It was our first rehearsal for Salome, late spring 1991. I had managed to drag Mutahar Williams along. “Mutahah,” as it was pronounced, was his Subud name, but he was very English, his voice deep and resonant, like seasoned wood: an exquisitely-tuned instrument for poetry. We’d hit the coffeehouse poetry circuit trolling for players for Festival Dionysus, our anarchic take on the ancient Greek festival of wine and theater. I found Mutahar at Lizards on Santa Monica, or the Espresso Bar in the alley off S. Raymond in Pasadena. He was a professor at Occidental College and a considerable poet. The M in MTV still stood for music then, they actually showed videos still. Mutahar felt the time was ripe for poetry videos, so he made his own. Nature poetry, shot outdoors. I think I still have the VHS cassette somewhere. But I recruited him for the Ancients Chorus in Dionysus. He was one of those who remained skeptical of the show all the way through our run. Not as skeptical as the only professional actress in our patchwork company of poets, musicians, painters and general gung-ho creative types, who kept moaning, “This is going to ruin my career,” throughout every rehearsal. She never invited anyone she knew to the show. And she’d lose herself in back whenever the whole Gray Pony Chorus took the stage. Oscar Wilde’s Salome was our follow-up to Dionysus, and it would prove to be a fluke hit (as I wrote about last month, complete with cast and crew list, synopsis, etc.), but at that first rehearsal who could know? There were at least eight women there, and only three men: Mutahar, myself, and Blaine Steele, the director. (Peditto might have been there, too–our producer, and founder of the...

I have a problem. And like most of my problems, I was the last one to know about it. In fact, I had considered this problem an attribute until last Saturday night when I was strolling through the outdoor shopping and dining district of Old Town Pasadena enjoying a fruitful, funny conversation with my companion Anne Hathaway. (Ok, it wasn’t really Anne Hathaway, but since my actual companion wouldn’t appreciate having her name immortalized in this blogumn, I figured I’d pick a pseudonym that could bring in some extra search engine traffic.) It was just after 10pm and suddenly every store front –from quaint coffee shops to high-end wine bars to Yogurtariums– transformed like some brick and mortar werewolf into make-shift night clubs with obligatory velvet ropes and roided-up door men hairier than Cerberus. Turning onto a slightly more quiet side street, Anne Hathaway and I passed two women in their early 20s who were squeezed into club wear of such suffocating tightness that their female forms resembled nothing less than two freshly fed pythons. As I watched them wobbling forth in their sky-scraper heels like sailors after seven years at sea, I quickly concocted twin backstories featuring a whistle stop tour of heartbreaks, disappointments and diminished expectations. “I feel bad for them. They seem just so desperate to impress,” I said in a tone of genuine pity as opposed to my usual snark attack. “That’s really judgmental. How do you know they’re desperate and sad?”  Anne Hathaway snapped back. In an effort to save face, I mumbled something to Anne Hathaway about how she was right and then asked her to reveal some plot spoilers from The Dark Knight Rises (Ka-ching! – Take that Google!) And that is how I learned about my problem: ...