Well, everyone’s favorite world-class NASCAR precision driver has made yet another exhilarating trip to the Winner’s Circle.

I was feeling so good. The strike for Pick Up Ax had gone very smoothly and only taken about four hours. Everything was accounted for, cleaned up and on it’s way to storage. So I’m on my way to Angstrom Stage Lighting to return the instruments we had rented for the show, and after dropping everything off I’m told that we’re missing three adapters and two spare lamps. Total hit: about $175.00.

Then, as I was leaving, I backed my Eclipse into a steel pole. Nice. Smashed the right rear tail lamp and scraped up the rear side pretty good. There’s more damage to the car, but you get the picture. And the total estimate for repairing it is exactly $34 over my deductible.

After I got back home, I had a surprise package from Microsoft on my doorstep. A complimentary copy of the final release version of Windows 98. It seemed almost too good to be true. That’s probably because it was. The installation went very poorly to say the least, and I ended up having to delete the registry in order to get the system going at all. The install applet said it would take about 30-60 minutes to complete the installation, but because I was forced to use slower DOS drivers for the CD-ROM, it ended up taking more than two hours, and I had to install several times.

Finally, the HP Scanjet 4p would not show up in the hardware detect. Couldn’t manually install it. After struggling with it for about a day and a half, I finally wiped out the scanner drivers and the registry entries for the Scanjet and SCSI card with RegEdit, then reinstalled Windows 98 one final time. Thankfully that did the trick. Total hit: about 16 hours of work time lost. Now that Win98 is behaving itself I have to say it’s a big improvement over 95.

But enough about that. A big trip is coming up. New Hampshire, for my cousin’s high school graduation. It’s quite a sojourn. First you fly to Boston, then drive north for about three hours until you reach a Grover’s Corners knockoff called Littleton. I’ve only been back there once. Although there’s a lot of respect there, I’m too much of a West Coast native to really enjoy the New England style. I’m not really looking foward to the trip, but I’m not dreading it either. It’ll be good to be away from the ringing phones and incessant e-mail and yes, even the web for a few days. Maybe I’ll have some pictures when I get back.

Somehow I inadvertently planned things so that I’ll be driving out of Logan airport at 5 p.m. on a Friday. If you think L.A. traffic is bad, just take a gander over to Boston. You’ll never complain about “gridlock” in Southern California again.

Los Angeles grew up in the mid-late 20th century–the century of the automobile. Boston matured as a metropolitan area more than two hundred years before Henry Ford was even born. As a result, two hours in L.A. traffic will move you 50 miles. The same two hours in Boston might not move you even a single mile. Bean Town is a much smaller place, to be sure. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

I’m currently in Littleton, New Hampshire.

This place reminds me of Alaska. I guess it should… New Hampshire and the southern part of Alaska occupy a similar latitude. Littleton reminds me of Eagle River, the town I lived in during those carefree Alaska years. I remember Eagle River as having a real homey feel to it, which is odd because the town was growing so quickly. In fact, it was billed as the fastest growing city in America when I lived there (1982-1985).

But there were a lot of constants: playing Donkey Kong at the laundromat, trying to eat a whole steak at the Northern Lights steak house (they gave you a sticker that said “I ATE THE WHOLE THING!” if you did; funny what you’ll do for a sticker when you’re 10 years old), watching the houses go up all over town. We used to sneak into the under-construction houses and steal sugar cubes the workers would leave there for their coffee. Yum.

I wonder what it looks like today, what my old neighborhood is like. Does that long sloping driveway still go down to 2403 Teklankia? Does it still flood every spring when the snow melts? Are there still fish in the creek behind the house? It’s sad that those years played such an influential part in my adolecence, and yet I haven’t kept in touch with anyone. I wanted to. I started to, but over time things like high school, teenage angst, and life in general get in the way. The relationships wither away and die the death of a hundred letters and phone calls never quite made.

In any case, the graduation ceremony was yesterday. It was a real small-town affair. Stephanie went to a private high school called “The White Mountain School”. Total student population: about 85. Her graduating class had just over twenty people in it. The graduation was held at the Littleton Opera House. I cracked up when they told me that. Can you imagine a town of 5,500 people having its own opera house? I sing at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with Opera Pacific all the time; now that is an opera house. It seats 3,000. This place probably sat 300.

It was a beautiful building, built early 1800’s and restored about ten years ago. But it’s far from a serious performing arts facility. I’ve never seen a real theatre that had a half dozen large windows streaming light into the performance space. And the stage was no more than 20 feet wide. I asked my family if any opera was ever performed there. They looked at me like I was crazy.

Anyway. Today we went horseback riding with Stephanie. She has been riding since she was nine, and now has four horses. Only two of them are rideable, so she took the mustang while I rode Sugar, a quarterhorse with a mind of its own. By the end Megan was pretty banged up from having to sit on the back of the horse; she was essentially sitting on the base of it’s backbone which was surprisingly sharp and bony. We both fell off once due to a loose saddle. Megan got bumped off a second time when Sugar tried to run us into a tree. But we had a great time going through the countryside. As usual, I forgot my camera.

In the fall Stephanie will be going to a college in Virginia to study equine business and other horse-releated things. It sounds pretty cool, she will even be taking one of her horses to college. I’ve never seen her at a show yet, but Steph was recently out west to compete with her newest horse at Del Mar.

Returned to Los Angeles last night. As predicted, the trip was short but tiring. No crashes with the plane or the rental car, so as Bing Crosby once sang, “I’m counting my blessings instead of sheep.” Surprisingly, after that two and a half-hour horseback ride through the forest yesterday, I wasn’t sore at all.

I started the day by buying some wonderfully scented candles from Cindy and Dave’s flower shop in downtown Littleton. They had some of the weirdest smells! Just how big is the market for chocolate-scented candles?

After breakfast we left for Boston. They say that if you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait five minutes because it’ll change. It sure did, to heavy rain which lasted until after the plane took off.

We got into Boston three or four hours early to leave time for exploring the town. A good portion of that was blown just trying to conquer the city’s arcane and varicose layout. Eventually we landed in Cambridge, home of Harvard University. I’d always wanted to see Harvard. In high school I had the grades, recommendations and extra-curricular activities necessary to get into Harvard, but for various reasons (many of which I’m not sure I understand) I never applied. I loved the Yard, it was everything I expected it to be and more. The campus had such a heady and scholastic feel to it, especially in comparison to the ultra-modern college from which I graduated.

There are a number of majestic and beautiful churches at and surrounding the campus, a testament to Harvard’s long history as a school of divinity. My favorite building was The Memorial Church, a luminous Colonial-style chapel built in memory of the Harvard grads who died fighting for our country. The interior is predominately white, with various memorials to those who died in military service. Just inside the South Porch is the Memorial Room, which houses a Caen marble sculpture called “The Sacrifice”. The afternoon light streams into the room through windows placed high in the walls, creating eerily quiet shadows which silently sorrow on the marble faces. It is one of those places where you just have to feel at peace, yet without the ever-present morbidity of, say, a cemetery.

I could have spent days just wandering around Harvard taking in the beauty of it all. They seem to have the best of both worlds: two hundred year-old buildings with fully modern interiors. Which is not to say they weren’t opulent. We peeked into a couple of random lounge/study rooms. I would have been afraid to even walk on the carpet. The grounds were absolutely immaculate. I remember thinking that Harvard was like a large museum. I suppose in many ways it is.

No trip to Boston would be complete without a visit to American Repertory Theatre, one of the leading resident theatres in the county and home to an MFA program which has politely rejected my application three years in a row. Can I just say one more time how awful the city streets are around there? Jeez. I eventually managed to find 64 Brattle Street, an address I remembered off the top of my head. Pretty non-descript from the outside, but the theatre is surrounded by some of the most spectacular homes in Cambridge.

The trip each way was just exhausting. Three hours from Littleton to Boston by car, plus a six hour plane ride, followed by an hour drive back to Irvine. How can one be so tired after spending an entire day sitting more or less motionless? Hmph. Anyway, there are a dozen or so other photos from the trip on the photo pages. Do a search for “Boston”.

I was watching the NBC sitcom “Working” tonight, and saw Harry Groener guest-starring on the show as the Vice-President of Upton-Webber, the fictional company the show is centered around.

I thought that was cool because I was just sitting next to Harry a couple of hours ago. He’s one of the cast members for The Hollow Lands, which is getting ready for a staged reading in two days. I’m a big fan of Harry’s. He starred in the hit Broadway musical Crazy For You for its entire run. I was fortunate enough to see his performance, and the boy can sing and dance like it ain’t nobody’s business. Of course, he was also one of stars of the original Broadway production of Cats (can’t say I ever saw that one), among other shows. The best part is that he’s a genuinely funny, likeable and down-to-earth guy. He says the funniest things in rehearsals.

Working on The Hollow Lands has been great. The script is mammoth in scope and size; it reminds me of The Kentucky Cycle, but with a bit of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales thrown in. I’m constantly amazed by Howard Korder, the playwright, and his seemingly limitless knowledge of 19th-century American history. The dramaturg on this production is Amy Freed, whose play Freedomland was produced by SCR last season and was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. I am truly not worthy.

Anthony Clarvoe, who’s play Pick Up Ax I just produced and acted in, is also at the festival. His latest play, Walking Off the Roof, is receiving a workshop production. I met Clarvoe briefly the other day; I was in the production office at SCR, and this guy was sitting on the floor cross-legged with a printer cable in one hand and a laptop computer in the other. I think he was trying to get it to print or something like that. When I finally realized who he was, I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of his struggling with a computer. Does life imitate art? Survey says: yes.

This is the inaugural year for the Pacific Playwrights Festival. There are something like six or seven new scripts receiving readings or workshops during the week, and I’m glad to be a part of it. I’m willing to bet that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the “great American plays” of our time, more than a few will have come from South Coast Repertory.

Every month or two, my ex-roommate Richard and I will spend an evening hanging out. It usually goes like this: a dinner much too high in calories and fat, then a mainstream type movie, then back to my place to make fun of Saturday Night Live or play a computer game like You Don’t Know Jack. Pretty routine. This last time, though, was a bit different.

First of all, I found out at dinner that he did indeed audition for Jeopardy, as he said he would. But he didn’t pass the test! I couldn’t believe it–you’d have to know Rich to understand just how full of useless trivia he is. I also beat him at You Don’t Know Jack that night, winning two out of three games. The world is turned upside down! With the Jeopardy audition, you have to correctly answer 35 out of 50 questions you are asked. And they are fill-in-the-blank, not multiple choice. Rich said only 2 out of the 50 or so people who auditioned passed the test.

The coolest part of the night was the movie. Instead of a typical big-release picture, we decided to see an indy film, The Last Days of Disco . Currently in “limited release” in Southern California, Disco it is a Whit Stillman film and part of his trilogy of movies which include Metropolitan and Barcelona. When we got there, I was reading a blow-up of a Los Angeles Times review of the film posted outside the theatre and saw that a friend of mine was one of the stars of the film.

Matt Keesler, who plays a assistant District Attorney and major disco aficionado in the film, played the title role in The Interrogation of Nathan Hale at SCR a few years ago. He’s a cool guy, and I’m glad to see him doing so well. I enjoyed not only the film itself, but also seeing a sextet of “unknown” but highly talented actors for a change. A person can only stomach so many Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Al Pacino, other other “A” cast movies before yearning for something truly different.

Today was the first reading of Hollow Lands. With intermission it came to about three hours. The director, David Chambers, had us break the script down into individual stapled scenes because the script was so unwieldy in size. I thought the reading went well, but I felt sorry for a few of the actors that had little to do in the show. It must have been hard to sit up there onstage and wait for three hours, especially after four hours of rehearsal this morning. What’s really weird is performing at 3 p.m. on a Friday. The next reading is at 10 a.m. on a Sunday. That’s even stranger. Theatre isn’t supposed to take place in the morning. It’s not natural.