Smørrebrød.

This place sounds great, and I can't wait to try it.

When we were in Denmark 2 years ago for the opening of LIZZIE at Fredericia Teater, we (the writers and director) were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime meal at Ti Trin Ned. Chef Mette Gassner personally served us dinner. It was unexpected and unforgettable.

We also had a couple of more traditional Scandanavian meals, one I particularly enjoyed was at a lunch place on the harbor, nice but not fancy) where we ate the traditional lunch of dark bread with various cured or smoked or otherwise preserved meats and fish, and pickled vegetables. Delicious. I love that kind of meal. It reminds me of dinners at Grandma Lenore's apartment where, if she prepared a meal at all, she might open a can of smoked oysters or sardines, a jar of cheese spread, some dense rye bread or crackers, pickles.

But my inner Andy Rooney perked up when I read this:

Dinner menu will have just 15 dishes, each of which will cost no more than $16. They won’t be full entree-sized, but they won’t be super small either. People should expect to order between three and five of them, depending on how hungry they are.

I'm not such a fan of the "small plates" thing. One, you have no idea what small means. And two, it's great if everyone you're dining with is as adventurous as you, wants to have a communal experience, and likes ordering a bunch of stuff, especially the weird thing on the menu "just to try it." But if you're not with that group, it means you either have to figure out how to share some things with some people, or not, or default to the choices of the pickiest eater in the group.

Critic!

With all these licensed productions of LIZZIE all over the place lately, we're reading a flurry of reviews. Mostly really good, but as always at times like this I end up in a (somewhat tedious to me, at this point) conversation with myself about the function or utility of reviews, the relationship of critics to artists, etc., blah blah blah.

In the middle of this stew of intellectual inquiry and artist's insecurity plops this piece in this week's New Yorker.

I was excited when I saw the subhead, to read something by a gay man about A Life, a moving and thought-provoking new play running right now at Playwrights Horizons, which C and I saw last weekend and enjoyed quite a bit, and I like Als's thoughtful take on it. I haven't seen Duat, or the Front Page.

That last paragraph though. Yikes. I can understand having a strong negative reaction to a piece of art. I have them all the time. Just last week, in fact. I get how it can feel personally offensive to sit through something you think is awful. You feel taken. But still.

Artists complaining about critics is complicated if not just tiresome, but I will say this: if you're going to so fiercely attack someone's work, I think you should support your argument with an example or two.

Finitude.

I was in a funk for several days this past week, and because I've lived with this idea of myself as "sensitive" and "moody" ever since I can remember -- does anyone not have a half dozen go-to adjectives their parents assigned them practically at birth and that have stuck for all time? -- I didn't for most of my life think of these dark spells as anything I had much control over or particularly wish to know more about or even look at closely until I discovered Buddhist meditation in my early forties and realized that with a great deal of self-discipline (to be honest, more self-discipline that I can usually muster for very long at a time) one actually can get on more familiar terms with these states of mind. Inhale, exhale.

I was in a funk for several days this past week. I'm shaking it off now, but not completely. It was triggered by a dismissive review of a production of one of my shows, and around the same time a fundraising campaign for a new project got off to a very slow start, and then I caught a cold which has held on for almost 3 weeks now. I'm not sleeping well, and that makes it all worse. Or seem worse, which is maybe the same thing.

Even though periods of being stressed out, angry, sad, irritable, are not unusual for me, the last year or so has been tough. I've been increasingly anxious since my mom died. Aside from the grief, I can't stop thinking about how time is limited. Mom was less than 20 years older than I am now. The show of mine which only now is seeing some wide success, making a mark outside my tiny artistic neighborhood, bringing in a small amount of revenue (small), is work that I began 26 years ago.

There are so many stories I want to tell, so many shows I want to write. No longer can I just sort of casually believe that I will get to them all. Clearly, I won't. It's not new for me to fret over what to do now, what to do next, how to best spend my time, which project has the best chance of coming to fruition, but now, when I decide, "I'm going to work on this project now," I'm not just postponing the others. I am coming to terms (or not) with the fact that I may not have time for them.

Stacks of books in my apartment represent the stories I have some serious interest in turning into theater. Big creative projects, for me, always start with a lot of reading.

There's the Scarlet Letter musical that we've already written, and now we're trying to get it on a stage.

The other thing I'm actively working at now I usually call my Horatio Alger project. It's a mashup of Horatio Alger's biography, an adaptation of his most famous novel, Ragged Dick, and my own high school diary. I've written one and a half songs and some rough pages of monologue.

Other projects in the cooker (my brain) are a musical adaption of the life of Grant Wood. I call it "Wood."

"Syphilis, the Musical."

Something about the Gold Rush.

And a musical based on some aspect of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Tom Hayden, R.I.P.

Years before I discovered queer politics or even knew that I was gay, I was a tween peacenik, and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda were my heroes.

I'm not sure how that happened. My parents were not particularly anti-war, despite my mom's involvement in race issues in the neighborhood. Mom had two cousins, Lonn and Neil, who were a few years younger than she, and I remember anxious conversations about their draft status (I think it was A1, the most likely to be called up) but I don't remember now if either of them was drafted before the war ended.

I suspect it had something to do with our babysitter, Pam Fryer. She lived next door and she was a few years older than my brother and me and a total style icon for my baby gay soul, with her maxi-skirts and macrame jewelry. I remember reading the cautionary novel Go Ask Alice and thinking Alice was EVERYTHING. Not that our teen babysitter was a peace activist, but in my eyes she was a hippie and it was all part of an ethos I absorbed.

Anyway, I was surprised to see Tom Hayden's obit this morning. I thought: but he's so young! He was my mother's age.

Monster Breakfast.

I think I stole the plot of my dream last night from a children's book. If not, then someone needs to write it. Even in the dream, at a certain point, I was thinking, "This is a little hackneyed, isn't it?"

I was at a small party at my friend M's apartment in San Francisco. (She moved back to the Midwest years ago, but for many years she lived in the Inner Richmond.) I left to go get something, buy something, I don't remember exactly what, but it should have been a quick errand.

As I was walking, I noticed that nearly the whole neighborhood was under construction. Cranes and huge steel girders, cast iron framework, and trusses everywhere, dwarfing the existing buildings, and a crowd of people here and there on the sidewalks, looking up at the workers.

A burly, shirtless man was climbing up the side of a building -- not a worker just a guy impressing his friends. He was about 3 stories up. A cop shouted, "Hey come down off of there!"

On his way down, he missed a foothold and started falling. Everyone gasped but a small group of people on the sidewalk caught him and lowered him to the sidewalk gently. On his feet, he turned and waved to the crowd and everyone cheered.

But the cheering turned to screaming when we turned to look down the street and saw a huge creature coming toward us, about 20 feet tall, covered with silvery-brown fur, sort of a cross between a gorilla and Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, rampaging, roaring, grabbing people, tearing them apart and eating them.

Of course we ran. The monster was coming from the direction of M's apartment so I couldn't go back there to safety. I ran with the mob for a few blocks, then a few of us turned into an alley that led to a small enclosed space with a lot of debris piled up at a back wall. (I know, don't go in an alley when you're being chased by a monster, but we weren't thinking clearly.)

We heard the monster coming. We were doomed.

But then through a quick process of discussion and consensus, we discovered that some of us had restaurant skills, we rummaged through the pile of junk and pulled out what we needed to improvise a cute little coffee shop, we fried some bacon and eggs, brewed coffee, and, by the time the monster reached us, we were just sitting at a small table having breakfast, pretending not to be frightened out of our minds.

The monster stopped short, smiled. He was famished, and it turned out he much preferred bacon and eggs to people. He sat down with us and had a scrambled egg sandwich on an English muffin.

Make You Feel My Love.

Dylan getting the Nobel Prize is validating, and very moving, to see songwriting recognized as great literature.

Though I've always been more of a Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen guy, I think every songwriter has maybe half a dozen songs that, when they sit down to write they think, maybe not consciously, "I will strive today to write something that good, and this is one of those songs for me. The way I know it's great is that, no matter who sings it, it retains all its power and depth.

Starting with 3 of my favorite singers, and then some guy.

Sex, Shame, the South.

Really interesting piece about literature and the South. The Garth Greenwell novel, What Belongs to You, sounds good. I'm fascinated by the obliquitous but mostly invisible sphere of gay culture that sprang from homosexuality being illegal and dangerous for so long (and still in many places in the U.S.): cruising in parks, bathrooms, bus stations, etc.

I'm always drawn to subjects that people just do not want to talk about. If someone is ashamed to talk about something, you can bet it's good stuff.

I don't think there's necessarily anything "wrong" with the fact that we had to emphasize certain aspects of gay life (we fall in love and have lasting relationships) and deemphasize or even stigmatize other aspects (we cruise truck stops for anonymous sex) in order to gain rights. Sadly, privilege comes with fitting in. We got marriage rights by admitting, essentially, that we were awful and dirty and shameful but only because we were oppressed and really we just want to be like you if you'll let us.

Of course, there's no shortage of straight people having sex in public bathrooms. The difference is that they have always had more options. For gay men for a very long time, public bathrooms were an important site of their culture. I mean, seriously, where do you expect people to meet each other when their lives are literally illegal?

I know I'm conflating a lot of issues and speaking vaguely about different historical periods that had different laws, attitudes, pressures, etc.