"I think all great innovations are built on rejections."
-- Louise Nevelson

It was a tough year, but I made it !!!

But not everyone is as lucky as I am......

The economy is so bad that I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

I ordered a burger at McDonald's, and the kid behind the counter asked,  "Can you afford fries with that?"

CEO's are now playing miniature golf.

If the bank returns your check marked  "Insufficient Funds," you have to call them and ask if they mean you or them .

Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.

McDonald's is selling the 1/4  'ouncer'.

Parents in  Beverly Hills and Malibu are firing their nannies and learning their children's names.

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico .

Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

Motel Six won't leave the light on anymore.

The Mafia is laying off judges.

BP Oil laid off 25 Congressmen.

Congress says they are looking into the Bernard Madoff scandal.  Oh Great!!   The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!

And, finally...
 
I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, and our bleak future, that I called the Suicide Lifeline and was connected to a call center in Pakistan .   When I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.

This was sent to me by my friend Dudley Stone. I love it!

The country in your pocket

I took a train trip across the country and back last night, visiting 24 cities and covering 9,000 miles. And I did it in under an hour thanks to the masterful storytelling of Jack Finnegan who wrote, directed and performed City Love Song. He’ll take this one-man show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest cultural extravaganza, next month.

Gems like this pass through New York each July on their way to Scotland, taking up residence at 59E59 Theaters as part of its East to Edinburgh series. Their gift is their simplicity and originality.

Finnegan, 32, in jeans and orange T-shirt, is alone on stage with nothing but a stool and his energy and natural animation. We begin our journey with him at Penn Station in New York and head north to Boston as he brings to life the people on the train and the world outside. We enjoy a stroll through the cobblestone streets and a rest in the Boston Commons before boarding the train again to pass through the small towns of the Rust Belt, with their tiny brick train stations and people going about their business unaware; we head to Detroit and Chicago. We have a beer at a working class bar in Fargo, see a sign on a train stop in the prairie reading “Station open midnight to 5 a.m.” That’s when trains pass through this part of the world, so far from the point of departure in the city that never sleeps.

Next: the Dakotas, Montana, the country rolls by, one place at a time. As he says, “You can never see what might be coming in a train, only what’s right in front of you.” Just what’s right outside Finnegan’s window.

The beauty of the Pacific northwest: “Puget Sound teaches patience. Let it,” he says. “Reading a book would constitute a crime.” But after a bit, “there comes a time you wonder if it will ever end.”

Finally we “slide into Seattle,” which seems to be his favor spot on the journey. “Something about Seattle raised my cheer. Everywhere I turned people were smiling.” Even the panhandlers as he walked through the city. “Seattle always left me with a reason to smile.”

Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, onward through the drab miles of scrub and bush in west Texas. Finnegan offers humorous accounts of trying to navigate around Austin, dogging cars because of the scarcity of sidewalks, resorting to walking in a drainage ditch because he preferred to hoof it rather than take a taxi.

“Nobody walks in Texas unless they’re walking to their cars.”

Roll on through the Bible Belt, get dropped off at a station outside Charlotte at 1 a.m. to curl up on a bench and wait for the connecting train to D.C. due to arrive at 7. Tired but changed, we arrive back in NYC after 13 weeks of travel, “with the country in your pocket.”

As vast as was the physical space Finnegan covered, I felt an unexpected intimacy with the people and places we had visited, a feeling of being a community rather than one big country. And I did feel I had visited; I left the theatre with the joy of having had a really good time. Finnegan has a journalist’s gift for observation. He put it to good use creating this show after his creative writing nonfiction graduate study plans fell through. With a notebook full of observations and reflections, which he didn’t think would constitute a book, and his acting background and an undergraduate degree in philosophy, he created this enchanting performance piece.

I’m sorry last night was the final of three performances in New York. I would like you to have seen it. Visit Finnegan’s site, www.jackfinnegan.com, to learn his plans after Edinburgh.

The seventh annual East To Edinburgh festival takes place through Sunday at 59E59 Theaters (between Park and Madison Avenues). Created as a way to help shows get on their feet before flying off to Scotland, the festival simulates the same production constraints shows experience during the Edinburgh Festival, while giving them a space to fine-tune their productions.

Ticket prices range from $10 to $20 ($7 - $15.50 for 59E59 Members) and may be purchased by calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or online www.59e59.org. 

So much talent!

I had a great time at the Episcopal Actors' Guild's open mic night on Monday. Lots of terrific singers, strong poetry readings and, as always with Guild people, fun partying. Ronnie Giles, one top-notch showman, snapped this photo of my friend Mary Sheeran singing "With Every Breath."

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
-- Edith Wharton

The Wise Man of Nyokodo

Actor friend Casey Groves will present a staged reading of his play The Wise Man of Nyokodo, a Japanese-style Noh play in English, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
 
The play is a testament to the transforming power of sharing our stories, and based on an imagined meeting in Nagasaki Cathedral between the famous Catholic peace activist, Dr. Takashi Nagai, and the pilot of the Bock’s car, Charles Sweeney, years after the dropping of the bomb.
 
The reading will be accompanied by the Japanese music ensemble Wafoo and followed by a brief discussion of the play and issues around the bombing. It is sponsored by NY Peace Film Festival and Interborough Repertory Theater (IRT)

Written and directed by Casey (in photo with Episcopal Actors' Guild executive director Karen Lehman), the reading will be 7 p.m. Aug. 7 and 8 at Interborough Repertory Theater, 154 Christopher St., 3rd floor, buzzer 3B.

For reservations and information call (917) 969-8698.

(Photo by Lauren Yarger.)

Freud's Last Session

How refreshing to hear a challenging debate between two equal opponents who treat each other with respect and wrap it up in about 75 minutes. Even better when that debate is about the existence of God and put forth during an imagined meeting between C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold, left in photo) and Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner). Mark St. Germain’s new two-character play, Freud's Last Session, which opened last night at the Marjorie S. Deane Theater Little Theater, is a worthy exploration of faith by two great thinkers of the 20th century.

A discussion of religion could really bomb theatrically without the right ingredients. Director Tyler Marchant has been blessed with St. Germain’s excellent script and two first-rate actors. Not to mention Brian Prather’s outstanding set, Freud’s book- and artifact-filled London study, with its dark furniture, Victorian lamps, Oriental rugs and, oh, yes, that infamous therapeutic couch.

We don’t know if such a meeting ever took place between the Christian convert Lewis, then a rising star, and the esteemed atheist psychoanalyst Freud, although Harvard professor Armand M. Nicholi Jr., in his best-selling book The Question of God, mentioned that a young Oxford professor visited Freud at the start of World War II after Freud had settled in London to escape the Nazis. St. Germain’s creative speculation that it could have been Lewis makes for dramatic and witty entertainment.

Set on Sept. 3, 1939, the day England entered the war against Germany, Freud, dying of oral cancer, would have been 83 and Lewis 41. (Freud died of doctor-assisted suicide less than three weeks later.) The two men interrupt their discussions frequently to listen to BBC reports on Hitler’s aggression in Poland, which certainly give credence to Freud’s claim that the notion of a loving God is “an insidious lie.” But Lewis holds his own, and even turns the psychiatric table on Freud. Pointing to the assortment of figurines on the doctor’s desk, Lewis asks, “What do you call a man whose desk is dominated by gods and goddesses?” Freud’s quickly replies, “A collector.”

It is that kind of fast-paced exchange and St. Germain’s balanced theological arguments that keep the play from falling into preachiness or dogmatism. While I agree with Lewis and choose to believe in God, Freud’s points make sense to me. I also find it hard to explain away pain and suffering as something we just don’t understand. Any questioning person wants to know where God is in that.
 
Freud's Last Session had its world premiere last June at Massachusetts’s Barrington Stage Company, where it was extended twice and brought back by popular demand for two subsequent encore engagements.  It holds the record as the longest-running play in Barrington Stage’s history.

The Off-Broadway premiere is at the Little Theater, 10 W. 64th St. For tickets, call 212-352-3101. For more information, visit FreudsLastSession.com.