summer journal part one: LA to NYC

This year I was in LA for June and July working on MSW. LA never really feels like summer to me, partly because it always feels like summer there. If CVS has sunscreen on the shelves year round, how is one to know if it's January or July and behave accordingly?

Adam says I love to talk trash about LA but that I don't really dislike it as much as I claim to - and that's probably fair. However, after suffering through this insane winter and then an insane allergy season (apparently cold winters make pollen stronger, wtf) it was a little bit of a let down to leave NYC the second that everyone started feeling the June euphoria.

As our time in the writer's room was winding down I was desperate to come home to the humidity. When I got back to NYC, I felt a little bit of "summer is almost over" energy--which people love to start saying as soon as the fourth of July has passed. I wanted to scream, please no, it's just starting for me. You might have been sweating it out for the past six weeks but I've been wearing jeans every day, JEANS! Long ones.

The day after I returned to NYC, Slant Theatre Co. did a workshop of my new play, CORPSE POSE. This was perfect because it got me firmly out of TV land and reminded me that I am a playwright and TV is just a job and whatever stress I was feeling in LA is over (for this month at least). I was running late to rehearsal and starving so ran into the first deli I saw and ordered a salad that I ended up throwing away because I wasn't actually going to eat canned beets during the read-through of my play. But sometimes buying food and knowing it's under the desk is as good for your hunger as actually eating it* and isn't that just so New York!**

**(Apparently, I was so happy to be home that even wasting a salad felt glamorous to me.)

*(This is only true in NYC -- in the writer's room in LA, I waited with baited breath for a salad that I didn't pay for to be brought to me, complained if it was late and then ate every last almond slice.)

Anyway, the CORPSE POSE reading went well. I really love this play, I love SLANT and we had a wonderful cast (seen below). Here's to power of positive thinking that someone will produce this thing soon! Also, I need not have feared that summer was preemptively ending because after this reading, I spent the entirety of August bopping from one amazing vacation to another. More soon. X.

Maria Tucci, Carmen Zilles, Alfredo Narciso, Russell Posner, Andrea Syglowski