Process LXVI

Stop Making Sense

Interviewer: What are you going to do next?
David Byrne: A project with songs based on true stories from tabloid newspapers. It's like “60 Minutes” on acid.

Break’s over, back on your heads.

Last year, I regretted (only slightly) taking a summer course because I didn’t appreciate the idea of sixteen weeks of work crammed into six. But my, did I enjoy the time off once that was through.

Having the entire season without any classes, however, I feel mentally out of shape. No reading, no writing -- and that was before my eye procedure. But the days pass as days will and ready or not, school is here and the time is right for dancing in the sheets (of paper).

Fortunately, the last of the gas bubble which was put into my eye (to assist healing) disappeared the same day as the plastic medal band on my wrist, the one warning EMTs not to administer N₂O or to put me on a plane, finally cracked and fell off. Reading was suddenly easier, driving possible. I began running again.

Thursday night the semester began as I drove to Akron for my first class in a course on creative non-fiction. In spite of having autobiographical plays, these did not involve research. I wrote what I thought, from my own point of view. This is not creative fiction. Memoir, perhaps. Not the same thing.

Girlfriend Is Better

Shortly after obtaining an Apple Macintosh SE in 1990, I did what all callow young men do shortly before graduating college, I started to write the Great American Novel. That fall I drank 100 proof Southern Comfort, smoked cigarettes, and banged out my first book.

It was a recollection of a solo road trip I had taken the previous year, when I visited a former girlfriend with whom my relationship was undefined, and also to see my dying grandfather. Heady stuff. Great potential. Unfortunately, it read like a journal, not a novel, and the horrible truth was I wasn’t terribly interested in anything that was going on around me.

I was twenty years old. I was traveling through the deep South, to first reach Panama City, Florida, then onto Clearwater. And yet, I took the interstate, and not any two-lane roads. I ate at chain restaurants in service plazas instead of seeking local cooking. My erstwhile girlfriend was seeing one guy, and had her eyes on another (who would become her life partner) and I was a dull interloper.

When I did visit my grandfather, it was for one long afternoon in which neither of us said very much at all. He was in great pain, and I was terrified of that and of him. It was a pilgrimage I felt I ought to make, though I did not know why.

Road To Nowhere

Most of the narrative included my referring to other, better books, like Blue Highways, Still Life With Woodpecker, even Anne Rice’s Belinda. I quoted song lyrics which weren’t epigrams so much as hopefully evocative phrases taking the place of any original sentiment I was unable to have or create.

Basically, because it happened to me, I thought it was important for others to know about. I guess I’ve always thought that. I like to think I’ve gotten better at deciding which tales to tell, and how to tell them.

So, anyway, we’re not doing that this semester. This time, we’re telling other people’s stories. True stories.

I Hate This (First Reading, 2002)

Twenty years ago today, August 26, 2002, we held the first public reading of I Hate This (a play without the baby).

To recap, my wife and I suffered a stillbirth in early 2001. And I wrote about it. And wrote about it. My journal was a form of solace and understanding. We mourned, we talked, we traveled. We wanted things to stand still for a while but they kept moving forward.

My wife had a show in the New York Fringe that August and I saw a lot of shows, many of them solo performances. As I drove a van of sleeping teenagers and young adults back to Cleveland I had a lot of time to think and I realized then that I was going to write a show about this experience.

It had only been five months. I told myself to wait, not to think about it again at least until the new year. The wife had invited me to join her writers’ group which met at that coffee shop in University Circle. In 2002 I began to share pages for what would become my first solo performance.

Early that summer I met for lunch with Joyce Casey, Artistic Director of Dobama Theatre. As I had worked there for three years she was my former employer and mentor, and also a good friend. I had shared the script with her and she asked how she could help with the piece and I said I wanted to hold a reading, an invitation-only event and could I use the space. She agreed.

This was something I had never done before. I hadn’t actually written many plays. I’d never had a public-private showcase of a work I had just written. Maybe a few folks invited over to my house to read and comment. I planned to invite a wide variety of people, friends and close artistic colleagues, but also directors of other theater companies and most importantly to extend an invitation to those we had met on our journey, others who had lost children and were familiar with this grief.

I made postcards to send through the mail or to hand out. I must have sent emails, too.

Tom Cullinan was director, he would go on to direct the original staging of the play. We worked in various rooms in my house to create a shape for this performance. It was script-in-hand but there was also blocking. In the end what we created was the basis for the stage play I would eventually perform, on and off, for the next five years.

There were no slides, I read the title for each scene. There was no music or sound effects, those would come later. There were a couple music stands so I could place the script for longer passages. It was a staged reading. I wore the sweater.

The version dated June, 2002 is remarkably similar to the final version. I have edited and edited as the years have gone by, but its shape was established from the beginning. There are uninteresting details which were cut, and inaccuracies.

“I sang to it on Friday and I swear it was listening to me.”

That line may be poetic, or possibly emotion-evoking. It is not accurate. I changed that passage before the first reading. There were many, many f-bombs, and other obscenities which were unnecessary.

There is a scene where my brother and I are in the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, observing the Annunciation Triptych. I compare myself to Joseph, the blithely ignorant father: “He has no idea what’s about to happen to him.” In the original draft I go on to describe other famous men who have lost children:

“God lost His son. Did you know the guy that writes Doonesbury, his wife had a stillbirth. And John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a number of miscarriages. And Luis Guzman. He’s that guy, you know, in 'Traffic' … yeah, you know, that guy, him, too. Read it somewhere. Really fucked him up for a while. Isn’t he great?”

That passage was struck from the August, 2002 version, the one I used for the reading. I had wanted to share what a widely-felt experience child loss is, and examples of famous men who have was one way to do that, I guess. But the scene is long and bends from topic to topic and we needed to draw a narrower focus.

Trying to describe our visit to Great Britain to see my other brother that summer, I originally read this:

“I don’t know what we wanted our trip to London to be, but it wasn’t what we wanted. I love that city, it bleeds history, and you’re surrounded by people from all over the world, rushing through its narrow streets, the places just pulses with music and art and exciting smells and noise. But it was still scary to even step outside and you know, there are newborn babies everywhere, even in England.”

Press to play.

But that wasn’t right. That’s some sexy but entirely vague explanation of how I feel when I am in any large city, and when things are entirely normal. It didn’t describe that place at that time, the way we were experiencing it. It was revised for the premiere.

The turnout was very good, all things considered. Sixty people? Maybe seventy? Following the reading I changed and sat in the back while Tom led a post-show discussion about the script.

I mean, here’s the thing. Everyone in the room knew me, most likely knew both me and my wife. They knew we’d lost a pregnancy. I knew no one was going to be very critical of the work. But I didn’t know what I’d written. Was it a play? Was this a story anyone wanted to hear? Would they say, I am glad you got that off your chest?

Well, no. No one said that, at least not yet. And there were generous questions about form and clarity. Someone suggested I cast other actors to play the characters I impersonate which was interesting and while that was not something I wanted to do you it has been done that way.

One theater colleague, a playwright (I did not yet call myself a playwright) marveled at the fact that I would even attempt something like this. She said there was this conventional wisdom that it takes ten years before someone can successfully write about tragedy, and yet I just went ahead and did it.

And Randy Rollison, Artistic Director of Cleveland Public Theatre asked if I had any plans for it. I said I had not. He asked if I would like to participate in a new works program he was planning, called Big Box. I said I would.

My wife and I were already four months pregnant with our next, and living child. They would be a month old when this new play would would premiere at CPT in February 2003. And that is how two decades can pass without your really noticing.

How I Spent My Summer (2022)

June: Topsail Beach

This past weekend we visited Athens, Ohio. To celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday. Also, to drop our eldest back at school. A second-year. A sophomore. There is much I could say about my sophomore year at Ohio University. It is enough to say I never accomplished as much as they have their first year, and I lazed away my first summer break from college while they worked and worked and worked. They are my inspiration and my motivation.

I have continued to recuperate from my eye surgery. There are good days and bad. Sleeping remains a challenge. And writing. And reading. I spend a great deal of time on social media, because that is easy. But even my relationship to social media has changed this summer.

July: Deck Time

Last month, someone contacted me via Twitter to let me know they have been made aware that something they had posted on that social media site I have reposted onto my professional Facebook page.

I post all manner of things on my Facebook page, related to playwriting, to spur conversation, sure. But also to generate attention.

However, I don’t know this person. Another playwright, yes. But they are not a famous person. What right did I have to repost their thoughts somewhere else for my own purposes? None at all. It was a mistake. I was wrong. I took down the post and I apologized.

This exchange occurred just as my family was leaving on vacation without me the day before I would undergo surgery on my left eye was extremely helpful. It meant that instead of spending the day feeling sorry for myself, I could spend the day hating myself.

July: Zoom Reading

Feeling sorry for myself means something beyond my control happened to me, that I am a victim of circumstance. And as far my eye is concerned, perhaps that is true.

But I do shit like this all the time. Social media has only enabled me to cast a wider net of people to hurt. Hating oneself, at least, places blame squarely where it belongs.

The ten days I spent on my own I had the chance to do a lot of viewing. I watched Under the Banner of Heaven, completed BoJack Horseman, a friend came over and we watched The Moderns, another joined me to watch Magnolia. Each and every one of these stories are about men who plow thoughtlessly through their lives, only tangentially aware of their own sense of entitlement. Viewing or reviewing them, I was acutely aware of my own failings.

July: College Visit

I have both thoughtlessly and also with intention damaged personal items that were meaningful to my ex-wife. I have ended friendships with one carefully chosen sentence. I have complicated relationships by saying things I should not have said.

I have transgressed. I have been inappropriate. I have failed to return that call. I have pretended to be asleep.

Early in the social media era, long before the #MeToo era, this guy I know posted something on Facebook along the lines of, “If you are a woman I have hurt, I want to apologize.” That was it. I was incredulous. I’m sure I wasn’t alone. No one responded. Because cringe?

August: Birthday Reunion

But, you know, I understood the impulse. We know we have done bad things. We want people to believe we are good. But we’re really not. I wasn’t when I was a sophomore at Ohio University. And also last month. When will I hurt someone next?

This is not really an account of how I spent my summer, except to say that I have been going through some things. Convalescing has provided an awful lot of time to go through them. My final year of grad school begins next week, and I wonder what I will be writing.

June: Theater Camp

Our Missing Hearts (book)

Pengo's 2022 Summer Book Club

“All the King’s Screenwriters, 1946: A drama of how Fascism might even come to this country.”
- Firesign Theatre, "Dear Friends"

First, a quick update on my health; I’m good. It’s difficult to see out of my left eye, which looks like a disgusting bloody mess, but it feels fine, a little sore for the additional use. A friend came over yesterday and we watched Magnolia. Man, does that thing hit different once your parents are dead.

But, okay. So. On June 24, 2022, the day Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, a playwright on Twitter recommended all those who were moved to write about this disastrous historical event concentrate on the future, not the present. Two wit; write about the effects this will have on people in the future, not about what is happening today.

Which is to say, speculate. Speculative fiction.

Recently, my fourteen year-old niece was reading The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1984 novel that surged with attention after the 2016 election and the Hulu television adaptation that followed. Author Margaret Atwood created an America in the not-too-distant future in which conservative politics and a very real calamity in the human birthrate combine to create a nation where women are regarded primarily as chattel for breeding.

If you could imagine such a thing.

The success of her work, and stories like this, is in its believability. It is grounded in a reality based on laws which have passed, behaviors which have been exhibited, things that have happened.

Dystopian fictions like 1984 (1949, or did I just confuse you) are extreme in their depiction of the future and so lean more into the realm of science fiction, with their guesses at future technologies. As if you can imagine a world where there are screens in every room which watch you just as you watch them, or that screaming at one would be limited to two minutes a day.

With It Can’t Happen Here (1935), novelist Sinclair Lewis set the events of an authoritarian America in his present. With Mussolini’s reign firmly established and Hitler on the ascendant, Lewis sought to shake the United States from the naïve assumption that our democratic systems take care of themselves and that we would never willingly elect a tyrant.

Art: Hartley Lin
The New Yorker, July 31, 2022

Philip Roth put a spin on Lewis’s novel with The Plot Against America (2004), a revisionist history in which the charming hero and Christian Nationalist Charles Lindbergh runs for President in 1940 and wins.

Imagining an alternate Roth family based on his own, this tale centers on an American family that suffers under the Antisemitism which, previous expressed in more subtle and one might say normative manner, is unleashed in naked fury by an American populace emboldened by their new leader.

If you could imagine such a thing.

This summer I had the opportunity to read an ARC (advance review copy) of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, which will be released in October. As described in advance promotional materials, Ng has created an America which has been “governed by laws written to preserve ‘American culture’ in the wake of years of economic instability and violence.” 

Reading this on the beach in North Carolina the the days immediately following Dobbs v. Jackson, in a season when inflation and gas prices may have more effect at the polls than the daily revelations of just how far our former President went to subvert the 2020 election, her work might also have the more immediate title, It Is Happening Here. Or that it has.

It’s the kind of book I would like to imagine being added to the middle school curriculum of every middle school in the nation, if we weren’t living in a land where the reading lists are currently being culled rather than expanded.

Penguin Random House releases "Our Missing Hearts", a new novel by Celeste Ng, on October 4, 2022.

Letterman's Final Morning Show

Merrill Markoe & David Letterman
"The David Letterman Show"
October 24, 1980
(NBC TV)

Had some folks over last night to celebrate my birthday. I thought it would be good to have several people over so they could talk to each other and I would just listen. As it happened, I feel like I did most of the talking. I felt more normal than I have in a week.

Sleeping is still very uncomfortable. In the middle of the night, I watched a YouTube video of the last episode of David Letterman‘s morning program. His first shot at stardom was a daytime television program which was part David Letterman humor, and part… morning program. Who greenlit this, I cannot fathom.

It lasted six months, even that long is crazy when you think of it, over the summer and early fall of 1980. I actually saw this show, because you know, it was summer, I was 12, and it was on television.

For this last episode of what he at that time probably considered the end of his career, he introduced and had a brief interview with the entire company. Announcers, musicians, video editors, crew, etc. He tried to give everybody a little time and also keep it entertaining.

Each staff writer had the opportunity to come out and do one bit. One by one, a white man in a corduroy blazer would step out and make a joke.

At last, he introduced Merrill Markoe. The only female writer on his staff. She was the only one who looked cool. Like, she didn’t care what she looked like, which was on point in 1980. She was wearing a show T-shirt and jeans. She looked like a rock star. She looked like Patti Smith.

Her bit involved explaining to Dave, in the audience, how the show was probably getting canceled because it didn’t have enough sex and violence. To rectify this omission, she brought out a copy of Playboy, and also Playguy (?), set them on a table in the middle of the stage, and offered a tiny peek of each to Dave. That was the sex.

Got my birthday cake.

For the violence, she ushered Dave to the side, put on dagger goggles, undid a rope that was tied to the wall, blew a whistle, and a very heavy weight dropped straight down from the ceiling onto the (pre-scored) table, destroying that — and the pornography she had left sitting on it.

Three or four dudes came out and told their little joke, then Markoe pulled a stunt that worked on many levels.

Did I mention she was the only female writer on the staff? She was also the head writer. Merrill Markoe is such a boss.

Had my follow-up with the eye doctor later in the morning, and things are progressing well. The tear has been repaired, it is healing, I no longer have to keep my head down, and I can sleep normally so long as it is on my right side. This is such excellent news.

I may not resume running for a month, but you know. I can deal with that.

The Maine Videos

Last night I slept for about five hours, set up and watch TV for an hour or so, then slept for another hour and a half.

I have terrible pain in my neck and shoulders, holding my head in the correct position. Also, into a position where I can sleep in my head tilt of the way it supposed to be.

Lots of offers to come by and keep me company, but I’m not really into that. With my head in this position, I feel underwater.

But I’m eating well, dear friend from high school brought me ice cream the other day. Did I blog about that already? I can’t remember.

My dreams, what dreams I have are very strange. In one, the cat got out. Okay, that’s not strange at all. In another, I had to put this blue goo on my shoulders and chest to get home safely.

Other people’s dreams are boring.



Ten years ago I had a new laptop and was playing with various video features. I chose to document our trip to Maine, making one video a day.

It’s hard to describe a place that is so familiar, and yet not really your own. It’s about the setting, of course. It’s perfect. The cabin we stay in, it’s set back from the others, affording more privacy, but it has this excellent view of the water. And it’s best when every room is occupied because it’s full of family and friends.



I’m still not used to my grandparents no longer being there. I’ll never be used to my own parents never being there again. But it’s the vivid memory of them that makes it a joyful place to return to.

Under the Banner of Heaven (miniseries)

Gil Birmingham & Andrew Garfield
"Under the Banner of Heaven"
(FX, 2022)

It’s that second day after a major procedure, when you can feel the worst. That’s where I am right now. Tried to sleep sitting up, tried to sleep lying on my chest. Around four in the morning I curled up on my side with my head twisted to the right and I was finally able to get a couple hours rest.

Meantime, I have been burning through the FX miniseries, Under the Banner of Heaven, Based on the true crime novel by Jon Krakauer.

My father first shared Krakauer with me. The summer my wife and I got married, I read Into Thin Air, his account of the 1996 Chomolungma (Everest) Disaster, while sitting on my porch in 90° weather, and it literally made me chilly. On our honeymoon, she was reading Into the Wild on the patio of a hotel room at Denali, not even 20 miles from where Christopher McCandless died.

Under the Banner of Heaven begins with a double murder which just happened to take place thirty-eight years ago today, July 24, 1984. A pious young woman and her child were killed by men who felt their actions were justified by God. Victim and assailants thought of themselves as Mormon, but had different ideas of what that meant. But women dying at the hands of men in a quest for dominance is universal, and not unique to any one belief system.

I haven’t read the book this series is based on. Father did, an amateur historian and devout Christian. I can only imagine how he may have judged each of the individuals represented in the book, those who are members of the Mormon faith.

I feel however, that this miniseries adaptation, like the musical The Book of Mormon, is not a critique or condemnation of this one Christian religion, but of all religion. In this case, it is also a metaphor for the United States as a whole. Watching this show, which follows the murder investigation and also depicts the historical origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe that the Mormon church is possibly the most American thing ever created.

I believe that Americans are essentially good, and that the American experiment has allowed us the freedom to live independently from strictures of the past. But it has also allowed for a minority of white men to pursue paths of complete selfishness which they defend through a mutating set of beliefs which they call righteous but are always a means to whatever end they desire.

So it is with the LDS, and also the Supreme Court.

Heavenly Father wants us to do this is a common phrase throughout the series, and it is as mutable as the assertion Founding Fathers want us to do this. Interpreting and perverting their unknowable wills has become its own religion.