by john | Aug 5, 2009 | Theatre
…and never let go.”
That’s a quote from the play I’m directing, Moonlight and Magnolias. The play is about the five days in 1939 when filming was halted on Gone with the Wind, a new director was hired, and an entire new screeenplay was created. By a writer who’d never read the book. Talk about a gig! The play all takes place in produced David Selznick’s office, with Selznick and director Victor Fleming acting out scenes from the book as screenwriter Ben Hecht turns it into a script. It’s a pretty funny show, especially if you’re really familiar with GWTW.
Which I’m not. I, like the play’s Ben Hecht (not sure if this was the case with the real Ben Hecht or if it’s dramatic license on the part of Playwright Ron Hutchinson), have never read the book. I have seen the movie. Once. On a re-release ten years ago for the 60th anniversary of the film I took Suzy to go see it. It was pretty good, I thought. Like the characters in the play, I kinda thought Scarlett was a slut and Ashley was a bit of a fag, but overall I liked the flick.
So why exactly did I pick this play to come out of theatrical semi-retirement? I’m not sure, except that the president of the community theatre’s board is a friend of mine, the space is small enough not to need much set, which is the kind of show I work well with, and I was a little bored. So I submitted my name as a potential director, and then right before they offered me the gig, I tried to back out. Then I found out they were about to offer me the gig, so I did what any money-grubbing whore would do, I asked “What does it pay?” So since it will pay me slightly more than I’ll spend on gas driving to and from rehearsals 45 minutes away, I took the gig. Then I read the play. And I liked it, which is a good thing, since I’m stuck with it for the next couple of months.
So we had auditions this week, and for my 4-person play we had a marginal turn-out. 7 actors. 5 men, two women. The play requires 3 men and 1 woman. Fortunately there were six castable actors that showed up, so I picked four and away we go. One of the first assignments will be for the cast (and director) to read the book. At some point there will be a movie-watching party at my house, and then I suppose we’ll make a play happen at some point. It’s interesting: I really thought I was done with theatre. Again. But I’m not. Again. I don’t have any intent to do the level of productions I did at Off-Tryon, when I was doing 10-12 shows every year. And I will probably move back into happy semi-retirement after October. But I guess I’m not ever going to be done with it, no matter how much of a pain in the ass theatre people can be.
This looks to be a good ensemble, though. My Selznick and I have worked together a bunch, and the lone chick in the cast and I have known each other for several years, plus my friend that dragged me into the show is my stage manager, so I only have a couple of guys to get to know. And it’ll be fun doing something for a change that’s not in iambic pentameter, which is all I’ve done for the past couple of years. And I have a lighting gig coming up in September, I’m once again designing the season opener for Theatre Charlotte, the local community theatre. After they lost the rights to Annie, Ron, the Executive Director and director for the show, settled on Seussical and called me up to see if I’d do the show. I figured WTF? why not, so I’m calling in favors from all over the lighting industry to make a hellaciously bright and colorful Seuss-world this fall. So that oughta pay for my December trip to Vegas.
In other news, I think my time at PokerNews is likely at an end. There’s been a change in leadership, and that has actually very little to do with my departure. I think Matt Parvis will do an excellent job helming the ship there, but as I’ve been doing that gig for the past two years solid, I’m no longer nearly as into the whole poker scene as I once was. And they need someone who eats, drinks and breathes poker. I’m just not that guy anymore, and with the theatre stuff going this fall, and my own writing stuff happening, I just don’t think I can give them the time and focus they need. I’ll still fill in every once in a while when they run short, but the days of me churning out 20-30 recaps in a month are probably done for the most part. It’s been a fun ride and I’ll miss the money, but I think Matt will do a great job over there and wish them nothing but the best. I had it in my head for a while that I was probably done with that gig after the WSOP, so it’s time. It was a good run, but after a few hundred articles I might be tired of talking about some donkey four-flushing another donkey to crack aces with jacks. I’ll miss the money, though. So I’ll have to sell a few books to make up for the revenue.
by john | Aug 4, 2009 | Theatre, Writing
This was in my inbox when I returned from auditions tonight –
Shipped on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 via FedEx Ground Home Delivery
All items in your order have been shipped.
In This Shipment
===========================
100 of Returning the Favor and other slices of life by John G. Hartness (Printed)
Shipped To:
3512 Winterfield Pl.
Charlotte, NC 28205
So by the end of the week (hopefully) I’ll have a pile of copies of Returning the Favor in hand and ready to ship out to those of you who have (or will) purchase the analog version. So far I have sold more digital copies than analog editions, but I expect that to change shortly.So if you want your autographed copy, click on the button the right of the screen and make it happen!
I’ve been really impressed with the service I’ve gotten from Lulu throughout this process. It’s not like they’re doing much for me, I’m laying everything out and making sure it’s ready, but for a straight-up print house, they do good work. And they dealt with the ISBN paperwork for me quickly and easily, so I didn’t have to learn how to do one more thing in the process. I think everybody’s favorite not really ex-stripper (really favorite, not really ex-stripper) is looking at using them for her book as well, so you’ve got that to look forward to.
So yeah, I might have mentioned coming home from auditions. Funny thing, that. So a few months ago, I got a message on Facebook from a director buddy of mine. Seems a local theatre had issues with the rights to their season-opener. Issues like a national tour pulling all the rights nationwide or something silly like that. So they were no longer doing Annie and had switched to Seussical the Musical. Since I’m widely considered somewhat misanthropic and a bad influence on children (all true) my name had been quickly dismissed in discussions of designers for Annie. But when Seussical came about, someone might have thought that I had some experience with bright colors and hallucinogenic substances (also all true). So my buddy asked me if I had really retired from theatre.
My response was a cautious “kinda. Why?” And he mentioned Seussical, and I mentioned that some things might be up in the air with my employment status at PokerNews and I might be interested in the money, and we cut a deal. And along about the same time I had signed on to direct Moonlight and Magnolias for another community theatre in a nearby town. The schedules overlapped a little, but I juggled things around to make them work, and one of the things I juggled was scheduling M&M auditions early. Like tonight early.
Just one problem – nobody showed up. We had four people last night, which almost works out because it’s a four-person show. Except the genders of the auditionees was perfectly balanced, and the genders of the characters are 3:1. So we had one to many vajayjays at auditions last night. And since the characters are real people (the play is about the moment in cinematic history when David Selznick stopped shooting Gone with the Wind, fired the director, shitcanned the screenplay and re-wrote the whole friggin’ thing in five days) I can’t do what I would usually do, which is cast the show gender-blind.
There’s a lot to be said for doing plays where the writer has been dead for a few centuries. Just sayin’.
But basically here’s the deal – I’m directing again, and for the first time in several years I’m directing a show with a living playwright and with language that’s not iambic pentameter. I’m designing again, and was a little bit of a diva and demanded sufficient programming time to make the show look the best that I can. And I’ve got a shitload of books of poetry en route to my domicile, so buy them quick before Suzy kicks my ass for cluttering up the den. Yes, she’s leaning on my shoulder while I’m typing this :). Love you, honey.
by john | Jul 30, 2009 | Fiction
This comes from a true story about a friend who got drunk one night and bought a houseboat on eBay.
Some things, thought John Roy Parnell III, were just inevitable. As a matter of fact, everything in his life since the day he broke his leg trying to roll out for a first down in the high school state quarterfinals had seemed to flow inexorably onwards like ten thousand pounds of molasses going up the side of a hill in January. It never went very fast, but it never quite stopped moving, either. And ever since he lay three yards short of the first down on his own 37-yard line clutching his ankle and crying like a little girl his life had oozed forward to this very point.
That’s what he was thinking on an alarmingly sunny Monday morning when he woke up on the rook of his houseboat surrounded by thirteen empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and one bottle of Jagermeister with two inches of brownish liquid and three cigarette butts sloshing around in the bottom. A groan from the lower deck of the houseboat reminded John Roy that he wasn’t alone, and he rolled over on his side to look down, disturbing the delicate balance of the beer cans and sending several of them rolling and clattering to the deck below. one or two landed with a softer thunk as opposed to the clang of their fellows, and John Roy figured those must have landed on Joe Don.
“Gawdammit John Roy, why you always gotta make such a ruckus?” came a screech from below to let him know that yes, indeed, Joe Don Burgess was on the deck below him, and yes, indeed he was awake. “I gotta pee,” mumbled Joe Don in a much quieter voice.
“Piss off the side a the boat, the shitter’s clogged up,” replied John Roy.
“What the hell happened to the shitter?” asked Joe Don.
“I can’t remember, but I think I remember puking in a t-shirt and puttin’ it in the shitter last night. And if I did, you better not piss on it. I might need that shirt later.”
“Alright, alright, I’ll piss off the side.” And Joe Don staggered to the rail of the boat to do just that, without ever quite opening his eyes. When he heard the wet splatter of piss on sun-baked Georgia clay instead of the splash of water on water, he opened his eyes and started to look around. “John Roy…”
“Yeah, Don?”
“Why ain’t your boat in the water?”
“Lake dried up. Drought, remember?”
“Yeah, but didn’t you just get this boat?”
“Yeah.”
“So why’d you buy a boat and put it in a dried-up lake?” Joe Don continued.
“Cause I needed a place to stay after Erlene kicked me out of the trailer park.”
“Oh, ok. But don’t that mean I’m pissing in your front yard?”
“Kinda, but since you’re pissin’ off the back of the boat, I reckon you’re pissin’ in my back yard, not the front yard. Lawn chairs is in the front yard.”
“Oh, ok. I don’t mind pissin’ in the back yard. But pissin’ in the front yard didn’t seem right, somehow. Know what I mean.”
“I reckon.” By this time John Roy had develop a pretty sizable need to piss himself, so he stood up, walked over to the edge of the rook, and started to piss. A golden stream powered by an evening’s worship of Milwaukee’s finest arced high over the side of the boat, and over the head of a very startled Joe Don, and splashed into the dusty red lake bed beside the boat.
“Gawdammit, John Roy, don’t you pee on me!”
“I ain’t gone pee on you, don’t get your panties in a twist,” replied John Roy as he began to write his name in the lake bed. He added his name to a litany of incomplete “John Roy”s in the dust, shook his pecker, and tucked it away in his shorts. Then he kicked the rest of the beer cans off the rook, tossed the Jager bottle in a 55-gallon fuel oil drum he used as a trash can and general place to light shit on fire, and started looking around the edge of the roof. After a few minutes, he laid down on his belly and looked over the edge as Joe Don.
“Don?”
“Yeah?”
“There ain’t no ladder.”
“There ain’t?”
“Nope.”
“How the fuck you get up there?”
“Fuck if I know?”
“How you gone get down?”
“Bring that mattress out there on the deck.”
“That don’t sound like such a good idea.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you the whole thing. I don’t wanna think about it too much. Now bring me that mattress.”
“Alright.” Joe Don went into the cabin and dragged out a raggedy twin mattress. He laid it on the deck and looked back up at John Roy. “You want the box spring, too?”
“Nope,” said John Roy as he took a couple of running steps and belly-flopped from the roof of the houseboat down the ten feet onto the mattress, blowing up a huge cloud of dust, funky smells and a couple of oddly-shaped insects. He lay there face down for several long minutes without moving before he rolled over, looked up a Joe Don and said “Well, that sucked. Gimme a beer.”
by john | Jul 30, 2009 | Uncategorized
So after posting 45 segments of a novel online and updating my website with multiple buttons to my book of short stories and poetry, now what do I do?
Well, for one thing, I get back to what got me here – I blog a bit more. I had toyed around with keeping this page as a writing samples page and adding a blog elsewhere on the site, but that’s just not gonna work. I’m too lazy to update two sites, so it’ll just all be here.
And I’m going to work on new material. I’ve got some poetry to post in the next few days, some drafts of poems and story ideas that I’m working on, and things like that. Not to mention that I have 100 copies of Returning the Favor en route to my house, so I’m going to get out and do readings at local bars and bookstores and hope to move a few books that way.
Plus I’ll be continuing to polish Choices, work on a cover design and get it ready for print. I should have copies ready by fall for print and electronic format.
In other news, I’m trying to muddle through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform process and Returning the Favor should be available on Amazon for the Kindle within the next couple of days. Until then, you can already buy it for the Kindle at Smashwords.com.
Anyway, I really want to thank everyone for reading Choices. It was an experiment that grew into something bigger, and I hope better, and I appreciate my friends, old and new, who came along on the ride with me. Who knows where we’ll go next time?
by john | Jul 20, 2009 | Fiction, The Chosen
We’re in the home stretch now, both in uploads and edits. If I finish editing before I finish uploading, the whole thing might see print before it sees the web, but that’s pretty unlikely. But I’m feeling pretty solid that the book will be available by Labor Day at the latest in hard copy, and sooner than that for the Kindle and other e-book formats. In the meantime, enjoy the next section and go buy my other book in hard copy here or here. And it’s now available for the Kindle here. And if you have a site and could pimp the current book, it’ll garner my undying love and gratitude (and maybe a drink or two).
“Aren’t you going to pack, son?” I asked Cain on my way into the hall.
“I haven’t unpacked anything, so I don’t need to pack. I’ll meet you downstairs.” He got up, stretched, and headed towards the door in our wake. Myra and I tossed the few things we’d unpacked into our bags, and looked around the room to make sure we hadn’t forgotten any random firearms before we headed down to the car. She looked pensive, so I gave her a quick hug before we left the room.
“It’s almost over, isn’t it?” She asked, her face buried in my chest. That made her a little hard to hear, but it was worth it.
“Almost.”
“What will you do?”
“What do you mean? My Choice? I don’t even know what it is, so I have no idea what I’ll do.”
“No. I mean after. What will you do after it’s done. Are you going to leave me again?” She held me tighter, but I didn’t think her squeezing me caused the tightness in my chest.
“I don’t know, babe. I…”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. I’ve seen you thinking about it. I can see it whenever you look at me when we’re driving. When you think I don’t notice you looking. I can feel your eyes on me and I know you’re trying to decide if you’re sticking around or if you’re going to run again.”
“You’re right. I have thought about it. A lot. And I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve been putting off making that decision until this whole thing was behind us. And who knows? The kid might decide to blow up the planet and we won’t have to worry about it. We are going to DC after all. If there’s any place a slightly crazy right-wing preacher can get his hands on nuclear weapons, it’s Washington.”
“Or Tehran.”
“Yeah, there’s always Tehran. But the jet lag is such a bitch. DC is a better choice.”
“Fair enough. Let’s go finish saving the world. But we’re not done with this, buster. As soon as the world is safe, we’re going to have a long conversation about our future.” She stood on her tiptoes, kissed me lightly on the lips, and headed for the elevator. I watched her walk, both because the view was nice and because I was thinking about that conversation. And how I was gonna get out of that one without actually blowing up the world. Because that option was looking better all the time.
We gathered downstairs, and Michael met us in the hotel lobby. “I will not be accompanying you on this leg of your journey. I must go ahead and prepare the meeting place. Lucypher and I will meet you at the Washington Monument at midnight tomorrow night. Packing was a good idea, you should be able to make it there easily if you leave now.”
“Hey! It’s not that far to DC. If we don’t need to be there until midnight tomorrow night, why are we leaving now?” I was getting a little grumpy about not having the chance to spend a little happy fun time with Myra before the end of the world.
“I’ve seen how long it takes you people to get anywhere, and I assume that Eve will have to start at least one barroom brawl before you can get through Tennessee and Virginia.” Michael responded dryly.
“Nah. I think I’m good for a few days. Thanks for thinking of me, though.” Eve said dryly.
“Besides, I said I would be leaving immediately. I never mentioned you coming with me. That was your own erroneous assumption. If I were you, I would try to salvage some sleep out of this wretched evening and leave in the morning. I will see you there.” With that, he vanished. Not walked out and flew away, just vanished. Sometimes I wondered who was more irritating, my smartass kids, or smartass angels. I stood there looking stupid for a minute with my bag in my hand before I noticed that Cain was sitting on one of the lobby couches, no bag anywhere in sight.
“You knew?” I asked very slowly.
“I noticed that he didn’t mention us going, so I figured there was no reason to rush.”
“And you didn’t think you should share that with the rest of us?”
“You guys were so happy running around like chickens with your heads cut off, I didn’t want to screw that up.” He sat there and chuckled at us as the rest of us dragged our bags back to the elevators and up to the rooms. That’s when I realized we had a little monkey wrench in the works. One with tattoos and a pierced lip.
“Uh, Junior?”
“Yes, Adam?”
“Uh, we don’t really have a room for you, I don’t think. I mean, we had a spot for Michael, but he doesn’t really sleep, so I’m not sure we have two beds in Cain’s room, so I don’t really know what we’re going to do about that. It’s really late and the desk clerk is already a little grumpy with me, you know the whole breaking into the pool, flying Seraphim and shotgun blasts in the middle of the night thing…” I trailed off lamely.
“Don’t worry, Pop. We’ve got it covered.” Cain chimed in.
“How?”
“Don’t ask silly questions, Adam. Now why don’t you and Myra toddle off to bed while Cain and I deal with sleeping arrangements for the children, I mean for Sidney.” I never trusted Eve when she was being solicitous, but Myra had a certain look in her eye at Eve’s offer that I didn’t want to ignore, especially if we were blowing the world up in 21 hours or so. So I did as Eve suggested, ignored the winks that were exchanged between Eve, Myra and Emily, and took my girlfriend to bed.
