Writing With Nancy

Coming to the End

Since the Writing With Nancy show closed I’ve had a chance to sleep a lot these past two weeks. Once the set strike was complete, at like 8pm Sunday night) I got violently, wretchedly sick for a few days. A total purge. In that initial 72 hours it felt the way coming off a long road trip continues after the car has come to a standstill. I was heaving and dreaming, curled in a ball having acid flashbacks of the songs, monologues and moments of getting particular laughs etc. only to go deeply unconscious again. People have since mentioned that a stomach flu was going around; although I have not been sick like that in years. I think purging was part of completing this project, this period of my life, this stressful attempt to articulate and share my personal vision to date and TO GET IT OUT OF ME. There’s a reason people don’t act on their dreams. You make mistakes, you get a huge feedback buzz, (which includes disappointments & surprises–eek!) and to top it off you have explosive diarrhea while puking your guts out

Soon I was back up on emails and able to go to yoga and the gym. Then I fell into watching a little BBC television I’d missed. (Specifically, may I recommend the latest effort by Jennifer Saunders –of Ab Fab?– who has a new series titled, *Clatterford* that features an ensemble of 8 superb actors mostly in their 50s. Not to mention the special features commentary with Pedro Almodovar on his last film *Volver* talking with Penelope Cruz.) After a few days of that I called my friends and even had lunch one day with my bff, Denise just to feel slightly human again. Then I wrote a few more checks to pay for the show’s final production costs–including an HD video document of the performance, which I will be able to show to those out-of-towners who had wanted to see the show but couldn’t travel.

The question I have is: What is it like when you to complete something? You hear a lot of people talking about their plans or goals. Sometimes you hear people describing their creative process or even their latest accomplishments–like writing a contract on a piece of business. But it is rare in my experience to hear anybody talk about completion. Is it like death I wonder? In my case it is a multi-dimensional feeling of things coming OUT or being left behind. Got anything on that?

I can’t say I was all that motivated to celebrate the holiday this year although I have been drinking a cheap champagne from New Mexico called Gruet that’s awfully good.

Merry/Happy To All!

Please Come to Live Bait This Weekend

The opening weekend of Writing With Nancy was very successful. I have already made over half my goal for the run. Thank you to all the friends who have taken ads in the program to ensure my advanced ticket sales. You really got my back. Opening night I was seized with terror and went up on many lines. Saturday, somehow relieved of pressure, we killed. On Sunday afternoon, with only about 20 people in the house, Eileen Donohue, preggers, bravely went on stage for the first time in 10 years to replace Gillian Bellinger who took the day off for her birthday. Many well-wishers have brought flowers to the show and my house is filled with the aroma of roses and lillies and stuff I don’t know the name of.

When you come to the show why not bring along champaign or some non-alcoholic bubbly? Put a ziplock of ice in the bag to chill the bottle (Denise did this on opening night and it was fabulous) and I will provide us the paper cups. Let’s have a toast and chat each other up and celebrate on the couch in the lobby.

I’m glad to be finally doing the show and seeing what the whole thing is about and how it works. People adore the Posse. And given my rocky ability to retain the sequence of the show, I am so bloody grateful to be up on that stage with SOMEBODY ELSE to whom I can turn for support and guidance. Maybe that’s the ultimate lesson here: that without the support of others for what I do, I am lost. The people I have chosen to work with on this project, have supported me with kindness and generosity. I am having fun and realizing this dream is rewarding. Can't remember the last time I could say that.

We will be off for the Thanksgiving week, giving thanks, so please make a concerted effort to sell out my performances this coming weeked. And PLEASE tell a friend.

MEMORIZE THIS!

I have been memorizing lines for 2 weeks with limited success and yesterday I got on my feet and put down the script. With Denise prompting me, within 2 hours I had managed to get to page 18. That’s close to 2/3rds. Note to all sketch writers and playwrights especially:

Do yourself a favor before you die by memorizing the entirety of something you have written so you can immediately discover IT’S TOO DAMN LONG.

Not only is every one of my monologues too long but they’re convoluted. too. I seem to write things upside down and with lots of additional gee-gaws hanging off of it. My writing is saying something I want to say but my feelings about what I’m saying gob thing up with guk. It’s so annoying! Fortunately I can edit the play because I wrote it.

But I think a lot of sketch writers watch their scenes and think: Damn that actor! Why can’t they just pick up the pace? This scene is dragging and they just need to say the lines faster! Wrong and wrong. Andy Miara, one of my colleagues at Second City says dialogue should take up about 1/3 of the theatrical space. The other THIRD is for the gestures and exits and other blocking. The final third is for the audience to react–hopefully from time to time with laughter.

When I direct student shows, first-time writers lean in to me during the performance and whisper,

*Why aren’t they laughing?*

I always end up saying, *Because they’re too busy listening.*

LET'S TRY NOT TO HOG ALL THE THEATRICAL SPACE WITH WORDS FOLKS. I'm trying, I'm really trying. So putting up *Writing With Nancy* has already been an invaluable experience and we’re two weeks away from opening!

BTW: Opening night is already half sold so please buy tickets soon BY CLICKING THE BANNER ABOVE. I appreciate your support.

Greenlight

I have succeeded in finishing the script and getting John’s (my director) approval to have a reading of the draft which is coming up this Sunday at my house. The script is 30 pages long but the format is a little goofy so it will play longer than you might think–usually it’s about 2 minutes a page. There are three songs too. So John says the show will run about 80 minutes. Fine. But boy am I glad I cast the Posse to share the stage along side and behind me. I don’t think I’d care to be alone up there. The ending for the show was from an essay that I wrote about the beginning of my writing business. I wrote the piece about 2 years ago. In September, with 5 pages left to go, I kept thinking the end of the show should be different than the essay but when I finally opened up the file of the essay I saw that I was saying what I had wanted to say back then. It just took me 2 years to realize it. Oh well.

Last week I made an inquiry about renting the Live Bait Theatre for the show and as fate would have it, they just had a group cancel and they were looking for a show to replace it and offered the slot to me. Then this week, within 24hours I found a stage manager, lighting designer, set designer, graphic artist and publicist. So, what I’m trying to point out is that when things reach fruition, and sometimes that’s after YEARS, many other things fall into place almost at a ridiculously funny rate.

Not only is there no problem, but the project seems to be riding on a deserted city street that has nothing but green lights all the way. So we’re set to open Nov. 9^th and run Friday, Saturday and Sunday for 4 weeks (minus Thanksgiving) thru Dec. 9^th. So the next few weeks will be extra busy trying to rehearse everybody. Yesterday I called my friends Denise and Ginny to ask them for help memorizing the lines. Will I be able to memorize lines that I wrote? Without changing them? Well in the dialogues with the Posse I had damn well better. Maybe in the monologues I’ll have some wiggle room.

I am very happy and excited to be doing this show. It’s only taken me about 17 years to get it together. Hope you’re enjoying yourself, the weather and whatever part of the writing process you’re in. Stay tuned for more, more often from me.

Walk The Walk #5

I’m on page 25 of my show and it’s really taking shape. I have decided to have a slightly unusual writing class right on stage. Hey, that’s a pun, Write on Stage. Might be a good title too. The Posse is going to be my class but they are there (in the show) to learn some life lessons. In order to connect with the lessons they are going to be writing-on-the-fly. I had wanted to give audience members small pads of paper and have them jot a few things down throughout the show. Two weeks ago when I last met with my director, John, he had all these issues about having the audience interaction really work. John showed me that there was much less likelihood of the audience participation than I cared to think. He gave me several good reasons why I needed to re-consider this.

This is the value of a director in this writing stage of the game–they’re discerning. They don’t say yes when they are not sure; and, they say basic things over and over like: What is it you want to show the audience that you’ve learned? (Jeez he’s said that to me about 20 times at this point. That’s almost once for every page of script.)

When you’re creating something it’s embarrassing. I should say it’s humbling. But the truth is that you feel lost, blind, awkward–pick your word–and to stay in that place requires a certain amount of stamina and hope. You are exposed and you are also capable of failing. You have a life that requires your attention and other projects come swooping in and derail your efforts. So when you show people the work you need them to be straight with you but in a real basic way. Plus you require kindness. Lots and lots of kindness. When you’re creating something kindness is like rocket fuel. (I worry on my death bed that this single thing will haunt me. That I will shudder at the sobering recognition that I have not been nearly kind enough.) It’s only when a collaborater can be detached and yet still care, that you have any hope of hearing them.

Walk The Walk #4

Let’s Talk About Fear. The Courage to Create and all that Sh*T...

I’m making brief forays into scene writing for my upcoming *Writing With Nancy* show. I finally got on track at the end of June when I met with my director, John Hildreth, and he pronounced the pages I sent him *preliminary*. He explained that I was still writing about the show I wanted to write and not SHOWING the audience what I had learned, not placing myself inside what I wanted to communicate. This had something to do with me wanting to narrate the show AND be in it. Is that narcissistic? No. It’s good theatre. Oddly, I was enlivened by John’s pronouncement. Because frankly I had stopped my scriptwriting on page 9 and I had not wanted to even go into the document at all, even to just look at it. That always makes me feel bad about my writing when it sucks somehow and I turn my back on it. So John’s comments gave me a face-saving reason for having stopped and I felt relieved.

Getting stuck in the writing process is always about being afraid. FEAR. Usually we don’t even know what we’re afraid of. Art’s a lot like life. There are lots and lots of decisions to make and there’s no particular roadmap with which to make them. Making art, or if you will, creating something, is a process of working through layers of fear. Some people call it problem solving. Fear is like a Pacman game, with levels of difficulty. Fear is the distance between you and the next choice. In that sense, war and creation bear similar characteristics, where things are coming at you fast and loose and you no sooner find an idea or word that’s just right, but in the next breath you’re thinking, *That is shit. What am doing?* How do you gather together the right words for just the right statement before you doubt it? It’s enough to drive you crazy.

One way I keep my cool is by writing longhand in a prone position on my couch in the living room. The red couch always has a good breeze and writing on yellow pads has a way of grounding me. Plus lying down is probably a very good thing too. Maybe somebody’s done a study of that, I don’t know. I do know that Virgil Thompson, the great American composer was fond of writing in bed. Who else? Proust? So I’m in good company. But seriously folks what’s up with the prone position thing? Once I write out the scene in longhand I can type it into the computer and that seems like a pleasure.

Got any bright moments with your own writing lately?

I’ll be in touch sooner than later...

Walk the Walk #2

So I started writing my one-woman show this week, which is now titled: *Writing With Nancy: Second City Spiritual Epicenter,* instead of just the latter. I would like to have a show with an open-ended run that plays once a week in small venues. So this nomenclature allows me to use the WWN brand yet be able to change the subtitle as time goes by, to reflect whatever content strikes my fancy.

But first a word about the courage to create.

As many of you know, and perhaps as many of you would not care to know, I have been doing battle with menopause for a long while now and I’m losing the war. I’m reminded of the old Linda Ronstadt cover of the Eagles’ song:

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

I admit I thought I could ride menopause out. No pun intended. But recently I hit the proverbial wall: I’m sick and tired or being sick and tired. My stress hormones are off the charts. My skin is blotchy, my nerves are shot and I break out into pouring sweats throughout the day and night. Recently I laid down my weapons and finally decided to go see a doctor about hormone replacement therapy. That’s a big step for me because I don’t tend to go to doctors and I don’t take prescription drugs. I don’t think I’m going to die either. So there’s that.

The courage to create involves the courage to fix what’s broken, even if that means tossing it or replacing it (as in hormones). This is hard to do because it’s painful to admit all the pain you’ve been in and it’s embarrassing to acknowledge how long you’ve been in that pain. So you keep broken watches and you sweat for10 years. I know, it’s insane.

For some reason this Come-to-Jesus moment coincides with writing the one-woman show. The show is a monologue basically that is based on a long-ass essay that I never finished from some book idea I never started. The long-ass essay is about how miserable I was while I was teaching writing. Maybe it won’t sell in Peoria. Anyway the story involves being a washed-up playwright in a bad marriage who starts teaching creative writing in preparation of divorcing my now ex-husband. The essay further chronicles how I continued to expand my creative writing business while I tried to marry the wrong man a second time. Fortunately I got dumped before I could perpetuate more damage. But it takes me 5 years to get to that point of feeling fortunate because I am one of the all-time, most-wounded, stupidest, smart people. So as you can already tell, the show is fascinating.

The hell of solo performance is that it is talky; the heaven is that within the prism of the individual we see myriad characters, images and stories. So somehow I had to figure out how to play a bunch of people. What’s more, many of these people are in classes, groups of 10, or 20. So when I attempted to write out some of those scenes it was overwhelming trying to capture all those reactions and nuances. (Not to mention the ever-nagging doubts of how boring it all was...) So one night I was home alone, drinking, chewing my lips, watching a documentary on Funk on Channel 11. So there was all this great archival footage of the whole scene and everybody had a posse, dressed to kill. So I started thinking about how I might like to have a posse of my own onstage. Yeah, an entourage of hot improv girls could be my back-up. I could put a couch on stage and have them drape themselves on it–a little eye candy for the crowd–while I’m yammering away. Yeah, that seemed like a good idea. And I would of course ask Rebecca Pavlatos to play piano and underscore the show–what the hell, why not have a few songs while we’re at it?

And that my friends is only the beginning. Tba....

WALK THE WALK

Part Uno of God-only-Knows-How-Many

I am writing a one-woman show titled, *Second City Spiritual Epicenter*. That’s the working title. Every time I say those sentences I feel sick to my stomach. Some people like to climb glaciers that are melting; so I don’t feel that bad about wanting to perform. Except, they don’t say the number 2 thing that people are most afraid of is glacier climbing. They say it’s performing. Maybe if they could actually FIND the glacier climbers, the data would reflect the reality of their fear factor. I would assume they are not available for comment that much. But here I am.

It’s time for me to do a show. I’ve been teaching for many years. Ten. This means I have been getting paid to give people advice on how they should write. So my sense is that it’s time to take some of my own advice. Like I said, it turns my stomach. Plus my daughter is going off to college in the Fall and I would like to put the Past to Rest if that’s a real possibility. I don’t mean Her, I mean the Troubles of my marriage and with Love and one of my favorite topics, Misery.{Otherwise Known as Self-Hatred...} That’s the Past I’m talking about. I suspect it is because I have Rested a whole lot of the Past. I mean I can’t even remember how much because that’s what happens in resting things: you forget.

So why in God’s name do I have to TALK about these things in front of an audience? It’s funny, I’m suddenly reminded of when I rode the Subway in NYC in the 80s; I used to thank God that I wasn’t a pervert who had to expose myself to people on the train. I mean drugs, alcohol and gambling aside, having to expose yourself is a rough row to hoe IMHO. And while I have problems, I was grateful not to have that one. But now I realize I’m an exhibitionist too. Or a wanna-be, exhibitionist. I want to expose the painful truth of my years teaching Comedy writing. Maybe it won’t be that funny. Which, won’t deter me actually. Jason, the guy who runs sound and lights over at the SC Training Center would say it’s *talking heads* theatre.. Note to Self: I must call him and see if he’s be available for Tech.

TBA.

How do you like me Now?