Rain, Rain, go away...

My it is wet here.
I wish I could explain why I'm listening to the theme from Love Story right now, but I cannot. 

My roommate is so very polite.  He offered to take turns vacuuming.  Maybe my last roommate was just a bastard, which is why I appreciate very small things like this offer.  No more Love Story. I am moving on to something with more pep.

Tonight Wahima and I visited our favorite cheap-ass haunt: The Old Spaghetti Factory, where, amazingly enough we can have dinner for $10 apiece.  After this we talked for long times about Cloud 9.  I am feeling very conflicted about my good friend directing this show.  Perhaps this is because I am not directing a show.

It is weird, because I have been working on some kind of show since Fall of 2002 when I was in Othello... I mean, Othello, Gross Indecency, Closer, Hamlet, Fantasticks, ICFB, Crucible, Sin... it has been madness: unending madness: on which I evidently thrive.  Having free time is wonderful, but there is something lacking: work.  It is for this reason that i began to study theatre: to feed my desire to create.  Going to work at the accounting firm every day pays the bills, and it's a fine thing to do, a satisfactory way of making a living, but without anything else to create, to work on, to fucking DO, I don't know... I get kinda bored.  Plus, it seems like everyone I know is always busy working on some other show.  It's not like I'm not reading, because of course I am reading.  More than I have since fricking Othello.  I am watching movies too, but I feel like I ought to be directing something, or at least contributing artistically to some sort of endeavor.  I volunteered to help Wahima out, of course, but I don't know...

I guess I just feel lazy or useless or something... who knows.

Tonight I watched what my grandmother always said was one of her favorite film performances of all time.  Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker.  I don't know what I was expecting, really, but man oh man, what a film!  It is early Sidney Lumet... not sure I know if this is true, but it is 1965, and the Sidney Lumet I know is the Lumet of Network and The Verdict, which are 70s movies.  Considering my affinity for Network, it is odd that I hadn't looked up this flick before.  Steiger is great in the movie, and the movie itself is a spare, unflinching tragedy in the Greek sense.  A sort of post-holocaust The Best Years of Our Lives with none of the happy ending stuff.  It's super-intense and incorporates that 1960s European influenced way of working: mood-heavy, sad, and an "every single day" sense to all of it.  It was totally powerful and I see why my grandmother liked it.

I finished my Nicky Silver kick today too.  The last play I read was Fat Men in Skirts, which is funny at times, but mostly undirectable.  Maybe I will re-read Raised in Captivity.  Pterodactyls could work too.  Not sure.

Rain. 

The Oscars will be here soon and I have done so little planning.  I have a fucking party to throw.  I really ought to get on it.

I am so tired lately.