Uh I’m sorry that I can’t you know open the conversation and talk easily with you about it like gracefully and sympathetically because uh I get uh tongue tied you know I like get nervous and I can’t talk because you know it’s all these thoughts like these thoughts inside my head and I want to talk to you but I can’t express myself you know I can’t uh get these ideas out of my head and into yours and achieve clarity and sympathy and uh sorry did you say something?

Jenna picked at her salad with one hand and flipped her black curls off her forehead with the other. Her high cheekbones, which I have often seen pale and drawn, had a pleasant pink flush. She was happy, and I was happy to see her.

“I want to thank you again for doing Orpheus Descending with me,” I said. “Two years ago, was it?”

“Almost to the day,” said Jenna. Her twenty-seven year old cheeks dimpled dutifully.

“Did you ever see Alan after the show ended?” I asked.

I saw a little shadow pass over her face. “We exchange e-mails from time to time,” she said. “But, no, once the play was over I never saw him again.”

“What happened between you and Alan?” I asked.

“Oh, I fell in love with him. Did you not know? Yes,” she said. “Or perhaps I fell in love with the character he was playing. Or both.”

I decided to change the subject. “How is the married life?”

Jenna smiled. “Oh, Chris is a dear. We’ve been married for three years, and things are much better between us now. He’s okay with you and I having dinner together.”

“I never quite understood why Chris hated me so much,” I said. “Why did he refuse to let you visit me for all those months?”

Jenna dropped the piece of bread on the plate. “During Orpheus Descending, my husband was convinced that I was in love with another man. He was right, of course. He was just wrong about who the other man was.”

You know when I’m in a play, and I either tell you flat out, “This play’s gonna be good, come see it” or I mumble and change the subject to something else?

Well. This play’s gonna be good. It might even be really good. Come see it.

Dragon Productions presents Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, directed by Jane Geesman. It runs February 18 through March 6, Thursday thru Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. at the Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View.

Tickets are $10 – $20. You can purchase them online here or call (650) 492-2006.

Are you a loser with no life? Sure you are! Come on by tonight (that’s as in February 5, 2005) to the PEERS Ball at the Masonic Lodge in beautiful downtown San Mateo! The M. Lestat de Lioncourt will be there, and boy, will he be funny!

“But darling most of all…” sang Amanda, spooning against me and holding herself to me. “I love how you love me.”

The plane touched down with a gut-wrenching thud in Seattle. I hustled off the plane, activated the GPS and drove at eighty miles an hour to the conference.

“Time,” I say. My head begins to swim and the world dims. I sink down to the curb.

The lawyer leaned across the boardroom table and looked in my eyes. “If I can speak candidly here? I just don’t think you understand. The value. You?re off by an order of magnitude.”

I turned over and looked at her. “Things in my life are happening too quickly,” I said. “Drama, fear, anger, conflict. Too much. I seem to be losing my understanding of temporality. My sense of order.”

“The news was on KGO radio,” said the e-mail. “I realize that you are all grown-ups, but I’d like you to keep the news as quiet as you can, for as long as you can.”

Danielle wrote, “About five hundred people will be attending tonight. But seeing as how all of us are sick, we’ll cancel the rehearsal. Don?t worry! Everyone participating is a great improv actor. We?ll fake it! You’ll be a great emcee tonight, John.”

“Don?t change a single fuckin? word,” said Devon. “If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

ESTELLE: “You think too much!”

CRADEAU: “And what else is there to do?”

Elevator music. “Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold.” I redo the math: redo the license contract, send out quotes, reprint the postcards, four days, reprint the flyers, that’s five days, mailing house is three days, that’s not enough–”

The most expensive bedroom in Seattle, underneath the down sheets, three a.m. The asthmatic sigh of the high-speed elevator: inhale exhale inhale exhale, tick tick tick tick.

“And I can’t turn my brain off,” I said. “All these problems, all these thoughts and ideas. I can’t make sense of any of it. I can?t stop thinking. Please. Can you help me?”

“No, I didn’t read what you wrote… but that doesn?t matter!” she shouted. “You have no permission! You’ll delete it immediately!”

The beer and wine is on the company card. Somehow I’ve just bowled three strikes in a row. Jean-Pierre looks at me with a sardonic grin. “You’re the vendor and we’re the client, you know. You?re supposed to lose in order to make us feel good.”

“Sshh,” said Amanda, holding me. “You need sleep. Let me sing to you.”

From: J&C Myers

Cc: Charles McKeithan

It was great meeting you at last Saturday’s ball, John, and fun dancing with you (You’re much too modest about your dance skills!). Yes, Charles is right: PEERS does need another leading man (we have some great character actors and some cute juveniles but it will be some years before they’re romantic lead materials!). If you’d like to come and play with us when your schedule permits, we’d be overjoyed!

So on to the next event we’re trying to seduce you into doing:

Those are great photos, by the way! If you can do Dracula, you can certainly do perfect justice to the character of Lestat – assuming you’re available and still interested and want to do the gig. Here’s a link to the ball’s official page. The date is Saturday, February 5, and, though the acting is mostly improvisational, we’d like to get in one evening rehearsal-cum-dinner before the ball.

Lestat de Lioncourt is a complex character. Only one side of him is shown in the film version of “Interview with a Vampire” and Tom Cruise did just fine with the one dimenstion the screenplay let him have. In the later Anne Rice novels, Lestat emerges as a much more three-dimensional character. Unlike Dracula, he prides himself on hunting the evil doer. In tallying up his virtues, however, Lestat does not, however, always take into account the number of hearts he’s broken and the number of lives he’s ruined. He’s – even for a vampire – egotistical and narcissistic, fully aware of his own beauty, talent and charm. (I know that’s a stretch for Charles but he’s a trooper).

Please do let me know whether you’d like to do the role. We will schedule the character rehearsal around your schedule and will find a Peninsula or Southbay location for it since all but one of the actors playing principal characters at the ball live either on the Peninsula or in the South Bay – a real first for us! Most of the rest of the PEERS gang is from the East Bay.

The challenge of playing Lestat would be that you’d be working not just with seasoned professionals like Arthur Pruyn and Beth George but also with two inexperienced young actors playing Lestat’s “family” – the handsome but guilt-stricken Louis and Claudia, the exquisite child vampire. Tui (our Claudia) is the most beautiful child actress I’ve ever seen and a trained dancer as well. She’s played Little Nell at Dickens Fair for two years now and takes direction very well and her British upbringing really shows. She is, however, a little intimidated about being the ball’s co-hostess and would definitely need some attention and encouragement from you (Beth and Arthur will help, of course). Jeff Jenkins (Louis) has had a lot of stage experience but not much with improv (he looks good, which helps), so he’d also need some gentle guidance from Lestat.

Now that’s the ball itself. Within the ball we have a one act play from the Theater of the Vampires, which will be performed at half-time. The conceit (in the Anne Rice novels) is that the actors in Le Theatre des Vampires are vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires (“How avant guarde!” is Claudia’s comment in the film). Anyway, I THINK we have Charles’ character in the play re-cast (he was originally set to play both Lestat the host and the hero of the play), but if that falls through, is that something you’d be interested in? It’s a 25 minute piece and, of course, that’s a lot to master in less than a month, and we’d be having at least two rehearsals – plus a pre-ball rehearsal on the evening of the ball.

But do let me know if you’re interested. It’s a fun Victorian melodrama based on a trifling but fun vampire story by novelist Marie Elizabeth Braddon, a friend of Charles Dickens.

I know, of course, that you’re busy with a new production and Charles also mentioned that you have another writing project, but if you find you can’t manage to fit our February 5 event into your schedule, we do have lots of other events in the works. Check our 2005 schedule and see if anything interests you. If you’re free, for example, March 5 (also a Saturday) – our Romeo & Juliet Ball – is also a role-playing intensive ball. We’re simply spending the entire evening portraying the characters (and extras) at Lord Capulet’s Ball and will, of course, do some Shakespearean scenes at intermission along with our improv work. Charles is Mercutio. We really need a strong Tybalt as a foil. Interested?

Our biggest pure theatrical project of the year is our November 5 (also a Saturday) Le Bal des Vampires, at which Le Theatre des Vampires always performs at half-time. It’s usually a fully costumed one act play and, thanks very much to Charles and our ensemble, the acting’s pretty impressive. Anyway, if something like this interests you, please let me know. Of course, you’d probably have to commit before seeing the script but that’s the life of our non-profit, volunteer organization! But I’m usually pretty good at meeting script deadlines.

Anyway, please check your schedule and let me know what your availability is for the above-mentioned events.

Fondest regards,

Cathleen

Alex walked out of the Noh Space and into the chill South of Market air. She emitted that burning aura that actors radiate after they’ve just given their strongest performance — she practically gleamed. Alex said, “It’s not that I don’t want you to come, but I’m afraid that you shouldn’t come.”

“Why not?” I asked. A happy couple of theatergoers beamed at Alex, and she waved at them.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s called the Lexington. It’s in the Mission. It’s just a dive bar, with cheap beer.”

“Great job,” someone shouted. Alex waved again and grinned.

“It may not be for you,” said Alex. “It’s kind of… A women-only bar. Lesbians. Well, I suppose you can come, but you’ll be the only straight man there.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said. “It’ll rock.”

—–

The Lexington, nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds later. A girl with a pierced nose and a ripped black T fingers a pool cue thoughtfully outside the bar. The woman working the bar is black and round and tough. Her hair is close cropped, and her eyes are the color of chestnuts. She weighs almost as much as I do. She slams down a glass of pineapple-orange juice on the bar. I raise it over my head to protect it from the pool cues and the swing-dancing goth chicks, and I walk over to the table of actresses.

Lee is big, as in six feet, with a smile widened by a couple of glasses of something red. She’s the artistic director of something. Ann, this side of forty, in a denim skirt with curly blonde hair, sits immediately to her left. Directly in front of me is Patrice — mixed-race, perhaps black and Asian. She fondles what looks like a piece of alabaster. Alex and Stacey are at the other end of the table, along with a few other women I don’t know.

The conversation is fast and not very coherent. The din and the threads of multiple sentences and topics all simultaneously dogpile on top of one another.

Lee raises her powerful hand into the air and screams, grinning. “It is! It is an experience you will never forget! You’re coming! I’m going next weekend, and you’re definitely coming! To go through it, and come out the other side… It is the most powerful thing that can happen to you, ever!”

Patrice shows the rock to me. “You feel that, honey? Coming off that rock, it’s like heat? That’s power, darling. It’s the healing power, tell me that you don’t feel it.”

Ann sidles up to Lee and whispers something gently in her ear.

Lee shouts, “Caving! That’s what I’m talking about, caving! We’re going next weekend… I found this wonderful place near Sacramento! It is the darkest, tiniest, most twisted and closed collection of rock anywhere! And look at me — look how big I am — Can you imagine that I could fit through a solid-rock hole only this big?” Lee shapes her hands into a basketball.

Patrice puts the rock into my hand. “That rock right there is from the pyramids at Giza. Got the healing power of the pharaohs. You can feel it. It’s given me nothing but luck. Nothing but luck. I use it to warm these hands, just before I work on Alex.”

Ann says, “Oh, Lee and I are not going out right now. I just made out with her once. I didn’t actually get my rocks off, though.” Ann laughs.

Lee screams, “I’ve only done it once — but it changed my life! I was in this tube, only this big — complete darkness and rocks pressing on my body from all sides — and then, I focused myself and shot through the hole, like a bullet! You have to overcome all the challenges of yourself — physical, emotional, mental — in order to survive!”

Patrice says, “Alex and I trade massage therapy. She’s worked on me for seven years, honey. And she’s got a good and honest energy. A powerful earth-based energy.” Alex hears her name, and looks toward the conversation. Patrice throws her hands up and hoots at Alex. “I’m talking about your energy! That’s what I’m talking about, girlfriend!”

I said, “Don’t you need some kind of training? Some kind of safety gear to go caving?”

Lee pounds on the table. “And when you pop out the other side and come back into the light — You want to fall on the ground and roll in the mud, it feels so good to be free, back into life, back into the light! You are alive! You survived the earth! And the rocks! You can survive!” She reaches for my hand and howls. “YOU MUST COME CAVING! TELL ME YOU’RE GOING CAVING!”

—–

I walked Alex to her car. “Did they treat you kindly? How was it?” she said.

“It rocked,” I said.