Well, dear readers, shall we begin our look back at 2015, a year that had great things and not so great things, but as I said at Kritzerland, the good things outweigh the bad and I outweigh the good AND the bad. It began as I like it to, with me beginning a new novel on the first day of the year, in this case Murder at the Hollywood Division, the latest Adriana Hofstetter book. That obviously kept me busy for a while. Of course we had eleven really good Kritzerland shows (we took November off due to too much rescheduling). We had our fifth year anniversary – that’s a show a month for five YEARS – think about it. These aren’t just thrown together shows, with random casts. They’re all carefully planned, thought out, written, rehearsed and structured and I’m very proud of what we’ve done. Obviously others are, too, since they’ve regularly been ripping off what we’ve been doing for years now. While I was writing the book we also went into rehearsal for Inside Out. I directed a wonderful cast of six females, blocked it quickly, and it was the production I always thought the show should have had but hadn’t had. And it was a critical smash and an audience favorite for the entirety of its six-week run. I was very happy with all of it. And, later in the year, I got a Scenie Award for directing and the cast got one, too. Since I rarely win anything, which was nice to be one of 700 Scenie winners. I finished the Adriana novel faster than any other novel I’ve written – twenty days from start to finish, writing a large number of pages each day.
Then I spent a good deal of time preparing to direct the second annual ALS benefit. When that show finally happened it was an incredible evening, even better than the first one. I also got the surprising news that my song Simply had been nominated for a Mac Award. Given my track record with awards I expected to lose, and yet, astonishingly, I won. I couldn’t believe it but I now have the award in hand to prove it.
In the midst of all that, I was also writing Welcome to My World and got that finished. We did a private reading at my house, and it went pretty well, and then I made some adjustments based on that, and we began preparing for a one performance workshop in the summer. And Kritzerland, the label, turned ten years old and we began the exhausting Kritzerland Indiegogo campaign. We’ll continue the look back tomorrow.
Yesterday was an okay day. I was up early, she of the Evil Eye came and I went and had an omelet and a bagel to tide me over till supper. I picked up a couple of packages, one of which was a Vogue Magazine issue – April 15, 1941 to be exact. I’ve been searching for this issue for a bunch of years and I finally got it. I have a painting by artist Milena that’s featured in that issue, so it’s great to finally have the issue AND the painting. The Issue and the Painting – that sounds like a Billy Wilder movie. One fun thing was finding the title of the painting – Mould of Beauty. The artist was very well known and did a lot of work for Vogue and other magazines – she has a certain Dali-esque quality that you can see below in this photo of the actual painting. I had one straight on but the color wasn’t right – this one slightly off to the side has absolutely correct color.
Isn’t that great? The painting itself is quite small in size, about 10×13 but the detail is absolutely astonishing. Here’s a shot of it in the magazine.
I did some writing and some work at the piano, and I sat on my couch like so much fish and watched an hour of a documentary about steaks and where the best can be found. I dozed off several times. Then I relaxed until it was time to mosey on over to the Gardenia to see my pal Sharon McNight.
I met up with our very own Rob Stevens there, and we dined. He had the lasagna and I had to salmon – it was good. Then Sharon started her show right on time.
Sharon is a force of nature and a completely unique performer – I’ve seen a few of her acts over the years – this one was almost completely new, save for a couple of numbers she’s done at Kritzerland. It was fast-paced, funny, with good song choices and we all had a grand time. Afterwards, I stopped at Gelson’s and got food for today’s meal, then came home. I caught up with e-mails – just what up was doing with the e-mails is anyone’s guess. Then it was time to write these here notes.
Today, I’m having a ME day – I have a little work to do in terms of getting things ready to ship on Monday, but mostly I just want to relax and watch stuff and work at the piano a bit.
This week there are some meetings and meals, I know I have to see some show or other and I hope someone reminds me of what it is – I think I’m seeing whatever it is with Barry Pearl. We’ll ship CDs and I’m going to see if there isn’t something we can issue just before Christmas. Not sure if that will be possible, but we’ll see what happens.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, relax, prepare some good food, work at the piano, organize for shipping CDs, and that’s about it. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, enjoying our little look back at the year in review.