project here.

One From the Heart (album)

“I should go out and honk the horn,
It’s Independence Day.
Instead I just pour myself a drink.”
- This One’s From the Heart, Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle

Twenty-five years ago and shortly after I got married (the first time) I craft myself a mixtape. I do not need to explain what a mixtape is, Nick Hornby did so most eloquently in High Fidelity. Needless to say, there are the tapes you made for yourself, and those you made for others. This one was for me.

Mixtapes took time in a way playlists do not, because they needed to be edited in real time. You had to play the song all the way through to get it on tape. You had to listen to it that way, too. There was also a mystery to the duration of the side, and how many songs you could get on it … unless your new bride was a programmer and made you a special time calculator, which she was and which she had.

My urge for this particular mixtape was to create a melancholy mix of every song that hurt. If it was not a song which in the playing humiliated me, and deeply, then it had no place on the cassette. The cover art is made of lines of handwriting, photocopied from some of the most painful letters I had ever received from lovers or friends. The tape was titled, “pathetic.”

I made this tape for myself in January 1993. I had been married for less than two months.

“I can’t tell, is that a siren or a saxophone?”
- This One’s From the Heart, Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle

July 4, 1981. Not yet thirteen, crazy about girls since I was at least ten, at the annual Independence Day carnival celebration in my hometown I made a connection with the one who would soon become my first true girlfriend. Soon, but not yet.

Emboldened by my first kiss, I spent the summer flirting with other girls, too. I decided I wasn’t exactly the creep I always thought I was, and it was a new world, writing letters, straining to express desire and interest without knowing the words.

I had my own soundtrack then, too. A cassette of singles I had purchased over the months from Kmart. They were the songs of the corporate radio machine, so even though my memory of the summer of ‘81 includes masculine pop classics like Hall & Oates “You Make My Dreams” and “Jessie’s Girl” the tunes on my playlist were prefab nonsense like “Hooked On Classics” and “Stars on 45.”

As with so many things, I was never very good at knowing exactly what good taste in music was. This was always something I relied on girls to teach me.

"Don't sit home and cry
On the Fourth of July."
- Little Boy Blue, Tom Waits

One woman I knew had a term for when you tell a story so many times you put yourself into the story and believe that you had actually been there; she called it an “in vitro experience.” And so it is with the music that means so much to the people that I get close to, and my love for them imprints this music on my heart so deeply that even when they are gone, and my connection between them and the music in question has faded deeply into the background, my own affection for the music remains as though I had discovered it myself.

First she played me “Nothing Looks the Same in the Light.” Later, she taught me what it means.

He played the soundtrack to The Moderns so often, I had created an entire screenplay in my head years before I had ever seen it. My version was darker.

Then there was the one with whom I often shred a bed, but no kisses. At bedtime, they would often play One From the Heart, a collection of songs by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle written for a film by Francis Ford Coppola. It was in joining them in this practice (more than once) that this entire record became one I still need to listen to all the way through, that it doesn’t even exist to me as individual songs, only endless night whispers and thwarted fumbling.

Never seen the movie. Most people haven't.

Sometimes I feel as though I have absolutely no personality of my own, that I am merely a hollow vessel, devoid of spirit, emotion, or understanding, filled to overflowing with the memories, thoughts, ideas and passions of others. My great hope is that my interpretation and redirection of all of these compelling and competing narratives has somehow held within them any spark of originality.

Happy Independence Day.

UPDATE 2026: Last summer, I finally saw the film One From the Heart. Like The Moderns, it was nothing like the movie I had created in my head. Unlike The Moderns, it's terrible

Play a Day: Encanta

Shawn C. Harris

For Wednesday I read Encanta by Shawn C. Harris, available at New Play Exchange.

This is an absurd tropical adventure with amorous pirates, heartbroken witches, and murderous church ladies. Our heroes literally dance on the edge of a volcano.

They dance on the edge of a volcano.

The stage directions make the audience complicit in the action of the play. We are beachcombers, members of a costume party, a mob of kidnappers. I want to see the production where these things actually happen.

The piece wears its inspirations proudly, though I am curious as the whether the pirate Penzima and the sorceress Katrina are an intentional nod to Petruchio and Katherine, because they certainly could be.

This morning I woke from a particularly vivid dream; we were in a small club where Bryan Ferry was performing, He was seriously old and unshaven, and writhing on the floor. He found a fat potato chip and crushed it in his fingers as a metaphor about love.