1/23/10 Yes, when the show is over I’ll be posting new material. I just can’t write other stuff while I’m doing this. Please understand and check in. If you’re in Portland–come to the show.

1/22/10 See what the audience is saying.

1/21/10
1/10/10 We’ve been hard at it and the Tech is mostly there! getting comfy on the set. We got an overture today! wow. Risers, chairs. Like a real theatre….

1/3/10 We loaded the show in the space. The lights are up. Tomorrow we’ll give her a workout.

12/29 Line of the day: “I don’t want my head in a vice or my ass in a girdle.”

12/26 Three more weeks. Terrifying and delightful all at the same time. Have you got your group together yet?

12/18 The new version of the music is on it’s way. can’t wait.

12/14 I’d better do this new choreography one more time before crashing or it’ll never stick in my tiny brain. But how exciting.

12/10  Tickets make GREAT Christmas and Chanukah presents. They always fit and the color is right. Fertile Ground Passes:   For $100 you can get into EVERYTHING that’s part of the festival. (My show opens before the Festival begins. If you buy a pass from me I’ll honor it on the opening weekend of The Only Way Out is Through–January 15, 16 or 17–and you can save your festival weekends for the other shows. GROUP OUTING? email me and I’ll help you plan.

12/05 We had our first session with Choreographer Kerris Cockrell Thursday and that was a lot of fun (with a few creaks in the knewws the next day.) It’s another wonderful hit of seeing something that has lived in my own head for months now take more shape in someone else’s and come alive. You’ll definitely want to come see us rock out to the X Song!

11/29 It’s interesting coming to understand my own play as an actor. I feel like I’m looking at a scene from another side of screen with a vague sense of deja vu. I’m glad for the experience.

11/21 playing in props and costumes and NEW PHOTOS!! Take a look. That’s my co-star Cindy Lyndin, who plays Dr. Dopfelganger and Laine and sings like an angel.

11/16 It’s great to be singing this stuff. I’m transitioning from playwright to actor. And man, memorizing isn’t like it used to be. Just because those words came out of my head doesn’t mean they go back in so easily.

11/13 I have two set-rooms set up in my basement for rehearsals. The Clackamas Women Lawyers are excited about their evening-to-be at the theatre. Wouldn’t your group like to come? email me–we’ll tawk.

11/6  This was a big week as we started blocking rehearsals and got a choreographer.   I’ve set up a mini-set in my basement and the props, they are a gatherin.  I even scored some pillows for seating. I still need more tho’.

10/27 I should have 3 pretty scores now it’s time to cleanup the website. Time to put on my waders…

10/25  Have you “fanned” at the FB fan page?  I’ve starting a discussion page on bringing your book group to the show in January.  This would be a great night out and it’s not too early to start getting on everyone’s calendar.  Special pricing for groups, meet the author (oo-wheee) and best of all–you don’t have to read a book!!! nochowfun@gmail.com–let’s talk.

10/22  Suddenly they’re words coming out of an actor’s mouth.  And songs too!

What is Chanukah all about? Chanukah, my children, Chanukah is the festival of socks. Each year the great Bubbe comes to the foot of each child’s bed and takes a sniff.

“Och, gotenyu. What a smell. I can tell you need new socks, you little stinker.”

And so, all over the world, at Chanukah, children get socks to replace the old worn out and stinky ones from last Chanukah. So now you know! Now we understand our non-Jewish neighbors, who always like to borrow our traditions and adjust them just a bit, come to hang their stockings by the hearth. Their Great Bubbe goes in drag and has a yen for fireplaces. Do we have fireplaces? No. Who would chop the wood? Who would make the fire? But it’s good for the Goyim. So socks connect us all with a sense of the warmth of the season.

Chocolate, my children, we celebrate Chanukah to appreciate how good the world is when there are eight days in a row of chocolate at our table. We have chocolates to share, to give and most importantly to eat. We even have chocolate to drink-noch. We make chocolate into money and gamble for it with our dreidels. If we are very lucky we get many Gimmels. Gimmels are for great—a great miracle happened here. Of course I’m right—I just won all the chocolate. Ante up so I can spin again before my dreidel cools off.

And why is chocolate so important? It’s the most delicious thing of all. It is rich and warm. It can be wrapped in beautiful paper and please the eye, even the eye of a grumpy Shin spinner. It gives you energy. It’s energy and hope that make you spin again and again and eventually you might get at least a Hay and split the pot. Chocolate makes you sweet on the inside, which makes you sweet on the outside which makes the world sweet.

Nuts kinder, nuts. This is what we want on Chanukah. The earth has given us nuts of the season and we use these to play and play with our dreidel. Nuts of all kinds, with their pretty little wooden homes. Round mahogany homes for filberts, thin crowded pecan shells crammed with sweetness. Stout comfortable walnut shells so that walnuts may play Chanukah games before they serve as Charoseth next Pesach and even dark crinkly homes for Brazil nuts, full of oil, like our beloved lamp.

Oh but you must think I am silly to forget the star of the whole show, quietly waiting in the dark for me to notice—our humble and most-dear Chanukah friend—the potato. The potato gives it’s all for Chanukah, allowing it’s pale flesh to be shredded, and stirred with eggs and onion and ladled into hot grease, flipped on it’s back, splashed with sour cream or applesauce (ok, you can have both) chewed and swallowed and maybe even some day soon, digested. This gentle giant promises all year long, reminding us how much we love Chanukah for the excuse to make latkes, for the better excuse to eat latkes, and for all the oil we can consume with each latke. And this, this little potato, really this is the secret of Chanukah. How the perfectly ordinary, so common among us, shines with greatness in the lights of hope, happiness, family, food and song.

What? You say Chanukah is not the potato, not the nuts, not the chocolate, not the warm snuggly socks? You’ve got to be kidding. Not even the beautiful menorah all bright with her warm candles? Songs—are you sad because I forgot the wonderful Chanukah songs where everyone knows the first two lines and hums the rest slightly out of tune? Is that what you think?

Oh, no. You think it’s us? Me, and the children, and our friends, and the guy I work with, and my neighbor, all gathered around the menorah while I look for the matches, turn down the soup that’s boiling over, flip the latkes one last time and finally make the brocha. You think that’s what Chanukah’s all about? Well, maybe you’re right.

You can teach an old car new tricks.

When I moved to Portland, I bought my first car: a perfect green Rambler Rogue. I paid $1000 for a car that ran almost perfectly for years and worried that I likely overpaid.

I spoiled her faded, matronly body, by plunging it into a small yellow truck in a residential intersection. My only defense was exhaustion; I had just finished my first year in law school. The humans were just fine, but the Rogue gushed blue all over the intersection. My heartbreak.

My boyfriend loved cars and had monkeyed around with them since boyhood. This was more complex body work than he had done before but his devotion let to months of rehab. Love me—love my Rogue. She re-emerged as the lemon-lime Rogue. She had a shiny yellow hood and fenders, fresh from the junk yard, on her straightened steel frame.

In search of my next human romance I came to discover the Rogue’s special secrets. The front seats flattened back into a double mattress—they even took a fitted sheet if one was to be so delicate. She was the auto-equivalent of the diaphragm: up-front and functional. Together we navigated the public lands of Oregon in those wondrous days before “sex” was modified by the word “safe.”

I didn’t think she’d make it cross-country so I let her keep her cushy job, trucking law students to school, for a few more years. Eventually I replaced her with a brand new little red Chevette. I sometimes regretted leaving the Rogue behind. She didn’t need red, shiny, brand new. She was a classic, beyond all that. Her light yellow and faded green body was like Sophia Loren however thick the glasses. She was permanently hot.