Mar 19, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From EF— If you’re reading this, it means you’re a reader, and as a reader you’ve probably had the experience of turning a book’s last page and wanting to growl, “No! Don’t stop there!” I stayed up late to finish Lab Girl, a memoir by Hope Jahren, and hop-scotched...
Mar 12, 2018 | Uncategorized
—CB— This week we had two performances of Survival, Elizabeth’s solo show. Both had wonderfully responsive audiences, 20-25 people at each. One was for an elder-housing complex, the other a house concert mainly drawn from the poetry community. These were the tenth and...
Mar 5, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From EF— It’s a damned heady experience to stand before a door you thought you’d already opened, then open it. The sudden flood of light is magnificent. I’ve just finished binge-reading Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, and I’m still giddy. It’s a close-up personal...
Feb 27, 2018 | Uncategorized
—CB— I’ve never spent a lot of time asking myself about “my purpose in life.” One does, of course, in writing your college admissions essay, but after that it’s catch as catch can. There’s your mission statement for your theatre company, dozens of grant applications...
Feb 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From EF— I had a strange, almost holy experience this last Friday. On Thursday, I got up at 5 a.m. to take Conrad to the SF-bound bus. He was attending a four-day writers’ conference, and I’d be on my own until Sunday. I came home, grabbed a little more sleep, and...
Feb 12, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From CB— I think I do obsession pretty well. Not that I would recommend it over Vitamin C, but it can be helpful to keep you on track. At times it can squeeze the life out of life, but if carefully nurtured I can be convinced, however rational I pretend to be, that...
Feb 5, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From EF— Creating a solo show is a unique process. I’ve done two before Survival, and each was very different. The first was huge, a staging of Pamela White Hadas’ book of character poems, Beside Herself: Pocahontas to Patty Hearst, involving eleven separate...
Jan 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From CB— It’s a truism among writing instructors: Kill your darlings. Meaning the phrase or passage you love so much that you’ll go to any length to preserve it, even though it stands like a speed-bump that rips off the wheels of your story. Not that Shakespeare...
Jan 24, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From EF— One perk of being 77 is reveling in long-term comradeship. I have been with Conrad for fifty-seven years, a mighty span. Right now I am visiting a friend I have loved for fifty-one years, another astonishing accomplishment. It’s been half a century of time...
Jan 15, 2018 | Uncategorized
—From CB— I became aware of the Whorfian hypothesis—that a language structure profoundly influences the way we think—in an undergrad linguistics course in 1961. I was 20 then. It’s entered the popular consciousness in simplified form: language structure, grammar,...
Recent Comments