Life With A Writer

There's going to be a reading of one of Baroy's plays this month at our friend Marc's gorgeous little theater (that is about to be shut down due to a bureaucratic fuckup so frustrating that it makes me want to cry). Our other friend, Glen, is directing it. During the first night of rehearsals, Glen saw a narrative hole he wanted Baroy to fill, and so yesterday Baroy wrote a new scene.

He spend much of the day on it, and when he was done, printed it out and handed it to me. "Let me know what you think," he said, and sat down across from me on the couch.

I wasn't three lines in when I felt them--Baroy's eyes boring in to me. I glanced up, then lowered my head slightly, peering at him over the tops of my glasses. He smiled weakly and picked up the newspaper. I went back to reading.

But not for long. "You know," I said, not even taking my eyes from the paper, "in about ten seconds I'm going to have to ask you to leave the room. I can't read with you watching my every facial twitch."

"But you haven't laughed," he whined.

"And I won't, until you stop watching to see if I do," I said. "Get over yourself. I'll tell you what I think when I'm done."

This morning, I was listening to the audiobook version of Stephen King's "On Writing.", when I heard him telling a story about riding in a car with his wife Tabitha while she was doing a first read-through of whatever novel he'd recently finished. "After I'd glanced over at her eight or nine times," he says (though of course I'm paraphrasing, because you can't take an exerpt from an audiobook), "or, OK, fifteen times, she turned to me and said, 'Would you keep your eyes on the road and let me read? Stop being so damned needy.'"

Apparently, they're all the same. Except Baroy's tax returns don't look like King's.

[For what it's worth, the scene was good--Baroy can write, no doubt about that--but seemed a bit stilted and contrived to me, possibly because I read it out of context of the rest of the play. And, yes, I said as much to Baroy. Except without the words stilted and contrived. Because he wants to hear the truth, but damn. Not that much truth.]