Those who have seen your face draw back in fear

My most recent film project, Ambassador’s Day, now has a Web site. Apparently I have some more ADR voice stuff to do, so my time in the mask is not yet finished. Here’s some wallpaper for your desktop, and here, and here.

After many rewrites and the help of many intelligent and creative people, “The Bishop’s Eighteen Wives” is, at last, the best thing I’ve ever written. A date has been selected for the Hillbarn staged read of “The Bishop’s Eighteen Wives.” Here’s an Adobe PDF version of the flyer. Mark your calendars for March 29, 2005 to visit the ‘Barn in Foster City.

Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before

Five days: Montreal, Boston, NYC; seven customers, two friends, and one Broadway show. The non-business part of the trip was breakfast with Greg Costikyan, long haired and shy-eyed. He speaks, passionately and precisely, in well-structured sentences, whether about his daughters, the World Trade Center attacks, the history of board gaming, or his published works. His apartment walls are covered with shelves and shelves of paperback sci-fi books, and his three cats dance and paw and shed happily about his game-filled apartment.

Doug Katsaros met me for a couple beers and some mac-and-cheese. We did our respective post mortems of The End and he talked about his new project. Broadway productions of well-established musical acts are all the rage… Queen, Billy Joel, ABBA, etc. Doug is working on a Doors cover band for a stage show.

I sprang for the double-price tickets for Avenue Q. It’s the musical with the ur-Muppets who sing four-letter words. I love Muppets and I love four-letter words, and so it was a shoo-in for me. The plot was surprisingly old-school: despite the wacky references to gay love, masturbation and racism, the two-plot story involves two star-crossed couples whose lives are in turmoil by the end of Act One. (Bert and Ernie are one of the couples.) It’ll be in Vegas eventually, so check it out when it settles there.

A few years before they wrote Avenue Q, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx wrote a musical screenplay called Kermit, Prince of Denmark. Henson Productions turned them down flat. Now that Avenue Q won a Tony, the screenplay is being reconsidered by Henson. Oh, the irony!

Rolling down the eastern seaboard, I’ve got my diesel wound up

The snow hit in Montreal about five p.m. yesterday. Seven o’clock this morning, my fat-ass Ford Expedition lumbers through the slush, skidding and sliding around corners. I scare the shit out of several Canadian jaywalkers.

Gas, food, parking: ten bucks, five bucks, twenty bucks Canadian. Get your passport out for crossing the border. Second time for immigration control, fifty miles inside the United States.

Office complexes and twists of Interstate metal in Troy, New York. Across the George Washington bridge; the dark towers of Manhattan burning yellow on the horizon. Double-park at the Doubletree at JFK and jack in. It’s nearly midnight. I gotta be up in six hours.

Man, these road trips can be tough. I miss you a hell of a lot.