Tragedy avoided so forced to write.

Last week I was hoping to be arrested, run down in the street, a victim of hante
virus, or just about anything and anyone else than a writer with a play
to write. None of the above happened so in the end I had to sit down
and begin. And I love it. And it is going well. I
remember now that I like to write. One word after another and then a
bit later a period.

When I write I always get the feeling that
the story is inside of me but is a tangled mess, a bit like a very long
string of Christmas lights that someone put away last year after not
getting what they wanted under the tree. A few more knots than really
necessary.

So I write and then get up and then lie on the
floor. My friend Bill once said the trick to writing is getting into a
space where you are able to hear yourself. To hear your voice telling
the story. This feels like that kind of process. Of course he also said that the trick to writing anything at all is to find other committments in your life you like even less than writing.

Writing a community based project is to start from the somewhat set plot of the Pastorela
(a typical shepherd meets angel, devil tempts shepherd, angel kicks
devil's butt, all adore the Christ child plot) and then adding info
from the upwards to 80 interviewees from the community. And doing it in
Spanish and English. But you know what? I like it. Just enough
diversity in the task to keep my interest.

In other
spectacular news I met with Arturo, the designer on the project, and he
is having so many good ideas about sound and color. Keep it coming. And
we have a new collaborator in the person of Libby Moore, a music/opera
person with an impressive resume of work all over the country. She has
been staging operas in such diverse areas asindian reservations and abandoned Quaker prisons. We are fortunate enough to have her working on the music for La Pastorela. What could be nicer, I ask you?