Mother Courage And Her Fanatics

Looks like this Friday will be my last and only chance to see Tony Kushner's new translation of Mother Courage. Oh, and yeah, this production's got Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in it, but you can see them on your television any old time. I'm talking about Brecht by way of Kushner, being performed out loud by live humans.

Anybody want to meet me in Central Park, ungodly early, to line up for free tickets? I've been advised that arriving at 7am to line up for the box office's opening at 1pm is the standard way to go about this. How I'm going to haul my little night owl self to Manhattan by 7am is kind of a mystery at this point, but hey, Brecht! Kushner!

Any friendly denizens of NYC who feel like waiting in line on my behalf will be regarded as bodhisattvas. Well, bodhisattvas are rare. Any friendly New Yorkers who feel like dropping by to hang out while I wait in line for hours will be greeted cheerfully--jubilantly, if you bring me coffee. Sardonic friends who come to goggle at the spectacle of Dr. Pretentious awake and out of the house before 10am will be forgiven, because it is an unlikely sight, if not an actual sign of the apocalypse.

tokeiwakamidesu, we were thinking of meeting up again before you head back west. I don't know when you fly, but I probably won't have another chance to get into the city before October.

EDIT:
Can't make the timing work after all. Damn and blast. See subsequent post. Anyhow, thank you to folks who offered to help me out.

A Change of Plans and a Buried Lead

It turns out my grandfather's memorial service is now going to be on Saturday, not Sunday, which means I will be spending Friday driving to Forestport, rather than seeing Mother Courage in Central Park. Yes, my grandfather died back in June, which is rather a long time to wait--he'd expressed a preference for cremation followed by burial, but not for where he'd like to be buried, and it took my grandmother a while to figure out whether the grave should be in the city where he lived for 30 years, or in his hometown. The hometown won out.

It's the kind of thing I wouldn't want to bail out on, even if I could.

So there's only one thing to do about Brecht: the minute the Kushner translation is available in book form, I'll get a bunch of copies and host a stage reading in my living room, with booze and sock puppets for everyone.

Oh, and the buried lead?

You may remember how the pitch sessions went well at Writer's Weekend, and a Much-Vaunted Agent requested a 100-page partial ms (the usual sample length people ask for is 30 pages).

Her assistant just emailed me to ask for a short bio and a synopsis of the whole novel. I'm really glad the revisions to the Big Book are done. If she likes the synopsis and bio enough to request the full ms, it's ready to go.