I not only discovered tiktok during quarantine, but found out lgbtqia teens like my poetry. This makes sense. To be lgbtqia, under 18, at home. omg. Write! Write! Write!
@betterhalf50
covid-19: The graduating class 2020 will always be bonded globally
On May 16, the XQ Institute, The LeBron James Family Foundation, and The Entertainment Industry Foundation hosted a celebration of the high school graduates of 2020. Whether graduating kindergarten, high school, or college, this year’s graduates will recognize one another forever.
covid-19: 24-24-24
When folks ask how long it takes me to write a play, I get stumped for an answer. It took me 7 years to write Jonathan, I say. While writing Jonathan, I worked on numerous other scripts & poetry and had a FT job, and a family. So it’s not like I wrote 9-5, 5 days a week, 2-week vacation, for 7 years.
With my covid-19 routine, I now know it took me 24 hours to write the treatment for the one-act play “Lookin’ for Liza Jane.” I wrote 6:30-7:30 am, M-F, beginning on March 24. I finished the treatment on April 24.
Treatment excerpt for “Lookin’ for Liza Jane”
covid-19: Script reading of “Find the Miracle” on zoom
We’re starting to get the hang of this Zoom deal.
This script-reading brought together 7 actors and a stage manager – no easy feat! Across a few nights, with some availability and bandwidth problems, actors and the stage manager jumped around quite a bit, picking up the lines for different roles. They are so fantastic and I’ll link to their names.
The big take-aways from this reading:
1. Is Helena Jozef’s 1st wife? 2nd? Does she die and he gets married a 3rd time?
2. Abby comes from no where. Need to develop the relationship between Abby & Jodi; they should be more buddies than the script currently shows
What’s working:
“Gold star” goes to the story with Jozef & Helena: Theirs is an epic love story
“Need to see” goes to the story of the prisoners in the Nazi death camp: This story is adventurous, intense, compelling; it’s very visual, so some of the confusion in the reading may be cleared up on stage
“The jury’s still out” goes to the current day story: some love the teenagers/some don’t see enough distinctions between the characters
My concerns:
a. How do I make the current day story as compelling as the prisoner story?
b. How do I weave the 3 stories as one play, showing 3 generations of 1 family?
This is 1 of 3 collage plays I’m developing. I have no blueprint, which makes this writing very exciting. The scenes are not flashbacks. Rather, the past informs the present as it unravels and forges ahead.
Great THANK YOU’s go to Star Banks, Jonathan Berry, Christian Carter, Jasmine Leonard, Tonya Lynn, Faye Miller, Nik Nemec, Shakira Stephens, Shakara Wright
The prisoner story and the love story from “Find the Miracle,” a script in progress.
covid-19: Cool shirts from the cricut machine
My stay-at-home partner made us these cool shirts!
(Left to right): Judy Meiksin (playwright) and fiancee Edie Glenn Green (artist)
covid-19: Family talent show
(Left to right): Judy Meiksin (playwright) and Edie Glenn Green (artist)
“AIM” script-reading!
Thank you to Kaitlin Marie Cliber and Hannah Brizzi for bringing Eidel and Henda to life in "Aim"! and thank you to Lynnelle Goins for giving three-dimensions to the longest set of stage directions in one-act play history! This is at Pittsburgh New Work's New Play Reading Series.
March 2, 2020
(Left to right): Kaitlin Marie Cliber (Eidel) and Hannah Brizzi (Henda) with Lynnelle Goins (Stage Manager)
(Left to right): Hannah Brizzi (Henda), Judy Meiksin (playwright), and Kaitlin Marie Cliber (Eidel).
covid-19: Haley Clancy writes us a poem
On our last weekend out on the town, poet Haley Clancy was working at the Strip District. She played music for my fiancée Edie & me to dance while she wrote us a poem:
So who knew, never did I think
it would be like this
us dancing in the Strip,
I plant you a kiss, because the
day has been scheduled
but you have always been
my date, right here,
I do feel safe
because I love you.
What a thing to say; it’s been
6 years,
but I will say I do,
I will say it for the rest
of my years.
© 2020 Haley Clancy
covid-19: Last weekend b4 the shut-down
I say to my fiancée Edie, “Let’s avoid shopping this weekend bc it'll be chaos out there.” Here's what I came back with.
covid-19: Back to playwrighting
After watching the Pro Bull Riding Global Cup with my fiancee, Edie, I’m back to work.
Welcome to the covid-19 Edie & Judy B&B - no vacancies
This morning at our B&B, my fiancee Edie cooked a quarantine special that’s like nothing we usually have for breakfast. And we went to the Pro Bull Riding Global Cup this afternoon.
What’s up today
MENU: The Quarantine Special
Getting ready to watch the championship
USA Eagles take the no. 1 position!
covid-19: Script reading of “Home Economics” on video call using facebook
The first script reading we set up on video call during the covid-19 quarantine was Home Economics, a biographical play about my great aunt Mali Spighel who founded AKIM in Jerusalem, an independent-living organization for intellectually-challenged adults. In one part of the play, Aunt Mali’s family is scattered, running away from Nazi Germany. This scene takes a special meaning during this time of “sheltering-in-place” – whether we’re miles away or just in the next block, we’re unable to get together with family.
Unlike Aunt Mali’s time, though, we have video calls on zoom, What’s App, Skype, fb….
Even so, when deaths from the virus began climbing in China, then Italy, and theaters were shutting down in London & nyc to promote social distancing, I found myself calling my daughter several times a day. She lives in the UK.
More take-aways from the script reading:
1. How does the history connect with Mali’s desire that her family remember her son Gabriel when she’s gone?
2. What segues from the present to the past will make the transitions important to the audience?
3. What is the purpose of the interaction between Gabriel and his cousin?
4. What do I want the audience to know when they leave the play?
Kudos to Kim El – playwright | actor | director – for taking the lead with these questions after the reading.
Great THANK YOU’s go to Kim El and Cheryl El-Walker for splitting the roles of Mali Spighel and Ilana, to Jonathan Berry for reading Gabriel, Nik Nemec for reading Cousin, and playwright Faye Miller for reading Stage Manager.
covid-19: Just a couple of lesbians during quarantine
While dancing to Koko Taylor’s “Piece of Man” we thought she was singing “pizza-man”!
covid-19: Frankie's line about Newton from "Seeking Transparency" - a script in progress
FRANKIE: It’s frustrating because it’s impossible to finish by deadline. I mean, I can try every metal in the periodic table, but then there’s every possible configuration. How much of it, for how long. Like baking it, you know? If I grow it at different temperatures, they do different things. If I try out the combination of materials in different amounts, they do different things. I need to have all the time in the world, then I could get somewhere. The best part for Newton was when they had a plague and he had to leave school. He got to go away and work for like two years straight and came up with his greatest discoveries.
covid-19: writing plays during quarantine!
covid-19: Writing M-F @ 6:30 am
Sister playwright Faye Miller and I establish a writing schedule, Monday through Friday, 6:30-7:30 am, on video call using Facebook. I’m using this time to write the treatment for a one-act play about Clara Brown, called “Lookin’ for Liza Jane.”
The weight symbols carry
After the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, my fiancée bought us the Stronger Than Hate t-shirts:
The t-shirt makers, in partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, send the proceeds to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Fund for Victims of Terror, benefiting the synagogue in this case. In support of the victims of the shooting, the Steelers allowed their modified logo to be displayed broadly, including clothing, signs, and stickers.
This show of solidarity throughout the city boosted our morale, and my fiancée thought to also pack the shirts for our trip to Israel where we would be spreading the message of unity with the Jewish community there. However, when my aunt saw our shirts, she was stunned.
She explained that to wear the symbol of the Star of David in Jerusalem would represent nationalism against Palestinian Moslems and anyone else not Jewish. Well, that’s not the message we wanted to send!
In the United States, where Jewish Americans are the minority, the symbol represents support.
In Israel, where the Jewish community is a majority, the symbol reverses itself as supremacist.
This 4th of July, Nike planned to release a shoe sporting the Betsy Ross flag design:
The company quickly cancelled the shoes when former football quarterback Colin Kaepernick pointed out its racist symbolism. Originally a symbol of pride for US independence from England—representing the 13 colonies—the design is now being waved by White Supremacists. Different groups of US nationalists are using various symbols prominent during the time of slavery in order to intimidate minorities in the country.
And US Americans are pitted against one another as they argue for and against Nike’s decision.
This controversy over the Betsy Ross symbolism makes me think of Frederick Douglass when abolitionists thought to honor him by asking him to speak at a 4th of July celebration. The date was 1852. Furthermore, the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed two years prior, which extended the danger of slavery into the free states. Douglass titled his speech: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?:
Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.
I think about the conversations we need to have as a country about the wrongs of our past in order to heal together, and certainly the diverse effects of these symbols give us a place to start.
Germany had this conversation within her borders and with Israel and the Jewish community worldwide. South Africans have done this during Mandela’s presidency (1994-1999). Indeed, Maya Angelou writes in her poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993: History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
Here is my new ritual: To listen to Dr. Angelou every 4th of July:
Happy (US) National Poetry Month!
The blessed angels
by Toi Derricotte
How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
table, as if in a bunch
whispering. How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse. Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars. Each heart
is a gift for the king. When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping. One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent. Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms and near invisible.
The 1st of March
Time to send out plays, 1 a day till the end of the month.
Digging into the archives
To make my characters authentic, I’m searching for first-hand accounts of life in the 1860s. It’s amazing how the slightest bit of information augments the plot: In Pittsburgh, Eidel’s aunt is with the Hebrew Ladies Aid Society every Thursday to sew, wrap bandages, and pack food cartons for soldiers’ wives, which comes in conflict with Eidel who prefers shooting lessons with a girl she has a crush on.
