The first time I met Mel Brooks was in October of 1995, at Buster Keaton’s 100^th birthday party. Buster, being dead, was not there.

At the time, I was producing a play by a writer named Kevin Barry, of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Kevin was in town, and one evening after rehearsal I invited him to join me for Buster’s birthday celebration, set for the now-shuttered Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood. Kevin, like me, was a big fan of Buster Keaton, so he eagerly joined.

When we got there and bought our tickets and inched into our seats in the middle row, I found myself seated next to an attractive lady of a certain age with a towering faded red updo. I immediately recognized her as Eleanor Keaton, Buster’s widow, who had been a dancer and then Buster’s onstage costar when he returned to doing live performances late in his career. She was happy to be recognized, and happy to share the odd tidbit now and then as a few of Buster’s movies were screened, asides like, “Oh, we did that bit in Paris. The French loved it.” Kevin, meanwhile, was agog that I was seated next to Eleanor Keaton and that she and I were conversing.

After the screening, and after the sold-out audience ate Buster’s birthday cake, Kevin and I were standing outside when someone started talking about Buster’s career. I heard something not quite right, so in a friendly manner, I contributed some information that started with “Actually….”

And that was the first time I met Mel Brooks. The person he was slightly miseducating was his wife — Anne Bancroft. I had been watching Buster Keaton’s work all my life, since my father introduced me to his movies when I was about 6, and had been coming to every Buster screening for a few years at Silent Movie, and had read every available Buster biography there was. Not quite an authority, but certainly an ardent fan. Listening to me for a minute, Mel called out to someone else, “Hey, come listen — this guy knows a lot.” And that’s how Dom DeLuise joined the conversation. It was extremely meta to be discussing silent movies in front of the Silent Movie with three of the stars of the film “Silent Movie.” Mel Brooks was gracious, warm, and eager to know more — three traits that seem to come up every time he’s mentioned.

When we got in my car, my playwright from Ohio was thunderstruck, and I gathered from him that he thought this was just another night for my life in Los Angeles. As if.

The next time I met Mel Brooks was in 2003, when the stage version of “The Producers” was set to open in Los Angeles. At the time, I was CEO of the performing arts league, and I had assigned myself the task of writing the story about the show for our magazine. I got to the press junket and spoke to the co-writer of the book, Tom Meehan; and the director and choreographer Susan Stroman; and co-stars Jason Alexander and Martin Short (Jason Alexander was very deeply discoursing on his Acting Method, having confused the situation with performing Brecht, while Martin Short, as a tonic, was loose and funny and knew none of this was that important); and… I kind of ran out of time to speak with Mel Brooks. I’d said hello earlier, but there were still a clutch of people to see him, and I figured I’d gotten enough for my story. So I left.

The next day, I was at my office and on the phone with my friend Doug talking about who-knows-what, when my assistant buzzed in and said, “Mel Brooks is on line 2 for you.”

Which gave me the opportunity to say to Doug, “Gotta go. Mel Brooks is on the other line for me.”

I still cherish that.

Here was Mel’s opening line on the phone to me:  “How did I miss you?”

Perhaps the funniest person of the past 100 years, as acclaimed recently by The Atlantic and AFI and just about everyone else presenting him with centenary accolades, and a movie star and producer and honestly legendary figure in practically all aspects of entertainment for almost all of those 100 years, was being apologetic. He figured it was his fault. 

I’ve seen him a few other times, too, although not recently (he being, well, 100 years old). I believe I saw him in 2007 at the memorial service for Bill Idelson, a sitcom writer and actor from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (he played Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman) who had doubled as one of my writing professors at USC; I definitely spoke with Carl Reiner there. (It being a small town, Bill’s wife Seemah was also a performer in a play I produced at Moving Arts.)  For a while there, Mel Brooks was someone I kept running into at events and performances and awards shows. Like Tom Hanks, who I saw so frequently at the Taper and the Geffen that his face showed him starting to think he knew me. 

Having met some celebrities in my 38 years here in Los Angeles, here’s what I want you to know about Mel Brooks. In a town where it’s almost required for celebrities to put on airs, to be aloof, to be indifferent while all-knowing, Mel Brooks has always seemed humble but driven, the funniest and cleverest guy at the party — while still an everyday guy (who just happened to marry a beautiful Oscar-winning movie star). 

Maybe his approachability was key to his success.

This spring and summer, I’ve carved out more time than I’ve had recently to work on my other job: being a playwright. This weekend is already serving as a wonderful reminder of why it’s great being a playwright. Oh, you’ll get lots of boo hoo hoos from playwrights (Tony Kushner once complained about how poorly playwrights are paid, even as he was loading a new $10,000 couch into his townhouse), but in many ways, it’s a dream job. Or avocation. Or hobby. Take your pick.

Based upon my experience of being a playwright, dating back a long, long time to my first play getting staged when I was 15 and in high school, here are just a handful of the reasons it’s great.

• Nothing beats hearing people laugh at all of your jokes, in the right place and at the right time, without prompting by your friends or lovers. (In my experience, your family does no prompting. More likely they’ll sit there like Easter Island statues, afraid it’s about them.)
• It can be nice to win an award now and then.
• When you don’t, it’s also comforting to know that the judges were wrong.
• Usually, when you fly in to see your play, everyone there will treat you the way you wish everyone everywhere treated you: with respect and reverence, and enormous admiration for your wit. It’s even better than how your dog does it.
• Sometimes you get to be a visiting artist or teacher or judge or lecturer, usually in a bucolic location that couldn’t quite get Suzan Lori-Parks, but they’re happy to make do with you, and they buy you drinks.
• Whether or not they see it, an actual production helps your family understand “what you’re trying to do.” Maybe.
• You get to work with actors. Sure, some of them are as bad at it as you are (or, inconceivably, even worse), but most of the time you get mostly good people, and the surprisingly good people lift your material up to even greater heights, and you get credit. If you saw a play that really wasn’t much of anything, but you enjoyed the hell out of it — that’s what happened: the actors. And, seriously, there are terrific actors everywhere. I’ve had plays produced in a little town in the interior gold-rush area of California, and in the backwoods hilltops of Arkansas, and both times the locals were great. I salute them!
• Also, the small-town people have a greater tolerance for outlandishness than you think. I think they even expect it, like: “Hey, this is an artist, so we shoulda figured on this.” So just have fun.
• Every time you get a production, you’ve set up a little outpost somewhere on the globe. People there now know you, and you know them! (Remembering their names can be a separate matter.)
• Those people in the outposts? Sometimes they’ll let you crash at their place. Even in pricey places like Manhattan. I’ll say no more.
• You make lifelong friendships with some of the actors and directors and designers. (And lifelong enemies with some of the others.)
• If it’s a production where you live, you’ll get to learn who your true friends are: They’re the ones who bought tickets.
• In your mind, you’re communing with Shakespeare, Brecht, Stoppard, and whoever wrote “Bob’s Holiday Office Party.” What could they learn from you? (You’d love to share with Brecht your better ending for “The Good Person of Szechwan.”)
• As a playwright, you will listen more closely to what other people say. Of course, you’ll need to determine for yourself whether or not this is a benefit.
• After you have even a little playwriting income, it can be surprising what’s tax deductible. I’m pretty sure that cigars qualify as office supplies.
• Big benefit: You can swear off drugs. That audience response is your drug.

This is just the starter list. There are many more delights (such as an entree to meeting famous people you’d like to meet), so I could go on. But I think now I’m going to go on to working on my new play, so that maybe I can add more of them in the coming months and years.

It’s not soda in those cups.

That’s beer that my mother and I are drinking, five or six years ago, she then in her early 90s, while we were awaiting a table at the Clam Bar in Somers Point, NJ.

Mom left this mortal coil two-and-a-half years ago, and I sure miss her. She was tough but fair, an even-tempered German Lutheran woman with a good heart and a strong will and both a ready laugh and at times a bit of an edge.

She would feed anyone and everyone who came over. Feeding people was first nature to Mom. Her first question, always, to everyone, was, “Didja eat yet?” Because she would always feed you. As a child of both the Great Depression in her native Johnstown, Pennsylvania and that city’s Great Flood, both being times when not everyone had enough to eat, she learned early on that you shared. No matter who you were or where you came from, my mother would feed you. Over the years I brought many, many people over, most of them strange artistic types or fans of the outre or quasi-bohemians or just college misfits; she fed them all. She fed my father, we children, her grandchildren, all of our friends, neighbors who dropped by, anyone and everyone. Generally, she kept a tub of fried chicken wings in her refrigerator (these, she said, were “fer snackin’ “) but even if it looked like she had nothing to offer, she somehow whipped up something incredible out of thin air.

Like all good mothers, she knew the difference between real problems and whatever minor annoyances you, as a child, might be complaining about. Complaining and crying were actively discouraged; the lesson was that if you’ve got a problem, you should just deal with it. If you were a child and you fell down and hurt yourself, she offered a mild, “Let’s take a look at you. … Oh, you’re fine.” If you wanted to cry about it, you had to go cry on the steps — and the steps were outside. Where nobody, including her, would have to hear it.

She was a font of hard-earned clear-cut wisdom. When, at age 16, I had been out drinking with some young men several years older than I was, and had had far too much and had been vomiting all around the parking lots of the bars along Margate, New Jersey, one of the guys finally thought he should call my house to see what they should do. My mother answered, and when my friend Kevin told her that Lee had had a bit too much to drink, my mother’s answer was, “You took him out, you keep him.” Kevin wound up with me vomiting in his basement until I sobered up. Lesson learned for both of us.

When I was an oddball teen, reading things I shouldn’t have been reading and writing things just as outrageous and publishing little magazines far above the level of my maturity, and causing all sorts of trouble at school and going to big cities on my own, she had the foresight to just let me be, even when she found what might have looked like very rude cartoons in a zine I was publishing. Some parents would have swooped in, but hovering around wasn’t her style, and I remain grateful. I just wanted out of the constrained life of southern New Jersey and eccentric art seemed like a pathway and certainly an interest, and I guess she knew.

She also provided the very best advice ever given to me: “When you’re going out, always take a jacket, and always use the bathroom, because you never know.” To this day, I follow this, and I’m always glad.

I count myself very lucky to have had her as a mother; if you’re reading this, I hope you were half as lucky. She had a good heart, a strong sense of caring and service, and unmatched personal strength. The only reason she’s no longer with us is because she let go. Most people fear death; she decided it was her time and went toward it in her sleep, still physically well at age 98.

She may be gone, but the example she set lives on in her children and her grandchildren and their children. We’re all the better for it.

I was struck by how well David Thomas was looking:  fit, lively, energetic. The last time I’d seen him he’d been ill, visibly ill, and weakened — but still determined, as ever, to continue on his life’s work, producing remarkably fresh and unexpected music that undermined the expected norms of a rock concert while delivering something powerful and urgent. He had been so debilitated that I couldn’t quite square how healthy he looked, sitting in a deep leather chair and enjoying a dark pint, but I was sure glad to see it.

The venue was a small pub in England, warm and friendly, but featuring a genuine performance space with lights and sounds. Waiting for the band to go on, I ordered a refill and when for some reason the barkeep didn’t fill my pint glass all the way, I gently complained and he topped it off. So I bought another one, for the man next to me, and we fell into conversation, he about how thrilled he was to be here, me about how proud I was to be producing the event.

David went onstage first, which was a massive surprise — I’ve seen Pere Ubu innumerable times, and generally the band came on first, he was generally the last one on stage, and deservedly so, as the front man, as the originator, the visionary. But then it became clear that it would be only David, David and no one else, and I worried if people would feel disappointed, and if they’d want something back, something in return, a make-good, because they’d expected Pere Ubu, I think I had advertised it as being Pere Ubu, but it was just David Thomas. But David, being David, went full thrust on his solo performance, and he was offbeat and brilliant and utterly committed and captivating.

And then I realized:  David is dead. He looks so good! And I’m so glad to see him! But I remember he’s dead.

And Pere Ubu — or, in his absence, the band as it was called two weeks ago in Hove and in London, “The Moon Unit” — isn’t dead. Because I just saw it without him.

And then I felt a hand rubbing my back, that of my fiancée, and I realized I was dreaming, awakening from a dream now, and I was very sad indeed to realize it was a dream, because I so wanted David Thomas to be alive. David Thomas whom I knew and had spent time with on several occasions over the course of 25 years and someone whom I always appreciated, not a friend, not really, but certainly a creative lodestar, someone whose work I had followed for the vast majority of my life, and I didn’t want him gone because I didn’t want the concerts to stop let alone the new music, and also because I wished him well, truly, always, as a thank-you for everything he’s given me for 40 years and more, and because, selfishly, selfishly because I could see the health struggles he’d been suffering, selfishly I just wished him to be alive longer.

But the dream was over, and no, I wasn’t producing a gig by Pere Ubu or by David Thomas, and David was still dead, gone from his mortal plane, and I was still grateful to him but still feeling the hollow space in my core that I’d felt since he died last April 23, a date that I’m unable to forget.

I shared this with K., my dream, and I suppose she could see written on my face what it had meant to me, no matter what I said about it. Science will tell you that when you dream of someone you’ve lost, it’s your brain processing your loss.

But what K. said to me was better: “It’s nice that he came to visit you.”

I’m overdue to see a good play.

I say this having seen the new show at the National Theatre in London two weeks ago. Beautifully staged and acted and lit… and pointless. It was the sort of play that, with no conflict and no real story, just the trappings of story, lives or dies on each little moment. The funny moments got laughs, at least in Act One. But by Act Two, everyone was tired of it, and I was calculating in my head how much the Uber back to my pub guesthouse would cost. (I came damn close.) The highlight of the evening? Sharing complaints with the woman to my right about how disappointing the play was, she especially, having taken the train in from Essex to see it.

I also say this having seen the two-act one-person show written by and starring a somewhat-acclaimed, or at least noted, or perhaps notorious, playwright whose previous work was far more fun. I genuinely don’t like tearing down others’ work — honest — but in my weekly playwriting workshop we discuss the plays we’ve seen recently, and to my good fortune two others in the group had also seen it and had a lot to say, none of it positive. Except: In fairness, I was impressed with the set change. Seriously.

I say this too having seen earlier in the month a revival of a play by a noted playwright, a writer of at least two plays I revere, that was so poor it called into question everything else this writer had written. Was it just this production, or was his work always his ham-fisted? (I think the former.)

Years ago, my then-wife stopped going to the theatre with me. “It’s always bad,” she said, “and you always say it’s bad.” Not true. And, the final two shows I dragged her to before our split were both terrific and we both had a great time.

No, I don’t think the theatre is always bad.

But I do think it’s frequently bad. After all, it’s hard to do, getting a good play, casting it well, providing the right circumstances for it (the space, the designers and design, having not just a good director but the right director, and so much more) and then… having the right audience for it. And having the elements support it (no rain/snow/terrorist attack).

Early on in dating the woman I’m going to marry in August, a friend suggested that he and his wife double-date with me and my then-girlfriend by seeing a play in Santa Monica starring two ex-TV stars in a play by a well-known playwright. My friend had seen this play before and assured me it’d be great.

It wasn’t.

The two ex-TV stars (the lead from “Northern Exposure” with one of the “Desperate Housewives”) were terrific. If you look down on TV actors, you should know that most of them are incredibly talented, whether or not the material that they’re now known for is any good. Both of these two had a background in theatre, knew what they were doing, and showed it on stage.

But:  The play was dull. It was badly directed. (Leaving me, for one, unsure whether it was supposed to be funny or not. Three young women in the audience clearly had decided it was a comedy and kept goosing it along – tittering here and there and trying to provoke others to laugh, to no avail.) It was slow. And it was badly costumed. When you’re doing a show about a man repeatedly referred to as a clotheshorse, perhaps you should get him a well-cut suit or ask him to provide his own, and for sure don’t outfit him with heavy shoes that he must clop around in, scattering thunderous echoes throughout the space.

The worst part, by far:  Shortly after this expensive little disaster, K. and I got into my car to drive back to her place. She turned to me and said, “You like theatre… why???”

If you have to explain why you like one of the foremost animating passions of your life to your new love, if it’s in no way apparent to her, it’s disappointing to say the least.

But here’s what I told her:

It’s hard to do. SO, when it’s done well, it’s a miracle — and you were there for it. You were there for the miracle. And it feels truly miraculous. You and that audience you shared it with, you all have that frisson, that electrical current through your body, that makes you feel alive. Comedy, drama, it doesn’t matter, you just feel charged when it reaches down your throat and pulls all the related emotions right up and out of you.

And:  A few months ago, I bought tickets to see a show downtown, and I didn’t even tell her. I just told her we were going downtown. We settled in for the show, and as it took off, as it gripped all of us, she started borrowing my glasses so she could see better. At times I heard her suck in her breath or gasp in shock at what was happening. During intermission, she said, “Come on, hurry! I want to go get my glasses out of the car!” We ran down the many levels to where my car was parked and made it back just in time with her eyeglasses clenched in her hand, and Act Two was even more shocking, even better. And then she said:

“How did they do that?!?!?”

And then:

“Is this why you love the theatre?”

Exercise with mice? I know I don’t.

I don’t believe in rules for writing. There are no rules to writing. No good ones, anyway.

Yes, you can bend the language — Chaucer did it, and so did Shakespeare, and Mark Twain, and thank God for them. You have my permission, and you should give yourself permission.

No, you don’t need to write every day. That’s some sort of constraint — a self-imposed dictate, someone listening to the advice of people who don’t themselves follow it. If it works for you to write every day, splendid. If not, don’t. My generous and inspiring teacher Jerome Lawrence told me that his friend Tennessee Williams, no matter how ill or hung over, wrote every day; fine, that worked for him, and I’m glad of that. But you don’t need to act accordingly.

You also don’t need to stick to one medium. (The people listed above didn’t.) Why was it that the University of Southern California was right for me? Because the graduate writing program actively encouraged writing in more than one discipline — which, as someone writing plays and fiction and essays and (very bad) poetry and also business writing I was already doing.

But I do believe in habits.

Habits can be good, and habits can be bad, but if you develop habits to your writing, they help you reacclimate yourself to doing the work.

At base, and setting aside the spiritual realm (whatever you may believe), we are made up of chemicals. So I believe in establishing the chemistry of what you’re writing, and how it will affect you, and re-establishing that chemistry every time you’re writing that thing.

That means:

Whatever you’re drinking when the writing is working, that’s what you’ll be drinking every time you’re working on that piece.

If you started out by drinking, say, orange juice, it’s orange juice you’ll be drinking every time you’re writing that play.

Sometimes, for me, that’s bourbon. I’m careful about that. Obviously, I won’t be writing a play in the morning if it requires bourbon; the ramifications of that sort of approach are well-known to followers of writers. My late friend Gerald Locklin, who was close to Charles Bukowski, said you had to catch Buk at the right time of day:  After he’d had one or two beers, but not too many. Much as I love Bukowski’s work, having known many alcoholics and seen how unhelpful that approach can be and also knowing myself and my own life, that’s not the path for me.

Although my current play does require bourbon so, yes, I work on it on Sunday late afternoons or evenings. It requires bourbon because I started with bourbon, and one way to stay unstuck is to reacclimate yourself into the environment of its creation.

The drink I strenuously don’t advise, at least for me:  coffee. I once wrote a play on coffee, and found I was going through half a pot or more in each session. I had the jitters for weeks. Never again.

(I’ve been writing all morning today, and you may be cheered to learn that I’m doing it via seltzer water.)

If you started with a nice cigar, as I’m wont to do sometimes, then a nice cigar is required.

If you started writing with music in the background, you queue up that music again. I’ve written 66 plays, some of them good and probably many of them pretty bad, and dozens and dozens of them have been written to music. Sometimes punk, sometimes postpunk, sometimes classical (thanks here to Glenn Gould in particular), once a particularly cherished album by David Sylvian and Robert Fripp that somehow transported me into a different state. People in the writing workshop I’ve led for 32 years now will ask, “How can you write while listening to music?” I tell them, “You don’t listen to it. It’s just on.”

If you’re writing outside, which I like to do (hence the laptop), then you’re better off always writing that piece outside. The outside-ness is part of the environment you’ve created.

Again, the goal is to recreate the environment in which you were succeeding.

By the way, real professionals do this in every profession. Some years ago, I read a lengthy profile of the swimmer Michael Phelps even though I have no interest in him or swimming or sports in toto. What fascinated me was Michael Phelps’ system:  his carefully orchestrated timeline for practice and for performance, the time he arrives, the time he puts on his trunks, the time he does warmups, and so on. His system is brilliant and inspiring, and he’s a true champion.

The other habit I endorse most:

Always stop in the middle.

In the middle of a sentence, preferably.

Because when you feel ready to pick it back up, you can start immediately by finishing that sentence.

I learned that a long time ago by reading a biography of Lester Dent, pseudonymously the Kenneth Robeson who cranked out a novel a week in the form of Doc Savage pulps while traversing the globe on a boat. Yes, the books were formulaic, but he was never stuck.

And finally: Don’t edit while you’re writing.

Editing is a judgmental process — a thinking process — and writing is a feeling process. If you’re editing while you’re writing, you’re sitting in judgment of what you’re writing, and that’s a wonderful way to sit back and assess yourself negatively. You’ll never finish anything that way. Every writer I know already has enough self-judgment; the only ones who don’t are the truly bad writers. Write your piece, then edit it. They are separate functions, and should be kept separate. Need some inspiration on this topic? I always recommend Natalie Goldberg’s book “Writing Down the Bones.” She’s smart and fearless.

Anything much beyond that in the way of writing advice, I’m suspicious of. The world is full of bad advice ready to disempower you. What you need to do is what works for you — what’s above is what works for me. But whatever habits you need, figure them out and stick by them. It’s easy to get stuck; habits, being habit-forming, make it easier to stay unstuck.

But, again, that’s my advice. So make of it what you will.

By their nature, writers are observers.

They’re also conjecturers, people who draw their own conclusions based on what they’re observing, and then extrapolating different pathways that might have led to what they’re seeing.

This is why we also have running narratives in our heads.

It goes like this:

“What am I looking at? I see X and Y and Z. … How did this happen? Did it happen this way, or that way, or some other way? Maybe it was this, maybe it was that, maybe it was this other thing.”

And that’s how, most of the time, we wind up writing a novel or poem or short story or play.

I just came back from a thrilling fast-turnaround trip to England, where I got to meet up with a dozen or so friends and see, twice, what’s honestly the most exciting act in music. (Pere Ubu, of course. And most exciting to me equals most exciting. I’m sure you can understand.) I also went to the National Theatre for the first time, and explored a new area of London, and spent a lot of enjoyable time in pubs and restaurants with said good friends, and navigating the byways of the British rail system.

But what I find I’m thinking about the most is a sad little drama I watched unfold while I was on the shuttle bus from long-term parking to the airport in Los Angeles. Usually, I write about these things in my writing journal, figuring if I’m ever stuck, I can go back to it and make use of it. But I’m never stuck, and I never go back.

(Sidebar:  Yes, I keep two journals. There’s the writing journal — for ideas and observations — and there’s the personal journal, for my daily thoughts and activities. No, I don’t know why I keep these separate. Five years ago, I also wrote a divorce journal, again a separate log, this one with a white leatherette cover to distinguish it from the others, and again, I have no idea why. In general, I think it’s best not to probe too deeply into creativity:  too closely observed and it might disappear.)

Although my flight was international (to Heathrow), and one would assume I’d be leaving from the international terminal, I was waiting to disembark the shuttle at Terminal 4, where my flight would board. This is just one of many many puzzling oddities about LAX, an airport constantly under (re)construction and where arriving passengers literally need to stand in the busy street to catch their ride or drag luggage what feels like a mile away to catch an Uber or taxi.

At Terminal 1 or 2, the shuttle pulled over and a boy looking to be about five years old came sullenly onboard — loudly sucking his thumb.

After him came a bouncy little blonde girl of about age 3, followed by two elders I took to be grandparents, then a woman in her 30s. All of them sounded faintly Southern, with slight twangs.

First thought: “Where’s the father?”

The little girl’s name was Anna.

I know this because Anna’s mother repeatedly scolded her, but in the most powerless, indirect way imaginable:

 “Anna, you really shouldn’t be sitting that way.”

“Anna, that’s not the way to sit in that seat.”

And, most inexplicably, Anna being all of 3 years old:

“Anna, I really don’t want us to need to visit a hospital while we’re here.”

All of this with labored sighs and through gritted teeth.

The grandmother, more successfully, distracted Anna with flashy games on her iPhone, each distraction lasting a minute or so before Anna would move again and the mother would launch back into it.

The boy, who wasn’t once addressed and was probably glad of it, sucked his thumb.

The grandfather was bearing the weight of the world, his entire face pulled down by it.

What a vacation this will be for them, I thought.

Let me be clear:  I helped raise three children, and traveled with all three of them at various times, including as a solo parent when they were young, and I know from personal experience how exasperating it can be and how irritated I could be at times. At age 3, one of my kids was a holy tyrant, screaming and demanding — even when I took him to the circus and got him anything and everything he wanted, he was running around and stamping his feet and being generally impossible for someone who might want to live to see age 4. (Oh, the thoughts I had.) I have video of that child scowling at me as I was teaching him now to ride a bicycle. But that kid burned it all out of his system early on, and has been an absolute delight ever since, someone who has grown into a responsible adult with a nice girlfriend, a job, and a good education. Another of my children was scarily silent and judgmental, glowering at me in every photo of any place I took her, all across the United States, and even to places that she had requested. (At age 27, she is over that, and we’ve had one gratifying trip after another.) At one point, my eldest put me through the ringer, but now to me he seems a legitimate sage, filled with calm wisdom, someone I can turn to for insight and a different perspective.

So I am not naïve about the challenges of parenting young children. Last week, I asked my friend Joseph, 46 and French, how old his kids are. “Five and seven,” he responded. I gave him the same advice I give all parents of young children:  “Hang on, it gets worse.” And then, with any luck, when they become adults, it tapers off.

I couldn’t help sympathizing with all five members of this family. I could see how harried the mother of Anna and her unnamed brother were. Judging by her boy’s coping mechanism — thumb-sucking — she had developed no tools of her own; this had been going on for years. Thumb-sucking by a five-year-old is a compulsive response to distress. Whether she knew it or not, her distress didn’t seem situational — it looked to be ongoing, and this was its impact on her son. And the way the mother was handling this, in inverted passive-aggressive formulations impossible for a three-year-old to parse or obey, just seemed like a plaintive cry for help.

I had many questions about this sad little scene.

Why were all five of them here?

They were visiting — but whom?

Was there a father in the picture? Was that father here? What was he like? If he lives here, why? And if he doesn’t, why wasn’t he on this trip?

What would these people be doing while here? They had enough luggage for a week. They were on their way to pick up their rental car, as Grandpa explained to Anna of all people. Anna, who at age 3 had assumed a seat of claimed power.

Grandma’s role seemed like more work than vacation; her week or so would undoubtedly revolve around trying to soothe, calm, and support everyone else in the family. As science tells us: “The ‘grandmother hypothesis’ suggests that human females evolved long post-menopausal lifespans to support grandchildren, increasing the survival and reproductive success of their family line. Biologically, grandmothers act as caregivers and knowledge keepers, while studies indicate their brains are wired for deep emotional empathy towards grandchildren.” She was doing fine with Anna, but there was only one grandma on this trip, not enough for everyone.

The boy was never once spoken to.

Anna did whatever she wanted.

The mother vaguely hoped Anna’s behavior would improve.

Grandpa seemed very much like he’d rather be somewhere else.

What a sad start to a new adventure on a distant shore.

Unable to help myself, I started inventing a father who, if he hadn’t merely allowed all this, had actively contributed to it. A seemingly nice guy who, when friends and guests weren’t watching, was a menacing bully. Someone this mother was fleeing, or needed to. I pictured Anna’s mother having been wooed by this man, and their happy young life together, before children and finances and the pressures of time and responsibility created cracks and fissures and his inner self emerged alongside his disappointment in himself and his situation.

I spun other narratives, too, pure fantasies cooked up in my head as they are every day, but then we arrived at Terminal 4 and I got off.

It’s over a week later and I’m still thinking about them. Are they still here? How was their trip?

What’s going to happen with that boy? And with his mother?

With any luck, writing this will be the end of it for me.

Yesterday I was in a meeting that got very technical between two other people, and therefore had nothing to do with me. So I decided to take care of something else on my to-do list:  buy tickets for a play my friend and fellow playwright David and I wanted to see on Sunday night. This would be a good time to do that, and I wanted to make sure to get it done, because the venue is about the size of a walk-in closet, and the show would sell out. While the others were figuring out the precise process they were going to take to handle the complicated technical thing, I opened up my laptop and went to the website of the theatre in question, pulled out my credit card, and then entered all the relevant information and hit purchase.

And then the screen froze.

To be exact, not my laptop screen. I still had full access to everything else. The payment-processing page of their website froze.

I waited and I waited some more, then finally I quit that browser. What else was there to do? Nothing.

Then three things happened: 

1. I got a text from Amex saying that my credit card had been charged for $75.50 by the theatre in question. Great! The ticket sale went through.
2. Then I got an automated email from the theatre’s payment processor saying, You abandoned your cart! Come back and purchase your tickets.
3. I realized it would now be up to me to invest the time in straightening this out. Which is precisely the way of things now:  Commerce is made fast and easy; customer service is all on you personally.

Immediately, I checked the theatre’s Contact Us page to see whom I could call. Answer:  not really anyone. They don’t keep business hours. (Understandable for a small operation.)

Nexte thing:  see who I could email. Welp, I could email the box office, but the site states: “Please allow 24-48 hours for a response from our box office.” In which time the show would have sold out or have already ended.

But I took that chance and emailed the box office an image of my credit-card transaction clipped from my Amex transaction page and explained that their system had frozen but I was coming to the show, and then cc’d someone else listed on the site who seemed to be an administrator.

A few hours later I was surprised and delighted to get an email. What it said was, “It looks like your charge is pending. Would you like to pay at the door?”

Well, no. Because the charge wasn’t pending:  It had gone through. So I sent them another screenshot, this time of the payment having gone through.

I checked again later and saw that now they had credited back my charge. By this time, it was six in the evening and I was having drinks at a business event on a Hollywood rooftop. I thought, Well, that’s one way to resolve it, I’ll just go back to the site and buy the tickets again. I set my drink aside to do that and pulled out my phone to order, but now found that I could buy only one ticket. Why? Because, sure enough, the show is in demand and now there was only one ticket left.

The woman next to me, with whom I’d shared this whole story while awaiting my drink, saw this happen and said, “Why don’t you just buy that one ticket for yourself and tell your friend something happened and you can’t go?”

This is how, it seems, some people think and behave. It explains a lot.

Instead, I went ahead and bought two tickets for Sunday, and confirmed with David. I messaged him that we were on for the show, but now the tickets were for Sunday.

He later told me that his first text back to me had been in error:  When he said he was available, he’d meant to say Sunday. Not Friday.

Good thing I never got those tickets for Friday.

In the theatre as in life, bad work can help you learn to do good work.

DuoLingo reminds me of this all the time, when it responds to my somewhat inept efforts to learn French with a reassuring, “Even when you make mistakes, you’re still learning!”

In 36 years of teaching writing in one place or another, starting at writers conferences, then at different colleges and universities, then in my private playwriting workshop, I’ve advised people to see a lot of plays and to read a lot, because while you can learn a lot from good writing, you can learn a lot from bad writing too.

Recently, I got further verification that just because a well-known and celebrated writer has written something, that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Yes, we already knew this, right? F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury, Pinter, Beckett, Edith Wharton, Hemingway — they all had good work but also middling or even bad work.  

I sure love “Tender is the Night” and “The Great Gatsby” and many of his short stories, but  Fitzgerald’s “Pat Hobby” stories are flat-out terrible — written as quickly and as plentifully as possible for ready cash. Years ago, when I was teaching graduate-level writing at the University of Southern California, I flat-out refused to teach from them when requested because I didn’t want students thinking I endorsed them. (And this, from a Fitzgerald fan.)

Harold Pinter was a certifiable genius, and I for sure certify him as such, but “No Man’s Land” is about nothing I can discern except Pinter writing a Pinteresque play that doesn’t actually say anything — it’s the sort of gamesmanship that Pinter had perfected 40 years earlier with “The Birthday Party,” but now made weary and pointless. The only upside:  I can say I saw it Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards perform those leads up close and personal in the 1994 off-Broadway revival.

I could go on in this vein, especially having seen so many David Mamet plays over the past 30 years, the pilot light having long ago gone out on the writer of “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed the Plow” and “Oleanna.” “The Old Neighborhood,” seen in New York in 1997, was so disastrous that I spent the viewing time admiring the lighting grid, and the aftershow reassuring two women on the sidewalk outside that, no, they were right and the New York Times was wrong, that it was indeed terrible.

I don’t expect any writer to do consistently great work. For every “Slaughterhouse Five” or “Cat’s Cradle,” there’s a “Slapstick” sitting in the oeuvre. Sometimes (usually) you can’t even tell if your own work is good or bad — that’s what we have audiences and critics for, and even they don’t know. As a teacher, I just try not to be the person who would have laughed “Waiting for Godot” out of the room, or, God forbid, anything by the completely brilliant Eugene Ionesco.

Which brings to mind this:  If you don’t take chances, you don’t grow as an artist. So I applaud writers who take chances. For this reason, I try to be generous about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s execrable children’s stories. Just one of my poor kids had to suffer through these before I realized my mistake. Maybe the author of “The Scarlet Letter” wasn’t the best choice for children’s literature.

This brings us to “Curse of the Starving Class,” a Sam Shepard play I’d never seen before. I’m an admirer of much of Shepard’s work; since the beginning, I’ve taught from “True West,” which features probably the best first line of any play ever (“So, Mom took off to Alaska, huh?”), providing a wealth of exposition while not sound at all expositional. (At one point, I diagnosed 13 different things that simple line tells us about the situation.) “Buried Child” may be an even better play, with a central metaphor that digs deep. I also like some of Shepard’s essays and short stories, and if he’d written a cook book, I’d probably have read that, too.

“Curse of the Starving Class,” meanwhile, seems like an early draft of later plays in which themes related to disaffected and aimless lower-class white people with few options are better explored. It isn’t stylized enough to be outlandishly comic or bizarre, and its premises, setups and outcomes are so paper thin that we can’t emotionally commit to the theoretical plight of any of the characters. When the underage girl tells us she was let out of the local jail because she flirted with the sheriff, or when a man signs a sheet of paper and thereby loses possession of a house it isn’t clear he owns, we just aren’t sure what universe we’re living in. And, when Act One is largely told with just four characters, but by the end of Act Two there are 11, several of them with just one brief appearance or merely a few lines, we have to wonder whether Act Two wasn’t written in a drunken burst over a single night.

I admire the pluck of the community producers who put this on; judging from the program, the young actor playing the girl made a case for the play and was thrilled when it was chosen. Playwrights need their plays to be produced — even from the grave, I like to think. Two of the actors were working pros, and that showed, and most weren’t, and that showed too. But through all that, you could still hear the play and the main problem:  no focus, no overarching theme, not enough of a comedy or a drama, or even a queasy feeling, just living or dying on discrete moments.

So, what can we learn from this example of bad work?

(And, yes, the play in its day won an Obie for Best Play. But that doesn’t mean they’re right.)

We who write plays can learn this:

Seeing a bad play can help us re-evaluate our own work that we’ve struggled and sweated over and say, You know what? It’s good enough:  Send it out.

After all, this got produced.