I just want you all to think of this as visual haiku.
Scarier Than Halloween
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Monthly Archives: October 2014
No Hope In Anything But Dessert
Mike Donahue and I have discovered that the way to survive rehearsals that go to 11 is for one of us to bring the dinner and the other to bring dessert. So far Donahue has been responsible for dessert. Yesterday we rehearsed Rice to Riches and today we rehearsed Magnolia. I mean, the play. I mean, what? 
In other news, a PSA from your friendly local laundromat:
Mugshot
When you shine bright lights on a herd of grazing playwrights, they are often stunned into standing very still, as they wait to be consumed by predators. – David Attenborough, shooting a nature documentary across the sprawling plains of Juilliard. 
(Photo by http://GregoryCostanzo.com/)
Ryder Farm, Adieu
The last weekend of my SPACE residency. I find it hard to imagine that winter will come, and I won’t be back here every other weekend/ every second/ tomorrow/ right now. Sarah Lunnie took most of these pictures, while also dramaturging my play, while also wearing bohemian wrist-warmers from Estonia. New residents included two white horses and two bearded goats. My friends are a glam set. 
Co-Parenting
I’m on Ryder farm, and Mazefield is in New York eating live crickets. While I wish I were witnessing this, I did get to hear it happen over the phone. #TheyGrowUpSoFast 
More Importantly,
I mean, ebola yes, but I JUST WANT EVERYBODY TO CLOCK that dying of a bee-sting IS ON THIS LIST: What’s My Risk Of Catching Ebola? #beesarescary #Iamvindicated #IcaughtaBeeinaJarOnceWithoutAnyHelp&itWastheBravestActofmyLife
MAZEFIELD!!!
There comes a time in every person’s life when you become responsible for the life of another. One is not always ready to become a parent. One does not always expect to become a parent. But when you come face to face with your child for the first time, and it looks up at you with its giant, trusting, slightly bulging eyes, and you hold its small tank in your arms in the midst of the chaos of an East Village bar, and your child is an albino African Clawed Frog, you fall in love. And you know that you will do whatever it takes, like capturing baby cockroaches and mosquitos and house flies, to make your child happy.
Meet Mazefield. He likes Yayoi Kusama installations, Ariana Grande sing-alongs, hiding inside of an egg-cup, and grabbing food with both front hands and stuffing it into his mouth, because his species doesn’t have a tongue. Mazefield also likes it when I crouch in front of his tank going, “Is he depressed? Do you think he’s depressed? Does he look depressed?” and Mazefield’s more well-adjusted co-parent says, “I think he looks like a frog.”
Mazefield in hiding
Butterflown
If you do one thing in DC (other than see Rachel Bonds’ play THE WOLFE TWINS at Studio Theatre – which you should do) – it should be the butterfly room at the Museum of Natural History.
Here’s what happens. You walk into a small humid glass airlock. Glass doors in front of you. Doors behind you. It feels very Jurassic Park. Maybe very OUTBREAK? A slightly bored employee, who is inured to people freaking out about butterflies and is generally tired of your joy, informs you that you shouldn’t pat/ squish/ steal/ eat the butterflies. Then the airlock opens and you walk into a Garden of Eden enclosure, in which GIGANTIC BUTTERFLIES ROAM FREE. They fly around your head with giant flapping wings, and they land on your hair, or your arms, or flowers, or pieces of slightly-decaying tropical fruit. And they are amazing. 
Emerging
The question I hear many of my peers ask is: What does it mean to be an emerging playwright? When do we get to stop emerging?
Those are fair questions, but honestly, my question is: What exactly are we emerging FROM? Several possibilities come to mind.
1. A swamp.
2. A cave?
3. The intestines of a biblically-proportioned whale?
4. A very large bus. Like a tour-bus.
5. A police state, similar to North Korea.
6. A FEMA trailer.
7. A miasma of some kind!
8. A cauldron.
9. A trench.
10. The fat-padded and therefore comfortably livable space between the ribs of a grizzly bear. Not all of us would fit in such a space, so it’s really a fairly miniature set of playwrights who emerge in this specific fashion.
More Fore-Leg, Anyone?
Yes, that’s a dead cricket. (An edible one.) (A dead-ible one?) Mere seconds after this photograph was taken, it was consumed. Eating dinner with these boys is a dangerous affair. 
Thankfully Rachel Bonds and I split all the plates that didn’t involve insects and/or the insides of things.