Cowboy Mouth/LIZZIE.

In the last week or so I’ve had 2 separate, different dreams in which I am walking around someplace public wearing no pants, and I haven’t forgotten to wear pants or lost them or had them taken away from me but, in both dreams, I have deliberately put together a pantsless outfit to wear, and the dreams mostly consists of my effort to commit to the decision, to tamp down my discomfort, to pull it off. In the first dream, several days ago, I was walking down the street; in the second dream, last night, I was at work, maybe in a restaurant but the setting is vague.

Tonight I'll be on a redeye to London with my friend Tim for the U.K. premiere of the musical we began devising almost 27 years ago. T and I have made lots of theater together in the years since, but LIZZIE was our first collaboration. It spans the length of our friendship. It nearly spans the length of my career, and, since about 10 years ago when we resurrected the old one-act we'd put aside after a short run in the early 90s, began rethinking the book and adding not only a bunch of new songs but a third writer, our friend Alan, it has come to sort of be my career, at least in the eyes of people who haven't known me long. I am one of the writers of LIZZIE. "Have you met Steven? He's one of the writers of LIZZIE." I guess it's a function of how long musicals take to develop, but people ask me now "How's LIZZIE going?" in the same way they would ask someone, "So how's work?"

We always talk about the various LIZZIE influences, the great rock women, Heart, the Runaways, etc. But I was thinking this morning that even deeper in the DNA is the Sam Shepard/Patti Smith play, Cowboy Mouth. I was obsessed with this play in the early 80s, and I directed a production of it when I was in college, briefly, in Indiana in 1983. Cowboy Mouth is literally about yearning for redemption by rock and roll savior:

"In the old days, they had Jesus and them guys. His words don't shake through us anymore. We created rock 'n' roll in our image -- it's our child -- a new savior, rockin' toward Bethlehem to be born. God was selfish. He kept himself hidden. You gotta be a performer."

Here's a beautiful recent clip of Patti Smith:

And there's this: