Below The Fold

In a few weeks, Below the Fold is going to the stage.
Here’s what happened. My sister was looking for a script to turn into a play at the E Project where she’s been so involved for the last year or so. One day she called me up and said, “I want to put your blog on stage. The stories are all there. I can adapt this and make it happen.”
At first, I was against it. I never wrote any of this with the intention of bringing it to the stage. A script is an entirely different medium; it’s like taking an oil painting and turning it into a print. Sure, the colors and lines are there, but the texture’s entirely different. But Deb persisted and I relented for two reasons: 1) I’d still work with her on the adaptation and 2) She’s the only person who knows me well enough to pull it off.
So, we worked together and created a stage play based off of several of the posts I’ve slapped up here over the last few years, and in a few weeks, they’ll be having a staged reading (I’ll post the info on the date and time here later) of the piece, along with a talkback session. Based on that feedback, it’ll make its trek toward a complete production.
So, with all this, and my trepidation aside, I was surprised when I heard my folks were concerned with how they’ll come off on stage. Apparently, after years of appearing in my columns and on this blog time after time, they were a bit gun shy.
Personally, I can’t understand why. I mean, they’re funny people, in an unintentionally-so way. I know YOU have enjoyed reading my accounts of their foibles, even if they themselves haven’t always.
It’s material, you know? All of it. My whole life. Every second of every day, there’s something there to be written about; something to be held up to the prism of my own perspective and spun into some sort of story. That includes my family, my friends, people I don’t know and that weird old homeless guy at the I-225 off ramp to Parker who always tells me how his old man made the paint they used on the tie rods on my 75 Chevy pickup.
I’m a writer. That’s what I do. Sometimes I do it well, even. I can’t stop writing, and I’ve explained that to my folks and I think they get it. My inspiration is the world in which I live and the people I know are my palate. In the meantime, I do try to be honest, (if a little too snarky on occasion), and I try very hard not to hurt others intentionally. Even my extra-extra Jewish mother said that the other day: “Well, I know you’d never hurt me intentionally.” Sure, she said it such that you could actually see the italicized words come out of her mouth like that one Sesame Street sketch from the ’70s, but she meant it. She knows that while I can be a hot-blooded jackass; I really don’t have the penchant for cold-blooded cruelty. It’s not in my nature.
So, to those of you who read this or might make their way to see the show, please remember that you’re seeing things through my very specific and particular sense of perception, colored by 33 years (give or take) of training in Eastern-European Jewish Sarcasm, Brooklyn-borne bluntness, newsroom gallows humor, Inner-City false bravado and littered with the influences of Hunter S. Thompson, Douglas Adams, Jack London, Mark Twain, James Madison, Miles Davis, Neil Simon, Matt Groening, Woody Allen, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Swift, Robert Frost, Frank Miller and William Shakespeare, to name a few.
And don’t let that list fool you. Just as big an influence is that guy who writes the Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” commercials. Man, that guy is funny.