"Show Business"

The Pride Festival is getting seriously underway now. Last Saturday, we had a preliminary meeting of all the playwrights and directors with the production manager and the festival committee chair. This coming weekend are the auditions - always unpredictable. One memorable year a young actor sat on a chair on the stage to give her prepared monologue, and everyone in the audience could see that her jeans were split. Trying not to laugh like school kids and throw her off was rough.

I've been through this pre-production stuff a couple of times before with the festival, but it's still exciting. When I was writing fiction, it was a lonely process - you sweated and typed and maybe shared your work with a small group of writers and your editor and then you sweated and typed some more - on your own. Then you turned it in. In contrast, the collaborative "let's put on a show" feeling that you get with theater is really like nothing else I've experienced as a writer.